Can I, in all good conscience, oppose genocide?

OK, but hear me out though

Every so often, I’ll remark that Israeli right-wingers are all out of ideas beyond ‘kill more people’ and, as such, have been reduced to just reflexively responding ‘kill more people’ as the answer to every question, increasing the amount of people we need to kill each time Israel crosses the threshold that was hitherto believed to be sufficient. Then, in case someone thinks that I’m strawmanning, right-wingers turn up in the comments and explain that I’m stupid and a bad person because I don’t understand that ‘kill more people’ will solve every problem.

I explained why I don’t agree elsewhere, and I won’t deal with the strategy side of things here, but there is another argument I’ve been a bit shy about addressing directly, which is that I’m a big heretic because the Torah says to commit genocide, and therefore opposing genocide is like opposing the Torah. Now, granted, the Torah doesn’t say you need to wee on our enemies and stick objects up their bum as these guys are a bit suspiciously wont to do, but look at the big picture, which is genocide. So, I opened up a chumash, and, yep, turns out they’re right. R. Jonathan Sacks misled me. Midianites, Amalekites, Canaanites, Amorites … it’s all there. What is there left to talk about except logistics? One excitable commentator cited the Armenian genocide as model, but will it fly today?

/jk.

No, I’ve read the Torah, I know what’s there and I still don’t think Israel should do genocide. How, though, can I justify this edgy position? In the main body of the article I’ll go through the various reasons why, like me, most Jews do not believe in committing genocide, and add my own comments. After that, I’ll give my only take. [Note: since writing this, various people have complained that the article is incoherent because my presentation of one faction of Jewry’s opinion contradicts my presentation of another faction’s opinion. Umm, yes, maybe consider the possibility that you are stupid]. Because I’m lazy, I’m going to occasionally revert to a sort of Jew pidgin that I would use when speaking about such topics offline, and I won’t go out of my way to explain what I’m talking about beyond throwing in a hyperlink or two. If any of my valued gentile subscribers feel lost, that’s OK, just hit like, restack, and there’ll be another article after the festival.¹

1. The Charedi approach

The basic element of the Charedi approach to this and similar topics is that whatever argument you might bring from Tanach is irrelevant because we can’t understand anything in Tanach. For example, you might think that Dovid haMelech sinned with Bat-Sheva. In fact, you might think that the Book of Samuel goes out of its way to state and repeatedly underline that he sinned with Bat-Sheva. In fact, you might think that this is actually the whole point of basically half the book, and, without that, its theological narrative, and that a of a good chunk of Kings, just falls apart. But you would be wrong because the gemara says Dovid haMelech didn’t sin, and that’s that.

Now, if you can be that wrong about something that apparently explicit, clearly you can’t really draw any inferences from the Tanach at all. So, what can you do? Well, follow halacha, which is whatever it says in the Mishneh Berurah. If the halacha is silent on a given issue, as it is (at any rate, so defined) on all matters of national policy and security, then you go by Daas Torah. Daas Torah can often be tricky to figure out, but on one issue it is absolutely crystal clear. You should always vote for Gimmel, and absolutely never for Ben Gvir. Now pass the kugel.

The strength of this approach is the strength of the Charedi approach to Judaism in general, namely that it’s the most plausible way of applying the past two millennia of Jewish tradition to contemporary reality. It is basically true that all the warfare parts of the Tanach never played any role in the life of Jews for two thousand years, and, for every verse imploring violence, I can show you ten midrashim whose clear purpose is to neuter that and promote non-violence.

Similarly, the weakness of this approach is the weakness of the Charedi approach to Judaism in general, namely that it offers absolutely no answers to what we should do given the reality that there is a state of Israel surrounded by hostile enemies. It’s not like the Charedi approach can offer us a non-genocidal strategy that weighs up the competing desiderata of deterring enemies and building regional partnerships. It offers nothing at all. That’s not necessarily a fatal criticism; after all, the whole point of this blog is that you can just not be a Zionist. If that means writing a metaphorical blank cheque to every government on foreign policy in return for a very-not-metaphorical cheque after each election, then that’s fine. Nevertheless, I think it’s also fair for others to ask for more than having no opinion.

My personal problem with the Charedi approach is just that I’m not Charedi. When I was Charedi, there were things I liked (gender segregation, indifference to liberal taboos, a generally pro-doing-mitzvos social environment) and things I didn’t like (ubiquitous single plastic use, apparent belief that garbage just dissolves or something, galla), but what I really couldn’t stand was the intellectually stultifying environment. I like learning chumash with Ibn Ezra, but I like it more with Shadal. I can’t come back to my children and tell them that this year, for karpas, they’re getting a thimble of potato because I did the maths and it turns out you do have to follow the gedolim after all. Indeed, it was commitment to a specific kind of anti-Charedi epistemology (which, with a tint of vanity, we might call ‘intellectual honesty’) that prompted me to suppress my conscience during my Kahanistish years. So, for me, this approach won’t cut it.

