Bernard-Henri Lévy

Much has been said and written about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s relation to Israel. Very much indeed—and much of it inaccurate. One has only to wander the vast landscape of the Internet and visit a few sites, forums, and blogs to get the idea. Even when Israel is not the topic of discussion, even when Lévy is talking about something entirely different, commentators look for a way to bring it up. Constantly. One finds it in the online pages of Libération, in YouTube videos, and even on the site of La Règle du Jeu, the review that Lévy founded 20 years ago.
Israel is the epitome of the dangerous topic, one of those subjects that stirs up passions, sours the atmosphere in a room, and causes enmity among friends. Remember Caran d’Ache’s famous drawing in the Figaro during the Dreyfus Affair? A happy family is seated around a table over the caption, “We shall not talk about the Dreyfus Affair!” In the next panel the table is a shambles; fists and forks are flying. The caption explains: “They talked about it.” And so it is with Israel. Yet for the last 40 years or more Bernard-Henri Lévy has not shied away from offering his thoughts on the future of the Jewish state.
Whatever his detractors say, the philosopher offers a unique voice on the Middle East and Israel. That voice—progressive, independent, and original—is listened to by Israelis and Palestinians alike.

AN EARLY COMMITMENT

Standing firmly beside Israel in times of joy and trial, and in the uncertainty of the armed conflicts that too often shake the Jewish state, has been a constant for Bernard-Henri Lévy since he was a young man. In 1967, when Lévy was preparing for the Ecole Normal Supérieure at the Lycée Louis le Grand, before his encounters with Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida, he made his first trip to Israel. Once back in Paris, when the Six-Day War broke out, Lévy rushed down to Israel’s consulate in Paris to join the Israeli forces that were pushing back the Arab coalition. The conflict ended before Lévy could serve, but his interest in the Middle East had been pricked. Deeply moved by his first experience of the region, the young Lévy was one of the authors of an article entitled “Zionisms in Palestine” that ran in Éléments, the review of Clara and Marek Halter, with whom Lévy had already formed a bond. Collaborators in the article included Vladimir Jankélévitch and Jean-François Revel.
Lévy’s interest in the issue has not dimmed for a moment since then. Discernible in the title of the article are several clearly identifiable leitmotifs of his thinking about Israel, ideas from which he has never wavered. The first of these is unconditional support for the existence of the state of Israel. The second is a desire for peace between Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors. That desire is fueled by the powerful idea that Israel, and Zionism, have the potential to make the message of Judaism a positive one despite the horrible fate of so many millions of Jews in recent history, and particularly the bloody 20th century. “Zionisms in Palestine” remains Lévy’s line in the sand: unconditional support for Israel’s security and its right to exist, accompanied by equally steadfast support, underpinned by ethical and political reasoning, for a sovereign Palestinian state thriving peacefully alongside Israel.
Bernard-Henri Lévy has returned to Israel many times since his first encounter. In May 2002, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tel Aviv. In his address on that occasion he gave an account of his many visits. The full text of that address constitutes the preface of his “Sionisme explique à nos potes” (Zionism speaks to its friends). An excerpt:
I came to Israel for the first time at the end of the Six-Day War. I came again in 1973. I was here during the war with Lebanon and again when the Scuds were flying. I am here today as you face yet another war—the longest of them all, the most costly in terms of Jewish lives, the ugliest in Israel’s history, the most ruinous for the nation’s image and moral credibility. Never, it seems to me, has Israel been so alone; never so much the wild outcast from the restless community of nations, as prophesied in our sacred texts. To that Israel, stigmatized as satanic, as Nazi-like; to an Israel flawed, of course, as is every nation at war, but that in no way deserves the torrents or hate and hysteria directed against it—to that Israel I am happy to declare once again, as many times before, my solidarity as a Jew and a French citizen.

