By Bret Stephens
Thursday, October 31, 2024
The prose style of Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most
recognizable public intellectual, is not to everyone’s taste. He is prone to
grandiloquence, self-reference, and metaphor salads. In the margins of my
galley copy of his latest book, Israel
Alone, I scribbled “O.M.G.” next to some of his more rococo flourishes,
like his scorn for the “shameful dialecticians” who “could still be found
putting themselves in the shoes of the pyromaniacs and seeing in these
arrhythmias the last false notes of a concert of nations struggling to emerge.”
It’s easy, almost fun, to mock.
It’s also a mistake. Israel Alone is an imperfect
but important book. Its importance stems, first, from Lévy’s unabashed Zionism,
which today is an act of moral and even physical courage, especially in Europe.
It stems, also, from getting all of the important things about the war in Gaza
right: that Hamas, in its bottomless cynicism, is responsible for every death,
Israeli and Palestinian alike; that the behavior toward Israel by groups like
Amnesty International and the Red Cross is a disgrace; that calls for
cease-fire are “merely a disguised manner of inviting compromise and peace with
assassins”; that anti-Zionism is the most effective method for today’s
anti-Semites to express their hatred of Jews; that the core problem between
Israel and the Palestinians is a 76-year Palestinian refusal to genuinely
accept a Jewish state in any borders; that the “yes, but” arguments constantly
made against Israel by its faux friends are the work of “professional excusers
of evil.”
Most of all, it stems from Lévy’s understanding of what
October 7 fully laid bare: “a colony of germs that were already present in the
sewers not only of Gaza, but of the world.”
Which germs? Anti-Semitism, for starters. The “blunt,
mad, almost limitless hatred” of Jews—seen in the euphoria that their mass
murder elicited from Times Square to the Sydney Opera House—is the glue that
binds militant Islamists to queer progressives, the bien pensant at Harvard to
American white supremacists.
Hatred of freedom, for another: As with the invasion of
Ukraine, the most significant outcome of October 7 is that it has consolidated
a global alliance of despots—China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and its proxies,
including Hamas—against the free world, even if the free world has mostly
failed to appreciate that Israel’s fight is part of the global fight for
freedom.
A third germ: moral inversion. Lévy observes the ways in
which October 7 was immediately blamed on the victims and not on the
perpetrators; how Israel’s war of self-defense was treated from the start as an
act of aggression; how “genocide” became the preferred way to describe Israel’s
war against a genocidal enemy.
With those inversions came another: the inversion of
reality. October 7 was the most documented pogrom in history, with the
murderers filming themselves butchering their victims. Yet within weeks, their
deeds were being obfuscated, trivialized, forgotten, or simply denied. Of all
the horrors of October 7, none is greater than its attempted erasure.
All this leads Lévy to his central point: “The Jews,” he
writes, “are more alone than they have ever been.”
It is, on the one hand, an absurd claim: More alone than
they were on the MS St. Louis, let alone at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?
So alone that, as of this writing, so many of the high places in American life
are held by Jews—from the secretaries of state, Treasury, and homeland
security, to the Senate majority leader and eight of his colleagues, to six of
the 10 richest Americans?
Yet Lévy might eventually be proved right. In the early
1920s, the most important political figure in Germany, Walther Rathenau, was a
Jew. So was Germany’s greatest scientist, Albert Einstein, along with its most
notable philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Within a few years, one was assassinated,
the other forced into exile, the third banished and humiliated. The recurring
nightmare of Jewish history is that our zenith often proves to be our
precipice.
A more decisive point: Until October 7, the idea that the
Jewish state was a haven for Jews appeared to be empirically true,
notwithstanding the terror, menace, and calumny of Israel’s enemies. A French
Jew, tired of hiding his kippah and fearful for the everyday safety of his
children, knew that in a city like Ashdod his family could be free and, if not
entirely safe, better protected. But now, as Lévy writes, “the refuge has
become a trap, and the place that was the symbol of ‘never again’ was where ‘again’
had come down like a bolt of lightning.” October 7, he adds, “marks the
alignment, for the worse, of Israel with the diaspora.”
In other words, Lévy is suggesting that what might have
died on October 7 was the conviction that Zionism still provided the best
answer to the Jews’ most pressing problem—the need to survive. Now Jews face
the prospect that no place is safer, never mind safe. From Minneapolis to
Marseilles to Metula, Jews are at risk, everywhere. And the solicitude that
Gentiles feel for our plight seems to be diminishing, everywhere.
