There’s a moment that keeps coming back to me from October 2023. Benjamin Netanyahu, standing before Israeli troops preparing to enter Gaza, invoking a three-thousand-year-old biblical commandment:
“Remember what Amalek has done to you.”
Most of the world heard it as heated rhetoric. But for those listening carefully, particularly those familiar with Jewish religious tradition, it was something far more specific. It was a window into how one man’s understanding of ancient scripture might be shaping one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
This isn’t about religion versus politics, or faith versus reason. It’s about something more subtle and perhaps more consequential: how mythic thinking, the kind that sees current events through the lens of eternal, recurring patterns, can become the hidden architecture of foreign policy. Because if you believe your enemy isn’t just hostile but is the latest incarnation of an ancient, unchanging evil, then every strategic calculation shifts. Compromise becomes cowardice. Diplomacy becomes delusion. And the only rational response to an existential threat is its complete elimination.
Netanyahu’s worldview, shaped by decades of family history and personal trauma, appears to operate through this ancient framework. A recent poll found that 65 percent of the Jewish population believes there is a modern-day “Amalek,” and of those, about 93 percent think the commandment to “wipe out the memory of Amalek” should still apply today. But understanding this framework, and recognizing how it differs from more conventional strategic thinking, might be the key to comprehending why certain conflicts seem impossible to resolve, and why some leaders appear to pursue strategies that baffle outside observers.
The Weight of Ancient Words
The story of Amalek begins in the Torah, in the Book of Deuteronomy, with a commandment that has echoed through Jewish history: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey out of Egypt, how he attacked you on the way and struck down all who lagged behind you when you were tired and weary. Therefore, when the Lord your God has given you rest from all the enemies around you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget.”
The ancient Amalekites weren’t just another hostile tribe. According to biblical tradition, they attacked the Israelites from behind during the Exodus, targeting the weak, the elderly, the stragglers, those least able to defend themselves. It wasn’t warfare; it was calculated cruelty, an assault on the very concept of moral order. And for that, the text demands something unprecedented: not just defeat, but total erasure.
Over the centuries, Jewish religious commentators have grappled with this commandment’s meaning. Some interpreted it literally, a historical people to be destroyed. Others saw it as metaphorical, representing the evil impulse within humanity itself. But there’s a third interpretation that has proven particularly powerful in political contexts: Amalek as archetype, a role that different enemies fill across history.
In this reading, Haman from the Purim story becomes Amalek reborn, the Persian official who nearly succeeded in orchestrating the genocide of the Jewish people. Later rabbinic texts cast Rome in the same role. Medieval commentators saw Crusaders as Amalekites. And in the twentieth century, many religious Jews identified Hitler and the Nazi regime as the ultimate manifestation of Amalekite evil.
According to Professor Motti Inbari of the University of North Carolina, “The biblical commandment is to completely destroy all of Amalek. And when I’m talking about completely destroy, we’re talking about killing each and every one of them, including babies, including their property, including the animals, everything.”
Yet many Jewish scholars have long argued against literal interpretations. Mainstream rabbinic thought has often emphasized that the commandment to destroy Amalek should be understood spiritually, as a call to eliminate hatred, vengeance, and the impulse toward cruelty rather than to target actual peoples. These voices represent a significant portion of Jewish religious thought, though they seem to carry less weight in the corridors of power than in the halls of study.
The Making of a Mythic Mind
To understand how Netanyahu might see Iran through this ancient lens, you have to start with his father. Benzion Netanyahu was a historian obsessed with Jewish persecution, particularly the Spanish Inquisition. His scholarly work chronicled centuries of European anti-Semitism, and his conclusions were stark: gentiles would never accept Jews, and Jewish survival depended on strength, separation, and preemption.
Benzion wasn’t just an academic; he was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, a hardline version of Zionism that distrusted diplomacy and favored what might be called fortress logic. Build walls, arm up, trust no one. The dinner table conversations in the Netanyahu household weren’t about normal politics, they were about patterns of persecution, historical cycles, and the eternal vulnerability of the Jewish people.
Young Benjamin absorbed this worldview during his formative years. But it was given brutal specificity in 1976, when his older brother Yonatan died during the raid on Entebbe. Yoni wasn’t just Netanyahu’s sibling; he was his hero, a symbol of courage, clarity, and self-sacrifice. When Yoni died rescuing Jewish hostages in Uganda, it crystallized for Netanyahu a lesson that would haunt his leadership: Jews are always one step away from slaughter, the world will not save them, and only strength and the will to act preemptively can prevent the next catastrophe.
