Bernard-Henri Lévy

Over a period of more than 10 years Bernard-Henri Lévy has joined me in the field almost every time Israel and its neighbors have faced off in a crisis of international proportions. The violence and inherent danger of these military crises never deterred the fighting philosopher. They were for him neither an obstacle nor an excuse to remain a mere observer.
It has been almost a decade since the second Intifada began. In addition to its political stakes and media impact, it has been one of the bloodiest episodes in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
There has been a wave of brutal attacks.
On Passover night in 2002, an attack killed 30 people in the Park Hotel in Netanya, which led Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to launch Operation Ramparts against the terrorists of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and (at the time) Fatah. In the course of that operation, terrorists—most of them from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad—occupied the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, taking several dozen priests, monks, and nuns hostage in the name of jihad.
We were in a full-blown crisis, and tensions were at their height as the terrorists fired repeatedly from their redoubt, hoping to draw a violent Israeli reaction. It was obvious that their objective was to provoke damage to the holy site.
It was a surreal situation. The army of the Jewish state was attempting to protect Christian religious against a hundred heavily armed terrorists who, by their arms and bombs, were desecrating the church.
In the midst of all that I welcomed Bernard-Henri Lévy and one of his close friends, Gilles Hertzog, whom Israeli officials had authorized to join us in the field operations center. Several Israeli journalists were also with us during the several weeks of the crisis, but Lévy had not come to talk to them.
He was there to listen, observe, and understand, and then to report what was not yet understood in Paris, New York, or London.
The perimeter of the church was an extremely dangerous place to be on the day of his arrival. Snipers hidden at various points in the church were firing at the Israeli forces. It was quite a risk to take just to have a look around.
Lévy’s visit lifted the soldiers’ spirits. They came to know an unpretentious, congenial man who was putting himself in danger for the sole purpose of expressing his solidarity with them. Little did I suspect that Lévy and I would soon cross paths again on the battlefield. And yet …

Summer 2006
Israel was facing a new terrorist threat, this time from Hezbollah, which, from its bases in Lebanon, was threatening northern Israel and its civilian population.
At the time of Lévy’s visit in July, the Israel–Lebanon border was a full-blown war zone marked by violent combat and a rain of Hezbollah missiles. Lévy wanted to see, feel, and understand what was happening to Israeli civilians and defense forces.
In addition to being a philosopher, Lévy is also a dedicated reporter. It seems to me that such a man—one who enjoys international renown for his lectures, books, and media events—can play an extremely important role alongside governments.
He realized that this was not just a war or conflict. The writer, reporter, and philosopher probed below the plane of appearances, seeking signs and information to help him predict what might happen beyond the Israeli–Iranian conflict being waged by proxy through Hezbollah. That, I believe, was very important for Israel and its defense forces.
Bernard-Henri Lévy arrived with two companions on a very hot afternoon. We met at the Yesha junction between Rosh Pina and Kyriat Chmona, in the area called the finger of Galilee, which for weeks had been the target of Hezbollah missiles.
He told me that he had put aside his other activities in order to visit the combat zone. But he wanted first to meet the family of Guilad Shalit, who had been kidnapped by Hamas in the Gaza Strip the month before. As fate would have it, Shalit’s family lived in a village near the Lebanese border.
As he spoke with Noam Shalit about his son, we listened to the Hezbollah rockets falling not far from the house—a potent reminder of the link between the two terrorist groups. Although we were talking about Guilad Shalit, we knew that other members of the Israeli Defense Forces had been kidnapped not far from the family’s house.
The meeting was an act of kindness and sensitivity. Bernard-Henri Lévy listened carefully, taking notes. The simple fact of his presence in the house at a time of war gave hope to the Shalit family, implying as it did that the world would not forget the fate of the combatants. They realized that intellectuals and philosophers are not exclusively preoccupied with abstractions. They can also care about the fate of a family’s son, their son, a young man lost in the clutches of a group of barbarous fanatics.
After the meeting we came under attack on the road. Missiles rained down. I was at the wheel; we were alone in the car. For a moment we both smiled while pondering the question of whether to slow down or speed up to avoid the missiles. It was Lévy who posed the question, almost in a kidding tone. “I don’t know,” I answered frankly. That made him smile.
Lévy was calm and seemed unafraid. He has at the very least an admirable amount of self-control. I sensed in him a strong desire to live each moment intensely so as to be able to convey it later to the world, a world that was having trouble grasping what the Israelis had been up against for the last several weeks.
A little while later we arrived at a position where the fighting was particularly intense. The Israeli soldiers in the unit holding the position, knowing that they had an important visitor, were proud to share their experiences with him. A dialogue began between the reporter-philosopher and the group of young Israelis at a moment in July when young people in France and elsewhere were at the beach or otherwise at leisure.
When Bernard-Henri Lévy left them, his departure marked more than the end of a courtesy visit. A symbol was leaving. For several hours, his presence had signified rationality, thoughtfulness, the capacity for analysis, and courage. The ability to see beyond the events of the day. The man was leaving to tell the world about a local situation of international importance.

