This article was published at the time in French in the booklet Israel-Forum N°3, December 2006, editor Dr. Izhak Adda, with the participation of distinguished figures such as Prof. Moshe Sharon, Pierre Yitzhak Lurçat and others.
The IDF has published a new “ethical” code for the IDF that is enough to outrage every reasonable person, and it therefore warrants a fundamental and in-depth response. That is what I endeavor to do in this article of mine. And this is the content of this “code”:
The Ethical Code of the IDF (the quoted document)
Introduction
“The Israel Defense Forces is the army of the State of Israel. The IDF operates in subordination to the democratic civilian government authorities, and subject to the laws of the State. The purpose of the IDF is to defend the existence of the State of Israel and its independence, and to thwart enemy efforts to disrupt the normal way of life within it. IDF soldiers are obligated to fight, to devote all their strength, and even to risk their lives in defense of the State of Israel, its citizens and its residents. IDF soldiers will act according to the values of the IDF and its commands, while maintaining the laws of the State and human dignity, and honoring the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
“The Spirit of the IDF” — Definition and Sources
“‘The Spirit of the IDF’ is the values-based identity card of the IDF, which ought to stand at the foundation of the actions of every soldier, male and female, in regular service and in reserve duty. ‘The Spirit of the IDF’ and the rules of conduct derived from it are the ethical code of the IDF. ‘The Spirit of the IDF’ will serve the IDF — its soldiers, its commanders, its units and its corps — in shaping their patterns of action. According to ‘the Spirit of the IDF’ they will conduct themselves, educate and examine themselves and others. ‘The Spirit of the IDF’ draws on four sources: the tradition of the IDF and its combat heritage as the Israel Defense Forces; the tradition of the State of Israel, its democratic principles, its laws and its institutions; the tradition of the Jewish people throughout its generations; universal moral values based on the value and dignity of the human being.”
Basic Values
“Defense of the State, its citizens and its residents — The purpose of the IDF is to defend the existence of the State of Israel, its independence and the security of its citizens and residents. Love of the homeland and loyalty to the State — At the foundation of service in the IDF stand love of the homeland and commitment and devotion to the State of Israel, a democratic state that constitutes a national home for the Jewish people, to its citizens and residents. Human dignity — The IDF and its soldiers are obligated to preserve human dignity. Every human being is of value, regardless of origin, religion, nationality, gender, status or role.”
The Values
“Devotion to the mission and striving for victory — The soldier will fight and act with courage in the face of all dangers and obstacles before him, and will cleave to his mission with determination and wisdom, even to the point of risking his life. Responsibility — The soldier will see himself as an active partner in defending the security of the State, its citizens and its residents, acting with a constant display of involvement, initiative and diligence, with discretion and within the framework of his authority, ready to bear responsibility for the results of his actions. Credibility — The soldier will present matters as they are, in completeness and with precision, in planning, execution and reporting. Personal example — The soldier will conduct himself according to what is demanded of him and will fulfill what he demands of others. Human life — The soldier will conduct himself in a considered and safe manner, out of recognition of the supreme importance of human life; in combat he will endanger himself and his comrades to the extent required to carry out the mission. Purity of arms — The soldier will use his weapon and his force to carry out the mission only, and only to the extent required for this, and will preserve the human image even in combat; he will not use his weapon and his force to harm non-combatants and prisoners, and will do all he can to prevent harm to their lives, their bodies, their dignity and their property. Professionalism — The soldier will strive to acquire the professional knowledge and skills required to carry out his role. Discipline — The soldier will be strict to give only lawful orders, and will not obey patently unlawful orders. Comradeship — The soldier will act out of brotherhood and devotion to his comrades in service, and will always rush to their aid. Mission — The soldier will see in his military service a mission, being a representative of the IDF acting by virtue of and within the framework of the authorities granted to him according to the army’s commands.”
The Critique
The contemporary events accompanying the public life of the last fifteen years have finally brought part of Israeli society — admittedly still only a small part, but a part nonetheless — to begin to contemplate what is happening and to ask the piercing question: How did we arrive here, and how do we extricate ourselves from all these entanglements? A small state, established against the will of all the nations, against all odds, by a handful of refugees from pogroms and wars, does not manage to live a normal life; and although it is attacked and also threatened from every side, it continues to be a target for every possible condemnation from all the nations, the so-called “enlightened” ones foremost among them.
A small confession on my part is in order, though it may perhaps provoke outrage: personally, this situation does not manage to surprise me at all. As a rabbi who grew up on the knees of talmidei chakhamim (Torah scholars) and in a genuine, deeply rooted Jewish atmosphere — and not in a Torah institution that is nothing but an academic ivory tower painted in the faint colors of “Jewish studies” (even though I am part of the research world in Jewish studies, and likewise in the exact sciences, and have been for some forty years now) — as one of the many young Zionist rabbis in our land, as a man whose spirit was shaped by Torah scholars filled with deep faith that draws entirely from a deep and constant connection with the Divine, a faith engraved like childhood dew in my consciousness through that saying of Chazal (our Sages): “Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says: it is a known law (halakha) that Esau hates Jacob” (Sifrei, Bamidbar, piska 69) — in its light, I cannot manage to look upon the Western world, the most legitimate offspring of Esau, except through the clear understanding that all its workings are nothing but an expression of hatred, or at the very least are accompanied by hatred: hatred and contempt for everything that is not itself.
