Faces don’t get much more expressive than Bernard-Henri Lévy’s. The thick eyebrows go up and down, powered variously by rage, incredulity and sadness; the lips purse, pout and curl with derision. But when the 75-year-old French philosopher describes the scene at what was left of the Kfar Aza kibbutz in southern Israel on October 10 last year, his face empties of all expression.
“The bodies of the victims had been buried by that point, but there were still pieces of bodies that hadn’t been assigned yet,” he tells me. “They were stacked in a corner of a vegetable shed that was being used to house unidentified body parts. And that image?” He shakes his head. “There is not a day or a night when I do not see it in my head. It follows me around constantly.”
“I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my life,” stresses the Algerian-born war reporter and documentary-maker, in reference to the many war-torn lands he has visited over the past 40 years – from Bosnia, where he highlighted the concentration camps, to Afghanistan, where he was a French envoy in the aftermath of the war; from Libya, where Lévy met the rebels fighting against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime to Syria, Kurdistan, Nigeria and Rwanda.
“At 23, I remember seeing a group of Pakistani officers [in a Pakistani-controlled area of Bangladesh during the third India-Pakistan war] playing cards as one fellow officer’s disembowelled corpses lay rotting 10 metres away.” He tilts his head to one side, sighs. “So deaths, and deaths of the kind no man or woman should ever see, I’ve seen a lot of them. But what I saw in that little vegetable shed, where body parts were on hold, where this debris of humanity had been put, which had once belonged to souls, to lives – but had been reduced to bits? That had a terrible effect on me.”
This is the third time I’ve interviewed Lévy in 12 years, and although he never seems to change physically – always in the same sharply-tailored white shirt, always undone a button or three too low, the famous mane as majestic as ever – there’s something different about him today. We’re speaking on Zoom, with him leaning into the screen, against the backdrop of his booklined Paris study. It’s also early morning. But that’s not it.
When we first met at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, there was a light-heartedness there. There is no British equivalent to the bestselling writer, philosopher, political campaigner and pundit known simply as “BHL” in his native France, no stud-like great thinker with glamorous wives, suits and friends, and back then, a part of him still seemed to be enjoying playing up to the critics and satirists who put the words “God is dead, but my hair is beautiful” in his mouth. We talked about one quote that was genuinely his – “You can’t make love all day” – and he made the (valid) point that: “Literature and lovemaking demand the same energy. And since one cannot write literature all day, one must make love for some of it.”
Traces of that levity were still there on our last meeting, in 2021, even if the subject matter we were discussing – a new book called The Will To See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope – was sombre. But today frivolity is notably absent for two obvious reasons.
The first is Lévy’s loss of liberty. I’m aware that for the past year, the “rockstar” philosopher has been living in an undisclosed location under very heavy police protection, after intelligence officials discovered that a unit of the Quds Force – the special operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – had paid an Iranian drug dealer $150,000 to assassinate Lévy, who has been critical of the country’s leadership. This will take its toll on anyone, let alone a man as sociable as he is, a man I know loves to wander around the streets of Paris and London.
Out of prudence, however, he refuses to talk to me about the implications this has on his family: his actress and singer wife of 31 years, Arielle Dombasle; his two children, bestselling novelist Justine, 50 (from his first marriage to Isabelle Doutreluigne) and lawyer Anthonin, 43 (from his second, to Sylvie Bouscasse). And although his personal life has always been complicated (Lévy had a long on-and-off relationship with the aristocratic artist, Daphne Guinness), this can’t have made things any easier.
The second reason is clearly laid out in his new book, Israel Alone: in the scenes he witnessed after boarding the first plane he could on October 8th – in the enormity of what he describes as “an Event with a capital ‘E’” for all of us, yes, but for a Jew?
In the book – a cris de coeur combining traditional war reporting with an interior monologue that reads, occasionally, like free verse poetry – the writer makes a philosophical distinction between events and “an Event” like October 7, that, he tells me today “changes not just the future but the past. Because it throws a new light on past events that we thought we understood. With Events like these, there’s a realisation not just that things will never be the same again, but that things were not what we thought they were before.”
