Oppressed lovers of freedom everywhere are secretly rooting for Israel to win

Bernard-Henri Lévy

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October 7 was not just a tragedy for Israel, but emblematic of an attack to the Global West, Bernard-Henri Lévy argues in “Israel Alone” (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

The war with Hamas is existential for all of Western civilisation

And then, the third upheaval.

For an instant the world saw what it did not want to see.

And what it saw was a planet that froze briefly before beginning to turn again—but now turning on new bearings.

In 2018, I wrote a book entitled The Empire and the Five Kings. The title was an allusion to the Biblical story of the five kings whom Abraham fought to save his nephew, Lot.

In that book, I described an empire consisting of Europe, its American outgrowth, and others in the rest of the world that have faith in the Western Enlightenment.

I argued that this empire, which I called the “Global West,” is contracting nearly everywhere, both in people’s minds and geographically.

I showed how the space left vacant by the empire’s retreat was creating opportunities for five new kings, five potentates, who ruled over countries that had once been the centers for powerful empires and aspired to become so again.

My thesis was that these five kings—Russia, China, the Iran of the ayatollahs, neo-Ottoman Turkey, and the Arab countries prone to jihadism—were ready to forgo their ancient enmities if that were the price of reviving the glory of Peter the Great, the Qing and Ming dynasties, the Ottoman vizirs, the shahs of Persia, or the Umayyad and Abbasid sultans.

The book was written in the context of the war against the Islamic State, the role of the Kurds in that war, and then, at the moment of the battle of Kirkuk—which in my eyes was the equivalent of the ancient battles that put an end to the hegemony of Sparta, Athens, or Macedonia—how casually their western allies abandoned them once they had served their purpose.

The book’s thesis was confirmed by the subsequent war against Ukraine, where we saw the same five— joined by a North Korea drunk on its own power—in coalition against a Global West that sometimes seemed to be pulling itself together while, at other times, looking like a heavy-footed giant with a head full of clay, a disconcerting mix of authority and restraint, extreme power and inexplicable cowardice.

But now we were seeing the five picking up where they left off, consolidating their alliance, and submitting us all to a new test, this time on the Israeli front.

What was true in the Kurdish and Ukrainian cases is proving true in the case of Hamas—but in reverse, and from the dark side of the world.

And it is around this minuscule terror state, this barbarous Lilliput, about which the big five had previously cared so little, that the dark planets realign and the new world takes shape.

The big difference is that the United States does not seem to be the same stumbling, dazed, declining empire ready to abdicate its throne.

I say “seem” because America still shows a reluctance to fully flex its muscles, to assert its creed and values. It moves ahead and retracts, takes a step toward Israel and pulls back.

And nothing can be taken for granted as the vertiginous unknown looms with the upcoming presidential election.

But regardless of the current or future US position, what is sure is that the revisionist kingdoms were there for October 7 and that we found all five of them as fiery as ever and ready to get back in the game.

That appeared immediately among the Sunni powers who are the natural allies of Hamas.

There was dancing in Kabul; in Islamabad, cries that bin Laden had been avenged; in Qatar, it occurred to no one to disturb Ismail Haniyeh and his retinue who were still, at least until further notice, Hamas’s senior leaders; at most, they were asked—politely and after days of talks—to close their luxurious villas and leave for a well-deserved vacation in Algeria.

It was clear with respect to Turkish president Erdogan, the grand master of the confraternity of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the avant-garde.

He did not lose a minute before resolving the ambiguities that previous signs of rapprochement with Jerusalem, linked with his nation’s gas interests, might have generated.

On October 24, Erdogan declared that “Hamas [was] not a terrorist organization” but rather “a group of mujahideen who are defending their land.”

We saw him, his neck wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, at a huge rally at the old Atatürk Airport in Istanbul, where he informed the “whole world” that Israel is committing unpardonable “war crimes.”

Then, on December 27, this great humanist who has yet, a century after the fact, to acknowledge the Armenian genocide and is still fueling the same hatred today in Nagorno-Karabakh, compared Bibi Netanyahu to Hitler and the Palestinian refugee camps to the Nazi death camps.

