“I believe they are fascists”: Bernard-Henri Lévy on Cdn antizionists

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Bernard-Henri Lévy, long one of France’s leading thinkers, is currently on a North American campus tour to promote his new book, Israel Alone. Lévy is a lifelong Zionist who has often championed the cause of Palestinian statehood. The book is his “cri de Coeur” on the tragedy of October 7, and contains his assertion that the Jewish people have never been more alone.

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Lévy is appearing in Toronto on Thursday, Nov. 7. He gave the following exclusive interview to National Post. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

An ad for Israel Alone in the trade publication Shelf Awareness was recently pulled, with editors saying that a pro-Israel book would upset their readers. You’ve taken up many controversial causes, you have faced protests, criticisms and in 2008 you were targeted for assassination by Islamist militants. In terms of opprobrium you’ve faced throughout your life, how does it compare to what faces a Western intellectual who unapologetically champions the cause of Israel?

You put it very well. I’ve seen this kind of incident so much in my life that this is not going to intimidate me. When you’ve spent nearly two years in the Ukrainian trenches, when you’ve filmed Bakhmut or Chasiv Yar under bombardment, when you’ve seen comrades fall just a few metres away, do you really think a miserable little guy like this is going to scare me?

The issue, however, lies with American authors. Especially, the younger authors. Because there is nevertheless an extraordinary climate at play here. Here is a country, two countries in fact — Canada and the United States — that were once homelands for persecuted Jews around the world. Here are two countries that were possible refuges for all threatened Jews worldwide. And now, in these countries, it’s the very name of Israel — and, soon, that of the Jews — that is becoming unpronounceable.

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A double bind. The First Amendment: Absolute freedom of speech. Antisemitism: one of these so-called “free” expressions has deadly consequences. This is where we are at. This is the situation of Jews in North America. All communities on the continent have the right to protection. All have the right to guard against provocations. Except one — the Jewish minority.

You have long argued that failure to defeat Vladimir Putin in Ukraine would have dire ramifications for the rest of the democratic West. Do you see Israel’s war with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and others as similarly being a bulwark between the West and illiberalism?  

Of course. It’s the same thing. There would never have been the Gaza War if there hadn’t been the war in Ukraine. What I mean is that Iran would never have taken the initiative to unleash the dogs of Hamas if it hadn’t observed our timid response to Putin unleashing his own dogs on Ukraine.

Similarly, if we abandon Israel, if we allow Hamas or Hezbollah to claim victory, if we give them even an inch of victory and credit, then I predict that the year will not end without China invading Taiwan.

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There is an axis of authoritarian powers. These are the five revanchist countries, the “five kings,” which I described in my book The Empire and the Five Kings. They form an unlikely alliance, but an alliance nonetheless. They observe each other. They spy on each other. When one scores a point, the second takes over, and the third rushes in and asserts its imperial ambitions. In this very precise sense, we can say that Israel, like Ukraine, is fighting a battle of civilization. The battle for rights. For democracy. The anti-totalitarian and anti-imperialist battle of our time.

Your book seeks to debunk, point by point, all the charges made against Israel by anti-Zionists: That it’s a Western “colony”; that it’s committing genocide; that it’s an apartheid state. The 25-year-old waving a Hezbollah flag in the streets of Toronto is probably not going to be swayed by logic on any of these points. So who are you hoping to reach?

Students of goodwill. There are some, after all. Young people tossed around between various influences, trying to understand and navigate. Young people who have been taken hostage by the Hamas-supporting fanatics. To these individuals, one can try and convey reasonable thoughts. One can explain to them, for example, that it is absurd to talk about apartheid in a country that has 20 per cent Arab citizens who enjoy full civil rights. One can explain what genocide means and why it is not a genocide when civilians are urged to evacuate bombed areas, when vaccines are distributed to children, and when, as best as possible — when Hamas permits and agrees to distribute them — humanitarian aid trucks continue to pass through.

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As for the accusation of being a “colonial state,” do you really believe it’s impossible to explain to students that half of today’s Israelis were already there, native, indigenous, at the time of Israel’s founding? And that, if the other half is of European origin, they didn’t arrive in military convoys to occupy a foreign country but on makeshift boats, rejected by a Europe that no longer wanted these outcasts, these shunned, these thrown away people, these hunted as prey? This point is essential. They were not sent by a colonial Europe, but were the “rejects” that this colonial Europe no longer wanted, and whom it got rid of by putting them on ghost ships that docked, when they could, in the promised land.

