In the days following October 7th, I did what much of the world did and took to the internet to track updates, uplift Palestinian voices, and look on in horror as Israel’s reprisals and the propaganda churned out faster than each jet sent over Gaza to bomb and bomb and bomb.
From the earliest moments that the “40 beheaded babies” myth took hold of the imaginations of those eager to believe it, it was an obvious fabrication. And a calculated one. What more gruesome an image? What other event would channel the bloodlust of the world into ignoring one of the worst civilian bombing campaigns in modern history. And what other image would so readily lay the groundwork for a narrative battle between modernity and antiquity? Good and evil? Civilization and barbarism? From CNN to Joe Biden, the collective West ran with the propaganda as if it were true, as if the IDF was a credible source. I found myself pointlessly arguing with Zionists, military bloggers and Open-Source Intelligence pages and horrified liberals willing to believe any lie told about Hamas.
What struck me about these interactions wasn’t the readiness with which people believed Israel’s propaganda factory (they were, after all, ready and eager to believe it as it confirmed a pre-existing worldview), but rather how easily I met them on their terms of debate and within an imperial rhetorical framework. The term used by nearly everyone from Twitter pages to news pundits was “barbarism.” Hamas’ attacks were “barbaric,” they were “barbarous killings.” Every possible iteration of the word was rolled out against Hamas, but what was clear was that Hamas was simply a proxy for Palestinian people writ large.
By calling Hamas barbarians, if done enough, Palestinians could be folded in just as easily to this category. One Twitter user commented in a thread that, “when you behead babies you lose your right to be a part of the human community.” To Israel, and its many backers, Palestinians had already been jettisoned from the human community. That has been, after all, the Zionist project.
I began my Twitter debate by making an argument against the use of the word “barbaric” for reasons just mentioned and ended up arguing that Israel’s violence was in fact the “barbarous” violence. I have seen the same trajectory from countless other pro-Palestinian voices over the past three and a half months, brought on by the urgency of the moment as well as the sheer size, scope and often indescribable nature of Israel’s violence. Of course, Israel’s violence is exponentially worse, their capacity to enact it grossly disproportionate (not to mention its 75-year span), but the argument I was making, I realized, was not in fact making that point.
To some extent, we remain having the same debate we were having in October. The debate has come to hinge on proving which side is barbaric. Israel creates the image of babies being beheaded by hand and then, in actuality, inevitably beheads Palestinian children with bombs.
Anyone who has studied any modern war, or even just thinks about it for a second, knows that bombs, missiles, and artillery regularly de-limb and behead their victims. What do people think happens to a body when it explodes? This argument, however, is unwinnable as it is pointless. If a child’s head is removed, does the method matter? Even if 40 Israeli babies had been beheaded, to suggest beheadings by machines vs. human hand is more civilized, advanced or some illustration of progress is ridiculous. Alas, this is the legacy of the guillotine: the further the human hand is removed from the corpse it creates, the more acceptable the violence. Worse than unwinnable, however, the argument which comes to hinge on the label of barbarism reproduces the very narrative terrain required for the Israel’s three and a half months (and 75 years) of violence to take place.
It is necessary then to look at the etymology and history of the word “barbarian,” consider its uses, and consider what we are fighting for when we are fighting, it would seem, for control over it as a narrative tool. The word finds its source with Greek (barbar) for a non-Greek person or foreigner. The same is true in French, Latin and every other iteration of the word. It denotes someone who is outside of the protected community of a centralized city-state. In this way, it also comments on a certain hierarchy of ways of being or socio-political organization.
For example, in Upland Southeast Asia barbarians were those living in the hills as opposed to valleys where population centers and centralized governments arose around wet rice cultivation. Their social organization, cultivation practices, economies and political structures were vastly different, often nonhierarchical, and thus they were seen as the opposite Other. A category necessary for the concentration of disparate peoples under a centralized state to begin to think of themselves as a single people. The term barbarian has evolved across time and space to include implications of religion and race. However, in all its forms and geographies it produces an othered community and suggests modes of behaving and existing which are incongruent with, and outright an affront to, modern life.
At every point, “barbaric” has been used as a term by the “center” or “metropole” against its colonial peripheries to justify whatever it has already done to them or is planning on doing. This is true for external colonialism (i.e. France and Algeria) or internal colonialism (i.e. Burma and the Karenni people). What does it mean then to engage in a debate which falls into this framework in deciding who is the group outside of the human community or realm of social responsibility? It reinforces the kind of hierarchies empires require and create, first through verbal language and then through violence. It creates the notion that the worst forms of violence (those labeled barbaric) are outside of modernity, belonging only to prehistory and our former lower selves, rather than inseparable from and in fact the result of modernity.
Palestinian children stand amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Al-Bureij camp, Gaza, on October 29, 2023 following Israeli airstrikes. © 2023 Mohammed Talatene/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images (via hrw.org).
The Holocaust was not a blip that transcended history, it was the culmination of colonial and industrial processes activated by nationalism (who is within the national community vs who is a “threat” to it). It was not a return to barbarism or a break from the march of progress but rather the most complete and cumulative expression of modernity. It was a project of internal colonization. So is Israel’s methodical annihilatory bombing campaign. Zionists have pitched Israelis, as Netanyahu said, “the sons of light” whereas Palestinians are “sons of darkness.” “Civilization,” to be defined, had to invent its opposite. For civilization to take its modern form, it required barbarism, both as a means of understanding itself but also for the justification of subjugation and plunder, of people and resources.
To attempt to re-pin “barbarism” on the colonial core weaponizing the word then is to affirm that world rather than, as is intended, reappropriate or hijack it. To say “this group is not the barbarians, you are the barbarians” says there is in fact a hierarchy in terms of social organization, ways of being and, ultimately, human life. However, there are no barbarians. It is as much of a fabrication as the 40 beheaded babies myth. It is simply the word which, historically, raises the sword, looses the volley, pulls the trigger, racks the bolt, loads the shell, releases the gas, blockades the food, closes the concentration camp gates, and opens the bomb bay doors.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Yoav Gallant, Eylon Levy, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Olaf Scholz and every political, military and media personnel responsible for this genocide deserve the strongest existing language in their condemnation and description, but what they do not deserve is their world to be affirmed for them as we attempt to condemn it. This calls to mind Audre Lorde’s famous quote and demands we also lift up the following, less quoted, sentence when she says “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” The language of empire is such a tool.
This genocide is not the work of “barbarism,” it is the work of modernity and its structures. Barbarism is the projection of the crimes of states onto their victims to justify those crimes. To argue Israel’s violence is barbaric is to erase the history of violence upon which modern states depend and misapply it using a term invented for the sole purpose of centralized states to expand through annihilatory violence. It is not a violence of the past, it is quintessentially modern and requires modern classifications of race, class, gender, nation and state to be carried out. Those who have been historically considered “barbarians,” or those existing outside of a centralized state structure, by definition, would have been ideologically and politically unequipped to carry out this kind of terror to scale.
Rafael Lemkin ultimately coined the word genocide to describe the Holocaust but was first inspired by the linguistic void in being able to accurately apprehend the Armenian Genocide and give word to events that broke the reach of language at the time. Our task as writers and witnesses to an ongoing genocide, then, is to do the same. Israel has invented a new kind of terror. Israel has fundamentally and forever changed warfare. Only new language can adequately apprehend this violence and in so doing offer us a chance to build a world where such wanton destruction is unimaginable, and no group possesses the capacity to enact it. That world, like any world, is built with language as much as, and often before, it is built with action.