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.

In addition to narcissism, Lévy has a taste for hyperbole. “Alone” is an odd adjective to append to a country that over the last year has received roughly $18 billion in weapons from the most powerful nation on earth. But Lévy doesn’t just claim that Israel is alone. He argues that because there are some on the global left who hate Israel and some on the global right who hate Jews, “the Jews, therefore, are alone,” all of us. Not just alone but “more alone than they have ever been.” Even New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is ideologically sympathetic to Lévy, has called this “an absurd claim.” Lévy’s evidence is the world’s response to October 7th and the war in Gaza. Here’s how he describes the reaction in Latin America: “The Latin America of my youth, when I supported opponents to dictatorship in Chile and Argentina, chanted in unison the dirge of the child-killing Jew.” The entire continent, in unison, apparently.

At first glance, Lévy’s argument is familiar. He offers talking points most readers will have heard before: Israel ceased occupying Gaza in 2005. Hamas is responsible for the deaths of Palestinian civilians because it uses them as human shields. Egypt is responsible because it didn’t open its border and allow vast numbers of Palestinians to leave.

But there’s something perfunctory about the way Lévy cycles through these bromides. He declares that Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005 without even acknowledging that it retained control of the Strip’s coastline, airspace, and population registry, and most of its land borders. He says the blame for Palestinian civilian deaths “lies with the terrorists who set up their stores of weapons and ammunition . . . under the most populous zones of the miniature Leviathan that Gaza had become.” But he never acknowledges that civilians are still protected under international law even if they’re near a military target, or that armies that attack those targets remain bound by the principle of proportionality, which means that when Israel demolishes an apartment building because it claims Hamas leaders live there, it’s nevertheless committing a war crime. Lévy certainly never grapples with whether the “human shield” argument could be turned on Israel itself. If Palestinian civilians are fair game because Hamas places its rockets in urban areas, what about the Israelis who live in downtown Tel Aviv, where Israel locates the headquarters of its military? Lévy claims that Egypt has a moral responsibility to accept refugees from Gaza, but doesn’t ask the same of Israel, which expelled them in the first place in 1948, and has never allowed their return. Nor does he ask whether Israel would allow those whom Egypt absorbed to come back.

To substantiate his claims, Lévy neither dissects counterarguments nor deploys evidence. He delivers proclamations: “Israel waged this war with respect for the laws of armed conflict.” (The world’s highest international courts disagree.) Israel must “win while taking every possible precaution in order to minimize civilian casualties—which I believe they have done.” (Even though Israel in the first year of the war killed more women and children in Gaza—a territory of only two million people—than were killed during a single year of any other military conflict this century.) Israeli soldiers need not be tried by international courts because they will face “real and true justice at the hands of the Israeli military and civil authorities.” (Even though the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din reported this fall that the Israeli military “rarely opens investigations against junior-ranking soldiers and completely refrains from investigating decision makers at the top command levels.”)

Behind these declarations about the war stand even broader ones about the nature of the Israeli state. Lévy’s global reputation depends in part on his foreign correspondence and on-the-ground experience in war zones. But Israel Alone relies largely on statements of faith. Israel is a “hyperactive democracy no less vibrant for the lack of a constitution.” (Even though it raided and closed the offices of six Palestinian human rights groups in 2022, this year banned Al Jazeera, and occupies millions of Palestinians who cannot vote for the government that dominates their lives.) “Israel is one of the most successful multiethnic democracies in the world.” (Although it stands accused of apartheid by global human rights organizations and its own.) “Israel is a small country fighting, not to expand, not to replace, not to oppress, not to exterminate, but to survive.” (Yet it has subsidized settlers in the West Bank for more than half a century, and now stands accused by both the government of South Africa and Amnesty International of genocide.) Israel “is the hearth that radiates a light and a language without which a part of humanity would be lost.” (Even as it prosecutes a war that has damaged or destroyed 80% of Gaza’s schools.)

If Lévy’s assertions about the morality of Israel’s war in Gaza rest on evidence-free claims about the morality of the Israeli state, his assertions about the state itself rest on something even more mystical: the inherent morality of the Jewish people. He claims that “Zionism, in short, like every other Jewish adventure, did not arise in order to gain power and dominate the world.” Every other Jewish adventure? Jews, unlike other human beings, never organize themselves in pursuit of power? At another point, Lévy insists that “the endurance of the Jewish people through the ages was also fed by their rejection of anything resembling contempt for the stranger, hate for the other, racism, or chauvinism.” Jews—all of us, across time—have supposedly been immune to bigotry and xenophobia. Thus, the Jews waging war in Gaza must be as well. This isn’t history. It’s ethno-religious supremacy.

The flip side of Lévy’s depiction of Jews is his depiction of Hamas. It is not a violent Islamist movement that emerged in a particular moment in time with a particular strategy for combating Israel. It is “the revenge of Amalek . . . The Serpent whose essence has not changed over time and who lurks in the fibers of man . . . the Beast unchained and, with its muzzle bared, hungry for Jewish flesh—which is to say, human flesh.” Jews are human; Hamas is not. Lévy offers no history of the organization and its shifting, sometimes contradictory, relationship to armed resistance, to Israel, and to partitioning the land. There’s no recognition that Hamas initially enjoyed Israel’s favor because it was seen as less radical than the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Or that it has repeatedly proposed a long-term truce along the 1967 lines, even as it refuses to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Or that it has at times endorsed non-violent “popular resistance” while also, for decades, targeting civilians with armed force. For Lévy, none of these complications matter. Proving that Hamas embodies pure evil is as unnecessary as proving that Israel—and Jews as a whole—embody pure virtue. Israel Alone isn’t a work of political analysis. It’s a manichean fantasy.

Lévy’s technique isn’t incidental. It’s necessary. Any genuine inquiry into the nature of the Israeli state would require grappling with the human rights reports that accuse it of apartheid, the international prosecutors who want to indict its leaders for war crimes, and the scholars, governments, and human rights groups that claim it is committing genocide. Liberal Zionism cannot sustain any of that. It requires conjuring an entirely different Israel from the one that exists. In American political and journalistic circles, this chimera remains in demand. And because Lévy is more interested in the visions in his head than the world around him, he remains in demand as well.