2. The Reform Approach

The second option is cut all the bonds of cognitive dissonance with one neat move. Judaism used to be a religion of brutally punitive warfare, just like it used to be a religion of animal sacrifice, and temple pilgrimage. Then it was turned by the rabbis into a religion of synagogue prayer and Torah study, with no genociding.

There are a lot of problems with this approach, which I’ll get to, but there is a big strength. It’s pretty obvious that if Raban Yohanan ben Zakai was around today then all the Kahanists would be calling him a Quislingstein and accusing him of 'leapfrogging moral loyalties’, if not outright treachery. It’s also true that, after his reforms, Judaism looked pretty different to what it looked before, not just the technical stuff like how many days you shake the lulav, but also just generally. The simplistic version of the Reform approach which posits one clear break between temple and post-temple Judaism is not really tenable in the light of the full breadth of academic research (narratives of this sort essentially never are), but you can cobble together a version that does fit the evidence if you want.

The real problem, however, is that if Judaism can change once, it can change again. This is, of course, the whole point of the Reform approach. Judaism changed before to be a religion focused on minute observance of ritual laws and intense study, and now it will change again to be a religion of abjectly cringe faggotry, but that’s not the only way it can change. Indeed, rabbinic Judaism has always insisted that Judaism will change again, that we will have a temple, animal sacrifice, tumah and tahara, all that stuff.

Now it’s true that none of our prayers include a request to return to the warfaring days of our forefathers; indeed, the basically magical concept of the messianic age that is almost (but not quite) ubiquitous across rabbinic literature would apparently obviate any need for it. However, the cold hard fact is that what has actually happened is not what rabbinic Judaism predicted would happen and, if there will be a messianic age (and, for the record, there will be), then it will have, in some way, to follow from what actually is. So, perhaps, we have no choice but to return to the Torah for guidance on how to get out of this ghastly mess, and, perhaps, that guidance is what it says to do, in radically different circumstances, yes, but in somewhat less radically different circumstances than the guidance we have from the Mishnah and onwards. This, more or less, is the concept of ‘Geula mode Judaism’, a concept that I spent not a few years believing in and whose answers to questions of national security are … you guessed it!

3. The Modern Orthodox Approach

Perhaps not very surprisingly, the Modern Orthodox approach is a bit of a fudge between numbers 1 and 2. It won’t quite come out and say that the deepest substratum of Judaism is off limits as a source of guidance, lost under the thickets of subsequently accumulated authoritative tradition, and it won’t quite say that Judaism has progressed and developed into something different from it what it once was. What it will do is oscillate between not quite saying either whenever it feels that the waters on this side or that have become too hot for comfort.

To fill in the gap, though, the Modern Orthodox approach offers a reasonably profound argument, which goes like this. The essence of Jewish life is keeping halacha; there are areas of ethics and life that are not directly regulated by the halacha, but we can work out what the right thing to do here is by observing how a person whose life is dedicated to halacha behaves. Such a person is delicate, kind, restrained, and thoughtful. He definitely won’t go and kill a bunch of people, so no genocide. This argument relies quite heavily on a certain conception of Jewish ethics in which halacha precedes values, and so we’ll turn to a quotation from the foremost exponent of this view:

All extremism, fanaticism, and obscurantism come from a lack of security. A person who is secure cannot be an extremist. He uses his mind and heart in a normal fashion.

R. J. B. Soloveitchik זצ’’ל

This is a good argument. In general, extremists tend to have problematic personalities, but genocidal extremists are overwhelmingly just really unimpressive as Jews. They don’t daven properly, they don’t keep mitzvos properly and they really - even their spokesmen - just don’t know squat. It famously says in Pirkei Avos אין בור ירא חטא ולא עם הארץ חסיד and the gemara takes this concept pretty far:

ולא ישא בת עמי הארץ, מפני שהן שקץ, ונשותיהן שרץ, ועל בנותיהן הוא אומר: ״ארור שוכב עם כל בהמה״. תניא, רבי אומר: עם הארץ אסור לאכול בשר, (בהמה) שנאמר: ״זאת תורת הבהמה והעוף״: כל העוסק בתורה מותר לאכול בשר בהמה ועוף, וכל שאינו עוסק בתורה אסור לאכול בשר בהמה ועוף. אמר רבי אלעזר: עם הארץ מותר לנוחרו ביום הכיפורים שחל להיות בשבת. אמרו לו תלמידיו: רבי, אמור לשוחטו! אמר להן: זה טעון ברכה, וזה אינו טעון ברכה. אמר רבי אלעזר: עם הארץ אסור להתלוות עמו בדרך, שנאמר: ״כי היא חייך ואורך ימיך״, על חייו לא חס, על חיי חבירו — לא כל שכן. אמר רבי שמואל בר נחמני אמר רבי יוחנן: עם הארץ מותר לקורעו כדג. אמר רבי שמואל בר יצחק: ומגבו. תניא, אמר רבי עקיבא: כשהייתי עם הארץ אמרתי: מי יתן לי תלמיד חכם ואנשכנו כחמור. אמרו לו תלמידיו: רבי, אמור ככלב! אמר להן: זה נושך ושובר עצם, וזה נושך ואינו שובר עצם. תניא, היה רבי מאיר אומר: כל המשיא בתו לעם הארץ, כאילו כופתה ומניחה לפני ארי. מה ארי דורס ואוכל, ואין לו בושת פנים — אף עם הארץ מכה ובועל, ואין לו בושת פנים. תניא, רבי אליעזר אומר: אילמלא אנו צריכין להם למשא ומתן, היו הורגין אותנו. תנא רבי חייא: כל העוסק בתורה לפני עם הארץ, כאילו בועל ארוסתו בפניו, שנאמר: ״תורה צוה לנו משה מורשה״. אל תקרי: ״מורשה״, אלא: מאורסה

So, you see that Kahanists are basically subhuman. Don’t shoot the messenger. It doesn’t seem to be coincidental that, while the most extreme right-wing Zionists are basically ape people, the yeshiva with the highest intellectual standards in Religious Zionism is also the most politically moderate.

The problem with this line of argument is that is makes you a hostage to fortune. There are groups that are genuinely superfrum and also genuinely into genocide. For example, in Yitzhar, the mecca of violent extremism, there are the Od Yosef Chai hoodlums, but there is also Roeh Yisrael. I vaguely know a few people from this crowd, and they are, from a ritualistic perspective, impressive. It’s true that making it all stick together requires industrial levels of neo-Chassidic claptrap that fries their brains, and I think there’s a good chance this will spectacularly blow up a decade or so from now. In the meantime, though, it’s still possible that they might find a way to sustainably blend piety and aggressive militarism, so best not to stake all your chips on this approach.

4. Leave it to Moshiach

This approach basically says that all of the national-level laws were relevant at some point in the past, and will be relevant in the future, but not now. It is based on the (in?)famous Three Oaths Midrash, which is the intellectual lodestar for more rigorous forms of anti-Zionism. In the messianic age, either genocide won’t be necessary, or everything will be so clear that we can do it without moral scruples. In either case, it’s not something to worry about now. The problem with this argument for anyone not rigorously anti-Zionist is that it proves too much, and therefore they argue that the Three Oaths are metaphor, or had a time limit, or have been released by virtue of the Balfour Declaration or the San Remo Conference (or, for the more academically minded, because there’s a diversity of opinion in midrashic sources, and we just don’t agree with that one).

I am, as in all things, a moderate on this question (it says NONZionism, right there in the title) so this doesn’t really cut it for me, but there is a related argument that might work better.

5. Non applicable for technical reasons

There are certain conditions under which genocide may be mandated by Jewish law:

1. Against Amalek

2. Against the Seven Nations

3. In a Milhemet Mitzvah

4. By prophetic or otherwise divine command (Urim v’Tumim etc.).

(1), (2) and (4) are out. Psychos argue otherwise about (1) based on a Brisker hiddush, but this is honestly a joke. It also so happens that our enemies are not idol worshippers (indeed, on that score, there are perhaps better grounds for saying they should be allowed to genocide us). However, there is still (3) and, well, it’s not so poshut. Is there a case that wars fought to secure Jewish ability to live in all or part of Eretz Yisrael is a milhemet mitzvah? Yeah, and it’s not bad, so we’ll have to move on.

6. The Conservadox Approach

For better or worse, there is a Jewish state in the land of Israel and it has to do a lot of stuff, like taxes, and commercial regulation, and intellectual property, and vaccinations, and immigration regulation, and pensions etc. And you know how much of that you can manage by looking at classical halacha seforim? Basically none of it. How do you stop burglary using evidentiary standards accepted as normative? Well, obviously, if you’ve thought about it for two minutes, you don’t. What does halacha say about fingerprints, and DNA, and CCTV, and PreCrime (hold your horses)? Nothing.