ISRAEL, A POLITICAL STRUGGLE

Bernard-Henri Lévy’s experience in Israel is one of encounters and discoveries. On the scene whenever Israel has been threatened, he has rolled up his sleeves to search for peaceful solutions since the 1970s. In 1979 his meeting in Jerusalem with then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin was captured in a photo of a youthful and sanguine Lévy alongside the Israeli statesman. The photo is fascinating. Begin was born in Jewish Brest-Litovsk, faced a sentence of eight years in the gulag, was a militant in the Irgun, and received the Nobel peace prize—what did he make of his young French comrade? That is a secret of history.
In the following year, 1980, Lévy addressed the general assembly of the B’nai B’rith. He then moved to the war front, covering the first war in Lebanon in 1981 for Le Monde. (He returned in 2006 at the time of the second conflict between Israel and Lebanon.) When Saddam Hussein began sending Scud missiles into Israel in 1991, Lévy obtained a rare interview with Yitzhak Shamir that was published in the fourth issue of Lévy’s review, La Règle du Jeu.
Israel soon recognized in Lévy a solid intellectual ally. Indeed, the philosopher makes a point of perpetuating the intellectual vitality that he finds in Israel. Consider his seminal support for the Institut d’Etudes Levinassiennes. It was in Jerusalem in 2000 that Benny Lévy (Sartre’s long-time secretary), Alain Finkielkraut, and Bernard-Henri Lévy made the decision to establish a center for philosophical reflection in memory of philosopher and Talmudic scholar Emmanuel Lévinas. They wrote of:
… the possibility of a place and a language in which Jews, divided by the stances they take in the outside world, can coexist, contest, come to understand each other—and no doubt sometimes to misunderstand—while striving all the while to create the conditions in which well-chosen words can change minds.
There would be many more encounters—with Rabin, Peres, Olmert, and Netanyahu—nearly everyone who at one time or another held the fate of the Jewish state in their hands. Encounters, too, in the Palestinian territories with democratic elements in Gaza and the West Bank. Thanks to the access provided by these experiences, Bernard-Henri Lévy became a keen observer of the vicissitudes of Israeli politics, as well as a trusted interlocutor of the nation’s leaders, as evidenced by the document that follows, an account of a meeting between Lévy and Ehud Barak, then Israel’s minister of defense. The text is reprinted from “Carnets de Guerre” published in the Journal du Dimanche on January 18, 2009. In it, Barak shared his intimate thoughts with the French philosopher. Lévy writes:
At the home of Ehud Barak. I saw him yesterday at Palmachim, surrounded by his generals. Today I meet him in a very long room that seems to have been built around the two pianos that he plays like a virtuoso. In his person Barak evokes the moral dilemma that his army faces. He describes the calculations of Hamas, which, precisely because it knows how the Israelis operate, stores arms in the courtyard of a school, in a hospital room, or under a mosque. “They win either way,” he explains to me in a tone in which I am sure I can detect the curiosity of a strategist faced with an unexpected tactic. “Either we know where the cache is located and don’t fire, in which case they’ve won, or we don’t know about the surrounding location and we fire. In that case they film the victims, send the pictures to the TV networks, and they win that way, too.” I prepare to ask him how the man who, at Camp David nine years ago, had offered Arafat the keys to a Palestinian state that Arafat did not want, how that man personally saw that dilemma. I want to say that Israel might not have found itself in the chain of missed occasions, missteps, and blind alleys of the governments that followed. But the telephone rings. It’s Condoleezza Rice calling to press him to call very quickly for a ceasefire. I ask, “Why very quickly, do you think?” The pianist minister smiled. “Because, depending on when it comes, it will either be Condi’s ceasefire or the other Barack’s (Obama), who will have stolen her ‘legacy.’”

In Jerusalem for the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy mingled with the greats: President Shimon Peres, legendary diplomat Henry Kissinger, author Amos Oz. Writing in Le Point’s edition of May 22, 2008, Lévy offered these impressions of the face of Israel:
Israel is exemplary. You heard me right. All is not perfect there, of course. The Palestinian question, in particular, is an open wound, an oozing sore. But putting that aside for the moment, I cannot think of any other state that has emerged from the breakup of empire that has been able to create, as Israel has done, steady prosperity, a democracy worthy of the name, and a stance in which violence is never untethered from ethical considerations. In addition to those accomplishments, in addition to being the political and economic standout of what we used to like to call grandly the anticolonial revolution, I see Israel welcoming without discrimination Russians, Yemenis, Frenchmen, Ethiopians, North Africans, and Poles—not to mention the 20% of its population who are Palestinian Arabs. Like it or not, Israel is one of the most open societies in the world. Like it or not, one finds in Israel multiethnicity combined as nowhere else with a sense of national belonging, patriotism, and an amazingly solid sense of civic duty. The country offers a very powerful lesson that several powerful nations that find themselves in the same seemingly impossible circumstances—France and the United States among them—would do well to take to heart.

TOWARD A UNIVERSALIST APPROACH—ONE THAT ALSO BENEFITS ISRAEL

Bernard-Henri Lévy’s detractors too often reduce his commitment to Israel to an unnuanced and Manichaean enterprise. His writings belie such reductions. Apart from the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and apart from considerations of identity that may account for the philosopher’s interest in Israel and its fate, it is important to acknowledge a crucial aspect of his thinking on the subject: that of universalism. When Bernard-Henri Lévy thinks about Israel, he is also thinking about the world as a whole. And when he takes a position on Bosnia, Georgia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, or anywhere else in the world, that position is shaped by his thinking about Israel. Without Israel, there would be no “Dangerous Purity,” no “Reflections on War, Evil, and the End of History.” The fate of the Jewish state underpins and explains the evolution of Lévy’s thought, so that when local feuds flare up, he thinks not only about the world as it is but also draws the lessons of history. The “never again” attitude that won Jews over to the idea of a Jewish state after the holocaust has its parallels in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. The lessons of history are often invoked—just as they are here. It is not an accident that Bernard-Henri Lévy received Bosnia’s highest honor for his aid to the resistance mounted by the inhabitants of Sarajevo. For why care about the fate of Israel and the Jews if that care is insular, autarkic, closed in upon itself? That, in the end, is what the writings of Bernard-Henri Lévy are trying to tell us. And that is why his thinking is interesting: far from the detractors’ mantra, it is unblinkered.
Lévy’s thinking about Israel led the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to award him an honorary doctorate in 2008. In his remarks on that occasion, already quoted elsewhere in this essay, Lévy paid tribute to his mentor, Jacques Derrida, and to Jean-Paul Sartre. The two men had already received the same honor, bestowed by a university conceived by Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. It is a measure of the seriousness of the honor that Sartre—who during his career refused many prizes and awards, including the Nobel prize for literature—accepted the one offered by the Hebrew University.

