{"id":199173,"date":"2026-07-28T05:49:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T13:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=199173"},"modified":"2026-07-28T06:52:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:52:17","slug":"what-might-survival-cost-for-israel-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=199173","title":{"rendered":"What Might Survival Cost For Israel & Jews?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a strand of Jewish thought that refuses the consolation of clean hands. It asks what a people has to be willing to do to live, and it accepts that some of the answers will be ugly. The strand runs from Rambam<\/a> on siege through Rav Shaul Yisraeli<\/a> (1909-1995) on reprisal to Asa Kasher<\/a> (b. 1940) on asymmetric war to the settlement yeshivot that publish arguments most Jews find unbearable.
\nAt least four different intellectual acts get filed under the same heading, and they carry different weight, different evidence standards, and wildly different status returns.
\nThere is descriptive realism, which claims to report how the enemy thinks without recommending anything. There is tragic necessity, which admits the act is wrong and argues it must be done anyway. There is doctrinal hardening, which revises the rules so the hard act becomes permitted rather than excused. And there is halakhic permission, which locates the act inside a system of divine law where the moral cost disappears into the category.<\/p>\n

The Kedar case<\/strong><\/p>\n

On July 1, 2014, days after the bodies of Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel, and Eyal Yifrah<\/a> were found, Mordechai Kedar<\/a> appeared on Israel Radio<\/a>‘s Hakol Diburim to discuss deterring Hamas<\/a>. He said the only thing that could deter a suicide bomber is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped. He added that it sounds bad, and that this is the Middle East. When the interviewer said Israel could not take such steps, Kedar answered that he was not talking about what Israel should do, that he was talking about facts, and that this alone would bring the man home to preserve his sister's honor.
\nBar-Ilan issued a joint statement with him saying he did not call for fighting terror by any except legal and moral means, that he used hyperbole to illustrate that suicide bombers cannot be deterred, and that his words contained no recommendation to commit such acts. Kedar wrote afterward that he opposes sexual violence in every circumstance. He kept his post. He kept his forty-five-day North American speaking tour, and no organization canceled him. He said the denunciations raised his profile.
\nKedar is a Bar-Ilan Arabist with twenty-five years in military intelligence and a research fellowship at the Begin-Sadat Center. He is not a crank on the subject of Arabic political language, which was his dissertation.
\nThe move Kedar made is the signature move of descriptive realism: I report, I do not prescribe. That move is legitimate in principle. An analyst who explains why a rival society responds to shame rather than to threats of imprisonment is doing his job, and a field that punishes such description makes itself useless.
\nThe move also has two failure points, and Kedar hit both.
\nThe first is that his claim was not a description of anything. He was not reporting an observed practice. He was asserting a counterfactual about what would deter, which is a claim about what Israel should permit its enemies to believe. That is a recommendation wearing a lab coat. The distance between “this would work” and “we should do this” is one sentence, and the speaker leaves that sentence for someone else to write.
\nThe second is that the empirical claim was never tested and cannot easily be tested. It flatters the speaker by making a horrifying method sound like the price of clear sight. Hard talk that costs the speaker nothing and cannot be checked is not realism. It is a performance of realism, and the market for it is large.<\/p>\n

