A conversation with French philosopher, columnist and writer Bernard-Henri Levy.
"The idea of putting Ariel Sharon on trial is insupportable. Ariel Sharon is a head of state - with supporters and opponents, and I'm one of his opponents - but he is not a war criminal. He is a democratic leader of a democratic country." This is what philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, a leading French philosopher, has to say about the call to try Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Europe for crimes against humanity.
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"There are so many dictators in the world, so many people who have committed genocide, that the thought of putting him on trial is unreasonable. For anyone who has experienced war - in South America, in Africa, in Asia where hundreds of thousands of dead were counted, where the dead have no graves, where the dead have no faces, wars where people die wholesale - it is wrong that the most tragic war today, the one most worthy of loathing and pity, is the Israeli-Palestinian war."
Bernard-Henri Levy came to Israel last week for a lightning two-day visit at the invitation of the Institute for Levinas Studies and the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University to lecture on his new book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" In an hour-long conversation at the hotel where he was staying, he spoke, despite his tiredness, with his characteristic clarity and fluency and with a judiciously measured bit of drama here and there - qualities that have helped him become a desired guest on French television programs and in public debates.
As a philosopher, author, columnist and filmmaker, Bernard-Henri Levy is interested in the world political agenda. In recent years he has researched and written in, among other places, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. As a Jew and an avowed Zionist, Henri-Bernard Levy is one of the few voices in France to have expressed uncompromising criticism of the European attitude toward Israel, especially since the outbreak of the intifada. He also draws a straight line between this attitude and the Holocaust.
In Jenin there was a battle
"The 2,000 Palestinian dead and the 1,000 Israeli dead are 3,000 dead too many, clearly, but it is necessary to stop the European madness whereby it appears that the tragedy of the 21st century is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." In his opinion, the reason for this madness is "the aspiration to blame Israel. To demonize it. Because the West has an old account to settle with the Jews. And this account is its guilt for the Holocaust. Because this is convenient for those who are carrying around Jewish suffering as constant guilt, the French for example." According to Levy, who takes care to stress that if he were an Israeli he would be fiercely opposed to Sharon, "It is convenient to turn the Jews into a genocidal people, to turn the head of the Jewish state into the biggest war criminal. It eases Western guilt."
Do you believe that in this respect the emphasis on the uniqueness of the Holocaust has done damage to Israelis?
"It is possible, but it is impossible to conduct negotiations with the truth. The truth. The Holocasut is unique. There have been other genocides, before it and after it. In Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia. But for what happened to the Jews, for various reasons, there was no precedent and has been no sequel. However, we must not be blinded by this sense of uniqueness. On the contrary, we must be on guard. We must use it as a measure - one that will make us aware not only about Jews, but also about others. The obligation is to become attentive."
Many people use the phrase "never again" as a purely rhetorical statement, a tool in the political debate in Israel.
"This is a pity. If memory is turned into rhetoric, it is the same mistake."
Last February, the winner of the Israel Prize for the Study of the Holocaust, Prof. Yehuda Bauer, aroused a fierce public debate when he said it is not impossible that Israel would carry out genocide against the Palestinians. Levy finds this possibility "very unlikely. At the moment this is not the case. Two thousand dead is not genocide. Murder can always occur, everywhere. There are crazy people in Israel who dream of re-editing the film of 1948, who dream of a massive departure by the Arabs of the territories. This seems most unlikely to me.
"Because Israel is a democratic society, because the Israel Defense Forces are a democratic army in which there are some idiots, some blunders, but a democratic army. I was in Jenin during the intifada. It was not a pleasant scene, but it was not a scene of genocide. It was a battle. There are two barriers between Israel and genocide - the democratic society and the memory - and these are very solid."
However, he does not ignore the increasing Israeli indifference to the Palestinians' suffering. "This is true. There is a failure here in the memory of the Holocaust. Because a memory that functions is a memory that makes us sensitive to the suffering of the other. A memory that makes us sensitive only to our own suffering is not a memory that works. Memory is for the other, not for oneself. And if there is indifference here to the Palestinian suffering, it means Israeli society has problems with its memory. This is to be a terrible Jew. To betray what Judaism has brought to universal history.
"I do not think Israeli society is free of faults. I think the crisis it is in is very profound. There is something very sad, a melancholy that has been affecting Israeli society for several years."
But he does not agree with the sharpness of the European criticism. "The problem is the diabolization of Israel. I agree that Israel is a country with problems, that Zionism is in crisis, that Israeli society is a sick society, that Sharon is a terrible politician. But this is not a satanic nation.