There are simple truths. Facts and evident truths. This is what I plan to explain to students in Vancouver and Toronto. This is what I intend to say in the major Ivy League universities on the East Coast. And this is what I am reminding everyone, right now, in the major universities on the West Coast of the United States.

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You come from a country that has known overt public Jew hatred going all the way back to the Dreyfus Affair and before. I put it to you that this is new to Canada. We’ve had institutionalized antisemitism and we’ve long had radical anti-Zionists in our midst, but the sight of weekly marches openly cheering the murder of Jews has no precedent. If Europe is witnessing the stirring of ancient hatreds, what are we Canadians to make of these hatreds as something new?  

Canada is at the forefront, that’s true. But this is still a global phenomenon, to say the least. What do we do in the face of it? First, don’t be afraid of words. Say clearly and distinctly that this is the new face of antisemitism. And we must repeat, time and again: “You have the right to defend the Palestinians; you have the right to be upset by their suffering; you even have the right to wish (I feel the same) for the birth of a state for them; but not at the price of a new genocide that would affect the eight million Jews living in Israel.”

Because frankly, who are we kidding? When they chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” that’s exactly what they’re saying: Eradication, annihilation, of the eight million Jews in question.

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Much of your career has been spent championing the plight of victimized populations, be they in Algeria, Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan or Ukraine. In this, many of the voices and institutions that were all too happy to join you in condemning violence against Syrian or Algerian civilians are now silent when it comes to massacred Israelis. Did this surprise you?

Unfortunately, I’m not sure I was joined by so many people when I denounced the massacres of civilians in Algeria or Syria! And, to be honest, I often found myself very alone! The real paradox, and the real scandal, is that the same people who didn’t say a word back then have now suddenly awakened to supposedly support the Palestinian cause. I say “supposedly” because the fanatics shouting in Toronto about their “support for Gaza” couldn’t care less about the actual people of Gaza and only take pleasure in demonizing Israel.

Israel Alone describes your lifelong advocacy for a “two state solution.” You describe your heart “pounding with joy” after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, believing it to be the first step towards a Palestinian state. Many others who once harboured dreams of peaceful Israeli and Palestinian nations living side by side have utterly abandoned that notion after October 7. Do you still see viability in the idea, at least within your lifetime?

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Yes. But on one condition: That Hamas and all those like it permanently leave power. And that the Palestinians, freed from their bad shepherds, wholeheartedly accept the existence of Israel and its legitimacy.

The October 7 massacres hit places, such as Kibbutz Be’eri, that you knew in your youth. Canadian victim Vivian Silver, who was murdered at Be’eri, was your classic idealistic-student-activist-turned-peace-campaigner. Here in Canada, many of the people cheering loudest for intifada are young, idealistic students who would not have looked out of place on a 1970s kibbutz or in the crowd of the Nova music festival. How do we square these two? How can Western students look upon people who are basically Hebrew-speaking versions of themselves, and decide they are the enemy?

I do not believe that those who shout for intifada are another version of ourselves. I believe they are fascists. Scoundrels. People who, consciously or not, support a dictatorial regime (Hamas), an imperialist power (Iran), and crimes of unimaginable horror (October 7). The exact opposite of the pure souls of Be’eri and Kfar Aza.

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Israel Alone warns against embracing the recent pro-Israel sentiments of the historically antisemitic European far-right, be they Hungary’s Viktor Orban or Marine Le Pen in your own country. Here in Canada, the tide of antisemitism we’re seeing is coming almost entirely from left-wing parties and left-coded institutions such as academia or organized labour. What do you say to the argument that this tide of antisemitism, more so than others, sprung from progressive corners?

You are right. But so what? This is indeed the paradox of the Jewish fate today. To be hated by people who claim the humanist values that we ourselves invented, and to be supported by others who carry values opposed to those we have always embodied — that’s the paradox.

I know well, to answer your question specifically, that the European far right now claims to support Israel; I know they now pretend to be philosemitic. But is that how people change? Is that how a party whose DNA is deeply marked by hatred of Jews makes a historical shift? One does not break with antisemitism by decree. One does not erase the past by a simple decision of a political committee. To be a friend of Jews and of Israel requires profound work. A work of self-reflection. A work of truth and memory. These far-right movements, in Europe and in the United States, have not done this work. This only makes Israel’s solitude all the more terrible.

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