On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 3, 2015, Moshe Halbertal (b. 1958) stood at a lectern in Mondale Hall at the University of Minnesota Law School and waited. About a hundred students and faculty had come for the annual John Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law. A law professor named Oren Gross had introduced him. The announced title was “Protecting Civilians: Moral Challenges of Asymmetric Warfare.”
The protesters rose one at a time. Each shouted, and each was walked out by university police. One woman came back through the door screaming after she had been removed. Outside the hall the chanting continued loudly enough that people inside had trouble hearing. Three people, none of them students, were arrested for trespassing. Roughly forty minutes passed before Halbertal could begin. Among the things shouted at him was “baby killer.”
Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law scholar sitting in the audience, later described Halbertal in a Washington Post blog post as “a well-known, widely respected expert on ethics and the law of war.” Meredith Aby-Keirstead of the Anti-War Committee told the campus paper she could not stand by and “watch the university hire a war crimes apologist.” Rula Rashid, a finance major who led the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said protest was the point of a university.
The lecture Halbertal had come to give argued that soldiers fighting irregular forces in populated areas should accept added danger to themselves to reduce the killing of civilians on the other side. He has put the claim in print: precautions must include the expectation that “soldiers assume some risk to their own lives.” It is a position that has made him unpopular with parts of the Israeli defense establishment for twenty years.
Two nights earlier he had spoken at Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park under the auspices of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies. A member of the audience there pressed him on the occupation, and said that a talk about how soldiers should shoot avoided the question of why they were there. Halbertal answered that he hoped the occupation would end and that its end will still leave Israel needing a strong army, because the conflict is not reducible to the occupation. He introduced the point by warning that he was about to say “something not pleasant to liberal ears.”
Both rooms took him for a representative of something. In the synagogue he was the moral face of the Israeli army. In the law school he was its alibi. He has spent a career arguing that institutions are neither.
He was born in Montevideo in 1958. His father had come from Łańcut, a town in Galicia, and survived the war by getting east into the Soviet Union. His mother was an Israeli who had traveled to Uruguay to teach Hebrew. They married there. Two sons were born, Dov (b. 1956) and Moshe, and the family moved to Jerusalem when Moshe was a boy.
The house held three languages and three worlds. Hebrew pointed toward Israel and toward the study of texts. Yiddish pointed back toward a Poland that no longer existed. Spanish belonged to the street where he had learned to talk. Jerusalem then supplied the politics.
He was raised modern Orthodox and educated in the texts as commands before he ever met them as objects of study. That order of acquaintance shows in everything he has written. He knows what it feels like to be inside a legal tradition and to owe it obedience. Years later, asked what separates the modern Orthodox from the haredi position, he gave an answer that reads like a summary of his research program: that tradition “doesn’t monopolize all of value, all of truth.”
His brother went the other way. Dov Halbertal became a haredi rabbi and an attorney, ran the office of the Chief Rabbi of Israel, and turned into one of the sharpest internal critics of his own community, arguing for the separation of religion and state and against the subsidy of full-time yeshiva study. The two brothers make an unusual pair in Israeli public argument. They agree that the Jewish people has a survival problem. They disagree about nearly everything that follows.
He took his B.A. in Jewish thought and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, cum laude, and his doctorate there in 1989. His committee joined two kinds of authority. Menachem Elon (1923-2013) was a Supreme Court justice and the great modern systematizer of Jewish law as a legal system. Avishai Margalit (b. 1939) was an analytic philosopher of language and politics who would become Halbertal’s collaborator. The dissertation was titled “Values as Interpretive Criteria in Jewish Law.”
The title contains the career. A judge does not first extract a neutral meaning from a text and then decide whether morality should soften it. Moral commitments do their work earlier, inside the reading. They determine which analogy looks apt, which contradiction demands resolution, which possible sense of a verse never comes up for consideration at all.
He published the argument as Interpretive Revolutions in the Making, a study of cases where the rabbis of the midrash halakhah did not clarify biblical law so much as replace it while continuing to call the result an interpretation. The standard illustration is the reading of an eye for an eye as monetary compensation. Halbertal’s question is not whether the rabbis departed from the literal sense. They did. His question is how a legal culture performs surgery on its own foundation and leaves no scar.