Nor did Turkey’s membership in NATO or its economic reliance on the United States dissuade him from announcing on January 14, 2024 that his government possessed solid proof of Israel’s genocidal activities in Gaza and would furnish them forthwith to the International Court of Justice, which was then in the process of examining and ultimately dismissing the formal complaint to this effect that had been filed by South Africa.

Iran began with denial. And perhaps remembering the good old days of the “nuclear agreement” with Teheran worked out by President Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, the American administration went out on a limb to confirm, in the early hours, that there was no “proof” of Iran’s “direct” involvement in the attack.

But we learned quickly enough, through Iran’s official press agency, that a meeting had taken place in Doha on October 14 between Ismail Haniyeh, who had not yet departed for Algeria, and the Iranian minister of foreign affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

This was followed on October 26 by a meeting in Moscow between Iranian vice president Ali Bagheri and another delegation of the terrorist organization, this one of lower rank.

And then another meeting in Tehran, probably on November 6, between Haniyeh and the Supreme Leader himself, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

We quickly learned that there had been others, in August and September, well before the attack.

We also learned that, according to what the Wall Street Journal described as “highly placed sources within Hezbollah and Hamas,” representatives of the Revolutionary Guard and, on least two occasions, Minister Abdollahian himself had reportedly helped during these meetings to “set up” the operation, “ironed out the details,” and, on October 2 in Beirut, given it the “green light.”

For those still in doubt, the regime’s minister of culture, Ezzatollah Zarghami, a retired general of the IRGC, gave the story the fillip it lacked.

In an interview released by the semi-official Mehr News Agency, Zarghami affirmed that he was “afraid of no one” and willingly admitted that his country had delivered to Hamas a quantity of Fajr-3 ballistic missiles of the type that had been used to strike Israel.

So, “Iran outside Iran” must be added to complete the picture.

Hezbollah’s launches over the northern border of the Jewish state.

The Shiite militias in Iraq ramping up attacks on American positions in Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan and threatening Israel.

And last but not least, the Houthis in Yemen—equipped with an arsenal of drones, medium-range ballistic missiles, and anti-ship missiles unparalleled in the region, and supported by a Revolutionary Guard spy vessel that makes little secret of guiding the attacks—who were harassing ships in the Red Sea they deemed to have any link with the “Zionist entity.”

Was China testing, as in Ukraine, the adversary’s capacity for resistance in the great confrontation to come?

Was it pondering “Thucydides’ Trap,” that fateful moment when, according to the ancient Greek historian (as recounted by American professor Graham Allison), a waning power (yesterday, Athens, today, the United States) commits the fatal error of responding with force against the rising power (then, Sparta, now, China)?

Or, conversely, was it running the risk of falling into what I dubbed Herodotus’ Trap in The Empire and the Five Kings, in homage to the great historian of the Greco-Persian wars and his account of the ultimate victory of democracy over tyranny?

Was China thinking of moving into Taiwan, and did it want to see whether America’s wound might be widening, hastening the decline of its influence?

Whatever the reason, Chinese premier Xi Jinping abandoned his customary restraint, as he had with Ukraine.

While stifling Tibet and annihilating the Muslim Uyghurs, he refrained from condemning Hamas, refused to label it a terrorist organization, let flourish on Chinese television and Weibo fake news of the type, “Jews represent just 3% of the American population but control 70% of its wealth,” and took the lead in the anti-Israel crusade that was gathering force among the BRIC nations.

But the icing on the cake was Putin. Over the years, he found useful idiots to serve up the edifying story of little Vladimir, poor and lost, raised by a Jewish family to which he remained attached and owed the remnants of his philo-Semitism.

But the admirer of Czar Nicholas I in him remembered that Russia, at the height of its power, massacred tens of millions of Russians, persecuted hundreds of thousands of Jews, and planned, during the waning days of Stalinism, to do their fair share in bringing about the “final solution of the Jewish problem.”