The serious version<\/strong><\/p>\n

The strongest hard doctrine produced by Israeli scholarship came from Kasher and Amos Yadlin<\/a> (b. 1951).
\nIn 2005 they published \u201cAssassination and Preventive Killing<\/a>,\u201d an essay on assassination within the framework of fighting terror. Kasher<\/a> is professor of professional ethics and philosophy of practice at Tel Aviv University<\/a> and an academic adviser to the IDF<\/a>; Yadlin<\/a> was a major general who later headed military intelligence<\/a>.
\nA state fighting in territory it does not control may prioritize its own combatants over enemy noncombatants. That inverts a settled assumption of the war convention, and it does so with an argument rather than a slogan. The state's first duty runs to its own citizens, soldiers included. Soldiers are citizens in uniform. A doctrine that spends their lives to protect the civilians of a party that deliberately embeds itself among civilians rewards the embedding.
\nAvishai Margalit<\/a> (b. 1939) and Michael Walzer<\/a> (b. 1935) answered in The New York Review of Books<\/i><\/a> in May 2009, noting that Amos Harel<\/a> had argued in Haaretz<\/i><\/a> that February that these guidelines governed IDF<\/a> conduct in the Gaza fighting<\/a>. Their objection was that if the lives of our soldiers take priority over their civilians, they asked, why could our soldiers not use those civilians as shields?
\nShlomo Avineri<\/a> (1933-2023) entered the exchange from a third direction, arguing that Walzer and Margalit were obfuscating, that no army owes enemy civilians the care it owes its own population, and noting the exchange between Kasher<\/a> and Yadlin<\/a> and Moshe Halbertal<\/a> and Avi Sagi<\/a> in Yediot Ahronot<\/i><\/a> on April 10 of that year. Critics in Israel gave the new doctrine a nickname: license to kill.
\nDaniel Statman<\/a> at Haifa<\/a> has defended targeted killing<\/a> on similar ground with more philosophical care. Yitzhak Benbaji<\/a> at Tel Aviv<\/a> works the contractarian foundations of the war convention<\/a>. These men are doing hard work without hard talk, which is why almost nobody outside philosophy has heard of them.<\/p>\n

Halbertal holds both ends<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moshe Halbertal<\/a> helped write the IDF code of ethics. He also wrote a long critique of the Goldstone Report that defends Israeli conduct against what he considered a false standard while conceding failures. He argues against Kasher and Yadlin on the priority question and argues against Israel's foreign critics on proportionality. He accepts that asymmetric urban war generates situations where every available choice is wrong and insists that the wrongness stays wrong.
\nThat is tragic necessity in its adult form. The act may be required. The requirement does not launder it. A man who does the necessary thing has still done the thing, and the residue is his to carry.
\nThis position has the highest intellectual standing in the field and produces the fewest disciples. Randall Collins predicts that<\/a>. Young men do not organize around a teacher whose message is that they will be guilty either way.<\/p>\n

The halakhic line<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1953 and 1954, Rav Shaul Yisraeli<\/a> published “Takrit Kibiyah le-or ha-halakhah<\/a>” in Ha-Torah ve-ha-Medinah<\/i>, later expanded as chapter sixteen of Amud HaYemini<\/i><\/a>. The occasion was the Qibya raid<\/a>, an Israeli reprisal on a Jordanian-held village after months of cross-border killing, culminating in the murder of a mother and her two children in Yehud<\/a>. Dozens of civilians died at Qibya and much of the village was destroyed.
\nYisraeli composed the essay to justify the operation, arguing it was a battle in an ongoing war of revenge against hostile neighbors and sanctioned by halakhah. His position was controversial because it endorsed violence against civilians in wartime and because halakhah appeared to contain no precedent for wars of revenge. He constructed a new category, milhemet nakamah.
\nHe also drew a line. Even inside that category, targeting civilians from the outset stays forbidden. He accepted collateral death without affirming total war.
\nYeshayahu Leibowitz<\/a> (1903-1994) wrote “After Qibiyeh,” the more famous response and the one every educated Jew has heard of. Gerald Blidstein judged Yisraeli's the more important of the two, measured by influence over time, because Yisraeli introduced most of the halakhic tools still used to argue about hostile civilian populations.
\nThe essay that condemns is remembered. The essay that permits is used.
\nRav Yisraeli was a dayan on the rabbinical high court and later rosh yeshiva at Merkaz HaRav. He was the establishment, doing the establishment's hardest work, and the tradition of source-driven argument about civilian risk that now runs through Religious Zionist responses to Gaza descends from him.<\/p>\n

