The remark, framed by his insistence that morality alone is not sufficient, distilled a political logic that has accompanied his career for more than three decades. What appeared as a wartime provocation was, in reality, the most explicit statement of a worldview that has long privileged power, even while speaking in the language of morality.
The comparison itself is revealing not because it shocks, but because it simplifies. By placing Jesus Christ and Genghis Khan on the same scale, Netanyahu reduces history to a single measure: who prevails in the immediate moment. Yet the two figures belong to entirely different historical categories. One reshaped ethical systems, legal traditions, and cultural norms over centuries. The other expanded an empire through organized violence. To judge both by short-term dominance is to empty history of its depth and turn it into a sequence of confrontations.
Historians have long resisted such reduction. The British historian Tom Holland, author of Dominion, argues that Western societies remain deeply shaped by Christian moral concepts. His point is not theological but structural: this moral language continues to inform institutions and political thought. Its influence cannot be measured through conquest or defeat. It endures.
Even the example of Genghis Khan complicates Netanyahu’s claim. The historian David Morgan has shown that the Mongol Empire relied not only on conquest, but also on adaptation and administration. Even the most violent expansions required governance, compromise, and institutionalisation. And still, they fractured. Power can expand rapidly; it does not secure permanence.
To understand why Jesus appears in Netanyahu’s rhetoric at all, one must return to the transformation of Israeli political language since the mid-1990s. In its early decades, the Israeli state—shaped by the largely secular Zionism of Theodor Herzl—did not rely on Christian symbolism. Its discourse was national and strategic. Jesus had no central place in it.
That began to change as Israel’s strategic relationship with the United States deepened and as evangelical Christianity became a major political force. By the time Netanyahu first came to power in 1996, he was already speaking in a language that blended security with civilisational framing. In speeches to Western audiences, he described Israel as standing on the front lines of a broader struggle between modernity and barbarism. This framing established a moral geography in which Israel and the West were aligned.
After the attacks of 11 September, this language intensified. In his 2001 book Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu presented the struggle against terrorism as one between the free world and forces of tyranny and fanaticism. The formulation resonated strongly in Western political discourse, particularly among conservative audiences. Israel was no longer framed simply as a state defending itself, but as part of a wider civilisational confrontation.
Within this evolving discourse, Jesus began to appear more clearly—not as a religious reference within Judaism, but as a political bridge. Netanyahu repeatedly emphasised to Western audiences that Jesus was a Jew who lived in the Land of Israel. The formulation acknowledged Christian reverence while anchoring it in Israeli geography and Jewish history, creating a point of symbolic convergence without entering into theology.
As Yaakov Ariel has shown, evangelical support for Israel is rooted in a theological reading of history. Netanyahu did not create this framework, but he engaged it with precision. His speeches to Christian audiences consistently invoked shared heritage, shared threats, and shared destiny.
This was not rhetorical ornament, but political method. As Yossi Shain observes, Israeli leaders have long used religious narratives to reinforce legitimacy. Under Netanyahu, this practice became more systematic, with religious symbolism deployed to strengthen alignment with Western Christian constituencies, particularly in the United States.
Yet this rhetorical bridge always existed alongside another register—one centred on strength, deterrence, and the necessity of force. In his 2015 address to the US Congress, Netanyahu warned that the greatest danger facing the world lay in the combination of militant Islam and nuclear weapons. The framing left little room for ambiguity. Survival, in this view, depended on power.
The March 2026 statement marks a break because it collapses this dual structure. By declaring that Jesus has “no advantage” over Genghis Khan, Netanyahu reverses his own rhetorical logic. The figure that once symbolised shared moral ground is now used to demonstrate the limits of morality itself.
This shift is inseparable from realities on the ground. Since 1967, Israel has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including East Jerusalem. Over decades, this occupation has been entrenched through the steady expansion of settlements at the expense of Palestinian land and its inhabitants, alongside territorial fragmentation and a system of restrictions that has reshaped Palestinian life.
At the same time, Israeli governments—especially under Netanyahu—have continued to present Israel internationally as a democracy rooted in shared Judeo-Christian values, emphasising rule of law, pluralism, and alignment with Western civilisation. The contrast is unmistakable. The external narrative invokes morality and shared heritage. The internal logic, increasingly explicit in Netanyahu’s own words, rests on force.
The contradiction is structural. Moral language is directed outward, particularly toward Western constituencies whose support remains politically significant. Power is asserted inward, shaping territorial realities. The two logics operate side by side, but they do not reconcile.
Netanyahu’s response to criticism—insisting that no offence was meant and attributing the remark to historian Will Durant—does not resolve this tension. Durant warned that morality without strength is vulnerable; he did not dismiss its importance. Netanyahu’s formulation goes further. It elevates power from necessity to principle.
Even within realism, this position is difficult to sustain. Hans Morgenthau argued for prudence, not for the exclusion of moral judgment. Politics required balance. That balance is absent here.
History offers a different lesson. Power can conquer, but it cannot sustain order on its own. Systems built solely on force may expand quickly, but they struggle to endure because they fail to produce legitimacy. What sustains political order over time is not coercion alone, but the institutions, norms, and shared beliefs that make authority acceptable. As Yuval Noah Harari notes in Sapiens, large societies hold together through shared narratives that allow strangers to cooperate. Without such foundations, power remains exposed—capable of domination, but unable to secure durability.
Netanyahu’s argument leaves little room for such complexity. It reduces politics to a stark choice between domination and submission, where even savagery can be recast as necessity. This is not an attempt to interpret reality, but to legitimise a particular form of it. Such language may mobilise support in wartime, but it cannot explain history, nor can it sustain any political order beyond the immediate use of force.
The deeper issue is not that Netanyahu recognises the role of power. It is that he turns it into a doctrine that justifies everything—especially when exercised in the context of an ongoing occupation. For years, he relied on moral language, religious symbolism, and shared narratives to secure support and legitimacy. Now he sets them aside in explicit terms. What emerges is not a theory of politics, but a position: that force is sufficient and legitimacy dispensable. In stating it so plainly, he does not clarify the world—he exposes the limits of his own project: a politics that can impose control but cannot justify it or sustain it. For his supporters and allies in the West, the implication is clear. One cannot invoke shared values and the rule of law while endorsing a framework that strips them of substance. The choice is no longer rhetorical—it is political, and it will shape how this war is judged, and how the West understands itself.
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*The writer is the editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly and Ahram Online.
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