Since the war called the First Lebanon War, the people dwelling in Zion writhe in hellish agonies of bloodshed the likes of which there has not been since the founding of our state. The scope of the casualties long ago exceeded, and by far, all the figures of casualties of classic wars — and this without even one ordinary war taking place. The deepest wounds, still open among thousands of families, have not healed; and in an act of despair, led by a delusional messianic vision of peace in the Middle East, the State of Israel bound its own hands in agreements of abomination and knowing suicide called the “Oslo Accords.” To the grim and terrible reality that developed as a result, the “emissaries of the new gospel” did not allow that reality to disturb their confidence in the righteousness of their path.
These insane agreements, which were supposed to put an end to the bloodshed, instead brought about many more casualties, dressed up in suitable costumes in order to conceal their failure: the public, who do not read the map correctly, were told that the casualties are not casualties of terror and war, but rather “casualties of peace”!
And the chronic Jewish disease, the denial of reality — so characteristic of our tormented people throughout its history, which a bitter two-thousand-year exile shaped and ingrained within it — grew and intensified. The bloodshed that covered the land, a people disheveled by a Western Christian hatred that saw in it the fulfillment of a still more ancient gospel of punishment for the murder of “God,” convinced significant portions of our society that a “Via Dolorosa” must be our portion forever and ever. And as with every chronic disease, the injury reached the very soul and deranged it, to the point that the Jew decided to take upon himself even the responsibility for all his own bloodshed — all this under the conducting of antisemitic Christian propaganda, which achieved its goal: the victim is guilty! For a moment many among us thought that the State of Israel, which claims independence, would free us from this madness too. But no. It still embraces the exilic approach; and although for nearly forty years IDF soldiers have been accused of Nazism, it has not dared to this day to fight back. In its wretched aspiration to attain normalcy and recognition from the nations, it continues to adopt the indictment, and with macabre cynicism we can sum up: thank God, “normalcy” has been achieved — there are dead and wounded Jews!
In the wake of the process of denial, a process of self-flagellation was born, and remarkably “creative” talents managed to nourish claims that even the wildest imagination would struggle to conceive. And the people of Israel, this victim of over a hundred years of Arab pogroms, was presented as the executioner abusing “poor” Palestinians, whose “sole” and “trivial” guilt is that they murder women and children, blow up buses, cafés, clubs and shopping malls, fire on innocent travelers on the roads of Judea and Samaria — roads that dare still to bear their original biblical name of Judea and Samaria — and who refuse to accept upon themselves the definition of an original “Palestine,” the fruit of the invention of the emperor Hadrian, may his name be cursed, and who fire even on travelers within the State of Israel.
But self-flagellation requires an ideological — and of course moral — conceptual basis. In this too the hands of the “emissaries” of flagellation and demonization from well-known circles did not slacken, and they did not hold back. All the twisted minds were recruited in order to cast upon us a moral stain of “occupiers,” to which they added the dubious title of “Judeo-Nazis,” which won its inventor the Israel Prize. They did not shrink from any means or any ploy. For example, every collective punishment by our enemies was sharply condemned, while from those same sick minds came, without any hesitation, a whole array of collective accusations against entire groups within the State of Israel without batting an eyelash! According to the warped opinion of those twisted minds, we indeed constitute a collective acting together, but our enemies are individuals disconnected from any collective — and all this even though they recognize them as a “people.” Nor did they suffice with that. The Israeli victim was presented by them as an executioner because he dared to defend himself.
But here is the problem: the people dwelling in Zion, bleeding, continued to send its army under inhuman conditions in order to try to reduce its suffering and its bloodshed, and it responded and struck our enemies, who, as is known, were “casualties of the occupation.” Therefore those circles decided that it was urgent to block this artery and to bind the hands of those who defend us. Through crude and clear political maneuvering, a representative of those circles was “recruited” into the IDF in order to formulate the “ethical code” of the IDF, so as to block any possibility of genuine self-defense, and thus to appear “beautiful and enlightened” in the eyes of those who hate us throughout the world. After all, a dead man photographs “better” than any soldier or policeman firing on a criminal and murderer!
Every honest and decent person who looks even for a fleeting moment at this document discerns that we are dealing — to use a paraphrase of Nietzsche — with a document in “Rococo” taste, and one of the most foolish ever formulated in such a context. Not only does it lack any ethical, rational and historical basis, but it is moreover a sure suicide note for any army in the world. Since too many soldiers have lost their lives because of it, it is fitting that the world of Torah, and every God-fearing Jew, or even merely any decent Jew, should respond to it and reveal publicly, before all, not only its nakedness, its cunning and the absurdities that pave it, but also the dangers it holds for the future existence of our people.
On the Structure of the Code
This code, as it is presented by the IDF itself, is built from the aforementioned introduction, meant to prepare us for the three sections that make up its core. But apart from the astonishing fact of the total absence of any connection between this introduction and the sections (which find no echo in it), it leaves every discerning reader stunned by the crude mixture of assertions, demands, and unclear, incomprehensible recommendations that strain to constitute a single fabric and weave — and in their place what ultimately emerges is a document riddled with logical contradictions chasing one another, until we ask ourselves: were its formulators ever educated on the knees of any kind of logical thinking?