His answer is that a revolution succeeds when it stops looking like one. The next generation receives the new law as though it had always been latent in the verse. The deepest changes in a tradition are the ones best disguised as continuity. This account rejects the pious story, in which interpreters add nothing, and the debunking story, in which interpretation is a polite name for judicial legislation. What he describes is disciplined invention under real constraint.
From 1988 to 1991 he held a fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows, one of the few appointments in American academic life that pays a young scholar to do nothing but think. He stayed on in 1991 and 1992 as a fellow in Harvard’s Program in Ethics and the Professions and taught in the Social Studies program. Then Jerusalem again, as a lecturer, senior lecturer in 1996, full professor in 1999. He joined the Shalom Hartman Institute as a fellow in 1992 and has been there since. In 2002 New York University Law School made him Gruss Professor, and he began the two-continent life he still leads, with an office in Vanderbilt Hall and a teaching load in Jerusalem. He has taught at Harvard Law School, Penn, Yale, and Reichman University, and in the Mandel leadership programs. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2010 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2021. In the spring of 2026 he returned to Harvard as a visiting professor in Jewish studies and in Talmudic civil law, teaching confession, self-incrimination, and repentance.
The books came steadily, in two languages, and they divide by subject while repeating one problem.
People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority asks what a community does when it organizes itself around a sacred text. Owning a canon settles very little. Someone still has to decide what belongs in it, what kind of force each part carries, who may expound it, and how later writing stands to earlier revelation. Halbertal separates the normative canon, which tells members what to do, from the formative canon, which supplies the stories and vocabulary through which they know who they are. The Hebrew Bible sits at the formative center of Judaism while daily practice runs through Mishnah, Talmud, codes, and responsa. Canonization does not end interpretive conflict. It raises the stakes, because once a text becomes sacred, whoever controls its meaning acquires authority without having to claim authorship.
Between Torah and Wisdom took up Menachem ha-Meiri (1249-1315) and the Maimonidean jurists of Provence, men who tried to hold philosophical culture and rabbinic law together without letting either dissolve the other. The Meiri became important to later Jewish argument about non-Jews because he built categories that removed contemporary Christians and Muslims from the ancient rabbinic law of idolaters. Halbertal shows how a judgment about what a society is, morally and institutionally, changes the law that applies to it while the old rule sits untouched on the page. The book won the Goldstein-Goren prize for the best book in Jewish thought published between 1997 and 2000.
Idolatry, written with Margalit and published by Harvard in 1992, asks why idol worship became the thing monotheism defined itself against. They pull apart several senses of the offense. It can be an error about what exists. It can be a forbidden practice performed by someone whose theology is sophisticated. It can be betrayal, which is why the prophets describe it with the language of adultery. It can be a corrupted relation between an image and what the image stands for. The tradition permitted some representations and forbade others, so the target is a kind of relation rather than depiction as such.
The book then turns the analysis on politics. People hand finite things, a nation, a leader, a movement, a piece of ground, the kind of devotion that only an absolute could bear. A political program becomes idolatrous when it demands what belongs to God while remaining a human artifact. Halbertal is careful here. The claim is not that ideologies are secretly religions. The claim concerns misdirected allegiance: an error about what any finite object may legitimately ask of a person. Twenty years of his political writing follow from that page.
Maimonides: Life and Thought is the book that made his name outside Jewish studies, and it won the National Jewish Book Award for scholarship in 2013. Earlier scholarship tended to split Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) into two men, the philosopher of the Guide of the Perplexed and the jurist of the Mishneh Torah, and then to rank them. Halbertal refuses the split. Both projects serve one ambition.
Maimonides did not simply reconcile Aristotle with the rabbis. He tried to rebuild the religious imagination. Anthropomorphic talk about God was, to him, no harmless concession to simple people. It aimed worship at a magnified man. Negative theology, the discipline of restricting what may be said of God, was therefore practical rather than technical, a repair to the object of prayer.
