Benjamin Netanyahu’s first English-language press conference since the start of the war with Iran, held earlier this month in Jerusalem, will be remembered less for the updates he provided on the progress of Israel’s military campaign than for his pronouncements on two seemingly disparate world-historical figures: Jesus Christ and Genghis Khan.“History proves that, unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan,” the prime minister asserted, citing the American historian Will Durant. “Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.”“The democracies led by the United States have to reassert their will to defend themselves and to oppose their enemies,” he continued, “before the jarring gong of danger wakes them up, and wakes them up too late.”The backlash was swift, including from several right-wing American commentators and supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump. With prominent MAGA figures like Tucker Carlson and others already portraying Netanyahu as having dragged the United States into a war against its own interests, the last thing he needs is to insult the Republican Party’s evangelical base.So, as has often happened, Netanyahu had to correct his remarks. “Let me be clear: I did not denigrate Jesus Christ at my news conference this evening,” he later posted on X. “A morally superior civilization may still fall to a ruthless enemy if it does not have the power to defend itself. No offense was meant.”Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map while speaking at the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Friday, Sept. 26, 2025, at U.N. headquarters. Photo: AP/PTI.It is true – Netanyahu did not disparage Jesus. He even placed him on the side of good. But it is also quite clear that when choosing between Jesus, who commands to turn the other cheek, and Genghis Khan, who instills terror in his enemies and destroys those who do not submit, Netanyahu will always choose the latter.There is nothing accidental about the analogies and examples that Israel’s prime minister draws from history. The son of a historian, Netanyahu testifies that reading and studying history are at the centre of his life, providing the compass of his decisionmaking. In his 2022 autobiography “Bibi: My Story,” he recounts advising a young American on which three subjects to study at college: “History, history, and more history.”The fact that Netanyahu has often had to “clarify” his remarks does not turn his historical statements into slips of the tongue. Quite the opposite: They testify most directly to how he perceives history and the course of action he derives from it.Genghis Khan is the embodiment of the idea that might is right, a timeless symbol of the ruthless use of violence as a method of warfare, of the destruction of entire cities, and of the mass execution of their inhabitants. The most famous example is actually associated with his grandson, Hulagu Khan, who destroyed Baghdad in 1258 – then one of the most magnificent cities in the world – demolishing palaces, mosques, and churches, and making pyramids out of the skulls of hundreds of thousands of its slaughtered inhabitants.By asserting that the course of history is dictated by those who emulate Genghis Khan, the representative of barbarism, and not Jesus, the representative of morality, Netanyahu reveals his worldview. “The weak crumble, are slaughtered, and are erased from history, while the strong, for good or ill, survive,” Netanyahu declared in August 2018. “The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end, peace is made with the strong.”Genghis Khan did not leave behind a written doctrine, but these words do not seem far from the spirit of the Mongol commander.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the opening event of the bipartisan delegation of American legislators to Israel in Jerusalem, Monday, Sept. 15, 2025, Photo: AP/PTI.Armed to the teeth and ready for battleNetanyahu’s remarks about Genghis Khan and Jesus come just months after he made another contentious historical analogy. At a Finance Ministry conference last September, he claimed that Israel had “no choice” but to become “super-Sparta” – in other words, to become economically and militarily self-sufficient in the face of increasing international isolation.Ancient Sparta, at least according to the popular historical image, was a society entirely devoted to the military and committed to constant warfare. Netanyahu spoke of “super-Sparta,” a sophisticated, modern version – although here too, as in the case of Genghis Khan, he was quick to correct his remarks after the stock market reacted negatively to his Spartan vision, explaining that he had meant only the military industry Israel would have to develop independently.An Israel armed to the teeth and always ready for battle is Netanyahu’s vision of the state. But the question here is not only what Netanyahu’s choices of historical imagery teaches about his inner world. The more fundamental issue is that he has turned his worldview into policy – adopting the Spartan model of eternal war and the Genghis Khan model of total annihilation as the only course of political and military action.This outlook, of course, is not Netanyahu’s alone. The overwhelming majority of the Jewish-Israeli public has grown accustomed to the idea that war is their fate – a view that Netanyahu played a significant role in instilling.More than a decade ago, he removed from the table the option of diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinians as a way to achieve any stability, let alone a peace agreement or reconciliation. And especially since October 7, 2023, he has refined the view that the only language with which Israel can speak to the rest of the Middle East is force: in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and even Qatar.Before he gave the order to bomb Iran at the end of February, he had already marked the next enemy: Turkey and an emerging “Sunni axis.” This is the translation of the Spartan concept into policy.