"I am amazed at the melancholy and the lack of imagination among members of the Israeli left," adds Levy. "It is true that they have been pushed to the margins and they have a feeling that the society is less responsive. So what? The moral left in France has often found itself in this situation. During the war in Algeria, for example. All the politicians supported a French Algeria. There were a few intellectuals, a small part of the left, who clung to the principle. But they clung tightly. And this is the work of the left. The Israeli left is too confused. It is not such a big deal to be in a minority, to be alone. This has happened to the moral left in all the countries of the world. The work of the left is to maintain the principle. And to do it vehemently."
To what are you referring when you say that the Israeli left lacks imagination?
"Imagination in politics is to be able to surge forward. Not to rearrange all the same pieces of the puzzle in a different way each time. It seems to me that the Rogers plan in the 1970s and the road map today are the same thing. There comes a moment when it is necessary to invent something else. Begin had imagination. Sadat had imagination. Suddenly - a kind of breakthrough, an opening, a new element, a new discourse. In Israel today there is no leader who has real political greatness, and the principle of this greatness is imagination. Political greatness is not calculation, it is not the political arrangement with one party or another, but the tearing, the cessation, the breakthrough - the imagination."
The strong can't be victims
A year ago, Bernard-Henri Levy accepted an honorary from Tel Aviv University. In his speech he criticized the French who, he says, show pity and sympathy for one side, the Palestinian side, and cruel indifference toward the other side, the Israeli side. The reason, in his opinion, lies in what he calls "the new anti-Semitism."
According to him, "Certain intellectuals in Europe have great difficulty believing Israelis can be victims. They are locked into the role of the wealthy, the powerful - and as an implication of this as oppressors of the Palestinian people. The idea that the oppressed can sometimes be murderers, the idea that the strong can sometimes be victims - these are two ideas that the progressive French intelligentsia has a hard time accepting."
Why?
"Because it makes an automatic connection between the strong and the hangman, because it makes an automatic connection between the ruled and the pure victim. Because it bases itself on the classical leftist thesis that the victim is always right, no matter what is said and done. This is an old thesis that continues to hold that the fact that you are a victim gives you direct and preferential access to the truth. It used to be the proletariat, or the Algerian rebels, or the Vietnamese. The French intellectuals found it hard to believe that they could become the founders of a Mafioso and terrorist state (like the independent Algeria).
In his opinion, this is also the reason the Americans, even though they were the victims of September 11, did not get the sympathy of the French intellectuals. "In France, there is a great difficulty in admitting that the Americans are true victims. That is, that the disasters that occurred are really disasters and that the Americans did not deserve them. That is what they often say - that the Americans are even responsible for the blows that have befallen them.
"The fact that they are victims is undermined if they succeed in showing that these dead are the result of American arrogance, that this is the price they paid for the victims of American policy around the world, that American power is the source of September 11. To think that more than 2,000 Americans, just because they are Americans, are pure victims is something that undermined Western understanding. Books continue to appear and so-called investigations continue to be published that aspire to prove that the Americans of September 11 are not the victims that they appear to be.
"This logic, which insists that the strong cannot be victims, and that if they are victims they deserve it and are therefore unworthy of pity - this is one of the reasons for the indifference toward the Israeli dead. It is true the Palestinian dead arouse great media, political and emotional concern in Europe - and this is good, I am very glad about this. But I do not find this concern, and this I regret, when the dead are Israelis."
In his new book, Levy describes his journey in the footsteps of American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Pakistan. He describes the character of Pearl's murderer, Omar Sheikh, a Muslim who had been educated in the West and became a murderous fanatic. According to him, people like Sheikh have also come to Israel. "The two suicide terrorists at Mike's Place are Anglo-Pakistanis and they are `derived from' and shaped in this model. They are not poor, they come from the West, they came in contact with enlightenment and democratic culture. We have a tendency to see the suicide terrorists as desperate people who have nothing more to lose, who come from the most unfortunate levels of society. This is not always so. There are cases - like the Twin Towers terrorists - when they are the sons of wealthy families, from the most educated classes of society, not from the slums."
Levy, who has come to the conclusion that the jihad is also an economic enterprise, finds that the Israeli press does not deal sufficiently with the suicide terrorist industry. "A suicide terrorist is not something spontaneous," he says. "One doesn't become a suicide terrorist on the spur of the moment. It isn't a decision like that - I wake up and I'm a suicide terrorist. It takes a lot of time, a lot of strength and a lot of resources to produce a suicide terrorist. There is a need for military training, political training, psychological training - really to go all the way, not to be deterred at the last minute. Very great discipline is needed and very long training.
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