And above all, the KGB man of a thousand ruses, the crowned seditionist who has thrived only through plots, assassinations, pawns advanced, pawns sacrificed, and power gained with guns and bribes, the postmodern Mad Max who has replaced the motorcycles of the apocalypse with tanks and hypersonic missiles and likes being blessed by Rolex popes who wear their cowls the way Attila wore his caps—that Putin was aware of the benefits he stood to gain from this new Middle Eastern war, which was drawing the world’s attention away from the heinous crimes he was committing in Ukraine.

So, he unleashed his pack, allowed his henchmen to revive the old national anti-Semitism and to warn Israelis of Russian origin that they would not be welcome when they flee their beloved “refuge” just ahead of the bombs.

He did not deny that the Hamas leaders had two sessions with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (in September 2022 and March 2023), whose announced purpose was to “weaken the West,” or that said leaders later returned to Moscow to meet with Iranian officials.

He could not hide the fact that the red carpet was rolled out for them in the days following October 7, or that the Kremlin had still not condemned the massacre.

The circle is nearly complete.

It is almost the same picture, but worse, that we watched take shape at the time of the war against the Kurds and again with the war against Ukraine—which, incidentally, continued unabated in a world where everything was suddenly splitting in two: the media’s focus, the attention of foreign ministries, and even military aid, which some political leaders, expecting Trump to return to power and taking advantage of the general confusion, would like to let fall by the wayside.

Could it be said that this upheaval is not really an upheaval this time around since it is just the same old song?

Is it the fortress Europe (and America) emitting its endless but familiar supply of collaborators and appeasers?

Yes and no.

It is as if tectonic plates had been rubbing together, sliding, overlapping, and separating before suddenly interlocking in a new pattern.

And for today’s observers, the current scene is a panorama where everything seems perfectly in place.

Hamas is no longer Hamas but, instead, the sword and toy of a counter-empire wherein the protagonists of the preceding wars have come together permanently.

And Israel, reciprocally, is a little more than just Israel.

It carries the message, even if unknowingly, of the Uyghurs of China, the intrepid bloggers of the Arab autocracies, the proponents of the Armenian cause in Istanbul who detest Erdogan and his fables of the Grand Turk, the strong souls of Kurdistan, the Iranian insurgents who continue to cry “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the opponents whom Putin deports, sends into internal exile, and assassinates—and also, perhaps in spite of themselves, the Palestinians in silent revolt against the Hamas dictatorship.

This has nothing to do with a war between West and East.

Nor with the “war of civilizations” that some, already lining up their legions, are hoping for.

Or maybe it does.

But in that case, one of the civilizations is the fine Internationale of the friends of liberty, law, and the spirit of resistance, drawing its members from within the new and ancient empires alike.

And the other is the civilization of tyrants and demagogues whose followers are recruited in the West no less than in the East or South.

The Maharal of Prague wrote in Netzach Yisrael that, in contrast to kingdoms and empires, which are extensive, Israel is a point, a single point, but what a point!

The central and hidden point, secret and essential, upon which rests, in the terrible dramaturgy of history, a piece of human survival.

So there we have it. Israel is not a pawn, but a point.

It is the hearth that radiates a light and a language without which a part of humanity would be lost.

Israel exists in a kind of solitude, no doubt.

A terrible solitude.

But to paraphrase Albert Camus, there are women and men, many women and many men, who would be very alone indeed without this solitary presence and who pray each morning and each evening, more or less secretly and silently, summoning whatever boldness their status as hostages of the five kings allows, for Israel to win its war against the empire of Hamas.

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Rape is Resistance and Beepers are Genocide

Daniel Greenfield

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• Those same organizations [that condemned Israel’s exploding pagers] and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country.