The legal work carried the same intention by other means. The Mishneh Torah took the argumentative ocean of the Talmud and reorganized it into a comprehensive code, in clear Hebrew, with the debates stripped out and the ruling stated. Halbertal reads this as an audacious intervention in the culture of learning. The Talmud preserved law through argument. Maimonides proposed to preserve it through architecture. The code opened the law to readers who could never master the sources, and it freed the strongest minds from a lifetime of dialectic so they could turn to metaphysics and science.
It also threatened the men whose standing rested on knowing where everything was. Talmudic mastery is a form of capital. A code that supplies the answer devalues the guide. The ferocity of the resistance to the Mishneh Torah becomes intelligible on those terms, and Halbertal grants that the resistance won. Jewish law remained a culture of commentary and dispute. Maimonides failed to convert the tradition and succeeded in installing inside it a permanent rival voice.
Concealment and Revelation studies the philosophers, kabbalists, and astrologers who each claimed to hold the secrets of the Torah. They disagreed about the content and converged on the problem. A secret never expressed cannot be transmitted; a secret written clearly stops being one. The teacher must show enough to prove there is something to know and withhold enough to keep the boundary. Halbertal sorts the reasons for concealment. The truth may be dangerous to the unready. It may resist statement. It may require a discipline of life before it can be grasped. And it may confer standing, since a man who claims hidden knowledge cannot be checked. Open teaching can be tested against a text anyone may consult. A secret tradition can always say that the evidence lies elsewhere. Invention then arrives dressed as antiquity.
Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism, expanded from his Hebrew By Way of Truth and translated with Daniel Tabak, presents Moses Nahmanides (1194-1270) as the architect of a full alternative to the Maimonidean project. Where Maimonides pursues purification and knowledge of a transcendent God, Nahmanides fills the world with presence, miracle, sacred geography, and commandments whose performance reaches into the structure of things. Halbertal declines to split him into a cautious Talmudist and a hidden mystic. The two are one enterprise: kabbalah explains why the commandments carry weight, and halakhah gives the mystical claims a body. Nahmanides also had to solve the problem of founding a secret tradition in public, and he solved it by burying the teaching in commentary and allusion, which taught later generations a method as well as a doctrine.
The Birth of Doubt follows the rabbinic category of safek, recognized uncertainty, as it grows from scattered biblical situations into a systematic field. The rabbis worked in a world where prophecy, ordeal, and oracular disclosure had receded, and judges had to decide without them. Presumptions and appeals to the majority let the law act without pretending to know. Different domains handle doubt differently because they fear different errors: what serves for a question of possession will not serve for the validity of a marriage. Every presumption assigns the cost of a possible mistake, and every burden of proof names the error a system would rather commit.
On Sacrifice begins with a distinction between sacrificing to and sacrificing for. Ancient religion offers to a power. Modern moral and political speech gives for a country, a family, a cause. He connects the two through the vulnerability of the gift. An offering can be refused, and refusal humiliates. He reads Cain and Abel as violence that begins in a rejected offering and travels sideways into the brother whose gift was accepted. Sacrifice looks like the opposite of self-interest and can contain an enormous claim: the giver who has paid may conclude that others now owe him. In national life the claim becomes political currency, because the dead leave no instructions and factions speak in their name. Halbertal is not writing against sacrifice. Societies cannot run without people who accept costs for strangers. He is writing against the conversion of sacrifice into title.
The Beginning of Politics, written with the political theorist Stephen Holmes (b. 1948), reads the Book of Samuel as a study of power by an author who understood courts, armies, and public opinion. Kingship arrives without becoming divine. Saul's authority stays fragile, and fragility turns ordinary conduct into suspected treason. David is the better politician: he attracts love, manages appearances, and repeatedly benefits from killings he did not visibly order. The text leaves his innocence undecided, and the ambiguity is part of his power. Halbertal and Holmes attend to optics throughout, to mourning performed in public and marriages contracted for alliance, because a ruler's household belongs to the state.
The collaborations are worth noticing as method. Margalit brought analytic philosophy and the critique of ideology; Holmes brought constitutional theory and the history of the state. In each case Halbertal supplies the primary sources and refuses to let them serve as illustrations of somebody else's theory. The texts generate the concepts, and the concepts then travel.