***
So what’s to be done?
On this question, Lévy has almost nothing to say. Maybe
that’s for a follow-on book. But it’s a subject that thoughtful Jews, with our
Gentile friends, must address. The task involves many challenges, most beyond
the scope of this essay. But we can begin by observing this: Prior to October
7, Israel’s isolation was diminishing, not increasing.
This was true, most obviously, for Israel’s foreign
policy. The 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and Morocco were the
capstone of three decades of diplomatic openings for the Jewish state, from
India in 1992 to Chad in 2019; the Accords also seemed to anticipate the
eventual normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia. It was true for the
Israeli economy: The value of Israeli exports more than quadrupled between 2002
and 2022: Israel currently has contracts to provide more than 130 billion cubic
meters of natural gas to Egypt and Jordan; supplies the British army with
protective systems for their tanks and sells spyware to the FBI (even as the
Biden administration was publicly denouncing the company from which it was
buying the merchandise). It was true about tourism: Between 2014 and 2019 the
annual number of visitors to Israel rose by over 50 percent, to just under 5
million, while the annual number of Israelis traveling abroad also nearly
doubled, to 9 million, in the same period. Those numbers fell during the Covid
epidemic but had rebounded by 2022. As for universities, in 2019 Haaretz reported
that Israel was the “No. 1 exporter of academic talent to the United States,”
with enough scholars in America to equal “the entire faculty of two to three
typical Israeli institutes of higher education.”
No wonder that Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the authors of Start-Up
Nation, wrote a convincing sequel, The Genius of Israel, that
was on the cusp of publication last fall and that
I reviewed in these pages. For all the unsuspected national shortcomings
that led to October 7—to say nothing of the torrent of hate that the massacre
exposed and fueled around the world—Israel was a nation visibly on the rise.
This raises two distinct but related questions. How do we
reconcile the broad optimism about pre-October 7 Israel with the post–October 7
pessimism typified by Lévy? And what was it that Israel was doing right before
that dark day—so that it may do it again?
The answer to the first question is that the picture Lévy
paints in Israel Alone is too dark. It ignores the dogs that didn’t bark
in the night—the virtual absence of anti-Israel protests on the vast majority
of university campuses outside of Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard,
Cornell, and a handful of other schools. It ignores the support Israel did get,
including more than 50,000 tons worth of arms shipments, from a Democratic
administration. It ignores the mostly full-throated support the Republican
Party gives to Israel, along with some notable progressives like Pennsylvania
Senator John Fetterman and New York Representative Ritchie Torres. It ignores
Israel’s continued ties, after a year of war, with its Arab partners.
None of this is to deny that things are worse for Israel,
and Jews, almost anywhere one looks. But they are not unrelievedly bleak. We
continue to have millions of friends and admirers, at home and abroad. Israel
maintains an astonishing capacity to persevere through trials that would have
broken weaker nations. Israel’s weaknesses were exposed on October 7, but more
so were the weaknesses of its enemies, exemplified by the pager explosions in
Lebanon and the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran safe
house. Perhaps most important, an ancient Jewish instinct for danger, dormant
too long, has been reawakened.
Which brings us to the second question: How do we return
to our former trajectory? Here it’s worth noting the very separate approaches
taken by Israelis and American Jews in the past two decades.
Broadly speaking, American Jews, at least outside of the
Orthodox world, opted not just for assimilation. Too often, they went for
self-erasure. More than 60 percent of Jews who have married in recent years
have done so with a non-Jewish spouse. Non-Orthodox Jewish women have the
lowest fertility rate of any ethnic group in America. Swedish, Polish, and
German Americans were once culturally and religiously distinctive subgroups in
America, before they dissolved into the great American mainstream. That could
be the fate of secular American Jewry.
Nor is the problem merely demographic. Secular Jewry has
largely embraced identity politics for everyone—except ourselves. We have
looked with benign indifference as Jewish enrollment numbers at elite
universities fell year by year. We have embraced DEI programs that ignored and
despised us because we are “white” or “white passing.” We have
participated in a kind of soft calumny of the Jewish state, meekly defending
Israel’s right to exist while endlessly second-guessing the means by which it
chooses to defend itself. We have loudly denounced an occupation that in Gaza
hasn’t existed for 19 years and continues in the West Bank only because
Israel’s enemies remain sworn to its destruction. At a graver extreme, some
American Jews have joined sides with our enemies, giving those enemies a veneer
of pseudo-respectability. There’s always a wicked son in the mix.