Where the floor gives way<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2009 the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva<\/a> in Yitzhar<\/a> published Torat HaMelech<\/i><\/a> by Yitzhak Shapira<\/a> and Yosef Elitzur, a 230-page halakhic compendium on when a Jew may kill a non-Jew. Among its claims: that the prohibition on murder as stated in the Decalogue governs a Jew killing a Jew, and that the children of Israel's enemies may be killed on the reasoning that they will grow up to harm us. Yitzchak Ginsburgh<\/a> and Dov Lior<\/a> (b. 1933) endorsed it. Yehuda Bauer<\/a> (1926-2024) called the book a mortal danger to the Jewish people.
\nAttorney General Yehuda Weinstein closed the investigation in May 2012 for want of evidence supporting an indictment for incitement to racism and violence. He found the racist content severe and the grounds for conviction absent, because the incitement statute exempts religious study. The High Court later ordered him to explain why the authors and endorsers had not been charged. The court said it was hard to doubt the racist approach of the authors. All four rabbis drew state salaries at a state-funded yeshiva.
\nA liberal state gave the most extreme halakhic argument in circulation a legal shelter that no secular argument of comparable content could obtain. Kedar needed a university to defend him. Shapira needed only the category of Torah study.
\nGinsburgh's network<\/a> is the one place in the Jewish world where willingness to say the unbearable is fully institutionalized, with yeshivot, publishing, communities, music, and disciples. He has the school. He does not have access to the general attention space, and he does not want it. His circle produces elaborators rather than falsifiers, which is what a school with a protected premise produces.<\/p>\n

The diaspora register<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ruth Wisse<\/a> (b. 1936) made the argument in a different key in Jews and Power<\/i><\/a>. Jewish political weakness was converted over centuries into a moral achievement, and that conversion left Jews unfit for the exercise of power once they had it. Her target is the sentiment that treats powerlessness as innocence. She paid at Harvard<\/a> in social standing and gained a devoted readership on the right.
\nWalzer<\/a> invented the modern doctrine of supreme emergency in Just and Unjust Wars<\/i><\/a>, the argument that a community facing annihilation may cross a line it may not otherwise cross, and he built it around the Blitz<\/a>. Then he spent decades refusing to grant Israel that license in situations Israelis considered qualifying. A man may hold both. Whether he can hold both without special pleading is the question his critics keep asking.<\/p>\n

Four tests<\/strong><\/p>\n

The genre is full of men who mistake brutality for candor. Some tests separate them.
\nDoes the argument specify a floor? Yisraeli forbade targeting civilians at the outset. Kasher and Yadlin bound their priority claim to territory outside state control. Torat HaMelech has no floor, which is why it is not serious halakhah even where it cites real sources.
\nDoes the speaker carry a cost, or only assign one? Halbertal's position costs him. Kedar's cost him nothing and paid a dividend.
\nIs the empirical claim checkable? Deterrence claims are the most abused in the genre because they can be asserted forever and tested never.
\nWould the argument survive publication in full, in context, to a hostile audience? <\/p>\n

What the status economy rewards<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hard talk in the media market pays well, costs little, and produces no disciples. Hard doctrine inside the Israeli academy buys real institutional influence, real reputational damage abroad, and a handful of students. Hard halakhah inside a settlement yeshiva enjoys total legal and communal protection, generates genuine disciples, and forfeits any claim on the wider conversation. Tragic realism earns the highest respect from serious people and builds nothing.
\nThe more responsible the position, the fewer the followers. Collins would say that a school needs an enemy it can defeat<\/a>, and tragedy offers no victory to organize around. So the men who think most carefully about what survival might cost are the men least able to reproduce themselves, and the men least careful are the ones with yeshivot.
\nSince October 7 the stakes on this have risen. Religious rhetoric about Amalek, once an internal idiom, has been quoted back to Israel in international legal proceedings. That is the modern condition for every one of these arguments. Nothing stays in the beit midrash. A halakhic category invented for a border reprisal in 1953 now gets read by lawyers in The Hague.
\nIf the hard thing is true, it should be sayable in the open, in full, with the limits attached and the cost admitted. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a strand of Jewish thought that refuses the consolation of clean hands. It asks what a people has to be willing to do to live, and it accepts that some of the answers will be ugly. The strand … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42918,605,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-gentilism","category-anti-semitism","category-israel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t