His politics began in a fight inside religious Zionism. After 1967 the movement associated with Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) and, more consequentially, with the students of his son Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982) read Israeli control of the West Bank as a stage in redemption. Gush Emunim formed in 1974 and made settlement a religious commandment rather than a security policy. Within a decade, to wear a knitted kippah was to be assumed a hawk.
The counter-movement came out of the Lebanon war. After Sabra and Shatila, a spontaneous Jerusalem demonstration drew religious Jews who had never joined the older, professorial group Oz veShalom, and organizers concluded that a new body could reach people who found the existing one elitist. Netivot Shalom held its founding meeting in 1982 in a hall filled to capacity, addressed by Yehuda Amital (1924-2010) and Aharon Lichtenstein (1933-2015), the heads of Yeshivat Har Etzion. Halbertal was among the founders and later served as chairman.
The movement's problem was legitimacy rather than argument. A secular peace camp could appeal to liberalism, international law, or prudence. Religious opponents of settlement had to show that Gush Emunim held no monopoly on Torah. So Netivot Shalom fought what its own members called a war of verses. It cited Ovadia Yosef's ruling that saving life permits returning territory. It read Abraham dividing the land with Lot as a precedent for compromise. It pressed Nahmanides against Rashi on the opening verse of Genesis, to argue that possession of the land is conditional on conduct. Halbertal supplied one of the movement's recurring formulations, that Israelis were commanded to see the Jewish eyes of the Palestinians, the descendants of slaves recognizing strangers. He also liked to quote the rabbinic observation that a sin repeated twice comes to feel permitted.
Gerald Cromer (1944-2008), the Bar-Ilan criminologist who studied the movement, reached a hard verdict. Netivot Shalom never achieved cultural resonance. It reached its own members and a secular audience that already agreed, and it left the hegemony of the settlement camp intact. Its leaders blamed the deafness of their opponents, which Cromer noted is what a losing movement usually says.
Halbertal's own argument was never that Jewish law compels withdrawal. Assessments of risk are contested, and halakhah does not draw borders. His claim was narrower and harder to dislodge: land is a value that cannot silence every other value, and any account that removes territory from moral calculation by declaring it holy has produced the thing he and Margalit had written a book about.
In Jerusalem he married Tova Hartman (b. 1957), a psychologist and scholar of gender and education, and the daughter of David Hartman (1931-2013), the American-born rabbi and philosopher who founded the institute where Halbertal has spent thirty years as a fellow. They had three daughters, Naomi, Rachel, and Shira. The marriage later ended.
In 2002 a group of residents of the German Colony, Tova Hartman among the organizers, founded Kehillat Shira Hadasha on Emek Refaim Street. It was the first congregation to put into practice the halakhic arguments of Mendel Shapiro and Daniel Sperber permitting women to read Torah before mixed congregations. The partition stayed. The bimah moved to the center. Women led the parts of the service that are not technically prayer and were called to most of the aliyot. The prayers requiring a quorum waited for ten women as well as ten men. Some accounts place Halbertal among the founding circle. Rabbis across modern Orthodoxy attacked the model, and it spread anyway, to Israel, North America, Europe, and Australia.
What happened on Emek Refaim is the thing his dissertation describes. Minority opinions were retrieved, a value was allowed to operate inside the reading, and a practice changed while its practitioners insisted, credibly to themselves and incredibly to their critics, that they had changed nothing.
The military work began around 2000. Asa Kasher (b. 1940) had drafted a code for the Israel Defense Forces in the 1990s, and the army found it unwieldy. A committee was appointed under the chief education officer to rewrite it. Halbertal has written that he was asked to join a group of philosophers, lawyers, and generals. The others included Avi Sagi, Daniel Statman, Avshalom Adam, Saul Smilansky, and Noam Zohar. The revised document, The Spirit of the IDF, went to the General Staff, and it is the version printed for recruits. Calling Halbertal a co-author of the army's code, as reference works routinely do, compresses a committee into a byline and obscures a dispute.
