“We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents ... This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilisation against barbarism.”
So said Binyamin Netanyahu in a message to world Christians on December 24th, 2023. He uses this framing rhetoric to say Israel is fighting on behalf of the civilised West against its barbarian enemy Hamas.
Such messages seek indispensable support from Europe and the US, where a reactionary western “civilisationism” – the idea that humanity is divided into distinct civilisations and that relations among them are the central drivers of global politics – now animates far-right populist movements. The significance of this can be seen in how long it has taken governments and political parties there to criticise Israel’s highly disproportionate actions in response to the Hamas atrocities, and to act accordingly.
The Netanyahu quotation is used in the case submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, with which Ireland is associated. The submission relies heavily on speeches by Israeli political and military leaders to demonstrate genocidal intent.
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The late poet Paul Durcan was inspired by George Orwell’s 1946 definition of political language “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. That language game is being played out fully in the Gaza war. The US socialist senator Bernie Sanders describes Israel’s actions as “barbaric”. How do we judge between the two barbarities?
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died this week, argued powerfully that such ethical questions required historical treatment. Barbarism, a classical Greek word, described often nomadic foreign neighbours who did not speak that language. In later classical times it came to mean unintelligible outsiders beyond civilised urban values, enemies of reason, feral animals to be defeated and eliminated if they resisted Roman imperial power.
The term civilisation comes from the European Enlightenment, drawing on its classical inheritance of selective citizenship and urbanised community. A presumed progression in human society from primitive savagery through chaotic and brutal barbarism to civilisation animated subsequent European thinking. Coinciding with the great expansion of European colonies and empires, the ideology created a hierarchical standard of civilisation and international law that privileged Europeans over all others.
Netanyahu’s appeal to Christians is aimed particularly at the far-right populist and Trumpian project of making western civilisation great again by rooting it in a new ethnically demarcated and bordered part of the world. This is why he described recent German, French and Dutch criticisms so immediately and vehemently as “anti-Semitic”. His “revisionist Zionism” has its own essentialist, primordial roots in biblical texts that assume a direct continuity between the present-day state and an ancient “land of Israel”, plus an abiding belief that only force can make the Jewish state safe.
“Civilisationism” has burgeoned in world politics since the end of the cold war as an alternative to domination from Europe and the US through the West’s liberal rules-based international order. The process is readily visible in Chinese, Indian, southeast Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Russian and Hispanic American settings. It rose in parallel with the search for a more multipolar world in which power is more equally distributed. It is expressed in calls for reform of the United Nations and other international institutions.
So civilisations are plural, as the international relations scholar Peter Katzenstein puts it. But he argues that they coexist within one worldwide civilisation of multiple modernities. That can provide the basis for a new set of universal values. Civilisations are internally pluralist, arising from their multiple traditions, cultures, vigorous debates, disagreements – and brutal interest-based conflicts.
This makes them – like nations – difficult to interpret and dangerous to analyse as unitary actors.
Christian armies from Europe clashed with Arab Islamic forces during eight crusades from the 11th to the 13th centuries, when both called each other barbarians. “Barbarian” is a term occurring in most civilisations to describe less well organised neighbours and colonial adversaries.
Civilisations are constellations of power and force too, often in imperial form, making them barbarian themselves. As Walter Benjamin put it, “there is no document of civilisation that is not at the very same time a document of barbarism”.
Netanyahu’s statement exemplifies this paradox. It allows Bernie Sanders to say Israel’s actions are barbarian – notwithstanding the frequent barbarity of US military force.
A European Union looking for an effective ethical role should seek renewed universal values and fairer multilateral institutions through engagement between and within its other regional civilisations. That would better equip it to reject Netanyahu’s appeal as a lie making genocidal murder respectable.
