Almost half a century ago, Bernard-Henri Lévy warned that antizionism would become the vehicle for a new wave of hate.
It was 1981, and the philosopher was already one of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, when, in his book L’Idéologie française (The French Ideology), he argued that antisemitism remained a “living ghost” in France and Europe, ready to re-emerge in a new guise.
Yet even Lévy was unprepared for the speed with which so much of the Western world turned against Israel in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre.
Speaking as his new book, Mémoires provisoires (Provisional Memoirs) looks back over his career battling extremism, Lévy recalls arriving in Israel shortly after the Hamas atrocities, finding a country still reeling from the slaughter, its army yet to launch its major military response.
“And immediately, I saw people, I heard people in America, in England, in France, saying Israel is committing genocide. Israel is reacting in a disproportionate way. Israel just got what it deserved.
“What happened on October 8, October 9, what occurred in the streets of London, in the streets of Paris, was unconscionable for me.”
Lévy spoke to the JC from his home in Paris on October 7, the third anniversary of the massacre, in a wide-ranging discussion that ranged far beyond Israel and the resurgence of antisemitism.
He sees Europe’s response to the attack as part of a wider failure to recognise the threats confronting Western civilisation.
For him, Israel’s struggle against Hamas, Iran and its Islamist proxies, and Ukraine’s battle against Russia are not separate, unrelated conflicts.
Though fought thousands of kilometres apart, they are intimately connected – two fronts in the same struggle to defend Western civilisation against forces determined to destroy it.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Lévy has devoted much of his time to Ukraine, making four documentary films and repeatedly travelling to the front lines.
“Ukraine and Israel are fighting the same battle: for democracy, for the West and its values, and against a new form of radicalism,” he says.
He describes an emerging alliance of authoritarian powers, including Russia, Iran and China, alongside radical Islamist movements, confronting the democracies of the West.
It is a chilling prospect for a man whose intellectual and political life has been devoted to the defence of Western liberal values.
Nowhere has the erosion of those values and the rise of antisemitism bewildered him more than in Britain.
“I really love Britain. I love London. I have enormous respect for its cultural and intellectual traditions, from John Locke and David Hume to Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill.”
For Lévy, Britain was a second homeland, as a beacon of liberalism and tolerance that offered reassurance against the darker currents of French politics he had long identified.
“Thank God for the UK, I always thought. The Brits get it right. They have the right instincts, the right reactions. They know when to say no.”
But the relentless wave of antizionist protests and deadly antisemitic attacks in the UK have profoundly shaken that faith: “I never expected that I should live, that I could live long enough to see what is happening today.”
The Labour government’s increasingly hostile stance towards Israel has left him deeply troubled.
“Too easy, too easy,” he says when offered the argument that Labour may simply be trying to regain voters drawn to the Greens by their opposition to Israel.
The problem is more deeply rooted, he believes.
“For millennia, a dark cloud of hatred has hung over the Jews, and therefore over humanity itself. Today, that hatred takes the form of demonising the state of Israel.”
His dismay extends to Western governments more broadly, and the stark contrast between their condemnation of antisemitism and reluctance to confront Hamas and their eagerness to pressure Israel.
“What I observe is that nothing of this energy is devoted to what should be really urgent, which is to get rid of Hamas, to liberate Palestinians from this barbaric organisation.”
It should not be beyond the power of Britain, France and their partners, he argues, to exert sufficient pressure on Hamas to lay down its weapons and surrender power.
“This is the real fault. The real fault is to exert pressure only on the side of one of the parties.”
One particularly egregious example, in his view, was the decision of so many Western countries to recognise a Palestinian state, a decision on which French President Emmanuel Macron had consulted him beforehand.
“My opinion was that a Palestinian state is unconscionable as long as Hamas is in charge, as long as Hamas can receive it as a gift and as a reward, and at least as long as there are not very strict and strong additional conditions.”
His advice went unheeded.
“I was not listened to,” he says. Macron made a “big, big political mistake, a historical mistake”.
“It was obvious that recognising a Palestinian state would do nothing to advance peace. On the contrary, it would reward Hamas, strengthen its leaders and enhance their standing.”
What troubles him is not only the decision itself but the wider political climate that made it possible.
“There is a sort of fury, a worldwide fury against Israel.
“I have never seen the word genocide enter everyday discourse so readily.”
Amid surging antisemitism and Islamist extremism, Lévy has found himself under direct personal threat.
In 2022, the Washington Post reported that Western intelligence agencies had uncovered an Iranian-linked plot to assassinate him. Since then, he has lived under police protection.
“I’m not a free man in my own country. I cannot walk alone in Paris. I can only go out surrounded by security.”
While he expresses deep gratitude to the police officers who protect him night and day, he resents the loss of a freedom most people take for granted.
“They are brave, they are saving angels. But it’s not normal. I should not need that.”
Lévy is adamantly clear on the distinction between Islam as its radical extremist form.
He believes Western governments bear considerable responsibility for the growing strength of Islamist extremism because they have repeatedly abandoned the very Muslims who were fighting against it.
He cites the West’s failure to support Ahmad Shah Massoud against the Taliban in Afghanistan, its inadequate response to the persecution of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, and the abandonment of democratic forces in Syria after the uprising against Bashar al-Assad began in 2011.
He also points to the Kurds, whom he regards as natural allies of the West and deserving of a state.
“We dropped them flat,” he says. “We missed no occasion to miss an occasion, to extend a brotherly hand to those who, inside the world of Islam, fight against Islamism.”
Levy argues the West should have backed democratic Muslims rather than allowing radical preachers and movements to establish themselves as representatives of their communities.
That failure, he believes, has strengthened the extremists while undermining the moderates.
“It’s more and more difficult because the radical Muslims are getting stronger and stronger,” he says.
Unless Western societies can distinguish between those in the Muslim world who support democracy and those who seek to destroy it, supporting the former while confronting the latter, Lévy warns, “the perspective is just hell for all of us. Hell, not crisis, hell.”
Lévy fears the survival of Western civilisation cannot be taken for granted. He invokes the French writer Paul Valéry’s famous warning that civilisations are mortal.
“Of course America can collapse. France can collapse. English civilisation, which represents a pinnacle of tolerance, of liberalism, of openness of mind, can collapse also.”
Yet he rejects the notion of societies being on an inevitable course of rise and decline outlined by Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher.
“I don’t believe history follows a predetermined course. I did not abandon Marxism half a century ago to become a Spenglerian.”
For all his criticism of Hamas and the Western governments he believes have emboldened it, Lévy has not abandoned the idea of Palestinian statehood.
Asked whether he still believes in a two-state solution, his answer is unequivocal.
“There is no other solution. I don’t believe in it now, for sure. But I also know that there is no other solution.”
A settlement will become possible, he argues, only when Hamas has been decisively defeated and discredited. It will also require a Palestinian leader willing to make a historic compromise, someone comparable to Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.
Lévy invokes the reconciliation between France and Germany after the Second World War as evidence that apparently impossible transformations can occur.
“We have to hope, but for sure it cannot be today.
“Things can always be reversed. And this is our task.”
To get more news, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.