This personal tragedy reinforced the Amalekite framework: enemies will target the vulnerable, hostages will be taken, and unless someone is willing to strike first and strike decisively, history repeats itself.
Netanyahu’s speeches often invoke the Holocaust, not as distant history but as contemporary warning. “Iran has threatened to annihilate a state,” he has said. “In historical terms, this is an astounding thing. It’s a monumental outrage that goes effectively unchallenged in the court of public opinion.” In his framework, every negotiation risks becoming appeasement, every concession another step toward vulnerability.
Yet this perspective appears to be Netanyahu’s own, shaped by his particular family history and psychological makeup. A 2023 Pew Research poll found Israelis deeply divided in their views of Netanyahu, with 52% viewing him unfavorably and only 47% favorably. Even more telling, 72.5% of Israelis believe Netanyahu should take responsibility for October 7th and resign. The mythic thinking that may drive his decision-making doesn’t appear to reflect broader Israeli public opinion, which suggests a more pragmatic electorate than their longest-serving prime minister.
When Myth Becomes Strategy
You can see the Amalekite framework clearly in Netanyahu’s approach to Iran, not just as a rival state, but as an incarnation of existential evil that cannot be reasoned with or contained, only eliminated.
For over a decade, Netanyahu has pursued what might be called a “smiting strategy”:
The sabotage operations speak to this logic: the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, the Stuxnet cyber attack that disabled centrifuges, the hundreds of airstrikes on Iranian assets across Syria and Iraq. None of these actions aimed at diplomacy or containment, they were about degrading and ultimately destroying Iran’s capacity to threaten Israel.
Netanyahu’s fierce opposition to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal revealed the gap between his mythic thinking and conventional strategic analysis. While many Israeli security officials viewed the deal as imperfect but functional containment, Netanyahu saw it as betrayal, not because of its technical flaws, but because Amalek doesn’t get negotiated with. Even when Israeli military and intelligence leaders supported the agreement, their voices were marginalized in favor of a worldview that saw any engagement with Iran as fundamentally misguided.
According to pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, surveys show that roughly two-thirds of the Israeli population support a strike on Iran, but when broken down, “About 37 percent supported a strike only if the US cooperated/participated, and only 31 percent of respondents supported a strike on Iran in any case. The 30 percent or so that support a strike on Iran, no matter what, overlap with the 30 percent that pretty consistently support Bibi.”
This suggests that Netanyahu’s most hardline positions, the ones most consistent with seeing Iran as Amalek, have support among roughly a third of Israelis, but not the overwhelming mandate that such consequential decisions might warrant.
The Gaza Laboratory
Gaza has become the testing ground for Amalekite logic applied to Palestinian resistance. Hamas, with its explicitly genocidal charter and October 7th attack, fits the archetype almost perfectly: an enemy that targets civilians, shows no mercy to the vulnerable, and openly calls for Israel’s destruction.
When Netanyahu told troops to “remember what Amalek has done to you” before they entered Gaza, Professor Inbari warned about the symbolism: “it sets for them something that may be understood differently… by soldiers on the ground that are coming from Orthodox background.”
The pattern of Israeli operations in Gaza reflects this framework: massive retaliation designed not just to degrade Hamas capabilities but to demonstrate the consequences of attacking Israel. There’s no exit plan because, in the Amalekite framework, the enemy doesn’t get reformed or reintegrated, it gets eliminated.
Yet this approach has created its own strategic blindness. By casting Hamas as irredeemable evil, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the organization and the population it governs, or to envision any political solution that doesn’t involve the complete destruction of Palestinian resistance. The result is a series of military operations that succeed tactically but fail strategically, because they don’t address the underlying conditions that give rise to organizations like Hamas.
The Cost of Mythic Clarity
There’s something seductive about mythic thinking. It provides moral clarity in a morally ambiguous world. It transforms complex geopolitical challenges into simple good-versus-evil narratives. It justifies difficult decisions by placing them within a framework of cosmic significance.
But that clarity comes at a price.
When your enemy is Amalek, every threat becomes existential, every conflict becomes a fight for survival, and every strategic decision gets filtered through the lens of ancient trauma rather than present realities. Iran stops being a complex regional power with internal divisions, economic pressures, and competing factions, it becomes a monolithic evil that must be confronted with total resolve.
The 2015 nuclear deal revealed this dynamic clearly. While security professionals focused on technical questions, enrichment levels, inspection regimes, sanctions relief, Netanyahu’s opposition was fundamentally theological. The deal wasn’t just inadequate; it was collaboration with evil.