“Things”, in this instance, is interchangeable with “people”, and he admits that he was able to write the whole book in three months “because I was writing in a state of rage”. “Hours after the attack,” he explains, “there were not only the ‘yes buts’ but actual, veritable explosions of joy. Professors at US universities with huge online followings recorded and broadcast messages of absolute joy. This, when the bodies of the dead had not even all been buried.”
“Rarely has negationism functioned so well and so quickly,” he writes in the book, pointing out that even many of those who did offer early support began to fall away within the ensuing weeks and months. Ask Lévy whether six months on from the book’s publication in France, he still believes Israel’s response has been just, and he doesn’t have to think about it for a second: “Yes. I still don’t think the response has been disproportionate. I have been back to Israel several times since last October. I have done my job as a journalist.” When filming the liberation of Mosul in 2016, he says, “I saw what indiscriminate hits looked like, what the desire to destroy a place from top to toe looks like and let me tell you: that is not what is happening in Gaza.”
He also stands by the assertion, in the book, that Israel “has done everything to avoid civilian casualties”. “Listen, one can always do better. But I’ve been covering wars for 40 years, and it’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever seen an army open up a corridor every day between 6am and noon in order to warn civilians that they are going to hit an area where they are. The Israeli army is the first army in the world that I have seen say: ‘We’re going to hit here – please move.’ That I’ve seen distribute flyers warning people, calling to warn people. Now, I’m not saying that it’s not a living nightmare [for those people]. It is.”
Nevertheless, reports are now suggesting a growing chasm between US Leaders and Israel, and the day before our interview, the British Government announced its decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel amid concerns the weapons could be used against civilians in Gaza. This has left Lévy “very disappointed and upset. It’s a huge political mistake and an even bigger moral one.”
Then there are the unprecedented scenes we both awoke to on the morning of our meeting: the tens of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets, with a general strike called, amid an eruption of public outrage over the Government’s handling of the war in Gaza, and the deaths of six hostages. “That’s to do with Israelis, though,” Lévy deflects. “Israel is a democracy, and if I were Israeli I would no doubt be with them, but I’m not and neither is Keir Starmer, and our duty is to support whoever is Prime Minister.” Until when? When should the support stop? “It should be the same as with Ukraine. There should be no limit to the support.”
He won’t say that Netanyahu needs to go, either in the book or to me today. “Because I’m not Israeli, for one thing, but if I were I would probably think that he should go after the war – not in the middle. And in any case Israel isn’t just Netanyahu but a whole army…etc.”
Lévy has known the Israeli prime minister for 30 years, and always been honest with him, he assures me. “But I cannot let people say that the hits are indiscriminate and targeting civilians, because that is wrong. And I cannot allow it to be said that there has been a genocide,” he says, echoing the chants of the students he accuses, among others, of “moral blindness” in the book, “because that is wrong.”
It’s no surprise that woke culture comes in for a particular skewering from Lévy. After all, the eldest son of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish timber magnate – who was born in Béni Saf but moved to Paris when he was still a baby – was one of a group of young writers, the Nouveaux Philosophes, who broke with the fashionable Marxist dogmatism of the French left in the 1970s.
At the elite École Normale Supérieure, Lévy was friends with Michel Foucault and taught by Jacques Derrida. Both philosophers’ theories have often mistakenly been blamed for the advent of “woke”, which enrages him. “Wokeism is an insult to the French theories these imbeciles think they’re adhering to,” he explodes when we move on to the virulent new strain of antisemitism woke theory has spawned.
“Antisemitism is like a machine,” he tells me. “Like a magnet that, throughout history has been drawn to whatever happens to be around at the time that might help create a ‘valid’ argument. It’s all about fuelling the hate machine.” It does beggar belief that in 2024, when, as he says, “we have a whole apparatus and a whole language to show that all races should be respected, and that we should be protected from racism at all costs and provided with safe spaces, that thinking doesn’t apply to Jews.”
“There’s a big difference between racism and antisemitism,” Lévy goes on. “Racism is about the hatred of the other for being too visible. That’s the crime, and the idiocy of racists – that you are too visible. But in the case of antisemitism, it’s exactly the reverse. The crime and idiocy of antisemites is in the thinking: ‘I hate you, because you’re too similar to me – because I can’t tell the difference between you and me.’”