The dispute broke open in 2005, when Kasher and Amos Yadlin, then head of the National Defense College and later of military intelligence, published a doctrine for what they called the new warfare. Their priority ranking placed a state's own soldiers above enemy noncombatants who are not under that state's effective control. For Gaza the implication was direct. Muhammad Ali Khalidi, among others, wrote that this reversed centuries of thinking about the rules of war.
Halbertal argued against them, and the argument survives as his most original contribution outside Jewish studies. He distinguishes two risks a soldier carries. Associational risk comes from the soldier's role as the defender of his own political community, and it explains why his obligations to his own citizens run deeper. Agency risk comes from the fact that his operations may kill innocent people, and it does not track nationality, because the right to life of the civilians in the building does not depend on which flag they live under. From this he concludes that soldiers may be required to accept some calculated additional danger to verify a target or reduce foreseeable harm, and that a doctrine of total force protection produces a permissive culture of fire, because every hesitation can be described as a risk to the men.
He sets limits on his own claim. He does not ask soldiers to die for enemy civilians. He says no formula fixes the acceptable increment, which depends on the target, the alternatives, the intelligence, and the likely reduction in harm. He has also argued that requiring more care pushes armies to develop better weapons, better intelligence, and better training, so that the total risk falls.
The position isolates him twice over. Against Israel's harshest critics he insists that an army may strike military targets even when the enemy fights from among civilians, and that an organization which fights out of uniform and from populated ground bears responsibility for the consequences of that choice. Against the defense establishment he insists that the enemy's misconduct does not cancel the standing of the people who live there.
In November 2009 he published “The Goldstone Illusion” in The New Republic, a long reading of the United Nations fact-finding report on the Gaza war led by Richard Goldstone (b. 1938). He conceded at the outset that he had read the document, which distinguished him from most of the people praising and attacking it. His central complaint was that the report obscured the deliberate strategy of erasing, in his words, “the front and the uniform,” and then treated the resulting confusion as though it were Israel's invention. He also faulted the commission for adding assessments of Israel's war aims and long sections on the West Bank to a mandate about Gaza, and said the report might have done real good by gathering and testing testimony from Gaza and acknowledging that such testimony is partial. His colleague at the Hebrew University, David Shulman, replied that some of the report's gaps followed from Israel's refusal to cooperate with it.
The essay was widely cited by people who had no interest in the rest of his views. That is a recurring cost of his position. He has never made peace with the slogan about the most moral army in the world; at a 2016 panel in New York he said he finds it “empty as a moral political gesture” and that it closes the listener's ear. The remark did not save him from the reporter for The Electronic Intifada, who described the evening's wine and pita chips and concluded that he and Kasher were selling the same product in different packaging.
That criticism deserves a fair statement, because it is not frivolous and Halbertal's own work supplies its premises. An ethics code can function as institutional legitimation. It gives an army a vocabulary of restraint that survives the destruction of neighborhoods, and it converts contested strategic choices into questions of individual conduct at the tactical edge. The Institute for Palestine Studies and the Israeli group Breaking the Silence have both argued that field orders in Gaza tracked the Kasher priority rather than the one Halbertal defends. If a rule is treated as proof of virtue rather than as a standard conduct can fail, it has stopped being a rule. Halbertal has said as much about religious institutions for thirty years. Whether he has said it loudly enough about the one he helped write for is a question his critics are entitled to press.
The domestic version of his politics has drawn a different objection. He argues that Israel can be a Jewish state and a liberal democracy, that the argument worth having concerns what kind of Jewish state, and that cultural neutrality is not required of a democracy. He and Margalit had defended a right to culture, not to culture in general but to one's own, and they held that a state may reasonably decline neutrality toward a majority culture only on the assumption that the majority can look after itself. Halbertal applies this to Hebrew, the calendar, the school curriculum, the Law of Return, and public symbols, and compares Israel to Denmark or the Czech Republic. He sets two tests. Does the national character of the state damage the political, economic, or cultural rights of minorities? Does the state recognize the right of another national group living under it to self-determination? He supports civil marriage. He warns the ultra-Orthodox against using the coercive machinery of the state to adjudicate who is a Jew.
