Military ethics and Judaism/Zionism

Everyone else is not insane

Among, conservatively, 90% of the world’s population, there is consensus that Israel has fought its war in Gaza very aggressively, with, at a minimum, a low level of concern for causing civilian casualties. To some, this is confirmation that they have been right all along: Zionism is an inherently racist and genocidal ideology that has finally unmasked itself. Now the wolf about whom they have so long cried is visible for all to see. For others, it is a sign that Israel has gone terribly wrong somewhere, led astray by Bibi and his settler allies. More forgiving spirits ascribe it to an understandable desire for revenge after October 7th that they desperately wish would now subside so they never have to have that conversation with their affable Jewish co-worker. Some small people are even cool with it; they think the Geneva Conventions are kind of gay and are glad someone is ignoring them.

Among large numbers, perhaps still a majority, of Israelis and Zionists around the globe, though, there is quite a different view. Israel has been far too concerned with civilian casualties in Gaza. Here’s Hillel Fuld talking to blog buddy Adar Weinreb.

Note what Fuld says. He is not merely arguing that Israelis should violate certain moral norms out of concern for their brothers and sisters, like a man who conceals knowledge of his brother’s crime from the police. Nor is he saying that there are competing moral obligations - protecting your own soldiers and protecting enemy civilians - and that the first should take precedence over the latter to some greater degree than present. He is stating as an absolute moral principle that Israel should never risk the life of one Israeli soldier for any number of Gazan civilians. It should not do so for 10; it should not do so for 1,000,000. He is firmly convinced that to do so is actually immoral, indeed the ‘epitome of immorality’.

Hillel Fuld is a religious Jew, but he is not in any way a religious extremist in the sense we ordinarily use the term. His father was the headteacher at SAR Academy, the kind of place where the girls wear tefillin to make a point and the boys don’t bother, since they have no point to make. I make no claims about either his level of halachic observance or the sincerity of his beliefs since I know nothing about either, but I would be flabbergasted, say, if he believed the world was 6,000 years old, that talmudic science was correct or that homosexuals should not be included within the orthodox community. His views are certainly extreme, and they have a certain relationship to his religion, but they are not straightforwardly a product of religious extremism, and they are not rare. Anyone in Israel has seen this sentiment expressed myriad times in myriad ways.

The basis of this argument is quite simple. Pikuah Nefesh is a foundational principle in halacha. If someone is ill on Yom Kippur and there is any risk of him dying, we instruct him to eat, despite it being in the second most severe class of offences in the Torah. Therefore, it is clearly forbidden to endanger the lives of soldiers. It’s not as simple as that because, of course, as Kahana would point out frequently, by definition fighting a war, even a milhemet reshut overrides the principle of Pikuah Nefesh. What the argument really comes down to is that reducing civilian casualties in Gaza is not a legitimate objective that would justify risking any number of soldiers’ lives.

Now, it’s possible to question this premise directly. Its is abundantly clear that the high number of civilian casualties in Gaza has negative diplomatic, and therefore economic, and ultimately security, consequences for Israel. If it is licit to endanger soldiers to secure, say, a strategically important hill, a port, or an oilfield, then, for the exact same reason, it is also licit to do so to avoid becoming an international pariah state. Diplomatic standing isn’t a less real national interest than territory or natural resources; if anything, it’s more real. Even if you genuinely think the whole world is mistaken - or worse - and that, in purely moral terms, it is correct to level a row of apartment blocks with everyone inside to save one soldier, it wouldn’t make a difference to the realpolitik of reputation. At a deeper level though, the idea suffers from a problem that is quite common in the application of Jewish ethics to contemporary problems: the absence of a conceptual limiting principle combined with the loosening of technical and logistical limitations that historically kept moral doctrines from logically concluding themselves into insanity

The paradigmatic example of this is the Covid-19 hysteria. Among both Modern Orthodox Jews and Charedi-but-with-it types, there were universal demands for strict adherence to even the most absurd and inhumane regulations, long after their futility became evident.