I begin with a personal note so that readers understand my point of view on the Israel-Hamas war. I am a Classical Reform Jew, with its reduced roles for traditional customs. I was never taught Hebrew and was not Bar Mitzvahed; I was confirmed. Although I am neither affiliated nor observant, I am a Jew committed to its basic cultural and ethical principles and values, especially reason and the rule of law. I am no Zionist; years ago, when I participated in Passover services, which end with the pledge “Next year, Jerusalem,” I substituted the name of the city in which I lived. Yet, when Israeli armies routed Arab armies in the Six-Day War (1967), I was moved to tears. I was moved to tears again when Israeli armies recovered from the initial Arab attack in the Yom Kippur War (1973) and decisively routed Arab armies.
It pains me to view the creeping corruption of Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians since those military victories. Nothing fails like success. The defeat of Arab armies in the earlier war inspired Jews in Israel and around the world; they were not weaklings, and they proved it. But their pride prepared for their fall. The continued occupation of the West Bank served no defensive purpose. For, at about this time, advanced weaponry—long-range artillery and short-range missiles—and terrorist attacks made “buffer zones” irrelevant, and massed tank units without air cover were useless. Worse, the occupation prompted some fundamentalists to advocate a “Greater Israel” beyond the 1948 boundaries internationally recognized. One result has been illegal settlements incrementally encroaching on Arab lands and encircling its peoples. Another has been increasing hostility between Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians, evident from local scuffles and terrorist attacks, with Israeli police repressing or Israeli army units reacting to an occupied populace’s acts of resentment and resistance, usually with excessive force.
Weary of the insolubility of a century-long struggle, Israelis have turned away from the liberal faction which wanted peace but was undermined by terrorist attacks to the conservative faction which wanted land and an end to attacks on Israelis. An aggressive leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, fearing prosecution, conviction, and prison for his personal corruption, has struggled to retain power to avoid justice under law. His strategy has been to maintain a tolerable though imperfect status quo by dividing Palestinians by undermining the Palestine Authority on the West Bank and supporting Hamas in Gaza. This strategy neutralized the Palestinians and gave him the excuse to avoid a two-state solution on the grounds that he had no reliable opposite with whom to negotiate one.
The 7 October attack by Hamas could not have done more to entrench him in office, at least for the time being. Israelis want to rescue the hostages and avenge their losses, though it is impossible to do both at the same time. So Netanyahu’s government is an unstable one, increasingly so because Israelis, like much of the rest of the world, are appalled by the deaths of so many Gazan civilians. Of the current total of 35,000 dead, the estimates suggest that 40%, or 14,000, are Hamas personnel, and 60%, or 21,000, are Gazan civilians, with many thousands more injured, starving, diseased, and distressed.
One qualification of these numbers. In modern warfare, military operations frequently kill or injure civilians, especially in urban areas. Military commanders weigh the value of their targets against not only acceptable estimated losses to their forces (troops and materiel), but also reasonable estimated losses of life to civilians. Such judgments have no objective standard. Having said so, I believe that the value of the target Hamas is not great enough to justify the number of civilian deaths and the amount of destruction. Fifty percent more civilian than Hamas deaths is wildly disproportionate. I think that Israeli commanders failed to make careful, professional judgments. Symptoms are the excessive number of claimed “accidental” attacks on relief workers, journalists, and the like; and the inexplicable delays in humanitarian relief. The displacement of half the population is an ambiguous fact; it can represent an effort to minimize civilian casualties or an effort at “ethnic cleansing” or both. The second possibility arises because some members of Netanyahu’s government are urging the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and the occupation, then incorporation, of Gaza into Israel.
That said, I return to my theme about Israel’s betrayal of Judaism. It is on this point that both international military standards and Jewish law converge. There is no denying Israel the right to defend itself and the right to seek security against future attacks. But both rights require the restraint of proportionality. Military standards do not forbid operations involving civilian casualties; they insist that the casualties be proportionate to the value of the military target. Likewise, Israeli law demands proportionality. Best expressed in the words “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” the aphorism is not a law of revenge, as is commonly thought, but a law of just compensation. By both standards, the number of civilian casualties and the extent of destruction in Gaza exceed a measure of proportionality to the death and destruction of the Hamas attack. Accordingly, Israeli forces have violated not only military standards, but also Jewish law.
In addition to the principle of proportionality, the military and Jewish demand efforts to minimize casualties, particularly to children, women, and seniors. Judaism gives special attention and respect to life. (This regard for life extends to animals; Jews do not hunt for sport, and they have special rules, kashrut, for killing animals for food so that it may be kosher.) Given the number of civilian casualties, both the dead and the damaged living, Israeli forces have violated both military standards and Jewish law.
The number of dead civilians is unjustifiable. Equally unjustifiable are the conditions of the living civilians injured, starving, diseased, and distressed. The Israeli fight against Hamas may serve justice, but Israeli conduct toward surviving Gazans does not serve mercy. Judaism demands compassion for the oppressed; every Passover, Jews are reminded that they, too, knew oppression and must assist the suffering. Jews are obliged to bind the wounds of the injured, feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless, and comfort the grieving. But Israel’s resistance to or restriction of humanitarian aid flouts these Jewish obligations.
Of course, I am angry at Netanyahu and his government for fighting such a war, which, without a plan for the day after, seems a war motivated merely by fury and conducted in malice. I am also alarmed and ashamed that its response thus puts it in opposition to and erodes Jewish principles and values. Israel was intended to be a moral light to the nations. It is now a “darkness visible.”
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