What Netanyahu says when he speaks French — and why it borders on obscenity
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky June 4, 2024
For the first time since the Hamas massacre last October, Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview last week on French television. On TF1, the country’s most watched network, the Israeli prime minister gave yet another master class in distorting past events and denying present realities in the defense of his political future. The revelation of the hour-long interview, however, was that Netanyahu does this fluently not just in Hebrew and English, but also in French.
Seated at a desk with the Israeli flag to his right and a bookcase behind him, Netanyahu spent the first ten minutes parrying in English the questions posed in French by the news anchor, Darius Rochebin.
When an incredulous Rochebin asked whether one could compare, as Netanyahu just had, the Allied landing at Normandy in 1944 to the Israeli invasion of Gaza 80 years later, Netanyahu, apologizing for his faulty French, declared, “Notre victoire, c’est votre victoire ! C’est la victoire de la civilisation judéo-chrétienne contre la barbarie. C’est la victoire de la France !” In English, this translates to: “Our victory is your victory! It’s the victory of Judeo-Christian civilization over barbarism. It’s the victory of France!”
With the repeated darting of his eyes to the desk, on which a cheat sheet most probably sat, Netanyahu had prepared this moment. He seemed to think it would be a coup de théâtre, one in which Netanyahu himself played the part of Charles de Gaulle. Part of the problem, of course, is that Netanyahu can no more compare himself to de Gaulle than the threat of Hamas, terrible though it is, can be compared to that of Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, de Gaulle would have admired one aspect of this moment — namely, the invocation of historical myth. In the case of de Gaulle, the myth, which he created for the sake of national unity, was that the French nation had, after four years of resistance, liberated itself from the Nazi occupation. Netanyahu did not need to invent a myth, however. Instead, the one he borrowed one knocking around for more than a century, sometimes for the better but most times for the worse, that we now call “Judeo-Christian civilization.”
By now, most of us know that if you keep repeating something that is not a thing, it tends to become a thing. At times, it works according to an inverse ratio: The greater the incredibility of the thing repeated, the greater the credulity of the intended audience. (See: Trump, Donald.) At other times, the thing has an aura of credibility that, over time, hardens into historical fact that most of us accept.
“Judeo-Christian civilization” falls into the second category. It is, historically, no more credible than the History Channel’s claims that ancient aliens are watching over us. Though the term seems based in the mists of the distant past, it is instead bound to theological and ideological battles that go no further back than the early 19th century. It was coined in the early 1830s by Ferdinand Christian Baur, a German Protestant theologian, who was building on the theory of supersessionism.=
Whereas this notion held that Christianity, though with roots in Judaism, had rendered it obsolete, even offensive, Baur went one better. By the phrase “Judeo-Christianity,” he argued that both Judaism and Catholicism had been superseded by Protestantism. (Think of it as superdupersessionism, a theory proposing that Christianity reached its full expression in Tubingen, the provincial backwater where Baur taught.)
But it is only a century later that the phrase is, in effect, weaponized not just by religious figures, but also political and public figures. A new generation of scholars, including the philosopher Anya Topolski and historian K. Healan Gaston, have explored the many facets to the uses and abuses of the term in the twentieth century. In the context of European history and thought, Topolski notes that the authors of the constitution for the European Union excluded the phrase, instead opting for the less volatile claim that all member states share the same “cultural, religious, and humanist inheritance.”
On this side of the Atlantic, Gaston argues that the phrase truly became a thing in the 1930s. Faced by the rising threat of Nazism and communism, religious and political leaders insisted on the vital role played by the “Judeo-Christian tradition” in American history. In 1940, for example, the influential Reform rabbi Stephen Wise sought to persuade gentile Americans that Hitler was no less a threat to them than to European Jews. We must oppose him, he urged, by “upholding and magnifying Judeo-Christian ethics.”
After the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the term was mobilized in the struggle against the threats not just of communism, but also secularism and atheism. Conservatives and liberals linked Judeo-Christian values to democracy, overlooking the fact that ancient Athenians managed to invent democracy without the supernatural support of God.
Finally, the horrifying events of 9/11 conjured yet another enemy devoted to the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization: Islam. In 2003, as Gaston writes, a group of leading Muslim organizations asked Americans to “stop using the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ when describing the values and character that define the United States” and to say instead “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” or “Abrahamic.” To little avail: While a third of Americans viewed Islam unfavorably in 2002, more than half did so in 2010.
Since then, polls on public attitudes both in the US and France towards Islam remain volatile. Yet in this existential year on both sides of the Atlantic — with elections for the European Parliament in June and the White House in November — the entwined issues of immigration and Islam are more charged than ever. There is no better indicator of this than the burgeoning support for far rightwing parties on both continents.
All of which brings us back to Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel is fighting the good fight in Judeo-Christian civilization’s war against barbarism. With a disingenuous chuckle, Netanyahu apologized for his imprecise French. But he could not have been more precise. The myth of Judeo-Christian civilization, Topolski underscores, exemplifies “exclusionary identity-formation” — academese for identifying those on the bus and those thrown under it.
This explains Netanyahu’s appeal to French Jews and non-Jews alike who tend to fear Islam and furnish votes for the resurgent extreme-rightwing and ethno-nationalist Rassemblement national led by Marine Le Pen. The irony, of course, is this party was founded by her father, an antisemite who, even in his dotage, insists that the Holocaust was a “detail of history.”
But here is a different detail we must keep in sight: given the fatal role traditionally assigned to Jews in the myth of Judeo-Christian civilization, Netanyahu’s claim for its historicity borders on obscenity.
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