Israel alone, Israel unbowed

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy captures the essence of the Jewish people—and their innate and intense love for a tiny strip of land—in his latest book, in which he deconstructs the significance of Oct. 7.

Ben Cohen | Sept 20, 2024

“He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin/He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.” So sang Bob Dylan on his buoyant 1983 album track “Neighborhood Bully,” the title of which is an ironic take on how much of the world views the State of Israel and the nation—as Dylan observed, “always on trial, just for being born”—that built it.

Israel Alone. Just as Dylan conveys Israel’s grit in fighting back despite its stark isolation and its transformation by its enemies from victim into predator, Lévy’s book, sparked by the Hamas pogrom on Oct. 7 last year, communicates much the same spirit.

Unphased by the fact that he is writing about a rapidly moving target, the book is vintage Lévy, casually invoking thinkers and writers from Rashi to Pascal, from Hegel to Louis Aragon, as he dives into the Middle Eastern fray to then rise above it with his telling insights.

The book begins with Lévy’s arrival in Israel one day after the pogrom, which he defines as an “Event.” Like the “Black Swan” episodes that occasionally plague financial markets—unpredictable, unexpected and little-understood developments that can send the price of equities and assets crashing downwards—no one sees an “Event” coming, Lévy explains, “nor even its silent stirrings.” But once an “Event” manifests, it violently and rudely changes the future, tearing up the preconceptions we hold that give us comfort and a degree of certainty.

For Jews, both in Israel and outside, Oct. 7 marked a dramatic rupture with the concept of “Never Again” that had prevailed since the late 1940s, when the Jewish people emerged from the Holocaust still alive and achieved independence in our ancestral homeland. In the intervening decades, we garnered both pride and strength from the Israel Defense Forces in its spectacular defense of the country against a succession of invasions by Arab armies, as well as its spectacular one-off operations, notably the rescue of hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976 (I can still the hear the shrieks of joy from the kitchen of my grandparent’s London home when my grandfather picked up the paper and read the headline, dashing to the room where my brother and I were sleeping to break the news.)

Oct. 7 was the exact opposite. We watched with disbelief, sickness in our hearts, as the Hamas rapists and murderers ripped their way into Israel, crashing through a border that we had thought to be impenetrable. Suddenly, Israel seemed as small as it actually is and the IDF a shadow of what we had believed it to be. Centuries of Jewish suffering merged into one moment, as though the Cossacks and the Nazi Einsatzgruppen had traveled into our own time, joining with the Arab armies that had failed time and again over the previous eight decades to drive the Jews into the sea. That repellent ambition had, until that day, sounded like an empty slogan coined by perennial losers. Now, amid the rapes and mutilations and burning homes and sundry other cruelties, it seemed like our new reality.

Lévy says, and I agree with him, that he never seriously thought that Israel was faced with annihilation on that terrible morning. But, he adds, there is that “geosymbolic space that is no less influential in determining how people stand in the world”—a space where political realism and its calculations is dislodged by fear and memory. “October 7,” he writes, “marks the alignment, for the worse, of Israel with the diaspora.” Much later on, he reveals his love of “this little world of people stranded on the tiny strip of land they finally received, three-quarters of a century ago, left there by a West and by a larger world wet with the rivers of Jewish blood spilled into the torrent of centuries.”

He is far from being the only Jew who feels that intense love, and far from being the only Jew consumed with the abiding fear of living in a world where that tiny strip of land is no longer called Israel.

As I said, Lévy is writing here about a moving target, and much has occurred since he submitted his manuscript, providing both sorrow and satisfaction in equal measure. Sorrow at how divided Israel has become internally, when it should have been united; sorrow at the fate of the hostages seized by Hamas, many of them now dead and many of them still crying out to be rescued from Gaza’s fetid depths; sorrow at the global resurgence of an antisemitism—what Lévy calls the “Beast”—that deploys Israel as the gateway to attack and defame all Jews everywhere, and which denies in real time, as Lévy documents, the truth of what happened on Oct. 7; satisfaction at the manner in which Hamas has, by the accounts of its own commanders, been emasculated and decimated; satisfaction at the humiliating blows leveled at Iran and its proxies, especially Hezbollah, through a slew of assassinations and daring operations, like the pagers and hand-held radios that detonated in the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists across Lebanon during the last week. Lévy speaks for all of us when he writes that “the death of civilians in Gaza is not a massacre, and it is most certainly not a genocide.” To argue otherwise is, he declares, “a gift to the child-killers of Hamas, and an addition to the misery of the world.”

Lévy’s book is, of course, an early draft of a history that is still being made. We do not know for sure where that journey will lead, and we cannot discount the possibility of another “Event,” with all the trauma that will bring in the moment, and all the hatred that will flow towards us in its aftermath. Let us remember, therefore, the postcard that Sigmund Freud sent from Rome to one of his friends—a picture of the Arch of Titus on the front, with its stone carvings of Roman soldiers pillaging the Temple in Jerusalem, and on the back the simple handwritten message: “The Jew survives it!”

Because surviving is what we do, and we do so unbowed.

Ben Cohen, a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column for JNS on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics.