On July 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a joint session of Congress to deliver a long-awaited speech to the American people. Within seconds, he made a surprising error.
“We meet today at a crossroads of history,” Israel’s great leader began. “Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends.”
Orators love a dramatic opening, but this one felt appropriate. Almost ten months had passed since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. The Israel Defense Forces were still at war in the Gaza Strip, trying to destroy the Iran-backed terrorist organization root and branch. Hezbollah, a larger Iranian proxy to the north, had been hurling rockets, missiles, and drones over the Lebanese border every day since the massacre. From Yemen, the Houthis were firing their own missiles at the Holy Land. All the while, the Iranian masterminds directing the multi-pronged assault on the Jewish state—which included an unprecedented barrage of missiles launched directly from the Islamic Republic in April—had been watching gleefully as masked Hamas-supporters ran wild on Western campuses.
The world was truly in upheaval. We really did stand at a crossroads of history. Mr. Netanyahu was right—but then, suddenly he wasn’t.
“This is not a clash of civilizations,” the prime minister continued. “It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together.”
The speech went on for almost an hour, conveying a clear picture of the high-stakes war to which the US is unwittingly a party. By the end, however, I was still reeling from the analytical flaw embedded in the first few lines.
On one hand, Netanyahu is right. The actions of Hamas on Oct. 7 were barbaric, at least in a colloquial sense. The Iranian regime and its proxies threaten the US-led order. Israel needs all the help it can get.
Yet he’s also wrong. Our enemies are not barbarians. They are highly-intelligent defenders of a rival civilization who want to destroy our way of life for reasons we don’t care to understand. More importantly, they are supported by hundreds of millions of Muslims—the majority, not just the mullahs in Tehran—who, inspired by a shared understanding of the Islamic tradition, deem the killing of non-Muslim civilians as legitimate for the same reasons the ancient Israelites killed the Canaanites: because God said so.
This is a clash of civilizations, if not in our minds then in the minds of our enemies. Netanyahu, of all people, should know that. And after two decades of war in the Islamic world, we should too.
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There are good reasons for an Israeli prime minister to speak of a clash of civilization and barbarism rather than of what Samuel P. Huntington called “civilizations in the plural.” It creates a big tent for disparate nation-states to join the fight; it makes room for Israel’s Muslim citizens, nearly 20 percent of its population; and it recognizes the importance of Israel’s Muslim-majority allies.
But rhetorical gains earned through analytical errors are dubious, even dangerous. Polling data reveals that most Muslims see the Oct. 7 massacre as justifiable, if not commendable. Many go further, believing the murder of Israeli civilians to be an act of spiritual devotion and moral justice.
Let’s start in the West Bank and Gaza. According to a survey conducted in June, 73 percent of Palestinians believe that Hamas’s decision to murder, rape, and kidnap Israeli civilians was the correct one. Virtually all respondents believe that Israel has committed war crimes, while virtually none think Hamas has. Three-fourths approve of Hamas’s performance in the war, and roughly two-thirds hope to see Hamas still ruling Gaza when it’s over. A full 94 percent want Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate president of the Palestinian Authority, to resign.
Such sentiments are common across the Arab world. A poll conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies finds 67 percent of respondents in 16 countries describing the Hamas massacre as a “legitimate resistance operation” and another 19 percent as a legitimate operation “that made mistakes.” Respondents cite Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, encroachments on Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the blockade of Gaza as acceptable grounds for the attack. About one-quarter express solidarity with Gazans while opposing Hamas; more than two-thirds express solidarity with both.
Muslim sentiments in the United States echo those abroad. A February survey from the Pew Research Forum finds nearly 60 percent of US citizens describing Israel’s war against Hamas as justified while nearly the same proportion of US Muslims say the opposite. Only a small number of Muslim Americans are Palestinian and only a quarter are Arab. But while only 8 percent of non-Muslim US adults view Hamas favorably, that number nearly quintuples among Muslim Americans. Eleven percent of US adults sympathize only with Israelis, yet about half of US Muslims sympathize exclusively with Palestinians.
It turns out that Muslims, like Christians and Jews, feel a visceral kinship with co-religionists elsewhere. Huntington called it “civilizational rallying,” a phenomenon in which believers in one part of the world stand in solidarity—with prayers, with money, with weapons—alongside their afflicted brethren elsewhere. Muslims aren’t the only ones who rally—one of Huntington’s premier case studies was of the bandwagoning by Western and Orthodox countries around Croats and Serbs in the 1990s Balkans—but they tend to do it best.
There are pragmatic reasons to pretend that hatred of Israel and the US isn’t ubiquitous in the Islamic world and to portray our enemies as deranged philistines raving at the gates of progress. The implications of the alternative are certainly depressing. But in a moment of global upheaval, it is much better to build our foreign policy strategy on a sober assessment of the truth.
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Watching Netanyahu’s speech, I was reminded of another speech by another head of state before another joint session of Congress in September 2001. Just nine days after 9/11, with the US still in shock, President George W. Bush explained the context of our new world war. “This is not…just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.”
In a West Point commencement address nine months later, our commander-in-chief was even clearer. Describing the enemy as “a few mad terrorists and tyrants,” he declared, “When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations…. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. And their governments should listen to their hopes.”
President Bush was well-intentioned but wildly off-base. Our enemy was not a ragtag bunch of madmen, the Islamic world did not pine for liberal democracy, and Muslims were not (and are not) unified against Islamism. The result was countless dead and wounded, the loss of American prestige, and domestic blowback that we’re still dealing with today.
The lesson: Small errors in perception can lead to huge strategic mistakes. The simple awareness that bin Laden’s call for jihad against “crusaders and Zionists” was anything but fringe, being grounded in mainstream Islamic theology and popular among regular Muslims, would have helped President Bush grasp the limits of his freedom agenda without total victory and long-term occupation. Instead, his good-faith assumption that bin Laden was an extreme outlier, a barbarian, and that Iraqis and Afghans wanted Western democracy triggered the very civilizational clash he hoped to avoid.
True barbarians—mindless automatons whose morality derives from physical power—are rare in our world. Most societies are organized around some spiritual tradition which constitutes the moral core of a transnational civilization; and every civilization, drawing on its tradition, permits the killing of civilians under certain conditions. Ours famously extended such permission for the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To pretend as if hundreds of millions of Muslims who see the Hamas massacre as morally justified—and who condemn the US preoccupation with Israel’s security—are depraved savages is to insult both them and ourselves. They are merely drawing on a tradition different than ours.
The most important task in any civilizational contest is to rally one’s own side by restating core beliefs and connecting them to the present challenge, which means that political leaders seeking support for large outlays of blood or treasure must explain the contest to the public simply and honestly. To be sure, there are practical limits on a statesman’s ability to speak truth amid the competing priorities of global diplomacy. But if speaking the truth is impossible, leaders like Netanyahu should avoid civilizational talk entirely—especially in democracies, where foreign policy is both propelled and limited by the will of the people.
High-minded declarations of universal values intended for external ears only delude and disappoint core audiences with unrealistic expectations that inevitably go unmet. And, truth be told, such declarations rarely convince audiences beyond.
It turns out the “barbarians” are too smart for that.