At the end of a long article in today’s Yediot Ahronoth, Nahum Barnea interviews Bernard Henri-Levy, a leading French philosopher, who is in Israel to attend the President’s Conference. In his recent book, American Vertigo, published in 2006, Henri-Levy followed in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville and crisscrossed the US interviewing a wide cross section of American society, including Barack Obama.
On Obama and the special US-Israel relationship, Henri-Levy noted:
Bush and Clinton dealt with the conflict in the Middle East only in the last year of their terms. Obama went straight to it. It could be he will be more successful than they were. I believe he is friend of Israel. Israel has quite a few phony friends. The Evangelists, for example. They believe that the Messiah is about to come: all that needs to be done is to make sure he has a landing strip, and the landing strip is Israel. I’m not sure that this support is good for you. I spoke to Obama four years before he ran for president. He understood the contribution of Zionism. He understood Israel’s achievements.
Asked on his take between the Netanyahu of 1996 and the Netanyahu of today, Henri-Levy replied:
Twelve years ago, in Netanyahu’s previous term, I wrote a terrible article about him… I wrote that he is a danger to Israel. Today I would not write such an article. He has learned a lot and changed a lot. Did he learn enough, that I don’t know. Today Netanyahu is discovering what the ancient Greeks discovered: that you can be strong, but you can never know if you are the strongest. You cannot rely only on your military might. There are also moral values and political wisdom. I may be wrong, but my sense is that there is a new Netanyahu. He realizes how urgent the Palestinian issue is. If peace is not attained soon, this will not only be a tragedy for the Palestinians but also for Israel. You will face a choice: either there will be no Jewish state-or you will turn into South Africa.
On the Goldstone report:
I don’t think that Israel’s main problem is to appease the world… If your journalists have doubts, if top army commanders have doubts, if the Israeli citizens have doubts, do what you did in the past: launch an investigation. I don’t think that what Israel does will change the way the world judges it. Israel is prejudged.
Every country can have a bad government, but nobody concludes from that that the country is illegitimate. You could dislike president Bush, or Pinochet, and even the government in Germany, but nobody questioned the right of these countries to exist. This is only done to Israel. I don’t know of another country in the world that has been in a state of war for 60 years and hasn’t abandoned its democratic principles and has not lost its vitality. The September 11 terror attacks led to Draconian laws in America. The war in Algeria toppled democratic values in France. Israel is unusual: I admire it for this.