Recent polling shows that 70% of Israelis don’t trust the current government, with even 36% of coalition voters expressing distrust. This suggests a growing gap between Netanyahu’s mythic certainty and public confidence in his leadership.
The framework also creates a siege mentality that makes peace harder to imagine. If you believe that enemies are eternal and evil is unchanging, then every generation must prepare for the next existential battle. Young Israelis grow up not just aware of threats, but convinced that their nation is perpetually one step away from destruction. That’s not resilience, it’s chronic anxiety masquerading as strength.
Learning from Northern Ireland’s Escape
The question of how societies move beyond mythic thinking isn’t theoretical. Northern Ireland’s peace process offers one model of how deeply entrenched religious and cultural conflicts can be transformed. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 ended three decades of violence between Catholics and Protestants not by eliminating either community, but by creating structures that allowed both to coexist.
Rev. Dr. Gary Mason, who worked on the peace process, emphasized the role of religious actors as “temperature readers” who could assess where various groups stood and explore possibilities for moving them toward politics rather than violence. The process succeeded partly because it included voices that challenged the mythic narratives on both sides, religious leaders who refused to bless tribal warfare, politicians who risked their careers for compromise, and ordinary people who chose reconciliation over revenge.
The Northern Ireland conflict, despite its religious overtones, “was not primarily a religious war” but grew out of civil rights grievances and competing national aspirations. The peace process worked partly because it addressed these underlying political and economic issues rather than trying to resolve competing mythologies.
The Northern Ireland example suggests that moving beyond mythic thinking requires several elements: alternative religious voices that offer different interpretations of sacred texts, political leaders willing to risk their careers for peace, and a recognition that enemies can evolve and change. Most importantly, it requires a willingness to see the other side as human beings caught in their own historical narratives rather than as incarnations of eternal evil.
Yet even twenty-five years later, Northern Ireland remains “one of the most divided societies in Europe,” with physical barriers still separating communities and children still educated separately. The lesson may be that escaping mythic thinking is possible, but it’s a generational project that requires sustained commitment from multiple constituencies.
Breaking the Ancient Spell
If Netanyahu’s worldview is indeed shaped by the Amalekite framework, and the evidence suggests it is, then understanding this becomes vital for anyone hoping to de-escalate Middle Eastern conflicts. You can’t change someone’s strategic calculations if you don’t understand the deeper narrative that drives them.
This doesn’t mean accepting mythic thinking as inevitable or unchangeable. Jewish tradition itself offers multiple interpretations of the Amalek commandment, many of which emphasize spiritual rather than physical warfare. Mainstream rabbinical voices have long argued that the real enemy to be destroyed is hatred itself, not particular peoples. These alternative interpretations need amplification, particularly among religious constituencies that take biblical commands seriously.
The polling data suggests that Netanyahu’s hardest line positions, the ones most consistent with Amalekite thinking, don’t command majority support among Israelis. Only about 30% of Israelis support striking Iran under any circumstances, roughly the same percentage that consistently supports Netanyahu. This suggests space for political alternatives that take security seriously without embracing mythic frameworks.
Iranian policy makers, for their part, might benefit from understanding how their rhetoric gets filtered through this ancient lens. When Iranian leaders call for Israel’s destruction, they’re not just making threats, they’re confirming, in Netanyahu’s mind, that they are indeed Amalek reborn. Different language, different approaches, and recognition of Jewish historical trauma might create openings that defiant rhetoric forecloses.
The broader lesson extends far beyond the Middle East. In an era when political leaders increasingly appeal to mythic narratives, when opponents become not just wrong but evil, when compromise becomes betrayal, when every election becomes apocalyptic, understanding how ancient stories shape modern politics becomes essential for anyone hoping to preserve space for reason, nuance, and negotiation.
Netanyahu’s apparent embrace of Amalekite thinking represents one man’s response to genuine historical trauma and real contemporary threats. But it also represents the danger of allowing that trauma to become a prison, the past to dictate the future, and ancient fears to foreclose present possibilities.
The Middle East has seen enough repetition of ancient conflicts. Perhaps it’s time for new stories, ones that honor the past without being trapped by it, that take threats seriously without mythologizing them, and that leave room for enemies to become something else.
Because in the end, the most radical act might not be remembering Amalek, but choosing to forget him, to see today’s conflicts as products of human decisions that can be unmade by other human decisions, rather than as cosmic battles between eternal forces of good and evil.
The choice isn’t between strength and weakness, or between remembering history and ignoring it. It’s between being guided by trauma and being guided by hope, between seeing the future as an endless repetition of the past, or as an opportunity to write a different ending to an old story.
