On the inherent moral superiority of Jews
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart writing in Jewish Currents addresses an interesting phenomenon – the existence of a market for spokespeople who can dress Zionism in progressive garb in a world where fewer and fewer prominent figures speak the required language fluently.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a world-famous philosopher, fervent about human rights from Bosnia to Kurdistan, who has written a whole book, significantly titled Israel Alone, defending the rightness of Gaza’s destruction. Beinart says it “offers an in-depth look at how detached from reality that [liberal Zionist] case actually is.”
Beinart easily dismisses the familiar claims about the morality of Israel’s war in Gaza and its ability to offer Jews legal superiority while practising liberal democracy. What interests him especially is Lévy’s “ethno-religious” supremacism – the idea that Jews are inherently moral. All Jews, everywhere, according to this view, have always been immune to bigotry and xenophobia. They are the epitome of what it is to be human. Hamas is its opposite.
“Proving that Hamas embodies pure evil is as unnecessary as proving that Israel—and Jews as a whole—embody pure virtue,” Beinart writes. “Israel Alone isn’t a work of political analysis. It’s a manichean fantasy.”
NWI
This article was originally published by Jewish Currents on Mon 9 Dec 2024. Read the original here.
Bernard-Henri Lévy Speaks the American Media’s Lingua Franca
>In a new book, the French intellectual exemplifies a liberal Zionist discourse that has fewer and fewer spokespeople to choose from.
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Perhaps Lévy will get round to imagining a eugenicist Übermensch, where imagined Jewish moral superiority is gene-spliced, with similarly fantastical, Black natural sense of rhythm and enhanced sexual powers (that’s if you can imagine Lévy having Black or Indigenous friends?). It couldn’t make the moral universe in which Israel’s colonial crimes are justifiable, any more bizarre, incestuously privileged and socially-exclusive.
It is so easy these days, when those whose powers are greatest tell the most lies and use the most unhinged justifications for their self-aggrandisemants, to forget one simple rule: that being right does not depend on who you are, it depends on what you do. It cannot be right for a people to use the fact of who they are to justify what they do, if what they do is wrong. Genocide is manifestly wrong, and just because it is Jews carrying out this genocide cannot make it right, not by any standard of basic human decency. So it doesn’t matter how many volumes a Zionist might write to explain the reasoning behind it, it is inexcusably wrong, and cannot ever claim to be moral.
This can be condensed into two sentences:
Liberal Zionism is fantasy.
It’s antisemitic to say Jews are better or worse than anyone else.
A thoughtful piece by Peter Beinart in taking Lévy to task, as you’d expect from someone who has had an agonising journey away from liberal Zionism.
Unfortunately, Beinart has joined in the smear against Corbyn and the British left over ‘left antisemitism’. His journey has a way to go.
It is a bit of a stretch to decribe Levy as ‘a world-famous philosopher’. He is a French public intellectual; a species which traditionally has not travelled very well. It is significant that he is now being applauded by people who would normally regard French intellectuals with indifference or contempt.
Following his lengthy diatribe on X, about ‘the Irish’, Simon Sebag-Montefiori is not the man you’re looking for.