Today, one of the most appalling phenomena of Jewish life is the sight of Diaspora Jews, as well as Israelis, brandishing their Judaism precisely to attack Israel.
Not just on the intellectual scene but everywhere in the cultural, political, academic, and global spheres – from Paris to Washington and Hollywood – they wave their Jewish identity as a token of moral credibility while distancing themselves from the Jewish state.
In France, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, after his initial support, began lashing out at Prime Minister Netanyahu, condemning Israel’s “colonization” and finally siding with President Emmanuel Macron’s recognition of a Palestinian state.
Philosopher, writer, and reform Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, who offers a modernized Judaism diluted in universalism, has sided with the anti-Israel narrative of famine and ethnic cleansing, while still calling herself a “Zionist.”
Across the Atlantic, American celebrities have staged their coming out against Israel in the name of their own Jewishness, which some are even willing to forfeit in the name of the Palestinian cause.
All of these illustrate the posture that Jean-Paul Sartre described in his Reflections on the Jewish Question (1946): that of the inauthentic Jew, the Jew in name only. Confronted with that antisemitic hatred, which Sartre saw as a “religion,” the Jew must choose between two main postures. The Jew is faced with the choice between authenticity and inauthenticity. The latter meant fleeing, denying, and renouncing.
As for authenticity, Sartre argued, it branched out in three postures.
The first one was to fully and gloriously assume the accusations cast upon Jews and embrace Jewish identity.
The second, was to assume some kind of universalistic Jewishness – a posture that would ultimately lead to self-denegation.
The third “authentic” posture presented by Sartre and less explored, but on which Bernard-Henri Lévy insists, is to assume Jewishness through Israel.
Too many Jews only use their identity as instrument of denunciation
In our own day, too many Jews choose the less-than-authentic path of universalism, where Jewish identity itself gets dissolved and becomes an instrument of denunciation.
In this landscape, Lévy stands apart.
Better known in France by his acronym BHL – an abbreviation that erases his archetypal Jewish name – he has grown used to singularity and almost courts it: never to be put in a box, always on the move physically and intellectually. Mocked for his arrogance, caricatured for his stately bearing – antisemitism has many guises – Lévy has spent his life on the front lines: Sarajevo, Rwanda, Kurdistan, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. And more than anywhere else, he has stood with Israel.
Unlike those who brandish Judaism to condemn the Jewish state, he assumes his Jewishness through Israel itself. As such, Lévy embodies the ultimate authentic Jew – maybe the only authentic posture for a Jew in our time. And despite the stain of Sartre’s “unbearable” indulgence toward Palestinian terrorism after the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Lévy prefers to fondly insist on Sartre’s loyalty to Israel and to the Jewish people.
Though the critics say that Lévy is a “philosopher of the media,” the opposite is the truth. He is the only philosopher of his generation who has consistently acted on his thoughts – often even acting before fully formulating the thought, taking physical as well as intellectual risks.
Lévy has made Judaism and Israel the horizon of his life. Though not an Israeli citizen, he embodies Israel’s mission: to exist not only as a state but as a moral project, a people entrusted with an obligation toward humanity. As such, he is an integral part of Israel’s project.
He is not entirely alone. Raphaël Enthoven, a younger philosopher – who happens to be Lévy’s ex-son-in-law and is Jewish on his father’s side – has become a militant defender of Israel, breaking the suffocating narrative in France’s media and intellectual circles about genocide and famine.
Like Lévy, Enthoven insists that a Palestinian state cannot be conceded now, and that to grant it today would be to reward terror. October 7 put their dream of peace through partition on hold. It was nothing less than the return of Sartre’s antisemitic crowd before our eyes: the pogrom as fusion, hatred of the Jew as cement. What united the Palestinian hordes that day was not nationhood but annihilation, not justice but destruction.
Such destructive cohesion cannot be the foundation of a state. Not now and not tomorrow.
Lévy and Enthoven view the ultimate establishment of a Palestinian state as a question of timing, though it bears no logic. How can the Jewish state, which Sartre himself affirmed, survive alongside those who define themselves only through its destruction? Especially when an Arab state already exists on land promised to the Jews. It is called Jordan. To create another Palestinian state west of the Jordan would not merely be immoral; it would be suicidal.
Still, unlike so many Diaspora Jews today, Lévy has continued to embrace the privilege of Jewish authenticity through Judaism and Israel. He has shown up for history and has chosen, with courage, to live the obligation of a Jew in history.
In that choice, Bernard-Henri Lévy remains what so many are not, an authentic Zionist. Yet to be fully true to his own path, derived from Sartre’s own course, Lévy should argue not just for the impossibility of a Palestinian state now, but altogether.
The writer holds a PhD in cultural studies from Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on post-Holocaust and Jewish literature.