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with IDF soldiers. Photo: X/@netanyahu.The military has also fully adopted Netanyahu’s posture. In May 2024, there were reports that then-Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi warned that without any political horizon in Gaza, the army would have to keep fighting there indefinitely. Now, however, it does not appear that the current Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir even raises the question of a political objective — whether in Gaza, Iran, or Lebanon – and speaks of the war continuing “for a long time.” As Israeli academic Yagil Levy warned, the army has become addicted to the use of lethal force as part of a doctrine of endless deterrence, seen as the only way to “deal with” its neighbours.This Spartan consciousness is also reflected in the backlash to anyone who dares to criticise the current war with Iran — to say they are tired of the war and of sitting in shelters, that it is impossible to achieve the war’s stated goals such as toppling the regime in Tehran, or that there is no “exit strategy.”For Israeli academic Yuval Elbashan, not a far-right figure by any account, Israelis who demand an end to the war exhibit the “morality of tourists”: those for whom the state is not a shared destiny but a service contract, and who want to abandon the “historic window of opportunity … to crush and dismember the Iranian snake” in order to reclaim their “normality.”“I think it is a grave error to criticise the government for the mere fact that there is a war. The fact that there is a war is to its credit, not its detriment,” wrote Elad Nachshon, a researcher at Ben-Gurion University’s Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, in a Facebook post. “It is ridiculous to demand that it publish its military and policy plans to the public, and there is no need to explain why.”Exporting the ‘Gaza model’The allusion to Sparta justifies constant war as the sole, and even preferred, way to exist in the Middle East. But how this war is conducted brings us back to Genghis Khan.The International Court of Justice has found that Israel has plausibly violated the Genocide Convention in Gaza. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And according to the Israeli army’s own intelligence database, around 83 percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians. But it seems to me that what brings Israel closest to emulating Genghis Khan is the use of starvation as a military tactic, the declared attempt to carry out widescale ethnic cleansing, and the systematic destruction of cities, towns, and villages to prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes.Benjamin Netanyahu with IDF soldiers. Photo: X/@netanyahu.If one were to think of a single embodiment of this campaign, the name that immediately comes to mind is Avraham Zarviv, a bulldozer operator who became known as the “Flattener of Jabalia” and publicly bragged about razing 50 buildings every week. In a recent podcast interview, Zarviv recounted meeting Zamir in Gaza, who severely reprimanded him. “Don’t say you’re destroying houses,” Zarviv quoted the army’s chief of staff as having told him. “Say you’re destroying terror infrastructure.”One is almost tempted to say that, instead of boasting about razing Baghdad’s palaces, Genghis Khan could have said he was merely “destroying terror infrastructure.”Now, it seems Israel is transplanting this Genghis Khan-style policy to Lebanon. “In light of the remarkable success in Gaza, the newspaper ‘The New Reality’ arrives in Lebanon,” read leaflets that the Israeli army dropped over Beirut earlier this month. “All homes in Lebanese villages near the border will be destroyed – in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza,” Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed today, stating that more than 600,000 Lebanese residents who fled their homes in the south will be forbidden from returning until “safety and security” is achieved for Israeli citizens.Tehran, a city of 10 million people, would be difficult to level either from the air or the ground. But Israel is deploying extraordinary violence against civilian infrastructure such as oil facilities and health facilities, in a premeditated war that clearly violates international law.In Israel, a mindset has taken hold that, in order to achieve a sense of security, it is legitimate to dismantle a country of 90 million people. In other words, even if it cannot bring the entire Middle East under its thumb, it can destroy and sabotage. Israel has become an agent of chaos.“The Dahiyeh Doctrine is being applied in Tehran,” Ali Alizadeh, an Iranian political analyst and journalist living in London, recently claimed on the Makdisi Street podcast, referring to the doctrine of disproportionate force in civilian areas that Israel developed in the southern suburbs of Beirut during the Second Lebanon War. The United States, Alizadeh argued, is willing to hand over the Middle East to Israel, but Israel cannot be hegemonic in the region because everyone despises it.Meron Rapoport is an editor at Local Call. This article is republished from +972 Magazine under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article that was published in partnership with Local Call.