For example, alongside the puzzling — and therefore most troubling — fact, for a document meant to guide the army of an entire people, it is not stated who is addressing whom, nor even to whom it is addressed at all: do external bodies address IDF commanders, or do IDF commanders address soldiers in the field? Already from the introduction a terrible confusion is revealed between the description of facts and obligations. The first sentence, “The Israel Defense Forces is the army of the State of Israel,” is an assertion; but the second, “The IDF operates in subordination to the government authorities,” is phrased in the language of fact, when the reader expects it to constitute a demand — for the army must operate in subordination to the government, and there is no permission to act otherwise (so long as no grave ethical problem arises). And the third, “The purpose of the IDF, etc.,” is a declaration of intent, and therefore cannot be incorporated within a framework describing facts, nor within a description of demands. So what is its place here?
And as for the fourth sentence, it suddenly emerges as a command given to soldiers; and if so, it constitutes an address by IDF commanders to their soldiers, and accordingly one may infer that this is an internal IDF document presenting itself as a behavioral codex shaped within the system, and for its benefit. And then again the question arises: what is the place of this command within a description of facts and goals and the like?
And the most terrible scandal is revealed in the last sentence: “IDF soldiers will act according to the values of the IDF and its commands.” What is this about? A gospel? A command? And if it is indeed a command we are dealing with, how are values presented in this binding document in language that does not befit commands at all?!
All this from the standpoint of the structure of the code. But within the content of this introduction there is a monstrous sentence which everyone to whom the people of Israel — and even the State of Israel alone — is dear must protest with all force, and fight with all his strength against its implementation, namely: “The purpose of the IDF is to defend the existence of the State of Israel and its independence, and to thwart enemy efforts to disrupt the normal way of life within it.” If we innocently thought for a moment that the role of an army is to provide security to a people, to strike the enemy by every possible means, to prevent him at any cost from harming all that is dear to us in life, in land, in standing and in everything — it turns out we were gravely mistaken. It is only to act in order to “thwart enemy efforts to disrupt the normal way of life within it.” Not to strike the enemy, not even to prevent him from carrying out his schemes, but only to “thwart” the enemy’s efforts! In short: a defense that is purely defensive! There is in this a total negation of operations against the enemy, only operations against his schemes. What better defense than this could the enemy have wished for?!
Without entering into the important discussion surrounding the principle of “He who comes to kill you, rise early to kill him” — which all of humanity stole from the Torah of God and from the people of Israel, and which it is incapable of justifying on its own without relying on some human egoism, a principle on which it bases the right of self-defense of the individual and of the collective — we must declare before all, and before all of humanity, that this principle has no basis unless one establishes that from the moment the murderer attempts to murder, and in so doing negates the right of the other to exist, he has already forfeited his own right to exist, whether on the level of the individual or on the level of the collective. Therefore, from the moment an enemy attempts to destroy, the purpose and obligation of the defender cannot suffice with entering into one defensive posture or another, or with thwarting his schemes, but must be the destruction of the enemy by every possible means, and trampling him until he ceases his murderous designs.
The IDF and the citizens of the State of Israel have been wallowing in their blood these twenty-five years because of the refusal to internalize this, and because of the denial to every soldier and every citizen of the right to act according to the principle of “rise early to kill him,” and not “rise early to defend” or “rise early to thwart his schemes.” Indeed, whoever denies this elementary right to citizens, and all the more so to soldiers, bears the full responsibility for the spilling of their blood in every situation in which they could have come out on top and were not allowed to. And such situations turn out to be the lot of our soldiers and our citizens in thousands of cases and incidents that have occurred in our localities. To the cruelty of this ruling must be attributed hundreds of casualties and thousands of wounded among us. On the basis of this immoral command, commanders permitted and permit themselves to endanger the lives of their soldiers so as not to harm the enemy’s family or his neighbors and the like. By it, dozens of soldiers were killed in Lebanon during our stay there, because they were forbidden to endanger the relatives of our enemies and even to damage their fields and orchards. By it, our soldiers were turned into “ducks” at which our enemies took aim in the Lebanon wars and in the Gaza Strip and all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza in recent decades. By it, elite units were and are sent into houses at enormous self-risk so as not to endanger the enemy’s environment, and through an artificial and absurd separation between the terrorist and his surroundings. Dozens of soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip so as not to demolish the houses endangering them, and dozens of others were killed at junctions and checkpoints because they were required to treat every member of our enemies’ “people” as innocent civilians, until proven otherwise through the murder of the soldiers!
And I have not yet spoken of the folly in the use of the term “enemy” in this sentence. For if it is only a matter of schemes, then nothing has yet been carried out on the ground — so who is the enemy? By what right do they determine that he is only the lone individual carrying out the act and not also the hundreds of others standing behind him? And why do they grant the Palestinians the status of a people only with respect to rights but not with respect to obligations? And why does the code speak only of individual enemies, as if our war were against individuals, if indeed they are a “people”?
After this foolish string of sentences, three sections appear that were not mentioned even by a hint in the introduction, in such a way that it finds itself disconnected from what it is supposed to present. In the first section, the description of “the Spirit of the IDF” as supposedly constituting “the values-based identity card of the IDF, which ought to stand at the foundation of the actions of every soldier, male and female,” once again folds into itself those same absurdities — for what is the place of the word “ought” within a military framework? If the army is a body subordinate to the mechanisms of the State and its authorities, it has no right of judgment, and certainly not to determine what is fitting and what is not. And if freedom of judgment is granted to it, then it is not subordinate to any commanding body!