The point is that over the past 2,000 years halacha has evolved. You can be a mekori’ist weirdo and believe that a lot of these changes should be up for review, but, regardless, it changed. However, in areas of halacha that have been non-operative there was no such process of change. What that means is that these areas of halacha are interesting to learn, may raise any number of moral analogies, refine the human spirit etc., but what they don’t do is give you anything you can implement in a real court. If you don’t believe me, go take your next copyright dispute to a beis din and see how far it gets you.

Now, if we look at those areas of halacha where we can see development, a common factor that emerges across multiple different areas is a tendency to tone down violent aspects and nudge things in what we might roughly speaking call a more civilized direction:

1. The Torah, read simply, calls for the death penalty to be applied frequently for a wide range of crimes, but rabbinic law places numerous obstacles to securing conviction which mean that it would be enforced relatively rarely.

2. The Torah, read simply, prescribes keeping the blood-stained mattress of a bride in order to resolve disputes about her prior virginity, but rabbinic law understands this metaphorically to mean clear arguments establishing her innocence.

3. The Torah prescribes death for a rebellious son, but rabbinic law places numerous hurdles around implementing this punishment that appear to have been consciously designed to render it inoperable.

4. The Torah prescribes ‘an eye for an eye’, and the language in Lev. 24:20 practically goes out of its way to be taken literally, but nevertheless rabbinic law interprets this principle solely in terms of monetary compensation.

5. The Torah, read simply, mandates cutting off a woman’s hand for grabbing the testicles of man fighting her husband. However, in rabbinic law, this is understood to refer to (and in fact constitutes the source for) monetary compensation for public embarrassment.

We could go on. You can pick nits in individual examples, but unless you are going to go full obscurantist and claim that every single example of this tendency is explicable by an oral tradition going back to Sinai, then you have to admit there’s a pattern.

Granted, these are all examples of halachic development that happened either before or during the classical rabbinic period, but there are examples of this trend in the post-talmudic period too. Arguable examples include corporal punishment by husbands, the status of gentiles in monetary law, the waiving of the prohibition of female education, the ban on polygamy, and non-enforcement of the mandate to divorce a non-fertile wife. Unsurprisingly, these developments only happened in areas which were of immediate practical relevance and therefore frequently entered into the consideration of poskim.

In the case of warfare, the sources depict little in the way of such a civilizing process, with perhaps the only notable exception being the requirement to leave one side of a city under siege open for the inhabitants to flee. However, this is unsurprising for two reasons. First, since the disaster of the Bar Kochba rebellion, the Jewish people have not been engaged in warfare, and the chief practical job of rabbis in this regard was to dampen periodic nationalist urges that threatened to bring down another hammer blow. There was thus no pressing need to revisit the wars of law even during the mishnaic and talmudic periods, and even more so afterwards during the disaporic era proper. Secondly, the fact is that the generally accepted rules of warfare during the classical rabbinic period and long after were scarcely less brutal than during the Iron Age. Progress at scale - and then only fitfully - only really began to be made after the Thirty Years War, by which time Jewish scholarship had become completely lost amidst the weeds of pilpul and/or kabbalistic theorizing, with practical guidance for warfare seeming barely more relevant to the life of the Jew than building a ladder to the moon.

In the absence of an actual history of halachic development, then, in the field of warfare, the best we can do is hypothesize about what it would have looked like had that happened. The most pro-Judaism guess is that halacha would embody the highest moral ideals of the modern laws of war, minus the stupid stuff that is designed to make it impossible for the stronger side to win a conflict. So let’s run with that.

7. The Mystical Approach

The general thrust of kabbalistic thought is to reimagine the whole of Jewish law and lore as a cosmic drama that plays out simultaneously within the life of the individual Jew and with the godhead itself. In this way, everything outside of the individual’s life can be reimagined as some sort of internal/divine process. This is handy because if the mishkan can be a thing in your heart, then exterminating Amalek can be too.

The problem with this is that it’s all a problem. The position of orthodox kabbala is that the metaphysical symbolism it claims to identify in the mitzvot are as well as not instead of their literal application. It’s true that in un-orthodox kabbalah you have a lot of room for monkeying about with any halachos you don’t like, be that the prohibition on illicit sex acts or, well, … tbh that seems to be kind of an idee fixe for these guys. Shabbatai Tzvi thought that divine warfare consisted of rocking up at the Sultan’s palace and saying tehilim, but (a) that didn’t work and (b) he was bad. In any case, as we see with our own weary eyes today, kabbalistic-inflected Judaism - of varying degrees of orthodoxy - is no barrier to very literal adherence to biblical calls for violence.