Omri Boehm (b. 1979), an Israeli philosopher at the New School, published the sharpest reply in Boston Review in 2014. Boehm grants that cultural neutrality is not necessary for liberal democracy and argues that ethnic neutrality is. Membership in the Jewish people runs through descent, which is why a Jew can be Danish and a Muslim cannot be Jewish. The comparison with European states therefore fails at the point where it has to hold. He presses the education system hardest: French and German public schools are French and German, and Jewish parents in Paris pay for Jewish schooling privately, as Christian parents pay for Christian schooling. An Israeli public system that is Jewish is not analogous, because a non-Jewish family cannot enroll in it. His conclusion is compressed into one line: giving up one's Judaism in a Jewish state means giving up one's equality as a citizen.
Boehm also notes, in passing, that Moshe Halbertal's brother had published a column expressing alarm that a member of Knesset saw nothing wrong with marrying a gentile, and that the Knesset does in fact legislate to prevent intermarriage. He is careful to say that Moshe Halbertal rejects Dov Halbertal's politics and bears no responsibility for his brother's opinions. The example does its work anyway. It asks whether the majority's right to its own culture, once institutionalized, can be kept from hardening into a right to ethnic separation.
Halbertal's answer, in substance, is that no political community escapes interpretation, and that claims to read a program off the land, the majority, or halakhah conceal the interpretive choices that produced the program. Critics on his right make the mirror complaint: that his Judaism is whatever liberalism will license, and that the boundaries are always drawn from outside.
In January 2023 the new Israeli government presented a plan to change the selection of judges, curtail review of legislation, and abolish the reasonableness standard. Protests ran weekly for most of the year. Halbertal became a visible opponent, and his argument had two parts.
The first was about Judaism. A movement that identifies its own compound of nationalism, territory, and rabbinic authority with the tradition converts a plural inheritance into property. His scholarship is a long demonstration that Jewish tradition never existed as one settled political doctrine. It contains schools that lost, arguments left open, and revolutions that presented themselves as continuity. A government claiming exclusive title suppresses the plurality that kept the tradition alive.
The second was institutional. Israel has no single entrenched constitution and few structural checks on a governing coalition that controls the legislature. In such a system courts carry more of the load, and removing that load leaves very little.
He put the general theory in print in February 2026, in a symposium essay in the California Law Review responding to David Strauss. He distinguishes two conceptions of judicial review. The narrow one descends from the Carolene Products footnote and from John Hart Ely (1938-2003): courts intervene where the political process misfires, above all where discrete and insular minorities cannot protect themselves. Halbertal's objection is that this turns constitutional protection into a competition for the status of victim, which powerful groups are well placed to win.
The broader conception asks a different question first. It asks whether the state has entered a domain that politics has no business governing at all. Belief, expression, intimate life, communal practice, and conscience mark boundaries that a majority may not cross, whatever its size and however fairly it was assembled. Alongside this, he argues that judicial review protects equal citizenship inside the domains where the state does belong, because majority rule draws its authority from the equal standing of those it rules. A majority that legislates against a minority's standing attacks the ground of its own claim to obedience. He notes his debt to Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013) and marks where he departs.
He does not defend courts as wise. He defends a limit on another power, and he grants that the limiting institution can insulate itself and rule badly.
Then October 7, 2023.
On Friday, February 16, 2024, three philosophers appeared together on a Zoom screen for the fourth session of the Weatherhead Center's series on the war. Michael Sandel (b. 1953) moderated. Halbertal joined from one square. Sari Nusseibeh (b. 1949), the former president of Al-Quds University and once the Palestinian Authority's representative in Jerusalem, joined from another. Sandel described the two as old friends from Jerusalem. The audience heard that they had seen a good deal of each other during the Oslo years, and Nusseibeh recalled an evening at Halbertal's home.