And as for the second section, “Basic Values,” it is no different from its predecessor. It is not even stated whether it is in the category of an obligation imposed on the IDF as a whole as a body, or on the soldiers as individuals, or whether it is a description of a fact and a situation.
The third section, the only one slightly clearer than its predecessors — and only slightly — and supposedly meant to describe the obligations imposed on the soldier, does not manage to impose even a single obligation. Instead it shrinks into a list of expectations: “the soldier will fight,” “the soldier will see himself,” “the soldier will present,” and many more. Does one run an army in the style of a Parisian café on the central boulevards of the “City of Lights”?!
Already in light of this it is proven that this document is devoid of all military value, and certainly of intellectual value, for only amateurism or childishness is capable of presenting in a single breath a description of facts (which incidentally can be disputed!), values and expectations, and turning them — incidentally, without any authority — into a binding document. And if its main intent was those expectations, then let us wait for their fulfillment without anything obligating us at present, not even that document.
Regarding the “Spirit of the IDF”
It turns out that this “spirit” — or, more accurately, this “demon” bursting from the windows of the Canterbury palace of the IDF — constitutes its identity card. This is undoubtedly an original innovation of the concept of “identity cards,” which until now had been the exclusive province of administrative mechanisms of one sort or another. It now turns out that there is such a thing as a “values-based identity card,” and moreover without any mechanism or any entity toward which it “identifies”!
Worse than that: in the ring of “ought to stand” there is more than enough to deafen the ears of Israel — ears that have been deaf for two thousand years in the wake of this deafening Pauline style that refuses, and even forbids, the establishment of obligations, leaving all of reality abandoned to individual personal judgment (provided, of course, that it conforms to the positions of the Left). And further: if the correct judgment of security reality is truly entrusted to the soldier, why does this document not permit every soldier to derive from it what seems right to him according to his understanding? For the document itself testifies that it merely “serves” as an aid to our judgment! Why is not every soldier entitled to act toward it as Aharon Barak did in neutralizing the Hebrew Law statute that Mr. Menachem Begin passed — and then we would see where the IDF would end up.
And alongside this, another great deception: it turns out that “the values-based identity card of the IDF” was determined by parties appointed by the IDF. In other words, the IDF appointed a committee to determine how it itself should behave! What a scandal! This body, which is supposed to be subordinate and led, decides and determines how it will be led! And after the cat decided who would guard the milk on its behalf, it solemnly announces that a values-based identity card “ought to stand at the foundation of the actions of every soldier, male and female, in regular service and in reserve duty.” What folly to say “ought” within a military framework. Is the matter given over to the choice of every soldier, to his subjective assessment, to his personal judgment as to whether it is worthwhile to uphold it or not?! Is there room within a military framework for such freedom, if it is indeed something within the very soul of the IDF?!
And this freedom of action was expanded in a blind and cunning manner in the introduction, from which we hear: “‘The Spirit of the IDF’ will serve the IDF, its soldiers, its commanders, its units and its corps, in shaping their patterns of action. According to ‘the Spirit of the IDF’ they will conduct themselves, educate and examine themselves and others.” Ostensibly, according to this declaration, even an ordinary soldier is entitled to decide according to his understanding what is derived from this ethical code, for the judgment of his comrades, his commanders, the operations and more — and there is nothing in the code that is binding, only things that serve to determine values. But what happens in practice? Every soldier who reaches the army undergoes systematic brainwashing aimed at adapting his opinion to the navigated system, all according to a very particular worldview, while trampling his thought, his freedom, his judgment and his right — the right of that soldier. And I testify to this as a father of sons who served in the IDF and as a teacher to hundreds of students connected to me. Let it be told to us when a single soldier was ever given the right to express his opinion, to judge what is fitting and what is not? Under the explicit or implicit threats of his officers and commanders, the soldier is forced to absorb in silence the brainwashing whose like existed only in a Bolshevik world, and to tremble before any deviation from what descends upon him from very high up in the political world, which long ago seized the throat of the IDF in defiance of every wholesome norm.
Incomparably worse than this is the anti-democratic fact of the imposition of the four sources from which “the spirit” is derived. For a considerable portion of these sources clashes head-on with the faith of every Jew who remains faithful to the Torah in its entirety. In particular the fourth foundation, “universal moral values based on the value and dignity of the human being,” which includes a public admission of an essential difference between the values of the “tradition of the Jewish people throughout its generations” and that “universal” morality, which for some reason is so universal that it is not the heritage of the Jewish people — by the very formulation of such a statement.
This is not all. It turns out that the first source is “the tradition of the IDF and its combat heritage as the Israel Defense Forces.” And here, gaping, we contemplate this feigned innocence, and this contempt for the intelligence of the soldiers and of the citizens of the State. To which tradition is the intent? To the Deir Yassin affair? Or perhaps to the revenge operations of Sharon’s Unit 101? To the abandonment of IDF soldiers at the start of the Yom Kippur War by the government of Israel so as not to anger the United States? To the scandals of the First and Second Lebanon Wars, in which the lives of IDF soldiers were abandoned in a disgraceful manner unparalleled in the history of well-ordered states?
As for the second foundation, “the tradition of the State of Israel and its democratic principles,” it is simply ludicrous. To whom is the intent in saying “their democratic principles”? To the anti-democratic Ben-Gurion in most of his decisions? To the repugnant tyranny that characterized many of the heads of the State from its founding until now (and that of Sharon is but one of them), even if they were never formally defined as such? For to this very moment there is no one among us capable of opening his mouth without risking his workplace, his position, a confrontation with the judicial system, with the army and more! There are tyrannies that for some reason are defined as “democratic” when they conform to the expectations of well-known circles.
