Netanyahu rejects the gospel of Christ for the doctrine of Genghis Khan
Submitted by Soumaya Ghannoushi on Wed, 04/01/2026 - 16:33
The Israeli leader elevates power over principle, but unlike the Mongol emperor, his ability to unleash terror is entirely dependent on US support
Protesters set a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on fire during an anti-US demonstration in Istanbul, Turkey, on 1 February 2026 (Yasin Akgul/AFP) On During the most sacred days of the Christian calendar, Israeli authorities prevented the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Palm Sunday, which commemorates the entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem, passed not with open worship, but with barriers, delays and restrictions.
This was not an administrative inconvenience. It was a message about power and control; about who may enter the sacred space, and who must wait outside it.
During a recent speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed the deeper logic beneath this reality, quoting historian Will Durant: “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan.”
This was not a rhetorical flourish. It was a declaration - a glimpse into a worldview that elevates conquest over compassion, power over principle.
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In the New Testament, Christ does not conquer; he redeems. He does not rule by fear, but calls through truth. At the moment of his execution, he does not summon vengeance, but speaks words that echo across centuries.
This is not weakness. It is moral authority of the highest order.
In Islam, Isa ibn Maryam, the son of Mary, is honoured as a prophet of God who heals the sick, raises the dead, calls people to righteousness, and embodies compassion. His message, completed by the Prophet Muhammad, binds justice to mercy and strength to moral responsibility.
Across both traditions, the image converges with striking clarity: not conquest, but conscience. Not domination or annihilation, but dignity and the sanctity of life.
Campaigns of obliteration
Netanyahu looks upon this legacy with dismissal, even contempt, instead elevating Genghis Khan as a model worthy of admiration.
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But history does not whisper his name. It recoils from it.
The Mongol campaigns were not merely wars of expansion. They were campaigns of obliteration. Cities that had flourished for centuries - Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv and Nishapur - were reduced to ash and silence.
In his telling, civilisation is not defined by law or moral principle, but by annihilation and brute force; by the very logic it claims to oppose
When Bukhara fell, its inhabitants were driven out en masse, the city burned, its great mosque desecrated. In Merv, chroniclers describe massacres so vast that counting the dead became an act of exhaustion. In Nishapur, following the death of a Mongol prince, the city was annihilated in reprisal. Men, women, children, even animals were slaughtered in an act of total eradication.
Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvayni captured the pattern with chilling clarity: “They came, they sapped, they burnt, they slew, they plundered and they departed.”
This was not incidental brutality. It was doctrine - warfare designed not merely to defeat armies, but to erase societies; to extinguish life, memory, continuity and the possibility of recovery.
Though Genghis Khan himself did not reach Western Europe, the empire he forged did. Under his successors, Mongol armies swept into Hungary and Poland, crushing armies at Mohi and Legnica, carrying the same logic of terror across continents.
The method was consistent, the message unmistakable: submit or vanish.
Historical echo
If Genghis Khan built this machinery of terror, his grandson Hulegu Khan refined it into civilisational destruction. In 1258, during the Siege of Baghdad, one of the greatest intellectual capitals in human history was devastated. Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, a repository of centuries of knowledge, was destroyed.
Manuscripts were cast into the Tigris River in such volume that chroniclers describe its waters darkened with ink and thickened with blood for days on end. The Abbasid Caliphate collapsed in days. A civilisation was not merely conquered; it was extinguished.
It is here that the historical echo becomes impossible to ignore. The logic that underpinned those campaigns - the belief that overwhelming force can break a people, that devastation can secure submission - did not disappear with the Mongols. It re-emerged, articulated in modern ideological form, in the writings of Zeev Jabotinsky.
Netanyahu’s political lineage traces directly to Jabotinsky through the Revisionist movement, later embodied in Herut and ultimately in Likud. This is not a distant intellectual echo. It is a direct inheritance.
In his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall”, Jabotinsky wrote with stark clarity that every indigenous people will resist alien settlers, that a voluntary agreement is unattainable, and that colonisation must proceed behind an iron wall that the native population cannot breach.
Here, force is not a last resort. It is the foundation.
From this doctrine emerged militant organisations such as the Irgun, Lehi and Haganah, armed groups whose campaigns left a trail of bombings, expulsions at gunpoint, and massacres that carved terror into the landscape. Villages were emptied overnight, with families driven from their homes or killed where they stood. Entire communities were erased, their presence reduced to memory.
In the aftermath of the Nakba, these militias formed the nucleus of what would become the Israeli army.
Families erased
That logic did not end. It evolved. For more than a month, Al-Aqsa Mosque has been closed to worshippers, marking the longest such shutdown since the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967.
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Meanwhile, Jewish crowds were permitted to celebrate Purim openly and in large numbers in the streets of Jerusalem, with scenes that included the mocking and taunting of its Arab inhabitants.
In Gaza, this logic finds its most devastating expression. A strip of land barely 365 square kilometres in size, one of the most densely populated places on earth, Gaza has been subjected to destruction on a scale that strains comprehension.
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Israel has unleashed massive explosive force on a trapped civilian population, dropping bunker-buster bombs on makeshift tents. Death has been delivered in every form: bombs, fire, sniper rounds, disease, hunger, thirst.
Families have been erased from the civil registry, from grandparents to grandchildren. Children have been mutilated, their limbs severed in numbers that shock even hardened observers of war. A living city has been turned into a graveyard of concrete and ash.
This is violence not merely as a means, but as an end in itself. Look closely, and you see the unmistakable footprints of Genghis Khan and his hordes.
And yet the greatest irony remains: Netanyahu presents himself as the defender of western civilisation against barbarism, while openly affirming a philosophy that places him firmly on the side of the latter. In his telling, civilisation is not defined by law or moral principle, but by annihilation and brute force; by the very logic it claims to oppose.
Illusions of grandeur
More than 20 years ago, Netanyahu was among the most vocal advocates urging the United States to invade and destroy Iraq, repeating claims about weapons of mass destruction and the necessity of toppling the regime in Baghdad. That war came, and with it the destruction of a capital that had already once been reduced to ruins by Hulegu Khan.
Today, the pattern repeats itself.
Netanyahu once again pushed Washington towards war, this time against Iran, encouraging a campaign that targets the great cities of an ancient civilisation: Tehran, Isfahan and Mashhad, cities whose histories stretch back millennia. In the words of US President Donald Trump, the aim is to reduce Iran to the “Stone Age”.
The sword he brandishes is not his own. Take it away, and there is nothing left
The language is familiar. It is the language of annihilation.
The truth is that even the comparison to Genghis Khan grants Netanyahu too much. Genghis Khan wielded power that was his own. He forged it, commanded it, and imposed it across continents.
Netanyahu does not. His power is sustained - militarily, financially and diplomatically - by the US. The force he deploys is not independent. It is enabled.
He is not Genghis Khan. He is a derivative of power, not its source; a man who postures as a king while operating as a client.
Netanyahu speaks in the language of domination and invokes the imagery of conquest, cloaking himself in the rhetoric of civilisation. But the reality is far smaller.
He is no Genghis Khan. He is a thug with illusions of grandeur.
The sword he brandishes is not his own. Take it away, and there is nothing left.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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