The consequences of this self-erasure bear directly on
the return of anti-Semitism, which had been rising before October 7 and
exploded after it. Dwindling numbers erode the political power Jews once
enjoyed, not least vis-à-vis other minority groups. A diminished presence at
elite universities (especially when so many of the Jews on these campuses, both
students and faculty, veer left) shaped a campus culture that looked on Jewish
concerns with growing indifference and hostility. The koshering of antipathy or
hatred for Israel from “As a Jew” Jews (to borrow a term from Eli
Lake’s essay in the March issue of Commentary)
paved the way for more vicious forms of anti-Jewish politics. The eagerness to
empower “alternative voices” in publishing or the arts begat the exclusion of
Jews in industries they had once dominated. And the broad failure of Jewish
organizations to represent much beyond their parochial interests and obsessions
has led to a politics where everyone speaks for the Jews—and nobody does.
If a single word captures this type of Jewish-American
politics (in the broadest sense of politics), it’s ingratiation. With
noteworthy exceptions, the Jewish strategy in America has been to make
ourselves likeable: funny, vulnerable, generous, accessible, transparent,
sweetly neurotic, individually successful but always at the side of the needy.
When we tell our story, we tend to emphasize what’s universal to it, not what’s
unique. American Jews want to be lovable, and loved, not for being different,
much less better, but for being just like everyone else.
There are virtues to ingratiation, and often a necessity
for it, especially for a minority living amid frequently hostile host nations.
But a politics that mainly seeks to curry favor through a combination of
conspicuous achievement and constant self-effacement can generate as much envy
as it does admiration, as much contempt as it does love. It’s the recipe by
which American Jews have arrived at the place we find ourselves today.
***
Now turn to an alternative approach. Throughout most of
the 1990s, Israelis also chose the path of ingratiation, beginning with the
White House handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat that inaugurated
the Oslo Accords. It led to Nobel Peace Prizes, a peace treaty with Jordan,
and, briefly, an era of good feelings for the Jewish state, at least in certain
corners of the world.
It also led to disaster, for two principal reasons.
Israel’s enemies smelled weakness, and Israel’s friends—its supposed
friends—expected pliancy. Oslo created a dynamic by which every Israeli
concession became the occasion to demand another concession (euphemistically
described as “taking risks for peace”), and every concession became an
opportunity for Palestinian incitement, terrorism, and rejection. By the end of
Israel’s seven-year quest to earn the world’s favor—including the withdrawal of
Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, most of Gaza, and nearly every
Palestinian city and town, along with Israel’s declared willingness to accept a
Palestinian state on nearly all the West Bank and Gaza—the Jewish state had
conceded, on the ground or in principle, everything it could reasonably
concede. It wasn’t, and could never be, enough. When the long train of
concessions was met with a storm of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and
a lynching, it was Israel, not the Palestinians, who were blamed.
In short, long before Israel was alone after October 7,
2023, it was alone after the outbreak of the second intifada. I lived through
that period as editor of the Jerusalem Post, and I recall a time nearly
as bleak as the present: cafés, buses, discos, malls, and ballrooms blown up on
a weekly basis; a drumbeat of calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions;
denunciations of every Israeli act of self-defense as a war crime; endless
slander of the Jewish state by the world’s great-and-good; the tut-tutting of
experts who declared there could be no military solution to Israel’s problems.
This time, however, the Israeli government under Ariel
Sharon defied world opinion—including, at times, the wishes of the Bush
administration. It sent tanks into Ramallah to surround and isolate Arafat. It
initiated an intensive campaign of arrests and targeted assassinations of
terrorist kingpins, from Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti in Ramallah to Hamas’s Sheikh
Yassin in Gaza. It built the security fence. By 2004, the second intifada had
effectively been defeated. In 2006, Israel went to war with Hezbollah employing
a strategy of heavy bombardment intended, as then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
put it, to show that “the boss has gone mad.” The war was in many ways a
failure, but the ferocity of Israel’s military campaign did create a stable
border for 17 years. In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office and, for
all his many personal and political failings—which
I detailed in Commentary in the
summer of 2021—showed a repeated willingness to defy Western pressure to
accept a Palestinian state or go along with the Iran nuclear deal. His 2015
speech to Congress, in which he made the case against the deal and openly
defied Barack Obama, did more to cement Israel’s ties to the Arab states than
had any Israeli concession to the Palestinians.
