The Pharaoh's watch: the dialectical or cautionary recurrence of the massacre of children

"In the struggle against Iran, an approach similar to the killing of the firstborn in the Torah should be adopted; if senior officials cannot be reached, their children should be targeted."

This sentence, left over from a deleted tweet, is more than enough to describe the ethical-theological threshold reached by a war of utterly modern appearance. The tweet was shared in Hebrew by the Israeli academic Orit Perlov (a member of the National Security Studies Institute at Tel Aviv University). Our friend Turan Kışlakçı relayed it with the following comment: (Perlov) argued that, in her view, a harsh religious approach should be adopted in the struggle against Iran and that Iranian children should be killed in a manner similar to the catastrophe of the killing of the firstborn mentioned in the Torah. According to her, such tactics were previously applied in Gaza, where, according to UN statistics, more than 14 thousand children were killed. She proposes that the same model be applied in Iran and Lebanon as well."

Whether such statements should be taken seriously is often debated; but sometimes a single utterance is by itself the crystallized form of a mentality. Here too the matter is not just words uttered by an academic in a moment of anger. The matter is how violence, massacre, and here even the massacre of children, justifies itself, which memories it brings into play and ultimately how it legitimizes itself. The attacks against Iran were begun by Israel and the US by killing 168 girl children. We heard not the slightest expression of remorse for having killed these children. The laments sung over girls not attending school in Afghanistan were withheld from the girls bombed here. Just as they were withheld from those who became victims of the most perverted rites of pleasure on Epstein's islands.

THE INVERSION OF THE TEXT: THE TURNING OF A LESSON INTO STRATEGY

These theological expressions accompany all the aggressions Israel has displayed since Gaza. Such discourses also bring back onto the agenda the question of how texts are to be read. For the reference to the Torah here is not made to recall the text's historical context or moral warning; on the contrary, it is made to turn it into a manual for action. The text is now invoked not in order to understand but in order to apply, or to justify what has been done. The boundary between what is on the hermeneutic level and what is on the strategic level has been erased. Precisely at this point, it is not the meaning of the text but its use that becomes decisive.

Yet the historical function of such narratives was most often to expose an oppression and to produce a consciousness in the face of it. The texts that recount Pharaoh's killing of the children of the Children of Israel were not a recommended model but a warning. But the language of modern war, a product of Western civilization, is extremely skilled at inverting such narratives. Warning turns into strategy; lesson into instrumentalization. This transformation shows how narrow has become not only the relationship established with the text but also the moral horizon.

That victimhood, which was expected to turn into a universal ethical call, has increasingly become part of a narrower identity politics and from there produces no moral responsibility toward the "other" is a typical characteristic of Zionist arrogance. We can never accept this on the grounds that everyone would do it when their turn comes. We Muslims never do this. The ultimate goal of Muslims, even in war, is that those who are in the wrong find the right, that our enemies be guided and become our brothers. This is a magnificent difference, a difference peculiar to Muslims.

PHARAOH'S CHILDREN AND THE INVERSION OF HISTORY

Pharaoh's systematically having the male children of the Children of Israel killed is not merely a security policy; it is an ontological assault aimed at a people's future. What he sees as a threat is children who have not yet grown up, who are not even yet subjects, the possibility that they might constitute a threat to him when they grow up. That is why he wants to eliminate them. But the real power of the event lies in how this oppression reverses. Pharaoh raises in his own palace the fate he wanted to destroy. Moses grows up by his hand. Oppression produces its own opposite.

This narrative has been read throughout history as a lesson. That is, it carries the idea that targeting the children of a people is not only a moral but also an error concerning inevitable destiny. What we see today is those who condemn what Pharaoh did day and night reproducing him as a model in their own practices. And the irony that emerges here has an almost tragic clarity:

A people who stepped onto the stage of history by the oppression they suffered from Pharaoh have today adopted Pharaoh's methods.

THE DISPLACEMENT OF MEMORY: FROM VICTIM TO PERPETRATOR

This transformation is not a simple contradiction. What is deeper is the way memory operates. For memory does not only remember the past; it also builds the present. If memory is operated not as a moral warning but as a claim of right, it can easily turn into a source of violence.

The transformation Holocaust memory is undergoing today is noteworthy in this respect. This memory, once a universal call of "never again," is increasingly becoming part of a narrower security discourse. And within this discourse even the killing of children can be included in the category of "necessity."

The killing of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, the targeting of civilian areas in Iran and elsewhere in the region, should no longer be read as isolated incidents but as manifestations of a logic.

This logic is in fact familiar: The threat must be eliminated before it appears. The future must be destroyed from today.

This is Pharaoh's logic.

FROM GAZA TO IRAN: THE CONTINUITY OF VIOLENCE

The manifestations on the ground of the war the US and Israel are waging today clearly show that this mentality is not theoretical. That child deaths in Gaza have now become a statistical datum, that civilian infrastructure is systematically targeted, shows how the limits of war have disappeared.

The expansion of the same model toward Iran and Lebanon shows that this practice is not an exception but a method with theological or theoretical origins. The targeting of schools, hospitals, residences; children becoming not a "side effect" but an element actually located within the war...

All of this shows that the deleted tweet was actually not a proposal but a diagnosis.

BETWEEN HEGEL AND IZETBEGOVIC: THE LOGIC OF RESEMBLANCE

Perhaps today one way of universalizing the story of becoming like the enemy can be to appeal to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Yet here the matter is not only a change of roles. What is deeper is the way the subject internalizes its own opposite. The slave, while struggling against the master, can also take over his language, his tools and ultimately his imagination. In that case what emerges is not a simple change of power but the restaging of a repetition in a different context.

Precisely at this point, Izetbegovic's frequently cited warning gains meaning anew. The matter of becoming like the enemy is not only a moral loss; it is also an ontological transformation. For here the question of "who you are" is redefined through "what you do." And this definition is often fixed irreversibly.

There is a serious religious maxim that always warns Muslims against undergoing this ontological transformation. Even war is not a field where every means against the enemy is permissible.

Today the normalization of child deaths in Gaza and Iran, even their becoming a statistical datum, shows how evil becomes ordinary and normalized. This normalization produces an ontological transformation, a habit, not only when viewed from outside but from within as well. Habit, after all, is the most dangerous form of violence. Because after a certain point it turns into automatic behavior without being questioned.

Is it so, I wonder? Or does every child's death also produce a separate religious satisfaction?