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Like most millennials, I rarely stumble across newspaper articles in print. News finds me, rather than me finding it, through social media platforms or WhatsApp messages. That was how Kenan Malik’s article, entitled ‘In the Middle East, as in Greek tragedy, justice must prevail over moral absolutism’, arrived blinking onto the screen of my smartphone. The friends who sent it knew that I had been tracking the use of ancient Greece and Rome as the narrative cornerstones of Western supremacy for some time – and that I have a particular interest in the way these are used to obfuscate or foreclose criticism of the ongoing effects of coloniality.

The ‘Greek tragedy’ in the title of Malik’s article is in fact not one tragedy but a trilogy of tragedies, by the ancient playwright Aeschylus – the three plays are known under the heading ‘The Oresteia’ (named after Orestes, the character around whom the plays revolve). The trilogy concerns a revenge cycle: before the plays begin, King Agamemnon has killed his daughter Iphigenia, in a sacrifice to the gods that is part of the preparations for the Trojan War. On returning home victorious, his wife Clytemnestra kills him to avenge their daughter, and in the next play of the trilogy their son Orestes returns to kill Clytemnestra in revenge for his father’s murder. At the end of the second play, goddesses of vengeance from deep in the Underworld – the Furies – appear to torment Orestes, in revenge for the murder of his mother. In the third play, the Furies pursue Orestes, until after seeking the advice of the god Apollo, Orestes makes his way to Athens. Here, the goddess Athena ends the cycle of revenge by instituting a formalised legal system, and calling jurors to vote on whether or not Orestes should be punished. The vote is evenly split, so Athena herself casts the deciding vote, and Orestes is acquitted. Athena vows that legalised punishment will replace revenge cycles in future, and threatens to imprison the Furies in a vault beneath the earth when they disagree with her decree.

For Malik, “watching the tragedy unfold in Israel and Palestine has sometimes felt like reading the Oresteia backwards”. He sees “the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians” (a remarkable euphemism for genocide) moving “into a world defined more by the Furies than by Athena”. This return from justice to revenge he ascribes to “Hamas’s savagery” and to “Israeli perspectives” equally, as well as to “many Western supporters of Israel” and the “many left-wing voices celebrating the Hamas attack”. In Malik’s narrative, the 7th October 2023 marks the beginning of a descent from the way of Athena and justice to the way of the Furies and revenge. And in this sense his readings both of Aeschylus’ Oresteia and of the siege on Gaza are equally over-simplistic: in both cases he presents as ‘justice’ a situation that is fundamentally unjust. He neglects to mention both the forced imprisonment of the Furies, and the illegal occupation of Palestine before the 7th October 2023 that are constituent parts of his ‘justice’. Justice is, in his reading, little more than the acceptance of a violently imposed status quo.

Whose Justice?

But in his brief summary of the Oresteia as a “complex work engaging in issues from patriarchy to democracy” we see that the comparison between the genocide of the Palestinians and reading the Oresteia backwards is premised on much more than simply an inaccurate reading of an ancient tragedy. My objection to his argument is more than just a kind of pedantry against a mis-reading of Aeschylus. The institution of the law court at the end of the Oresteia has often been taken as a kind of extended metaphor for the beginnings of Western democracy, although there is very little that is democratic about it. Orestes’ acquittal eventually comes down not to the will of the majority, but to a decision Athena takes herself. And although Malik is apparently deeply concerned with women’s rights (and the rights of queer people, which in his own recital of the now standard repertoire of pink-washing he accuses Hamas of failing to uphold), he neglects to inform his readers that Athena’s so-called justice in fact rests on a simple gendered inequality: Orestes ought to be freed, Athena argues, because killing your mother is simply less bad than your father being killed. In what instantly became, the first time I read the play, my least favourite line in all of Greek tragedy, she tells us that this is because it is not the mother who is the true parent of the child but the father.

Much could be said – and has been written – about why Athena says this. She is born, mythologically-speaking, from the head of Zeus and so has no mother of her own. But in so far as her failed voting system established by the threat of violent imprisonment of dissenters to the new order serves to acquit a son of murdering his mother on the grounds that women are self-evidently less important than men, it has to be said that it constitutes a curious kind of justice. And it is Malik’s collapsing of this so-called justice with democracy that helps us to see how his argument is an example of a broader Islamophobic world narrative that plays on repeat. The attribution of the label ‘democracy’ to Israel is a commonplace of Westernese defences of the occupation of Palestine. Israel is, famously in these defences, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and support of its dehumanising violence by the West is often premised on this exceptionality.