In truth, in this respect, already from the introduction we encounter a necessarily cunning and deliberate deception, when it declares “in subordination to the democratic civilian government authorities, and subject to the laws of the State.” For there is no place in the Declaration of Independence in which the State of Israel was defined as a democratic state, but only as a Jewish one. If so, this document anchors the defense that the IDF provides in a foundational premise that is not part of the Declaration of Independence, and the ploy is transparent: to enable the pulling of the rug of obedience out from under the document, should the State of Israel one day be deemed undemocratic in the eyes of some citizens.
After a solemn assertion that one must build upon “the tradition of the Jewish people throughout its generations,” it turns out that this is still deficient and requires completion from universal morality, and the IDF spirit will be built upon “universal moral values based on the value and dignity of the human being.” Apart from the logical contradiction that screams to the heavens — for if one is to rely on the Jewish tradition and it is deficient, how can one rely on moral values that do not belong to it? And if we are told that in certain domains we will rely on the one and in others on the second, then not only is there in the matter an attempt at a cultural-values creation that deviates blatantly from the history and the past of the people, but there is in it even an abandonment of its identity (at least partially). To this is added the further question: who will determine when the one is chosen and when the other? And who is authorized to choose? And we did not even dare to ask: to which universal morality do we refer? To the one displayed in the extermination camps with the ideological and ethical support of Heidegger? To the one displayed in the Gulag? Or perhaps to the antisemitism surging throughout the world in the name of the value and dignity of the human being?
There is in the matter something both scandalous and wicked. Wicked, because according to the formulators it is a “supreme value,” yet a value that in order to anchor it one must turn to universal morality — if so, we have before us a declaration according to which this supreme and exalted value is lacking in Hebrew law and tradition! Antisemites could not express themselves better than this. And it is scandalous because the founder of this value, Justice Aharon Barak, inserted it through a ploy bordering on classic Israeli deception. For the concept of “human dignity” is an imitation of the laws of the nations presented as if shaped here, and of course through a translation that distorts the foreign source that served it — and one may hope that this deception and this translation are not malicious. The concept of “human dignity” (kevod ha-adam), drawn from the language of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” in its updated UNESCO edition, was supposed to be a translation of the foreign concept “le respect de l’homme,” whose precise meaning in Hebrew is “an attitude of respect toward the human being.” But every reasonable person understands that an abyss yawns between the two concepts. For the granting of dignity to every person merely by virtue of being human is an arbitrary determination lacking any rational and legal basis, whereas an attitude of respect toward him is a demand imposed upon each of us toward the other (before any examination of whether he is indeed worthy of that respect), and not the granting of an egoistic status.
Our Sages were far more cautious and far more sparing in everything concerning the granting of these or those rights to each and every individual. In the famous Mishnah in Tractate Avot, rights were not established for man; rather it is said, “Beloved is man, for he was created in the [Divine] image.” This refers to affection on the part of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, toward him, to a gift granted to him — and moreover without any right, but only out of God’s love for him. And the Holy One, Blessed Be He, took care to inform him of this affection; therefore we learned in the continuation: “an extra measure of affection was made known to him, that he was created in the image.”
Basic Values
And now the piercing discussion of these values presented as “basic values.”
The first, which is not at all a value but a determination of a goal — “The purpose of the IDF is to defend the existence of the State of Israel, its independence and the security of its citizens and residents” — stuns and outrages. For some reason it turns out that the IDF, that is, the Israel Defense Forces, is not such, but rather it is an army defending the State; and innocently we ask: if anything, it would have been fitting to call it the army defending the State of Israel! But there is worse than this. For there is no single civilized people on earth that sees in its army an army defending the State, but rather an army defending the people. Therefore there is an American army, a French army, an English army, but there is no army defending a State, and rightly so. A people has the “right” of self-defense, but the abstract concept of “State” — a concept harboring within it the danger of a fascist cannibalism (to use an expression of Leibowitz, the teacher and master of the formulator of the IDF’s pseudo-ethical code) — has no right of defense whatsoever. A State is not a living human entity that has a right to exist. And if anyone dares to claim that this virtual entity called a State, whose very existence is negated when its enemies attack it, has a right of defense independent of its citizens, let us see it prove its ability to defend itself alone without its citizens. In every well-ordered state, an army is the army of the people, or mercenaries in the service of the people, not the army of the State.
And what is outrageous is the fact that a people who has just been miraculously saved from that very monstrous ideology founded on the principle “Deutschland über alles” (Germany above all) sets up, through the rotten ideology of the formulators of this code, the State above the people — exactly as with our executioners! In this Machiavellian severance between the State and its citizens lies the danger of every fascist, Bolshevik or tyrannical regime of any kind.
How careful our people was, in its Torah and its halakhot, of this bitter error. It recognizes nothing but the people of Israel, the Land of Israel, the Torah of Israel — the name of the father of the family, the name of a people; in short, it recognizes only values and concepts connected to a living and breathing people.