• There is no legitimate way for Israel (or any non-Muslim country) to take out an Islamic terrorist. No amount of warnings, phone calls and dropped leaflets and roof-knocking warning projectiles were enough of a precaution. Even hostage-rescue operations were condemned for killing terrorists who, in the usual Hamas medical department parlance, turned into innocent children.
• And there’s also no such thing as an illegitimate Muslim way to murder Jews.
• The Democrat political establishment can’t seem to get around to condemning the Islamic groups attacking synagogues and marching through the streets praising the rape and murder of Jews.
• Every Israeli tactic is illegitimate because the cause, a Jewish State, is illegitimate, but no Islamic tactic is ever truly illegitimate because its cause, replacing Israel with an Islamic state, is legitimate.
• The liberal anti-Israel establishment in D.C., human rights groups and the media have played a cynical game of focusing on Israel tactics as if they actually cared how Israel takes out terrorists, and as if there were any means of taking out terrorists that would win their approval.
• What makes people cheer for Israel are accomplishments, winning a war in six days, rescuing hostages from Africa, taking out an Islamic nuclear program on July 4th, and detonating the communications devices of a terrorist group responsible for killing Americans.
• Israel has been held hostage trying to win over those who cannot be won over. Much of the liberal establishment has either become radicalized into permanently opposing Israel or has become complicit with those who do. The only narrative it will accept is the same demands that Israel be dismantled piece by piece and parceled out to Islamic terrorists in exchange for peace.
• No one cheers weakness, they only respect strength.

• The only way to win… is to win.

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No sooner did the encrypted pagers used by members of Hezbollah begin exploding than human rights experts and the UN began condemning the single greatest targeted attack on a terror group as a violation of international law. Those same organizations and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country. Pictured: A photo taken on September 18, 2024 in Beirut shows the remains of a Hezbollah pager that exploded the day before. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

The myth that Israel’s tactics, not its existence, is at issue died with the murdered Jewish families on October 7, 2023 and the Hezbollah terrorists taken out by pagers on September 17, 2024.

No sooner did the encrypted communications devices handed out to members of the Islamic Jihadist group begin exploding than human rights experts and the UN began condemning the single greatest targeted attack on a terror group as a violation of international law. Those same organizations and activists had nothing to say about the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli towns and villages that turned tens of thousands of Jews into refugees in their own country.

There is no legitimate way for Israel (or any non-Muslim country) to take out an Islamic terrorist. No amount of warnings, phone calls and dropped leaflets and roof-knocking warning projectiles were enough of a precaution. Even hostage-rescue operations were condemned for killing terrorists who, in the usual Hamas medical department parlance, turned into innocent children.

And there’s also no such thing as an illegitimate Muslim way to murder Jews. Oct 7 proved that. Nearly a year later, Islamic groups are still celebrating the orgy of butchery, kidnapping and rape. The Democratic Socialists of America, which boasts 5 allied Members of Congress including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, has taken to arguing in favor of “armed resistance” and Hamas.

More Democrats have taken to social media to condemn a Detroit News cartoon which implied that Tlaib’s support for terrorism may have led her to worry about her pager, than two recent Muslim terrorist plots to massacre Jews in synagogues in Las Vegas and New York City. The Democrat political establishment can’t seem to get around to condemning the Islamic groups attacking synagogues and marching through the streets praising the rape and murder of Jews.

The liberal establishment accepts the Islamic terrorist cause but rejects the Israeli cause.

That’s why when it comes to Islamic terrorism, it emphasizes the cause over the tactics, but when it comes to Israel, it emphasizes the tactics over the cause. Every Israeli tactic is illegitimate because the cause, a Jewish State, is illegitimate, but no Islamic tactic is ever truly illegitimate because its cause, replacing Israel with an Islamic state, is legitimate.

No matter how often the Arab Muslim invaders occupying parts of Gaza and the West Bank pledge their allegiance to terror, we are told that their ultimate cause is just and inevitable. And that the killings, kidnappings and rapes don’t truly represent the moral righteousness of it.

While every time Israel takes out a terrorist, the media links it to the Jewish “occupation” of those parts of Israel that the terrorists demand for themselves. Since Israel’s existence is wrong, any tactic that it uses to fight the terrorists trying to take it over is a human rights violation.

