Israel as the West’s “Dirty Worker”: The Return of the Sacred Executioner Myth

On the sidelines of the G7 summit, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz came out with a statement about the Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, saying that Israel was doing “the dirty work for all of us” (“Drecksarbeit für uns alle”)¹. This same statement was repeated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address to the United Nations on September 26, 2025, calling it an “admission.”²

Such statements, which portray the State of Israel as the outpost, the vanguard, and the front line of a war that is beyond its control, are not limited to the recent war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

They are also often heard in commentary on the war in Gaza, where Israel is cast, rather than acting like any other state out of enlightened self-interest, as carrying out, through the use of force, the West’s “dirty work”: a purportedly necessary “clean-up” on behalf of the free world (“the West” against “barbarism,” Europe against “Islamism”).

These statements are generally well received among proponents of hasbara, since they appear to acknowledge the voices of hasbara – Israeli public diplomacy – in that they seem to recognize both the necessity of Israel’s use of military violence and its essentially altruistic, benevolent, and purifying aspect.

This discourse also flatters certain egos, as it crudely disguises what is undoubtedly the only truth in international relations: states are cold monsters that act for their own survival and interests—Israel like all others—and there is
ultimately no good or evil in it. This is the concrete, but underlying and repressed, reality of the international system.
They may also draw on a somewhat twisted and inverted exilic ethos, according to which Jews must prove their usefulness to the world in order to earn the right to survive.

It is not uncommon to read that the world should be grateful to Israel for this. Many Israelis act as mouthpieces for this demand for recognition and gratitude, often expressing frustration and incomprehension at this resurgence of
hostility toward them, their country, and Jews more broadly, a resurgence whose scale and intensity are difficult to ignore.

It seems to us that by adopting the idea of outsourcing the ‘dirty work’ to Israel, all those who act as its spokespersons are consciously or unconsciously resurrecting a mythical figure from the most ancient and powerful antisemitic tradition: that of the sacred executioner³, theorized by the British historian of religions Hyam Maccoby (1924-2004).

The figure of the sacred executioner fulfills a ritual, bloody function, and emerges from it tainted, ambiguous, and often demonized after the fact.

While we can understand the needs of diplomacy and the retrospective justification of Israeli military and political actions, there remains a gap between pious fictions in which actions are retrospectively justified by their consequences (the fall of Assad, a consequence of the weakening of the Shiite axis of Iranian proxies, which thus becomes: Israel contributing to the liberation of the Syrian people) and the additional, mythical, and dangerous dimension of the subcontractor of violence.

For this reason, we believe it would be good to move away from these discourses, which, far from being rooted in a political understanding of the world, reproduce structures rooted in Christian anti-Judaism.

They fuel an ambivalence made up of fear, admiration, but also disgust and hatred (also mythical and sacred) towards Jews and Israelis, who are very real this time.

An ambivalent figure: necessary and hateful

In his work on the origins of Christianity and the origins of antisemitism, Hyam Maccoby showed how Paul of Tarsus introduced elements of Hellenistic mystery religions into Christian theology. He focused in particular on the figure of the sacred executioner: the executioner who had to carry out the symbolically necessary violence (Christ had to die on the cross for salvation to be open to all), but which was impossible to assume in one’s own name due to the psychological economy of guilt, which was then projected onto an external figure through a process of distancing. This figure of the traitor fulfills a ritual, bloody function and emerges from it sullied, ambiguous, and often demonized after the fact⁴. Maccoby thus shows how the completely innocent figure of Jude Thaddeus became the dark Judas Iscariot in the late Gospels, and above all how his characteristics were then extended to the entire Jewish people.

This is the figure of the sacred executioner: the one who does the “dirty work”, the work that others refuse to do, but which they need to have done. This figure is never honored for long. He is feared, sacralized, then hated. For Maccoby, this is the truth behind the creation of the concept of the deicide people.

During what was called “the age of faith”, in the pre-modern conditions of social organization and systems of thought, the structuring values of political life were centered on the divine, and political exclusion was manifested through religious symbolism.

The upheaval of the world represented by the French Revolution and the concept of nation brought us into the democratic age, where it is “the people” who embody the “sacred” values on which society is (re)founded. A century and a half later, Lemkin’s concept of “genocide”⁵ replaced the “crime of crimes” that was deicide in a secularized world. And, as in the time of faith, when the people of God became a deicide people, a new supersessionist transfer of function took place: the people for whom the concept of genocide was developed became the people who became paradigmatic of its perpetration against a third party.

