On the first anniversary of October 7th, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interviewed “two important thinkers” about events in Palestine and Israel. One was the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates; the other was the French philosopher-journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy. Both had recently published travelogues about the holy land. But their books differed in instructive ways. The section on Israel-Palestine in Coates’s book, The Message, is about the people he met and the injustices he witnessed while travelling through the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Lévy’s book, Israel Alone, is about Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Israel Alone begins with the word “I” and never changes the subject. On its first page, Lévy announces that he flew to Israel after October 7th to visit communities scarred by the Hamas-led attacks. About his first destination, Sderot, he declares, “I knew this city. I have made a point of visiting it on each of my trips to Israel over the past twenty years.” But he doesn’t quote a single resident. He then travels to Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri, which “had been part of my life from way back.” There’s no evidence that he interviewed anyone there, either. He also visits the families of hostages, though we never hear from them. Instead, he is reminded that he once met the parents of the kidnapped and then-released Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as well as those of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, which sparks a digression about the book he wrote about Pearl’s murder. In 146 pages, Lévy cites six of his own books…..more
