“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech last October, days into the Israel-Hamas war.

Netanyahu has voiced that idea repeatedly, both before and after the Hamas attack on October 7 — the idea that Israel is a bastion of Western civilization in an uncivilized, backward, and barbarous region.

His mention of “the jungle” recalls a popular Israeli expression, attributed to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak three decades ago, that Israel is “a villa in the jungle.” The jungle, in this case, is the Arab world, and the Palestinians in it are the “beasts” par excellence.

But the idea goes back even further, to the early Zionist thinkers. Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian father of modern Zionism, wanted to establish a state where Jews could be safe from the violent antisemitism they’d long faced in Europe. He painted a vision of a Jewish state in Palestine that would grant civil rights to the Arabs who remained there (in his diary, he toyed with the idea of transferring some outside the borders). He argued that by bringing Western civilization to the region, Jews would be benefiting the local Arabs economically and culturally — and that the Jewish state would “constitute part of the wall of defense against Asia; we would serve as an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”