It should be noted in passing that this analysis allows us to understand the depth of the Christian iconography that is very widespread in pro-Palestinian discourse, whether it be Marian representations of mothers weeping over the martyrdom of their children, or the martyrdom of the Palestinian people represented on the cross.

Israel, a new sacrificial figure?

This is where the secret and dangerous solidarity between the most anti-Israeli and the most pro-Israeli in the West is most acutely perceived. Between those who make the accusation of genocide the new form of accusation of deicide and those who, believing themselves to be pro-Israel, thank Israel for this “dirty work” done for the good of humanity, for this salvific and redemptive violence. This is the role played, in the economy of salvation of the post-Christian right in the West, by what the philosopher Ivan Segré once called “philosemitic reaction”. Just as the Jew was marked by anti-Judaism as necessary to the mystery of the Passion, Israel is marked, mutatis mutandis, as the champion of a ”Western civilization” seeking meaning in an imaginary clash of civilizations that masks the real upheavals in the international political situation⁶.

States are cold monsters that act for their own survival and interests—Israel like all the others—and there is basically no harm or good in that. This is the concrete, but underlying and repressed, reality of the international system.

To sanctify violence is also to sanctify those who carry it out. And the sacred, as always, is ambivalent. It fascinates, but it contaminates. The world never thanks those who kill on its behalf for long. It admires them for a moment. Then it fears them. Then it hates them. This is the fate of all sacred executioners: to become pariahs. In a way, this was already the West’s attitude towards Israel during the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his pursuit of hegemony in the Arab world: while seeking to establish a certain deterrent and security guarantees against the coalition of Arab forces during the Suez (1956) and Six Day War (1967), Israel seemed to be doing the “dirty work” for the West and was considered an expansionist and belligerent power for that reason.

A false narrative and a real risk

This discourse of necessary “dirty work” does not protect Israel. It isolates it, mythologizes it, and prevents any rational debate on its policies, including the issue of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Worse still, it exposes its citizens to symbolic, even real, violence by projecting onto them a perverse salvific function that no society can sustain over the long term. In the case of Israel, the perverse dimension of this projection is all the more apparent because it makes Israelis the human bulwarks of societies that many of their fathers fled after the great European massacres. Just as the fallacious notion of “Judeo-Christian culture” prevents us from thinking about this link as an irreconcilable conflict, the symbolic appropriation of the wars actually waged by Israel deprives Israeli society of its autonomy, its ability to define itself and defend its own interests⁷. It lends credence to the accusations of the Arab League and Iranian governments that Israel is an artificial entity dedicated to defending imperialist interests.

In short, Israel is a state. Like all states, it acts in accordance with its own interests. It is neither a priest nor a sacrificer of the world. To think of it in this way is to disarm it politically and morally. It also gives ammunition to its enemies who, seeing this sacralization of war, read it as proof of a global destructive intent.

Desacralizing violence, rediscovering politics

It is not certain that we can completely escape the myths that surround the name of Israel, so fundamental are they. But nothing obliges us to plunge headlong, without thinking through the consequences into the role of sacred executioner. Violence is never “necessary” in absolute terms. It is a decision. It must be measured, weighed, judged, discussed, criticized, and supervised. To say that Israel acts for everyone is to take away its right to act for itself. It is to make its citizens the unwitting bearers of a sacrificial role, and this burden is neither fair nor tenable.

Hyam Maccoby warns us: we would do well to listen to him. Let us not play the game of those who project onto Israel functions previously assumed by Jews in Western constructs. Israel must now assume responsibility for its independence and define its policy on its own terms, not according to the concepts of Christian theology or by playing a role in the political dramaturgy of others. Israel must not seek to be the little helper of Christianity, nor to demonstrate its benevolence to the world—a mirror image of its supposed malevolence according to the same system—but must focus on its goals, its values, and its society.

Just as the fallacious notion of “Judeo-Christian culture” prevents us from thinking of this link as an irreconcilable conflict, the symbolic appropriation of the wars actually waged by Israel deprives Israeli society of its autonomy, its ability to define itself and defend its own interests.

We must reject the agonistic, reifying, and alienating discourse of the “clash of civilizations”, which links Israel to a history that is not its own; we must also reject the fantasy that makes Israel the 28th state of the European Union or the 51st state of the United States, just as Judea was once a client and then a province of Rome. Similarly, we must detach ourselves from the internal contradictions of contemporary political discourse: everyone invokes unity with Europe, but the left projects the Europe of post-1945, of human rights and liberal democracy, while the right sees it as a “Judeo-Christian” Europe standing up to Islamism. Everyone also wants regional anchoring: the left through peace with the Palestinians, the right by defending a brutal ‘Levantinization’ in which Israel should learn the “local color” by abandoning what it considers to be foreign ideas inherited from international law and Christian ethics⁸. These discourses are internally contradictory: can we talk both about a war of Judeo-Christian civilization against Islamist barbarism and a clash between two “Levantine” peoples over a tiny scrap of land?