Scene three. For years homemade katyusha rockets had been falling in southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Israelis victimized by these attacks were waiting for their government to react. The world was silent.
Now the katyushas were falling daily on houses, schools, and daycare centers, creating a climate of fear and terror. Hamas had taken power in the Gaza Strip and exercised absolute dominion over a million and a half Palestinians. Their stated goal was to destroy the state of Israel by joining with Hezbollah in the north and squeezing Israel in a vice.
Guilad Shalit was still in the hands of the Hamas terrorists. Indeed, as I write, the young man remains in their hands. His captors will not permit visits on his behalf from the International Committee of the Red Cross or other international humanitarian organizations.
Criticism was being heaped on Israel and its defense forces. Once again the world did not understand—or did not want to understand—the right of Israel to defend and protect itself from an enemy that sought only to kill and to create a perimeter of death in the region.
At first the rockets had fallen only in parts of Israel close to the Gaza Strip. Then they began to fall on Ashdod and Beersheba before coming to reach the southern suburbs of Tel Aviv. It had become a veritable war of missiles.
Doing nothing would have signaled weakness, defeatism, and perhaps even the end of Israel. So, after years of restraint, the Israeli government resolved to launch Operation Cast Lead. The offensive began with an intense wave of precision airstrikes against Hamas targets, followed by ground operations at various points throughout the narrow Gaza Strip.
For reasons of security, the Israeli government did not allow the press to enter the Gaza Strip to cover the conflict from the ground, as it had done in the past. Palestinian and foreign journalists already in place reported only the Palestinian view.
It was at that point that Bernard-Henri Lévy, accompanied by war photographer Alexis Duclos, contacted senior Israeli officials and once again asked to be allowed to observe what was happening on the ground. His goal was not to rub elbows with staff officers at headquarters but to meet with Israeli officers and their troops, to follow them into action, and to hear them explain their moral dilemmas and the efforts they were making not to harm innocent civilians, especially women and children, despite the enormous difficulties presented by this type of conflict.
Lévy joined me in an armored car for a dangerous ride. Several hours before, on the same route, members of an Israeli unit had been seriously wounded by mines placed along the road from the Israeli border into Gaza. We covered several kilometers in complete darkness to reach the heart of the fighting. To see. To understand. To speak with the men who wore the uniform of the Israeli Defense Forces and to hear how they felt about the fight against the terrorists of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
After several intense hours with the troops and their field officers, Lévy and I returned. He was satisfied that he had fulfilled his mission.
Once again he could write on the basis of what he had seen and heard in the field, not on the basis of rumors or hearsay from sources too often prone to cynicism and enmity when the subject was Israel and her enemies.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is still a philosopher, just not one who practices restraint. In my view he has become, over the years, a change agent who is fully part of his time. Sometimes he has to stand alone, but he never loses faith in the duty to report and to fight. Unlike many other respected intellectuals, he understands that ideas are nothing without action.
Lévy provokes debate and even virulent opposition but continues to fight because, like we Israelis, he knows that in the absence of action and struggle, ideas can be stifled, books burned, people killed, and entire civilizations exterminated.
Today, faced with the violence of radical Islam and the rise of new forms of fascism, it is difficult to justify remaining a mere spectator who fights with words alone.
That Bernard-Henri Lévy has understood—at the risk of his life.

Olivier Rafowicz

Lieutenant-Colonel of reserve, formal spokesman of Tsahal for the foreign press, and currently head of the information channel Infolive.tv. he writes “le temps du retour” (2005.Favre) , Israël Hezbollah. Prélude à la troisième guerre mondiale ? (Favre 2007).

Translation by Steven Kennedy

Photo 1 : Sderot, southern Israel, in a house destroyed by a Hamas rocket. (c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 2 : During the war in Gaza, “Asaf” pilot of a Cobra helicopter. (c) Alexis Duclos.