Bernard-Henri Levy: The Ugly Tide Washing Across Europe

(Photo: Ouest France)

French writer and perennially controversial public intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy brings his usual crystal clarity to the crisis in Gaza. In his July 30th article in the Wall Street Journal, Levy notes the wave of anti-Semitism now washing over Europe, replete with pro-Palestinian protesters shouting "Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the Gas!" -- which vividly shows that the oft-mentioned "distinction" between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is, in practice, a distinction without a difference.

In the 1984 film The Little Drummer Girl, based on John Le Carre's novel, there's a scene where Diane Keaton, posing as a recruit to the Palestinian cause, is being "trained" at a Palestinian camp in Southern Lebanon. She's talking to one of the PLO leaders in his cabin, and, as part of her spy act, makes a reference to "those dirty Jews." The PLO leader stops her, raising his hand, saying, "No, listen, we are anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic." She looks at him with a sly smile and says, "Yeah, right." Then the PLO leader laughs, and Keaton laughs with him. They both know what the real story is.

Levy rightly points out the relative indifference in Europe over the tens of thousands of Syrians murdered by President Assad -- gassed, shot, obliterated -- as well as the 150 children who were used by Hamas to help build the dozens of underground tunnels from Gaza into Israel who died during their construction, buried under the rubble with no one protesting it in the streets of Paris or anywhere else. Levy's credentials on these issues is beyond reproach: he has spoken out against atrocities committed against Arabs in Darfur, Bosnia, and many other places, as well as supported a Palestinian state for the past fifty years. But he also recognizes that Arabs killing Arabs doesn't rouse the world's indignation; it's when Jews kill Arabs, even to defend themselves against a steady onslaught of rockets and tunnel attacks, that the world sits up and takes notice. In the media it's long been a dictum that "Jews are news." As Levy observes, the world sees Arabs killing Arabs as "normal" -- and Arabs killing Jews as business as usual.

Granted, all people of good will and conscience are disturbed by the civilian casualties incurred by the Gazan Palestinians; but responsible journalists have been careful to explain that the large number of such deaths is in no small part due to the Hamas leaders putting their rockets and bombs in precisely the civilian homes, schools, and hospitals where Israeli retaliation will do the most harm. Perhaps the high-minded citizens of the world expect Israelis to live with a constant barrage of rockets, sixty-second windows of time to get into bomb shelters, and the relentless fear of death falling out of the sky, day after day, year after year. No Europeans or Americans, or most anyone else, would consent to live with such daily terror.

What he does not go on to say -- but others will -- is that Europe has carried the overwhelming burden of guilt for the Holocaust for almost 70 years, and some, though not all, have grown weary of it. The polite agreement that anti-Semitism is out-of-bounds in civilized discourse appears to be breaking down. While there are legitimate criticisms of Israel, and many stalwart friends of Israel in Europe and around the world who have valid criticisms of it, it's not hard to discern an anti-Semitism that doesn't even attempt to disguise itself as anti-Zionism in the recent protests. And this is a development entirely welcomed by, and in fact planned by, Hamas. The plight of actual Palestinian citizens is plainly not their concern.

In the 1970s, Levy published Barbarism with a Human Face, which, together with the release of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, dealt a death-blow to the Paris intellectuals' long-running love-affair with Stalinism and the Soviet Union. He was aided in this long overdue awakening by other members of the so-called nouveau philosophes; and it's gratifying to see Levy continuing to fight against religious and political fanaticism in the second decade of the 21st-century. Barbarism periodically has a face-lift, but its visage cannot hide the brutality which remains all-too-familiar to those who have eyes to see.