And regarding the basic values, the scandal reaches its peak. They begin with a foolish declaration according to which “the purpose of the IDF is to defend the existence of the State of Israel.” How can a soldier defend the existence of the State of Israel against Iran, or against a resolution of the European Community and the like? Not only is this not his role, it is not within his ability. And further: when the State is attacked politically, propagandistically or in the media, is he expected to take up a weapon and eliminate a UN ape or a journalist and the like? And if the intent is that, when the State of Israel is in this or that danger, and he is given an order, he must act accordingly — not only is this self-evident, but it would have been fitting to write that the purpose of the IDF is to fulfill all the orders given to the soldier when the State is in danger; except that then there is no longer a problem of the soldiers, but rather a problem of the IDF as a body. And further: did the formulators of the code wish to construct some kind of little red book (similar to “Das Kapital”), which every soldier and commander in the IDF must recite each morning in place of “Elohai Neshamah,” so that his soul might thrill at the sound of the “holy spirit” flowing from this document, similar to some sort of Torah reading?
And as for the “second value,” “love of the homeland and loyalty to the State,” we hear once again absurdities: “At the foundation of service in the IDF stand love of the homeland and commitment and devotion to the State of Israel.” For most Israeli soldiers at the founding of the State, and tens of percent to this very day, their homeland is not the State of Israel but a foreign land — so how can one base the IDF on other homelands?!
And as for the “third value,” the most unbearable of all, called “human dignity”: “The IDF and its soldiers are obligated to preserve human dignity. Every human being is of value, regardless of origin, religion, nationality, gender, status or role.” On the concept of “human dignity” we dwelt just now, but it is fitting to complete the picture and say, without any hesitation: this is a clearly idolatrous religious determination. Religious, because it is some sort of “creed” founded only on the subjective recognition of its determiners, without any rational basis, and is nothing but an expression of some blind faith. And idolatrous, because it sets itself up as a “supreme value” (see above) — a refined and updated formulation of “God Most High” on the lips of Malki-Tzedek — a value founded on nothing Divine, but only on subjective human consciousness. Only a fool devoid of all logical thought can claim that the IDF must preserve “human dignity” when it is commanded to kill? Is there in killing a greater trampling of dignity than this?
And regarding the determination that there is value to every human being, “value” without distinction, this is a nebulous “philosophical” determination that was cunningly introduced by the rebbe of militant, anti-religious, extremist Israeli secularism, Aharon Barak, through the channel of the legal system and by means of the “Human Dignity and Liberty” law. And we ask: through the cunning use of the term “value” that is not anchored in any universally accepted conception, on what does this declaration, lacking any rational basis, rest, apart from the chronic human egoism that determines that every person has value and dignity? And who at all is authorized to make such a determination? Does Hitler, may his name be cursed, have value and dignity? Torquemada? Petliura? Stalin, the murderer of tens of millions more than Hitler? Does Arafat, may his name be cursed, have value? There is no system entitled and authorized to determine that every person has value. For there to be such, it would have to be above all of humanity; and if so, only the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is fit to fill such a place. If a society adopts such a declaration, it does not rely on any objective or rational fact, but only on a selfishness concealed behind a cloak of humanism — and especially when at the same time it holds to that same militant secular materialist approach spreading like a plague in every secular Western society.
To grant dignity to every criminal, to every murderer and to every human monster — this is the essence of the Christian spirit. In his famous essay against Simone Weil, Levinas quoted it, stating this explicitly:
Does Divine goodness express itself in an attitude of infinite compassion toward man, through a supernatural participation in his suffering — so moving to Simone Weil — or in admitting him into one’s “society,” in relating to him with dignity? To love one’s neighbor can be interpreted as discerning his wretchedness and his decay, but it can be interpreted as contemplating his face, his mastery in his relations with us, the majesty of his standing as a partner of God, who has rights over us. The supernatural love of God in the Christianity of Simone Weil, if it reaches beyond participation in suffering toward the misfortune of the created creature, cannot be interpreted except as a love of evil itself. God loved evil; here lies perhaps — and we say this with particular respect — the most shocking aspect of this Christianity and of the metaphysics of the “Passion.” But into this respect much horror is mingled. Our path passes elsewhere. (Difficult Freedom, in my translation.)
In their distorted way of sanctifying every folly so long as it originates in one national establishment or another, many in the religious Zionist world immediately sought a Torah basis for the chronic secularism of the State’s mechanisms, and “recruited” utterly baseless claims in order to “convert” the foreign idea and to purify the creeping thing with a hundred and fifty reasons.
And what is this universal morality? There are no two philosophers capable of agreeing today even on a single definition of the concept “morality,” and here, among us, they wish to impose on a military system and on simple young soldiers the obligation to act according to something that does not exist at all in reality?! Or perhaps it is a matter of Christian morality, celebrated throughout the world, according to which every terrorist has a right to exist, a right to self-determination, in the best Christian tradition that taught people to love the enemy even at the height of his baseness (with a slight caveat: of course, provided he is not a Jew!!!), and took care to violate and trample this very determination throughout all of history?