Israel thrived throughout these years. It did so, in
part, because it stuck to sound economic policies and created an atmosphere of
relative security that attracted investors and retained entrepreneurs. But it
also succeeded because it ceased hankering for the love and approval of liberal
Western elites and instead demanded, and showed itself worthy of, the respect
of adversaries, allies, and potential allies. It was not concessions to Mahmoud
Abbas that persuaded Emiratis and Saudis to grow closer to the Jewish state; it
was Israel’s demonstrated ability to infiltrate and humiliate Iran and set back
its nuclear programs. It was not Israel’s popularity on the streets of Cairo
that led Egyptian strongman Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to strengthen ties with his
eastern neighbor; it was the capabilities Israel brought to the fight against
ISIS in the Sinai.
***
There is a lesson in this for how Israel should move
forward. As I write, in late September, the Netanyahu government is under
intense international and domestic pressure to reach a deal with Hamas that
might free at least some of the hostages in exchange for a cease-fire that
would effectively guarantee Hamas’s long-term survival as Gaza’s dominant
political and military entity. It’s a deal fraught with peril, because Hamas
will use the hostages it doesn’t release to extract ever-greater concessions (and
treat those remaining hostages even more cruelly), and because a Hamas that
survives will eventually recover its strength, resume its assault, and re-gain
an aura of invincibility.
But the greatest danger will be to Israel’s reputation:
to the belief, among enemies and allies alike, that the Jewish state knows how
to pick itself up, that it can win wars against inferior enemies, that it
doesn’t capitulate in the face of moral pressure, that it is the strong horse
of the Middle East.
Precisely the same logic applies to Israel’s other
conflicts, above all with Hezbollah. The brilliance of the pager/walkie-talkie
strike in Lebanon has done more to restore Israel’s regional reputation than 11
months of relative restraint and tit-for-tat reprisals against enemies to the
north. A similar lesson will also have to be given to the Houthis, especially
since the Biden administration seems incapable of doing so. “Who Dares, Wins,”
the motto (borrowed from the British) of Israel’s special forces, should be the
motto for the Jewish state as a whole. The path out of loneliness is always a
path of action.
What about American Jews?
The resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States has
begun to force a fundamental rethink of the way in which at least some American
Jews contemplate their place in society: I call them “October
8 Jews”—those who woke up the day after the attack with a clear
understanding of who our friends are not. Those Jews include the donors who
revolted at the idea of continuing to give money to Harvard, Penn, Brown, or
Columbia; who are investing heavily in new educational institutions that adhere
to classically liberal values; who are calling out the DEI/anti-racism complex
for being the anti-Semitism incubator that it is; who are breaking out of the
stale orthodoxies of traditional media; who are investing all of their
philanthropic energies in strengthening Jewish life.
They are the vanguard, but we are only at the beginning.
So many institutions in American life that were once welcoming places for
American Jews have turned bad: elite private schools; human-rights
organizations; the literary world; social work; Mideast-studies departments;
public-school curriculums—the list is long. In every one of these fields or
institutions, October 8 Jews have a clear choice: Reject, reform, or reinvent
them. What’s no longer possible is to pretend that what we have now is acceptable,
or that indifference and inaction are viable options.
Just as the Bush administration spoke of a “whole of
government effort” after September 11, 2001, we need a “whole of American
Jewry” effort after October 7: to make high-quality Jewish day-school education
available and affordable to every Jewish family that wants one; to cut off all
giving to colleges and universities that are hostile to open and vibrant Jewish
life and Zionist expression; to create a new ecosystem of literary prizes,
faculty chairs, “genius awards,” and grants that reward and celebrate true
merit; to fund and tell stories on large and small screens that richly and
empathically explore the Jewish experience; to deepen American ties to Israel
through corporate and academic partnerships; to expose and shut down the opaque
and potentially illicit networks that fund and support the anti-Israel student
protests.
This is a partial list, but you get the point. If we
don’t want to wind up alone, we cannot afford to stand still, think small, or
look back. The questions are no longer “Who betrayed us?” or “Why is the world
this way?” They are “What do we do now?” and “How soon can we get it done?”
Israel and the Jewish people aren’t alone—yet. Ensuring
that we never wind up alone is going to take courage, work, nerve. And a demand
for respect.
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