The answers to war in aerate tend to fall into two camps: those who see it as a monstrous overreaction to the October 7th terrorist attacks, and a horrible one. crime against the Palestinians; and those who see the war and its opponents as a new and dangerous front line in the history of anti-Jewish prejudice.

The second view is summed up in the title of the new book by the French liberal writer Bernard Henri Lévy, Israel Singlewhere it is clear that he uses “Israel” in the biblical sense to refer to all Jews as well as the state of Israel.

Lévy begins with October 7, 2023, when Hamas killed 1,200 civilians in Israel and kidnapped 250 people, calling it a “historic, epochal, era-opening” event. He describes the horror of visiting the crime scene, where he was reminded of similar massacres of Jews by the Nazis: “I had to be alert and stifle the parade of reminiscences and images in my head. Any resemblance to a previous situation made no sense, because we were dealing with something completely unique.” This injunction is violated repeatedly throughout the book, as Lévy argues that Israel is fighting a form of “Nazism” in Palestine.

Next is a chapter titled “Amalek,” in which Lévy takes the biblical language of Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and runs with it: “Amalek is the terrifying being who has no attributes or will other than the innate, radical, eternal hatred he carries. for the Jews.” Lévy claims that October 7 represents the rise of this eternal enemy, who is described as “Evil” (with a capital “E”), “the beast”, “the serpent”, etc. and, implicitly, that Israel is fighting this demonic. enemy in Gaza.

Things get weirder from here, as Lévy describes a global conflict between the democratic world and what he calls “the five kings” after another biblical story, the kings being Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and Arab states “prone to jihadism.” As he writes, “Hamas is no longer Hamas, but instead the sword and toy of a counter-empire.”

Against this Hamas Empire (Lévy’s term), Israel “carries the message, even if unknowingly,” to all the Uighurs in China, the Armenians, the Kurds, democrats in “Arab autocracies,” feminists in Iran, dissidents in Russia, “and, perhaps in spite of themselves, Palestinians in silent revolt against the Hamas dictatorship.” Amidst the breadth and condescension of this statement, note the implication of Lévy’s crucial approach: Israel is bombing the Palestinians for their own good.

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Despite its noble mission, Lévy writes that Israel is alone. How can this be said when Israel (alone, if you will) is protected by the world’s greatest superpower, the United States, through billions in military aid and a veto power and the United Nations, whoever Israel is? government choose to do? Lévy prefers to focus on the dubious remarks of some critics of Israel after October 7, but his polemic is hampered by an absolutism about Israel and this lack of perspective.

Regarding Israel-Palestine, Lévy claims that he “has always been a supporter of a two-state solution”, although he adds: “that is, a solution according to which the rights of the Palestinians are recognized and granted, provided that they do not deny the rights of the Israelis to recognition and basic security.”

That “provided” does Palestinian conditional rights—a favorable view for a self-proclaimed internationalist writer and heir to des droits de l’Homme. Later he writes of “settlements that Israel will have to dismantle one day” (emphasis added). Again, the author’s moral urgency dissipates when Palestinians are involved.

Lévy brings up the rather important events of 1948 only in the context of rejecting the charge that Israel is a colonial project. (Anyone interested in a counterargument can read Edward Said’s 1979 book The problem of Palestine.) Lévy offers a familiar pro-Israeli version of history (long contested by the Israeli historians he names but ignores) that actually blames the “Arabs” for the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians and presumably their lives in exile or under occupation. since then.

People can argue forever about this, but it is clear that, as far as Lévy is concerned, the Jews have a special claim on the land. As he writes near the end of the book: “I love this little world of people stuck on the little strip of land they finally got, three-quarters of a century ago, left there by a West and a bigger world rivers of Jewish blood have flowed in the torrent of the centuries.” Edward Said would have taken a few pages out of “the land…left there by the West” and the accidental erasure of the Palestinians.

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In a chapter called “Radical Islam,” Lévy dwells on the anti-Semitism of Palestinian figures such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was indeed an ally of the Nazis. But Lévy wisely does not extend his argument to say (from France, of all places) that Nazi collaborator countries should cede territory to a Jewish state.

Instead, he says the Holocaust was a “metaphysical crime” involving all of humanity: “for all those haunted, in 2024 as in 1945, by (Theodor) Adorno’s vow to do all he could, absolutely all, for to ensure that ‘Auschwitz is not repeated,’ Israel is self-evident. It’s as simple as that.” Again, for Lévy it seems that this universal burden is to fall more heavily on some people (Palestinians) than on others.

When he finally gets to the current war in Gaza, where an estimated 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, he is stern: “All my life, I have stated in every way that (…) to consider the death of a child as a requirement functional, a statistical data, a mere detail, is to think like a barbarian.” He says this applies to children “pulled from the rubble” in Gaza, adding: “It needed to be said. It should have been clear.” He protest too much?

We read on: “But what I want to say is this, and with the greatest emphasis. The responsibility for the death of these children lies primarily not with Israel, but with those who turned them into human shields.” In other words, Israel is not responsible for the deaths of the people it kills.

He admits that the IDF made “mistakes” such as bombing the “clearly marked vehicles” of the World Central Kitchen aid workers or the “young soldiers, almost children themselves” (nice), who “panicked” and ” they killed unarmed civilians”. But that, too, is ultimately Hamas’s fault, because “this war is a horrible war that the Israelis did not want.” Lévy’s bias in the face of the evidence reveals his book to be an exercise in nationalism dressed up in humanist garb.

Lévy closes the book with a plea for Israel not to betray its values, which towards the end takes the syrupy form of a Jewish prayer.

Israel Alone could be an odd example of pro-Israel responses on October 7 and The war in Gaza by Western intellectuals. But it is the kind of book that could be given to Western policymakers to help them “understand” the conflict.

Despite its features (especially its spiritual undertones), it shares it with other texts (Dave Rich’s update Everyday hatere-prefaced by Jake Wallis Simons Israelophobia) the central problem with seeing the war through the lens of Jewish suffering, which is this: viewing the Israel-Palestine conflict solely as a problem of anti-Semitism requires making the injustices against the Palestinians invisible. If the Palestinian experience is looked at with clear eyes, the whole picture begins to change.

Lévy’s book is also a useful example of the dangers of abstraction—of imagining an abstract “Jew” or “Palestinian” who is either magically good or bad, depending on one’s point of view. For such a painful conflict material in focusing on land and people, turning groups of people into ideas (or idealized countries), even if well-intentioned, is a kind of dehumanization when what is required is mutual recognition.