The war in Gaza has significance far beyond its regional military aspects. It has come to play a major role in the global war of ideas, a crucial front in the worldwide struggle against woke ideology.
Its outcome will have significance for the future of liberal democracy everywhere. Because the war is a test case for one of the most crucial questions of our time: Can the West regain enough self-confidence to defend its own values?
This is what lends urgency to the battle over the framing of the war, which began almost as soon as the war did. The woke did not have to wait until the charred, mutilated and desecrated bodies of the Jewish victims cooled down in order to know which party was in the wrong.
Western “progressive” intellectuals began, almost immediately, to suggest that “more context” was needed. And the “context” was, predictably, “the occupation”—never mind that Gaza has not been under Israeli rule since 2005.
Trained in post-colonial studies and versed in identity politics, the woke possesses hostility to Zionism that is more than merely an item on their cancel list. It is a litmus test by which they decide who is “on the right side of history.”
The Palestinians are, in this view, native people of color and the Jews are European whites who colonized Palestinian lands. All other details must fit into this moral mold.
With the dispossession of Native Americans now relegated to the past, slavery extinct in the West and European rule gone from the Far and Middle East, only Zionism is left to embody Western sins. Israel is, according to the woke, a rearguard of Western colonialism and 19th century nationalism, the last vestige of retrograde Western ideologies.
Demanding its destruction is therefore both a badge of morality and a ritual of atonement. It is as if Zionism is, for the woke, a voodoo doll: By stabbing it, one demonstrates that he has transcended Western sins. Having thus shed their bad old self, Western woke elites are ready to devote themselves to making amends to the former victims of their civilization, by turning against it and against that which symbolizes its sinful past.
The woke are, in fact, attempting to exonerate themselves for the antisemitism of the past, by perpetuating antisemitism in the present, now in the guise of anti-Zionism. The sins of the Nazis will be atoned by calling the Zionists Nazis.
In this cultural context, it should be clear why the battle over the framing of the war is not just about Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. It’s about Israel right to exist. It’s also about the very legitimacy of Zionism.
This means that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on the moral justification of the war is also a demand to scrap the whole map by which Western “progressive” elites make sense of the world—not least their own domestic politics. If Zionism is, for the woke, the contemporary paradigmatic example of Western sins, then legitimizing it means rejecting the idea that Western sins can explain all evils that befell the world. Which in turn means collapsing the whole of the woke edifice.
For Netanyahu, far from being a relic of the bad old colonial past, Israel is a trailblazer, pointing the way to a safer future. It is the front line of Western civilization in its war against barbarism. It is the vanguard now rushing to defend civilization’s boundaries where they were violently breached.
“If you remember one thing from this speech, remember this,” Netanyahu said in July 2024 to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. “Our enemies are your enemies; our fight is your fight; and our victory will be your victory.”
He reiterated similar themes in his address to the U.S. General Assembly in October, when he spoke of the ” savage murderers” who are out to destroy “our common civilization.”
In Congress, Netanyahu also pointed out the collaboration between the West’s external enemies and its internal woke detractors.
“I have a message for these protesters,” he said, referring to the demonstrators against his presence on Capitol Hill, carrying “Gays for Gaza” placards. “When the tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair are praising, promoting and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.”
Wokeism is an autoimmune disease. It attacks our ability to defend our values. Its moral relativism first asserts the equality of all cultures, then lets anti-western values into its midst through the gateway of boundless tolerance. Finally, it inverts morality by leveraging Western guilt in order to forbid any criticism of racist, misogynist, anti-gay, antisemitic and anti-Western ideologies—so long as these come from groups designated as victims of the West.
The damage caused by this moral inversion is the same everywhere. It is what led British authorities to turn a blind eye to grooming gangs in the name of “community relations;” it is what led students to support the genocide of Jews in the name of “anti-racism;” it is what led courts to send rapists to women’s jails; and what authorized the sterilization of children in the name of “gender affirmation.”
It is also what led the International Court of Justice in The Hague to argue that Israel, not Hamas, should be tried for genocide. It reached the height of absurdity with Judith Butler, the feminist oracle, defending the sadistic barbarian rape and mutilation of Jewish women as “armed resistance.”
This inversion is, indeed, omnipresent in the left: The Biden administration’s instinctive response to the massacre of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023 was to set up a taskforce for combating “Islamophobia.”
Netanyahu’s mission is not, of course, to argue the fine points of queer theory or to point out the contradictions in the late Palestinian-American activist professor Edward Said’s teachings. But his instinct for calling out cultural and moral relativism goes right to the heart of the problem.
“This is not a clash of civilizations,” he told Congress, alluding to Samuel Huntington’s popular book. “It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”
Framing the war in this way and calling barbarism by name, Netanyahu set out to overthrow a worldview, not just an opinion. His call was for the restoration of our immune systems, so that we may regain moral clarity and be able to tell right from wrong. His speech was the virtual opposite of the worldview expounded in Cairo on June 4, 2009 by Said’s most influential disciple—Barack Hussein Obama.
Obama’s own disciples were still at the helm when Netanyahu spoke to Congress. He could not say this explicitly, but he must have been fully aware that he was asking the world’s greatest superpowers to jettison Obama’s woke moral compass and reverse course. It thus fell to the leader of a small country to call America, and the West as a whole, to its senses.
“For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together,” he said, adding Ronald Reagan’s famous Cold War quip: “Because when we stand together, something very simple happens—we win, they lose.”
Despite the standing ovation he received from senators and House representatives, Netanyahu was facing an administration that refused to rise to the challenge, or even to call evil by name. It was not only trying to appease the barbarians; it was even refusing to call them that.
It is high time we bring back truth to our language. The word “barbarism” must be returned to our lexicon if we are to understand the meaning of the war in the Middle East as well as almost every central aspect of politics—domestic and foreign—in every Western democracy.
The question isn’t whether the term does or does not give us a clue as to the alleged residual racism of those who use it. It is not a misnomer designed to excuse Western domination over innocent victims. It is an accurate, truthful description of powerful enemies who mean it when they say they are out to destroy Western civilization.
It fell to Israel not only to fight these barbarians for its own survival, but also to wake the West up from its woke dreams, and exhort it to return to itself. We Israelis are not the unpleasant remnant of your guilty past. We are the key to your future survival. That was the deeper meaning of Netanyahu’s speech.
Not all values are created equal. We will not be able to defend ours if we continue to use Obama-era sanitized language and talk of “radical extremism,” instead of calling the terrorists of Hamas, the Pakistani grooming gangs in Britain, the Muslim murderers of Charlie Hebdo journalists in France or the assassin of gay director Theo Van Gogh in Holland by the name that describes them truthfully: jihadi barbarians. Foes of humanism. Enemies of liberalism and democracy.
This is not all theory. Israel is now fighting not only against a military enemy. It is also waging a simultaneous culture war against a constellation of lopsided “human rights” organizations, think tanks and NGOs, biased international tribunals, woke newspapers, “progressive” media outlets and social-media platforms, corrupt universities and peace processors who are trying to tie our hands.
We need to openly defy them. We need to go on the offensive and destroy their moral credibility. Above all, we need to win on the battlefield despite their best efforts to stop us, because it is crucial not only for Israel’s exitance. It is also essential to demonstrate that democracies can defend themselves. That they will not let their moralizing elites turn their own values against them, demanding in effect surrender to the barbarians.
We cannot desert our values by pretending to adhere to them more scrupulously. Israel must now prove that the West can be diverted from the path of cultural suicide.
We are now the West’s boots on the ground, in the cultural war as well.
Adapted from remarks by the author at the JNS International Policy Summit.