He falls silent a moment, then says: “Racism is horrific, to be clear. But I think that antisemitism is even more criminal, even more crazy. Because the principal activity of an antisemite, the crazy fantasy of the antisemite, is to rip off your mask, and expose you as Jewish.”
“At the beginning of the woke movement,” he concedes, “there will probably have been an appetite for justice and equality – a desire to protect the weakest and so on. But as so often happens on the [extreme] Left, they then became racists and fascists, and today, woke thinking is straight-forward fascism.” It doesn’t help, he adds, that the kind of woke students inciting antisemitic hate or violence on campuses around the world “are basically bad students, with hopeless teachers. I am ready to tour US campuses tomorrow and talk to them all! I’ll talk to them about Foucault and Derrida – I’ll talk to them about identity politics.”
I think of Lévy as fundamentally optimistic, so I’m surprised by his response when I ask whether the pendulum will swing back. “I’m not sure it will. I certainly don’t think it will go back soon. Quite the opposite, actually. I don’t think we’ve yet reached the climax of this delirium, and I’ll tell you why: there’s a real visceral pleasure behind wokeism, and it’s rare for humanity to give up on that level of pleasure. But it’s because we’re not at the end of this that we really need to fight it hell for leather.”
Lévy was only 28 when he published Barbarism with a Human Face – an attack on Leftist mythology and its notion of an ideal society – and was hailed the new Camus. A series of best-selling books followed, which did nothing to temper the jealousy of less famous (and good-looking) intellectuals. Then there was Lévy’s family wealth, (when his father died, he sold off his company, Becob, for 750 million Francs to entrepreneur Francois Pinault), which has always been held against him.
He’s been accused of many things – vanity and hypocrisy among them – but even Lévy’s biggest detractor would have to admit that the level of his output is impressive. There are the numerous books and eight documentary films. There’s the political commentary – and the political involvement.
As someone who has often acted as an advisor to the French government, does he blame Macron for the mess the country is in? “No. Macron is not to blame. Because ‘France Unbowed’ [Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left-wing political party] exists, and the National Assembly exists – and they are powerful.” But if the president had dissolved the Assembly three months later? “No! We would have had absolutely the same result. A big country like France will rarely change its thinking in three months. Macron felt that the French had to be confronted with reality, that they should be asked whether ‘France Unbowed’ and the antisemites was what they really wanted – or not.”
Talk of the country being on the verge of a civil war is “excessive,” he says with a wave of the hand. “We’re basically in the same situation as the US, in terms of the adversaries having become the enemies and it no longer being about convincing them or winning but eliminating them. That’s the case for France today, it’s slightly the case in the US, and it’s starting to be the case in the UK too.”
This doesn’t mean that he’s about to relax about the far-Right opposition leader, Marine Le Pen. “I haven’t changed my mind about Le Pen in 40 years. Today my thinking is still the same: that we have to do everything we can to prevent her from coming to power.” Does he believe she’s actually evil? “Yes.” Poisonous. “Certainly. She may be a little more skilful [than her father] but this is not just about her – it’s about the party. And we know from the large number of press exposés [over the past few months] that the party is still infested with neo-Nazis and racists, that it is still a magnet for the worst of humanity.”
As for the leader of France Unbowed: “Monsieur Mélenchon is nothing! He’s an epilogue in the story of France. A clown – a clown! A tiny little man. And [the idea of him in power]… it’s unthinkable.” People called Trump a clown, I feel duty bound to point out; they still do. “I know, and America deserves better than Trump too. But if I were American, I wouldn’t let my country fall into his hands. What about Kamala Harris? “Listen,” he flings back wearily, “politics isn’t about choosing ‘the good one’, it’s about choosing the least bad one.”
When it comes to lobbing insults like razor-edged frisbees, French intellectuals really are in a league of their own, and I feel sad when our hour is up. Lévy has to promise me that if any university either here or in the US ever lets him speak, he’ll let me know. I’d buy tickets to that.
Israel Alone, by Bernard-Henri Lévy is published by Wicked Son.