Both men opened by describing a personal crisis. Halbertal spoke of the fragility Israelis felt after the attack, and of watching people he had taken for partners move toward denying that his country should exist. He said that in bad moments he returns to a conviction he cannot abandon, that there is no solution other than two states, and that Jewish self-determination will be justified only if Palestinians have their own. Nusseibeh said he had believed there was enough sanity on both sides to keep negotiating, and that four months had thrown him out of that frame of mind.
Halbertal mentioned a student of his who had been murdered along with the student's son. Nusseibeh referred, without detail, to something terrible involving cousins on his mother's side, and said that raising it made him think in ways he could not defend.
Nusseibeh condemned the attack of October 7 as senseless brutality. He endorsed two states as the most practical of the available proposals, said the effort had failed, and said it should be tried again. Both men opposed the occupation. Halbertal, whose father had come out of Galicia and whose family had reached Jerusalem by way of Montevideo, said the occupation rests on force, that it is wrong, and that he hoped it could be ended peacefully.
Then Sandel asked whether Israel's war in Gaza was a just war, and the friendship stopped covering the distance.
Halbertal answered that October 7 was not an act of resistance to occupation, and that Hamas had worked since the 1990s against any negotiated settlement. He said Israel is obliged to protect its citizens from a repetition, and that “the only justification of war, if there is any, is defense.” He then made the separation he has made for twenty years, between the justice of going to war and justice in its conduct, and said the second question is a different question.
Sandel pressed him for his answer to the second one. Halbertal said the campaign was an attempt to harm Hamas rather than an intentional and indiscriminate attack on civilians, which he called the worst thing a country can do. He said the cost to the people of Gaza was enormous and painful, that the question is how to end the war in a way that relieves civilians while the legitimate aims are met, and how life is to be rebuilt afterward. He said Israel's conduct will be judged in part by what it does after the fighting stops.
Nusseibeh said he was suspicious of the whole vocabulary. Palestinians see the occupation as inseparable from Israel in the same way Israelis see the deaths in Gaza as inseparable from Hamas. One side's self-defense cannot be justified at the expense of the other's. He said the language leads people away from what has to be done, and that what is needed is to sit together and face each other.
The session ended there, with the disagreement stated and unresolved, which is the honest outcome and not a consoling one.
Halbertal has been criticized from every direction available. Historians question whether categories built by philosophical analysis fit texts produced across centuries by different communities with different interests. Social historians note that in his reconstructions the ideas usually arrive first and the institutional pressures arrive afterward, which may reverse the order of events. Critics of liberal Zionism argue that his two tests are necessary and insufficient, and that formal equality does nothing about the distribution of land, immigration rights, and security. Critics on the religious right argue that he has let liberalism set the perimeter and then found a Judaism that fits inside it. Critics of military ethics argue that an ethics starting from what the rifleman may do accepts the political arrangement that put him on the street.
None of these objections has produced a Halbertal school, and he has not tried to found one. What he has is a method, repeated across subjects with unusual consistency. He rebuilds an institution in its strongest form, names the human good it protects, and then shows what goes wrong when that good is made absolute. Canon preserves memory and creates a fight over who may speak for it. Secrecy protects difficult knowledge and shelters invented authority from testing. Sacrifice expresses love and mints a claim on other people. National identity makes solidarity possible and can turn into exclusion. Force protection discharges a state's duty to its own and can push every danger onto foreigners. Democracy empowers citizens and can coerce them.
The pattern rules out apologetics, which drops the danger, and denunciation, which drops the good. It also explains why he is a poor recruit for anybody's campaign. He can be quoted against the Goldstone report and against the doctrine that ranks Israeli soldiers above Palestinian civilians. He can be quoted for the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state and for the Palestinian right to one. He was shouted down in Minneapolis by people who called him a war criminal and criticized in Jerusalem by people who think he asks soldiers to die for the enemy.
In the spring of 2026 he was in Cambridge, teaching self-incrimination and repentance, which are questions about what a man is required to say against his own interest and what happens to him afterward. He has been circling a single problem since the dissertation. Revelation reaches people through interpreters. Justice reaches them through courts. Security reaches them through armies. A tradition reaches them through a canon and the men who control it. None of these intermediaries can be removed, and each of them, given the chance, will claim to be the thing it stands for.