To say that Israel is democratic is to enter it into a relationship with the West – one that is narrated and sustained by a particular story the West tells itself about the ancient Greeks. If the ancient Greeks are – so the story goes – the fathers of Western democracy, then Israel and European democracies become natural brothers in arms. It doesn’t matter that Greek democracy was neither particularly Western nor particularly democratic. The goal of the comparison is not to contribute to political theory or critical study of the ancient world, but to draw Israel into a family relationship with the West, by means of their glorified ancestor – ancient Greece.

Whose Peace?

The ancient world plays a role much more widely in the way we tell the story of violence in the Middle East. We could see the ancient world underlining the same distinction between a glorified democratic West and a barbarian East in 2016, when François Hollande unveiled a new €60 million conservation facility as part of the Louvre Museum in Liévin, France. Hollande couched the project in humanitarian terms, arguing that by evacuating antiquities from Iraq and Syria “a part of civilisation, of humanity might be saved”, and imagining France rescuing classical heritage from the “barbarians”. In the UK Hollande’s announcement was received by the press in similar terms, with the Guardian seeing the Louvre as a place of “shelter” for Syrian and Iraqi antiquities – and unsurprisingly. In 2015, after reports that the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra had been destroyed by Daesh, Boris Johnson erected a replica of the monument in Trafalgar Square. He described the replica as crafted “in a spirit of defiance, defiance against the barbarians”. Prospect magazine went a step further even than Johnson, and heralded Palmyra as “part of the West’s heritage that accidentally ended up on Arab soil”.

Like Israel’s democracy, Palmyra had inherited from the classical its Western-ness – it was framed as an outpost of the civilised West that needed to be protected from the barbarian East. Meanwhile this humanising of antiquities offered “shelter” was accompanied by the dehumanising of actual humans from the places the antiquities were being rescued from. Only a week before Hollande opened the Louvre-Liévin, demolition crews had taken sledge-hammers to the refugee camp in which thousands of displaced people were living in Calais. And just as Boris Johnson – then mayor of London – was raising his Arch of Triumph in Trafalgar Square, the then Home Secretary Theresa May was promising restrictions to the numbers of refugees the UK would receive, and then Prime Minister David Cameron was referring to displaced people as a “swarm” of migrants. The flip side of classicism’s coin is this vocabulary of savagery, of barbarianism – the shadow that classical humanism casts is dehumanisation.

But this story of classicism also allows the West to abdicate responsibility for its coloniality. To contextualise violence within a history of classicism is to make an active choice not to contextualise it within more recent histories. In Malik’s article, the history of the world seems to jump from ancient Greece to the 7th October 2023, conveniently leaping over the history of political Zionism and its entanglement with other colonialisms, the Balfour Declaration and Britain’s presumption of ownership of Palestine, or the many decades of illegal Israeli occupation supported by the West. Narratives of history are about forgetting as much as they are about remembering – and remembering the classical allows the West to forget its complicity. The classical seizes control of the narrative of history, so as to make “Hamas’ savagery” seem like it comes out of nowhere, or is a-historical. The West has a special name for violence that is outside of its own narrative of history: ‘terrorism’. Terrorism is that violence that is positioned as being beyond compare because it cannot be explained in Westernese. Hamas, for Malik, are savages whereas Israel are not – even as the toll of murdered civilians mounts, and even as he points out official statements in favour of collective punishment, genocide and the dehumanising of Palestinians among “Israeli perspectives… from the very top”. Those who act with the backing of the West cannot properly be called terrorists, because their violence has precedents inside Westernese narratives of history.

And although I began by saying that my objection to Malik’s argument wasn’t simply pedantry about an ancient text, there is something about his mis-reading that is really important. It isn’t actually Athena’s so-called justice that brings about the end of the cycle of revenge in the Oresteia. After Orestes has been acquitted, and it has been announced that the Furies will be imprisoned under the earth, the violence simply intensifies. The Furies vow that even from underneath the ground they will continue to fight Athena’s new order, bringing a plague on the land and refusing to live in captive peace. What actually ends the cycle of revenge is Athena’s promise, after hearing their pleas, that she will restore their rights and give them back their land. “You will be,” she says, “the landholder of this country, and be justly honoured forever”. This promise of freedom and self-determination ensures that “the dust will not drink the blood of its citizens”. It is the Furies, and not Athena, who understand that justice is a false promise without liberation.