Another reason for not going down this route is that kabbala is all nonsense anyway and should be prohibited by law, so we’re moving on.

8. Thinking it out

Let us wargame, so to speak, what would happen if Israel made biblical war against its enemies. I think it’s pretty obvious that what would happen is that all the countries of the region would be united in opposition, international support would fall away, and Israel would be left, within a few months, broke, friendless and trapped in an impossible-to-win war of attrition, ending in calamitous defeat and the unravelling of the state. However, let’s say that didn’t happen, and everything went swell, with Israel’s borders now extending to the Euphrates, its enemies crushed, and in control of enough oil fields to withstand any amount of global opposition.

This is the dream (literally, it’s a dream) scenario of Kahanoids, but the thing is that, while said Kahanoids conceive of Judaism as a sort of group evolutionary strategy for our own wealth and glory, actually it’s about the Big Guy Upstairs:

מַּדְתִּי אֶתְכֶם חֻקִּים וּמִשְׁפָּטִים כַּאֲשֶׁר צִוַּנִי יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהָי לַעֲשׂוֹת כֵּן בְּקֶרֶב הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם בָּאִים שָׁמָּה לְרִשְׁתָּהּ׃ וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם וַעֲשִׂיתֶם כִּי הִוא חׇכְמַתְכֶם וּבִינַתְכֶם לְעֵינֵי הָעַמִּים אֲשֶׁר יִשְׁמְעוּן אֵת כׇּל־הַחֻקִּים הָאֵלֶּה וְאָמְרוּ רַק עַם־חָכָם וְנָבוֹן הַגּוֹי הַגָּדוֹל הַזֶּה׃כִּי מִי־גוֹי גָּדוֹל אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ אֱלֹהִים קְרֹבִים אֵלָיו כַּיהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ בְּכׇל־קׇרְאֵנוּ אֵלָיו׃ וּמִי גּוֹי גָּדוֹל אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ חֻקִּים וּמִשְׁפָּטִים צַדִּיקִם כְּכֹל הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם׃

The point of all this, the point of us, is to make God’s name great among the nations. In the ancient world, it would appear that a pretty good way to impress the nations was to kill loads of people. That showed that your god was strong, and the other gods were less strong. Today, the fact is that, apart from the absolute most ignorant, lowlife people whose GDP is 94% qat, no-one is impressed nowadays by genocide. They think it’s gross and disgusting and they will absolutely not be convinced that your god is no. 1 if you do one. You can claim that this is because they all got cucked by Christianity or whatever, but it makes no difference now and for the foreseeable future. If anything counts as a chillul Hashem today, then doing a genocide and announcing that this is what Judaism told you to do is for sure it.

If we take a step back from the ultimate purpose of Judaism, the intermediary reason the Torah gives for clearing everyone else out of Eretz Yisrael is so that we should not be tempted into idolatry. The insistence on no compromise and total war against the seven nations as a preventative against straying from the Covenant is repeated over and over again. If we apply this frame to our present conflict with the Arabs, three things are immediately evident. The first is that no-one is being influenced by the Arabs to stray from Judaism, because they aren’t being influenced by the Arabs at all, except to do the oppisite. An obvious example: just about every conceivable form of zany headcovering for women has been tried by one community or another except one: the traditional Jewish way which we now call ‘hijab’. Of all the religions Israelis convert to, Sunni Islam is probably around #30. Secondly, if we were being influenced by our Arab neighbours it would be, from the perspective of the Torah, a positive development since they are absolutely cleaning our clock on the monotheism front. Thirdly, it’s all moot anyway because we have the internet and global air travel so physical proximity is all but irrelevant as a factor in exposure to gentile corruptions.

Thus, viewed from the perspective of the Torah’s goals, going full genocide either fails to achieve or actually undermines them. The problem with this approach is that this logic is strictly out of bounds with halacha because, if it wasn’t, there are numerous other commandments for which you could make at least somewhat plausible arguments that they no longer fulfil their intended purpose, bringing the whole system crashing down.

So what’s the NonZionism take?

In truth, and as per usual, I have little very original to say and a lot of flash, slightly schizo turns of phrase to say it with. As may not surprise those who follow the other blog I write on, I come down somewhere between #3 and #6, though I think #8 has genuine force to it, properly weighed. What I have to add to that may sound somewhat lame and, as such, we’re going to paywall now. But, before that, I’d like to wish the freeloaders a happy Pesah, and also point you to a podcast I did last week that you might enjoy.