In Netanyahu's grotesque world view, even Gaza's four year-olds are barbarians

Irish Times

03-06-2025

There are two words that, when used together, tell at once a big lie and a terrible truth. Those words are 'barbarism' and 'civilisation'. The lie they tell is that They are not really the same species as Us. And the truth they convey is that the slaughter that is to be justified by this distinction will be both indiscriminate and unlimited.
Binyamin Netanyahu
has been playing this B/C two-card trick throughout his public career. As far back as 1986, in a book he edited called Terrorism: How the West Can Win, he declared 'the war on terror' (a phrase he was using long before it gained international currency after the 9/11 attacks of 2001) to be 'part of a much larger struggle, one between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism'.
Right from the start of his assault on the population of
Gaza
, this has been Netanyahu's mantra. He has used it both to absolve himself and his regime from all moral and legal obligation and to lure the western democracies into collusion with his crimes.
In Tel Aviv on October 18th, 2023, less than a fortnight after the
Hamas
atrocities of October 7th, Netanyahu told then-US president
Joe Biden
: 'You've rightly drawn a clear line between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism.' For anyone who doubted that
Israel's response
was going to be unchecked by any norms of decency or restraint, this utterance should have been a chilling moment of clarity. Netanyahu was intoning the dark spell that summons terror.
READ MORE
The binary opposition of civilisation and barbarism creates a 'clear line' that divides two moral universes. Instead of all the multiple limits so painfully put in place as responses to the horrors of the 20th century – all those laws for the conduct of war and the prevention of genocide and ethnic cleansing – there is only one line of demarcation, the great B/C boundary that rules them all.
Everything – and everyone – that exists on the B side is barbarian. Precisely because the line is so 'clear', there can be no innocents there. There are barbarian four year-olds playing with their barbarian dolls, barbarian women giving birth, barbarian doctors and teachers and aid workers and ambulance drivers and reporters. They shriek barbarian screams and cry barbarian tears – cries and sobs that must never be mistaken for those of civilised people like us.
But just as everyone on their side is by definition barbarian, everyone on ours is by the same definition civilised. No act committed by 'the forces of civilisation', however atrocious, can be barbaric. When you are on the C side of the great divide, slaughter is life-giving, anarchy is law, cruelty is kindness, famine is nourishment, obliteration is opportunity, collective punishment is justice.
Thus, addressing a joint session of the US Congress in July 2024, Netanyahu declared that 'this is not a clash of civilisations. It's a clash between barbarism and civilisation. It's a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life'. The logic is as remorseless as it is absurd: even when we are engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians we are sanctifying life. The right way to deal with those who glorify death is to gloriously kill them, and their families, their neighbours, their communities, their societies, their histories and their futures.
[
Netanyahu's claim that Israel is fighting 'barbarians' is a ploy to legitimise genocidal murder
Opens in new window
]
The annihilation of meaning implicit in this disfigurement of language prepares for and accompanies the annihilation of people. Those life-sanctifying 2000lb bombs (supplied initially by Biden) are armed, not only with explosives, but also with what George Orwell called 'language ... designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable'.
Given such an obviously grotesque descent into lethal gibberish, why have the western democracies been so reluctant to call this binary what it is: a warrant for genocide? How could they have convinced themselves that Netanyahu, who has been repeating it over and over for 40 years, would not follow through on its exterminationist logic? On the face of it, it seems impossible to understand how democracies could manage to bury their knowledge that the B/C dichotomy leads only in one direction: the wiping out of the barbarians.
[
Seeing Israel use hunger as a weapon of war is monstrous to me as someone with a Holocaust legacy
Opens in new window
]
Yet it is all too explicable. Most democracies have a lot of practice in burying this precise knowledge. Their modernity is founded on it. The exceptional aspect of Israel's current campaign of eradication is not the where but the when. It is happening now, rather than in the 18th and 19th centuries when the United States, Canada and Australia were founded on the genocides of indigenous populations or when European empires were bringing civilisation to the barbarians by murdering, exploiting and expropriating them by the million.
This history is the great fault line beneath the surface of western liberalism. There is a deeply disturbing sense in which Netanyahu can claim truthfully to be merely carrying on the work of the West, for much of that work was based on the same contradiction he deploys: in the task of spreading 'our' values, we must not imagine that the barbarians deserve the benefits that they bestow on our own kind.
'To suppose,' wrote the great English liberal John Stuart Mill in 1859, 'that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilised nation and another, and between civilised nations and barbarians is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into.' Law and morality are for people like us – they cannot be applied to people like them.
Writing of Britain but in terms that could apply equally to any of the imperial powers, Caroline Elkins says in
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
, that it 'constructed an alternative moral universe for populations it perceived to be off civilisation's scale of humanity, in an otherworldly order distinctly their own'.
The slaughter in Gaza cannot be confronted because it reminds the West of a history it prefers to forget. It is easier for its alternative moral universe to remain otherworldly.