The Marxist mobs in the street are at least honest about their ideological orientation. They define all Jews living in Israel as “settlers” who are fair game for genocide. Whether Israel takes them out with drone strikes, exploding beepers or Barney songs played on a loop doesn’t much matter except as it’s useful for propaganda materials calling for the destruction of Israel.

The liberal anti-Israel establishment in D.C., human rights groups and the media have played a cynical game of focusing on Israel tactics as if they actually cared how Israel takes out terrorists and as if there were any means of taking out terrorists that would win their approval. A generation of the Israeli military jumping through every possible hoop has yielded only angrier and more sanctimonious condemnations every time another terrorist bites the dust.

Israel has wasted a lot of the lives of its soldiers and civilians on its side in the hopes of achieving some phantom “purity of arms” that included an extensive approvals process for strikes that crippled its aerial response on Oct 7. Afterward things got better and worse. The pager attack was brilliantly calculated and yet crippled by an obsessive need to take out specific targets rather than inflicting as much damage on the Hezbollah terrorists as possible.

The painstaking efforts to monitor the terrorists to minimize collateral damage and to focus on specific targets did not change the inevitable condemnations that came rolling Israel’s way.

The real lesson of the pager attacks was that an innovative Israeli attack on Islamic terrorists will be cheered by the right people and condemned by the wrong ones. Israeli hasbara (public relations) is a fundamentally misguided effort to explain the need for a war whose hand-wringing signals weakness and guilt. What makes people cheer for Israel are accomplishments, winning a war in six days, rescuing hostages from Africa, taking out an Islamic nuclear program on July 4th, and detonating the communications devices of a terrorist group responsible for killing Americans.

No one except the occasional military expert who tours the battlefield is impressed by Israeli restraint. And restraint will win not a single concession from the same establishment that can’t bring itself to condemn by name the mobs waving Hamas flags and assaulting Jewish students.

Israel has been held hostage trying to win over those who cannot be won over. Much of the liberal establishment has either become radicalized into permanently opposing Israel or has become complicit with those who do. The only narrative it will accept is the same demands that Israel be dismantled piece by piece and parceled out to Islamic terrorists in exchange for peace.

That the peace has never come, that the negotiations are worthless and that the only product of two generations of concessions is endless war will not change a single mind. Just as the implication of the revelation that Hamas planned to murder Israeli hostages before handing them over in exchange for live Muslim terrorists was hardly even discussed in the media.

After nine months of demanding a deal with Hamas at any cost, the Biden administration has belatedly decided that the terrorist group is not serious about a deal, but that news hasn’t changed Kamala Harris’s set talking point about the urgent need to end the war and cut a deal. Nor will it change her policy should she be in a position to stop talking and start making the rules.

Israel has been divided by the need to balance winning wars against winning over public opinion, but the public opinion of the establishment was never winnable, and if it is winnable, it can only be won by winning wars. The Biden administration’s policymakers will never admit it, but they were far more impressed by the pager attacks than by 9 months of negotiations. The same is more obviously true of Arab-Muslim countries that despise Hezbollah and fear Iran.

No one cheers weakness, they only respect strength.

Israel will never have even the grudging acceptance of those who believe that rape is resistance and beepers are genocide. Accommodating military tactics to their accusations has led to a loop of defeatism that culminated in the deadly infiltration, invasion and massacres of Oct 7. But it can best be a player on the world stage by showing its strength rather than its weakness.

One Pagergeddon was worth a hundred Nova documentaries and exhibitions about the unhappy victims who were assaulted at the music festival to morale, national security and the reputation of a nation built on repudiating the helplessness and victimhood of its long exile.

Oct 7 incited the dark glee of a movement that believes it can taste Israel’s destruction. Protestations of innocence and victimhood only feed its triumphalism. What it fears isn’t a documentary about the atrocities of Oct 7, but the destruction of its Jihadist armies.

The issue was never Israel’s tactics, but Israel’s existence. The only way to win… is to win.

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Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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