Every reasonable person knows that the formulators of the document in this “Rococo taste,” in establishing this principle, intended only to preserve the life of the enemy, to be careful not to harm him, even at the cost of the lives of our soldiers, as is customary to instruct in the IDF for over twenty years now. According to this foolish and wicked directive, hundreds of soldiers lost their lives. For example, that soldier from an elite unit who was killed in an operation to apprehend a terrorist in the Gaza Strip only so as not to harm his wife. Presumably that woman was a righteous woman from the time of the Patriarchs! And in Jenin many soldiers paid with their lives for the cruelty of the government of Israel and the heads of the IDF, who ordered them to march and advance ten meters in six hours in terrain booby-trapped in a horrific manner, all so as not to harm “innocent civilians,” instead of erasing houses and neighborhoods in order to protect our soldiers and to defend the citizens of our State. We must raise our voice everywhere and announce, in the name of the Torah of God, that anyone who gives such orders is a cruel person, devoid of all humanity and all morality, and has no right to serve as a commander in an army, and a soldier is forbidden to serve under him. And for decades now IDF soldiers have been dying in vain in the Gaza Strip, in Judea and Samaria and in Lebanon, only so as not to harm the families of the terrorists, their neighbors and the citizens of other peoples. Where has the value of the life of our brothers and their dignity been hidden away — the dignity of their families, the dignity of the entire people who sent them? I want to hope that in the eyes of the formulators of this foolish document, a soldier’s family is not of lesser value than a terrorist’s family.
And all this within that same Western Christian conception that blurs the distinction between a people and an individual, between private morality within a people and morality between peoples, turning a conflict between peoples into an ordinary dispute between two citizens of one state subject to the same rules and values. The folly and the intellectual corruption reach their peak when they equate the murder of a citizen with the killing of a cruel enemy. To anyone with a grain of integrity, and all the more so a spark of Jewishness, the one is a crime but the other is a commandment. Only Leibowitz, in his philosophical abomination and in the best Christian tradition, would equate the killing of an enemy with the killing of a citizen. The cunning section that purports to express humanity is sustained only at the expense of the lives of the soldiers and citizens of the attacked State of Israel, in the best of that Christian tradition, as Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh aptly highlighted in Jewish Morality and Christian Morality, writing:
If Yeshu preached love of all human beings, if Christianity succeeded in granting itself, better than any other religious system, the appearance of human morality, this was at the expense of the love consecrated no less to homeland and to society. These two groups, these two great forms of human association, enriched with their remnants and with the special grace attached to them that other grace, that other love, which became the portion of Christianity: universal grace. Christianity recognizes only one homeland: the world, or perhaps more accurately, heaven; Christianity recognizes only one society, the spiritual society. The homeland, its rights, its needs, the limits it sometimes imposes on universal grace, just as one right sometimes limits another right; civil society, truly human society — that is, of bodies and souls together — its own rights, its claims, the system of relationships it creates among its members, the rules and laws regulating these relationships: all these vanish entirely from the eyes of Christianity. Does Christianity recognize any political enemy? No. Does it recognize social justice? Also no. And indeed one may state without hesitation that without the possibility of the existence of a political enemy there is no homeland, and without social rivalry there is no society and no social justice.
And why is this dignity applied in the IDF only with respect to our enemies, but never with respect to our own soldiers? Why was human dignity not expressed in “Homa u-Magen” (Operation Defensive Shield), when IDF soldiers were required to endanger their lives so as not to endanger the lives of their enemies?
The Values
And upon hearing the term “the values of the IDF” (already mentioned in the introduction), we remain simply stunned: who authorized the IDF to determine values? Is it a Divine or religious authority, or some other constitutional body empowered to determine values? And if these values came from outside it, who authorized those who brought them to determine such values without national consent?
“Devotion to the mission and striving for victory — The soldier will fight and act with courage in the face of all dangers and obstacles before him, and will cleave to his mission with determination and wisdom, even to the point of risking his life.”
And this is nothing alongside the absurdity that follows. In what was supposed to be merely an introduction, we already hear commands of the sort “IDF soldiers are obligated to fight, to devote all their strength, and even to risk their lives in defense of the State of Israel, its citizens and its residents. IDF soldiers will act according to the values of the IDF and its commands, while maintaining the laws of the State and human dignity, and honoring the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” — with a clear admission that there is a difference between the State and its citizens: “in defense of the State of Israel, its citizens and its residents.” And we stand astonished before such a demand that bypasses the IDF, for either the soldier must judge all this by his own powers, or he must rely on his commanders, the army’s commanders, to verify that what is demanded of him indeed conforms to these expectations.
And now to the last section, which constitutes a conclusion that wearies with more words of nonsense. Let us hear those “pearls” from within it.
For example: “The soldier will fight and act with courage in the face of all dangers and obstacles before him, and will cleave to his mission with determination and wisdom, even to the point of risking his life.” How can one command “courage” and “self-sacrifice”? For in order to reveal such sublime qualities, motivation is required that is not only not nurtured in the IDF, but, moreover, most of the IDF’s mechanisms are built precisely in the manner needed to break any such motivation. And I am not speaking of the political decisions that have been breaking, for fifteen years, every motivation to fight, since everything we conquer will be handed over to our enemies, and every terrorist we capture will be released, and if not, will at least be turned into a senior minister in the “PA government” — but only on condition that he “merited” to spill enough Jewish blood (see Arafat, and Abu Mazen at Ma’alot and more).
Or further: “The soldier will see himself as an active partner in defending the security of the State, its citizens and its residents. The soldier will act with a constant display of involvement, initiative and diligence, with discretion and within the framework of his authority, ready to bear responsibility for the results of his actions. Credibility — The soldier will present matters as they are, in completeness and with precision, in planning, execution and reporting, and will act so that his comrades and commanders can rely on him in carrying out the missions. Personal example — The soldier will conduct himself according to what is demanded of him and will fulfill what he demands of others, out of recognition of his ability and his responsibility, in the army and outside it, to constitute a fitting example. Human life — The soldier will conduct himself in a considered and safe manner in all his actions, out of recognition of the supreme importance of human life. In combat he will endanger himself and his comrades to the extent required to carry out the mission.”