A COMMITMENT TO PEACE

The latest developments in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s lifelong commitment to Israel are as follows. In “Stop Demonizing Israel” (October 2009) he reviewed criticisms leveled at Israel and debunked them one by one. In 2003, he participated in the Geneva Initiative, an alternative peace plan that offered—that still offers—the opportunity for a cooperative resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Of that initiative he observed:

Because it sidesteps no pitfalls, leaves nothing for tomorrow or the day after, doesn’t say that’s too volatile, too complicated, or “we’ll see at the end,” because it breaks with the idea of “steps” and “process” that was at the center of the Oslo mindset, because it is presented as a whole—take it or leave it—this plan shrinks as far as possible the space available for ruses, double speak, and maneuvering. It allows no party to say, “OK, I’ll sign and begin the process, but I know that I’ll bail out at step X or Y.” It’s a plan without escape hatches, a plan with no room for subtexts. It’s a new kind of plan that, were it to be put into action, would have the effect of defusing the mines that continue to be planted along the road to peace.
The plan includes joint sovereignty over Jerusalem, limits on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, Israel’s evacuation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and a guarantee of the Jewishness of the state of Israel. The plan, proposed by Yossi Beillin and Yasser Abd Rabbo, has been greeted with enthusiasm around the world. Bernard Henri-Lévy is promoting it, along with the likes of Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Even if Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon rejected it, the Geneva Initiative remains at the top of the list of realistic solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Following the Geneva Initiative came more articles, speeches, and conferences. Prominent among these were two events. The first was Lévy’s impassioned defense of Gilad Shalit, a young French-Israeli citizen captured by Hamas on June 26, 2006, during his military service. Lévy has worked tirelessly for his release. On June 22, 2010, he delivered an address in Paris on the plaza of the monument to the Rights of Man before an audience of 15,000. Gilad’s fate was central to his remarks. That event was followed several days later by an article entitled “Why We Must Save Soldier Shalit.”
The second event was Lévy’s support for the Jcall Initiative, an appeal by European Jews for the creation of a “European movement capable of making the voice of reason heard” on the question of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The goal of the appeal was “to work for the survival of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state, a goal that depends on the establishment of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state.” Jcall’s Appeal to Reason was answered by another call, known as Be Reasonable. The ensuing debate has divided the French Jewish community.
Why did Lévy take the position he did? First because it is a logical extension of his thinking about Israel. As a socially and politically engaged intellectual, Lévy supports Israel vigorously but exercises his role as citizen watchdog by speaking frankly to his friends in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. While objecting to the use of the expression “moral failure” to describe some Israeli attitudes, he nevertheless believes that the Appeal to Reason is a positive initiative. Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Elie Barnavi, and Patrick Klugman are among those who agree with him on that score.
It is fitting to conclude this review of Lévy’s relation with Israel by quoting his Bloc-Notes column in Le Point of May 6, 2010. With specific reference to Jcall, he evokes the courage that is necessary in order to achieve peace.
I have fought all my life against the delegitimization of Israel. I have defended the legitimacy of its position in all of the wars into which it has been pushed since I came of age. Even now, I never land in Tel Aviv without taking the time to visit my friends in Sderot, the southern city that lives under the threat of Hamas’s rockets. It is in the same spirit that I address Israel’s leaders today and implore them to reclaim the inspiration of their illustrious predecessors: David Ben Gurion in 1948, ratifying the partition plan of the United Nations; Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, more than three decades later, taking the risk of the Oslo Accords; and even the young Ehud Barak, who offered to Arafat, almost exactly 10 years ago, a treaty that the latter did not want but whose principles, indeed whose very terms, were immaculate. It takes two to make peace, of course. But who says that one party can’t take a step, even a decisive one?
Circumstances have proven as stubborn as Bernard-Henri Lévy’s constant but reasoned defense of the Jewish state. Because he has experienced more than enough war in the course of his many visits, Lévy has endeavored for 40 years now to suggest a line of thought to his readers that is distinctive, original, and above all progressive. If one had to reduce the philosopher’s commitment to Israel to a single element, it would be his willingness to imagine democracy and pacifism in situations where, if we aren’t careful, evil and passion will carry the day.

Laurent David SAMAMA

Laurent David Samama is columnist for  Transfuge et Rolling Stone magazine. He is one of the mains  bloggers of the website Regledujeu.org.

Translation by Steven Kennedy

Photo 1 : Bernard-Henri Lévy with the prime minister,  Menahem Begin. (c) Alexis Duclos.

Photo 2 : Bernard-Henri Lévy with Simon Pérès. (c) Alexis Duclos.