Both the Israeli left and right tend, each in their own way, to essentialize and crystallize the concept of Europe, the former by identifying it with the “legal civilization” of liberalism, the latter with a “cultural civilization” to be protected from barbarians. Rather than defining itself primarily in relation to these projections, Israel could be thought of as a nation situated vis-à-vis Europe without necessarily being a direct extension of it.

From this perspective, distancing ourselves from the discourse that makes Israel a simple extension of Europe and instead recalling the Levantine roots of the Jewish state and culture would not amount to denying the fruitful European contribution to Israel’s political rebirth, the technologies of the modern state, social and political secularization, and the protection of minorities and their rights. Rather, it would be a matter of recognizing that these contributions, which have the potential to be universalized, can be integrated without obscuring Israel’s pre-exilic origins⁹ or its geographical and cultural proximity.

From this perspective, the notion of “Levantinization” coined by Jacqueline Kahanoff¹⁰ may take on new relevance, at least as a working hypothesis: not in the pejorative sense of mimicking tribal violence or erasing European heritage, but as a project of conscious and creative integration of the history, languages, and codes of the Levantine space. Thinking of Israel as a small nation capable of assuming this dual European and Eastern heritage could be one possible way of loosening the grip of the contradictions in which current discourse, on both the left and the right, tends to confine its destiny. In a sense, this would be a return to the situation of ancient Israel, inserted into a space that was the interface between nascent Greece and the great civilizations of the Fertile Crescent¹¹, a space where it is difficult to find the inviolable boundary erected by 19th-century linguists between “Semites” and “Indo-Europeans”. It would be a return to a past whose roots form a rhizome, an origin that does not foreclose any future for the Hebrew state.

Abandoning romantic ideas of Europe in order to be faithful to the European gesture?

Returning to the figure of the sacred executioner allows us to measure the extent of the symbolic trap in which both Israeli discourse and its most fervent supporters find themselves today. By accepting, even claiming, the idea of a “dirty job” done on behalf of others, Israel allows itself to be assigned a quasi-liturgical function in which violence is treated as necessary, redemptive, almost sacrificial. However, as mentioned above, the sacred executioner is always paid in counterfeit coin: those who carry out acts deemed essential for the salvation of others inevitably end up being perceived as bearers of defilement, objects of a fascination mixed with fear and hatred.

The paradox becomes particularly acute after two years of a multifaceted, multi-front war in which Israel appears both as the new, virtually undisputed regional military power and as a deeply vulnerable player on the diplomatic and sovereign front. Firepower, projection capacity, and technological superiority seem to reinforce the narrative of Israel as an advanced bastion, an “outpost” of the West. But, at the same time, increased dependence on the United States, which sets the red lines, conditions military aid, and frames the legitimacy of operations, produces a form of symbolic vassalage, while the erosion of European support leaves Israel exposed to growing isolation. The figure of the sacred executioner is turned on its head: far from guaranteeing sovereignty, it confirms a political heteronomy in which others define the meaning, limits, and acceptable cost of the use of Israeli force.

The sacred executioner is always paid in bad currency: those who carry out acts deemed essential for the salvation of others inevitably end up being perceived as bearers of defilement, objects of fascination mixed with fear and hatred.

This is why criticism of this mythology is both a moral and political imperative. As long as Israeli violence is conceived and portrayed, by its opponents as well as by some of its defenders, in terms of sacred necessity, of “dirty work” done for the free world, or of expansionist and militaristic desires for power, Israel will remain trapped in a sacrificial economy that undermines its legitimacy, fuels hostility towards it, and jeopardizes the safety of its citizens. Breaking with the figure of the sacred executioner does not mean demanding an impossible ethical purity of state action; it means refusing to invest violence with a redemptive value that removes it from political deliberation, law, morality, and criticism.

