Apparently there are people in France who believe that
Bernard-Henry Levy is a bona fide philosopher. So be it if that is what turns
them on; who am I to object? But what I can do is go over his latest article,
and say a few words about its content – what passes for philosophy, or at least
pretends to be.
The way I ordinarily read a text is to quick read it once to
get a sense of what it contains. I then read it again but at a lower speed this
time, and pause where I meet dense passages over which I mull, and begin the
process of formulating an opinion. But something happened with the Levy article
that was a little out of the ordinary. It is that from the beginning to the end
– at whatever speed I read the thing – it struck me as being nothing less than
an orgy of Dershowism.
Let me explain. Alan Dershowitz is a lawyer that used to
speak for Israel .
The most infamous idea he ever came up with, was that Israel had the
right to do to the Palestinians anything that anyone had ever done to someone.
I have never before stuck the suffix “ism” at the end of someone's name, and I
used to scoff at Tom Friedman of the New York Times whom, I believe, invented
this trick. But I did not know what else to do in the face of an article that
drips with the Dershowitz non-philosophy.
Part of Levy's beef is that the crowds that demonstrated in Paris not long ago chanting “Palestine
will overcome” and “Israel ,
assassin” were nowhere to be seen when other incidences (as bloody as in Palestine if not more,
according to Levy) took place elsewhere in the world at other times. He
mentions Syria , Iraq , Sudan ,
Chechnya and Bosnia , but glaringly and surprisingly omits Libya where the
horror in there is in the process of metastasizing while promising to do more
damage to world peace than any of the incidences he mentions. And his point is
that Israel
has the right to do to the Palestinians what the respective governments in
those places did to their people or to their neighbors. Sheer Dershowism.
That was one part of Levy's beef. The other part is his
complaint that the only reason the demonstrators came out and marched in the
streets of Paris , of the other cities in Europe and elsewhere, is that there is what he calls an
odious double standard. He points out that “anti-Semitic slogans have marred
most European demonstrations 'in support of the people of Gaza .'” And here too, another glaring
omission hits the eye. It is South
Africa at the time when apartheid was the
governing regime in that country, and demonstrators everywhere in the world
came out and protested vehemently.
The indigenous Blacks in South Africa were treated badly by
the White minority that was not indigenous to the land, and the world
convulsed. Imagine what the world would have done if every 2 or 3 years the
White government had sent the air force to bomb say, Soweto … killing one Black
for every 1,000 of them in the country. That is, if the government had
periodically killed 40,000 Blacks in 3 weeks. Can you imagine this? It would
have been the equivalent to what is happening in Palestine today. But why did this escape
Bernard-Henry Levy's imagination – not to say his query?
Well, it escaped levy for the same reason that he did not
mention Libya .
You know why? It was a necessity for him more than it was a convenience. He
omitted Libya
for a personal reason. It is that he was one of the architects who planned the
Libyan horror. He incited the French government to get involved in the scheme,
a move that dragged America
into it as well … and the rest is history. A sordid history.
As to South
Africa , the argument is a little more
complex. To bring South Africa
into a debate about Israel
is to establish a kind of equivalence between Israel
and South Africa .
But to equate Israel ,
or any of the Jewish causes with those of mortals, is to bring the Jews down to
the level of mortals. This is what the Jews reject by religious dogma because
if they do not, they cease to be Jews.
To them, the Jew has the right to everything that everyone
else has – otherwise it would be a double standard – but when it comes to
obligation, he cannot be compared to someone else because this would establish
a kind of equivalence between him and the other; something that can never be.