BHL Goes to Israel
Travel Blog • Terry Ward • 08.09.06 | 5:22 PM ET
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article by Bernard-Henri Lévy (recently featured in a World Hum interview about his American travels) caught my eye. The French writer’s latest journey, in mid-July, took him to Israel, a country he has visited on many occasions. This time it’s the war in Lebanon that he ponders.
While dodging rockets near the Lebanese border, Lévy paints a picture of nerve-wracking insecurity and Russian roulette—the hallmarks of traveling in a warzone:
There’s a veritable rain of fire today over these biblical landscapes of Upper Galilee, not to speak of a storm of steel. “I’ve never really known what you should do in these cases,” Lt. Col. Olivier Rafovitch says to me, forcing himself to laugh, as we approach the border town of Avivim and as the noise of the explosions seems also to be coming closer. “You tend to speed up, don’t you? You tend to think that the only thing to do is get away as fast as possible from this hell. But that’s stupid, really. For who can tell if it isn’t exactly by speeding up that you come right to where it’s. . .?” In response, we speed up all the same.
With the usual smattering of ellipses and the measured, stream-of-consciousness style that is his trademark, Lévy relates his experiences, which include talking war and peace with Shimon Peres and meeting with the parents of Gilad Shalit—one of the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hamas, the event that sparked the war.
Lévy’s identity as a Frenchman, and its implications in Israel, are central to his experience. As an American who travels, I am used to being put in the position of answering for my country. I was interested to find Lévy in a similar role abroad. To the people he met, he was inextricably linked to his nationality and government. In preparing to meet with one war leader, he wonders:
Will he (Ephraim Sneh), like (Defense Minister Amir Peretz) Peretz, like (Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni) Livni, like almost everyone in fact, tell me about Israel’s disappointment with France, which could have played a great role in the region by pushing for the refoundation of the Land of the Cedars and for the disarmament of Hezbollah, as demanded by United Nations Resolution 1559, but which prefers, alas, to confine itself to opening up humanitarian corridors?
On meeting with Aviva and Noam Shalit, the parents of the kidnapped Israel soldier, Lévy writes:
What is happening, then? Is it his mother Aviva’s expression when I ask her about what she knows of her son’s captivity? Or his father Noam’s look when he tries to explain to me, a faint gleam of hope in his eyes, that the young man has a French grandmother, Jacqueline, who was born in Marseille, and that he hopes my government — that of France —will link its efforts with Israel’s?
As travelers, we are inevitably perceived as representatives of our countries—whether we’re budget backpackers or French rock star philosphers, it seems.
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Terry Ward is a Florida-based writer and a long-time contributor to World Hum.