1. ZDF (German public television), “Kanzler beim G7-Gipfel – Merz: Israel macht in Iran Drecksarbeit für uns,” June 17, 2025: https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/g7-gipfel-merz-100.html ↩︎
2. “You know deep down that Israel is fighting your fight. (…) This past June, when Israel struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, German Chancellor Merz admitted the truth. He said, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”. ↩︎
3. Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt (Thames & Hudson, 1982). ↩︎
4. See also Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil (Peter Halban, 1992) and A Pariah People: The Anthropology of Antisemitism (Constable, 1996). In The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, London, Thames and Hudson, 1982, he develops his analysis of this figure in the world’s major religions and mythologies, from Cain to the wandering Jew, via Loki and Seth. ↩︎
5. Raphael Lemkin, What is Genocide? (Les Belles Lettres, 2025). ↩︎
6. There is a vast body of critical literature on Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations in political science and international relations. Numerous articles on this subject have been published in scholarly and academic journals. Let us instead cite the text “Notes for an Appeal to the East” by the Lettrist Mohamed Dahou, published in Potlatch, the newsletter of the French group of the Lettrist International, No. 6, July 27, 1954: “Our brothers are beyond questions of border and race. Certain conflicts, such as the conflict with the State of Israel, can only be resolved by revolution in both camps. We must say to the Arab countries: Our cause is common. There is no West facing you.” ↩︎
7. This is, in short, an “Augustinian” reinterpretation of Israeli geopolitics: just as for Augustine, the Jews were the guardians and witnesses of writings whose meaning they did not understand, the Israelis would be, even without their knowledge, the advanced citadel of a West that rejected them from humanity only a few generations ago. See Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, Doubledays, 2008, and also Barbu, Daniel, Sabrina Inowlocki, Noémie Issan-Benchimol, Aaron Kachuck, and David Lemler, “A Witness People: The Jews in Augustine and in the Western Imagination,” in The Making of Consent: Belief and Testimony in Monotheistic Religions, ed. Philippe Castagnetti and Sylvio De Franceschi, Turnhout, Brepols (coll. “Bibliothèque de l’École des hautes études – Sciences religieuses”), forthcoming 2025. The confiscation and “theft of memory” (Borgeaud) of Jewish writings by Christianity is thus followed by the hijacking of Israel’s wars by neoconservatism. ↩︎
8. Unlike those who see in the return to the East and the need to impose themselves by force on the Arab states an opportunity to rid themselves of the constraining diasporic superego (see Jay Y. Gonen, A Psychohistory of Zionism, Mason-Charter, 1975), there are those who fear integration into the region (“Hishtalvut BaMerhav”) as a factor in the loss of the qualities inherited from Eastern European Jewishness to the benefit of the supposed brutality of “semi-Asian” countries. This is exemplified by the racial and racist identity anxiety expressed by Hannah Arendt during the Eichmann trial when she describes the Israeli police officers in charge of security for the event: “Everything is organized by the Israeli police, which makes my blood run cold. They speak only Hebrew and look Arab. Some of them are real brutes. They obey every order. In front of the courthouse doors, the crowd looks Eastern, as if we were in Istanbul or some other half-Asian country.” This passage is extremely revealing of Arendt’s identity anxiety, because Eichmann in Jerusalem: report on the banality of evil, raises as a fundamental question Eichmann’s “absence of thought” which allowed him to “follow orders” and organize the final solution, that is, to become a logistician of evil as if it were a mundane task. However, this banality of evil, this ability to “obey all orders,” is not found by Arendt in Israeli magistrates of German origin, like herself, but in Mizrahi police officers. She, who at the time advocated a Jewish-Arab federation in opposition to the Zionist consensus in Israel and the United States, saw in those Jews “who look Arab” what, in the context of Arendt’s thinking, resembled the seeds of Nazism. It should be remembered that the Israeli authorities entrusted Eichmann to Sephardic and Mizrahi police officers to ensure that the former Obersturmbannführer would not be the victim of an attempt at revenge by police officers of European origin who had suffered, directly or indirectly, from the events for which he was being tried (see Hanna Yablonka, Les Juifs d’Orient, Israël et la Shoah, Calmann-Lévy, 2016). ↩︎
9. See Élie Beressi, “À la marge du Tanakh: la tribu de Judah, la religion populaire et les origines du judaïsme” (On the margins of the Tanakh: the tribe of Judah, popular religion, and the origins of Judaism), daï! nouvelle revue juive, June 26, 2025 ↩︎
10. Jacqueline Shohet-Kahanoff, “What about Levantinization?” Journal of Levantine Studies, Summer 2011, No. 1, pp. 13-22; Jacqueline Shohet-Kahanoff, “Israel: Ambivalent Levantine,” in Deborah A. Starr, and Sasson Somekh (editors), Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford University Press, 2011). ↩︎
11. See in particular: Cyrus Herzl Gordon, The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations, (Norton Library, 1962); and Michael C. Astour, Hellenosemitica: an ethnic and cultural essay in West Semitic impact on Mycenaean Greece (Brill, 1965). ↩︎