And in the “sacred” domain of “purity of arms,” a domain that gained much publicity already since the First Lebanon War — but only in order to attack Sharon’s decisions at the time, while blatantly ignoring the folly of the semantics — for how can a weapon be pure? How can this instrument, built to spill blood, be considered pure? It will be such only in the eyes of those tyrannical and cruel rulers who used the “holy cannon” to fire on their brothers! Our Sages already firmly rejected the position of Rabbi Eliezer, who saw a weapon as an “ornament” with respect to Shabbat and thereby permitted carrying it on the holy day.
And what is this purity? Let us hear: “The soldier will use his weapon and his force to carry out the mission only, and only to the extent required for this, and will preserve the human image even in combat. The soldier will not use his weapon and his force to harm non-combatants and prisoners, and will do all he can to prevent harm to their lives, their bodies, their dignity and their property.” And from here it follows that all that remains for the soldier is to go about in every battle with an attorney attached to him to manage all his steps and to spare himself prosecution. There is here a grave distortion of the concept of war. Perhaps it may even be derived from this foolish decision that if we are able to shoot the enemy in the legs it would be forbidden to kill him! And the preservation of the “human image” is even more outrageous. Who said that man has an image? And what is this concept at all? With brazen effrontery, very many circles in the world that have stripped themselves of faith in God forged the Divine Torah text, and in place of “the image of God” (tzelem Elokim) they built an idol and a molten image by the name of “human image” (tzelem enosh). Precisely that which grants man his image — that slight resemblance he has to the Holy One, Blessed Be He — was omitted, and man was turned into an image of himself! What narcissism! From the standpoint of the Torah, the elevation of man does not derive from his being identical to himself, but from his resembling the Exalted One and from his connecting with this Exalted One.
But apart from this disgraceful forgery that tramples all the education of the people of Israel throughout its generations and the entire faithful Jewish essence, there is worse than all: instead of devoting all his strength to physical and moral harm to the enemy, the soldier must now turn his main attention to the damages that might result from his activity!
Everyone who has fought knows that the basis of mesirut nefesh (self-sacrifice) — which is in its entirety a pure Jewish concept — is that very enthusiasm to harm the enemy and all connected to him by every possible means and at every possible opportunity, and without any consideration, at least in time of war!
And the demand of “professionalism — The soldier will strive to acquire the professional knowledge and the skills required to carry out his role, and will apply them while striving for constant improvement of personal and unit achievements” serves as a cover for a desperate attempt to atone for the failures of the Israeli education system, which did not succeed in instilling national values-based motivation. And the army finds itself required to constitute a supplementary and substitute educational system. What spiritual and values-based poverty!
As for “discipline — The soldier will act to the best of his ability for the full and successful execution of what is demanded of him according to the orders and their spirit. The soldier will be strict to give only lawful orders, and will not obey patently unlawful orders” — the soldier is required to be at least a legal expert in order to fulfill his role. He must know, and even determine, what the “spirit” of the orders is, and greater than that, to know thoroughly what unlawful actions are. Show me one soldier who knows what a patently unlawful order is!
And from here to the foolish section: “comradeship — The soldier will act out of brotherhood and devotion to his comrades in service, and will always rush to their aid when they need him or are dependent on him, despite any danger or difficulty, even to the point of risking his life.” What do concepts of brotherhood have to do with a military framework? Hidden here is a sublime and cunning effort to conceal the Jewish national belonging that always served as the basis for all brotherhood in Israel, and for every collective and military struggle. There is also a desperate attempt to build love and brotherhood on a distinctly Christian basis of a relationship between individuals while bypassing the national framework. The soldier is required to express brotherhood toward his comrade insofar as he is a comrade, and not insofar as he is a son of the same people. If indeed so, then it is not a fighting people, but a group of friends in the best Christian or Bolshevik tradition.
And the last section, “mission — The soldier will see in his military service a mission; he will be ready to contribute all he can to the defense of the State, its citizens and its residents. This, being a representative of the IDF acting by virtue of and within the framework of the authorities granted to him according to the army’s orders,” is among the most terrible of all. It turns out that the soldier is an emissary — but of whom? Of the army! In other words, he is an emissary of himself or of his commanders. There is no trace of the people of Israel, no trace of the values of our people throughout its generations, no trace of the special value of the Land of Israel in the eyes of the last of the Jews in all times, but only a mission of a military body. This is a fascist position in the full sense.
Summary
This abominable document does not include even a single hint, a single trace, of the people of Israel, of the Land of Israel, and certainly not of the Torah of Israel. There is in it no Jewish element whatsoever, and it is entirely foreign, steeped in values that we vomited up in the course of our exile — an exile that admittedly burdened us with its yoke and spilled our blood endlessly, but which together with this enabled us to identify ourselves, to recognize our essence, to build our spiritual world, which rulers and advisers devoid of all morality in the First Temple and in the Second Temple — exactly as today — caused us to lose, and exactly as today.
It is entirely a repudiation of all that we were and of what we must be in order to be able to be called Jews. No people on earth would reject it; rather, it could embrace it gladly, and this is proof that it is entirely a denial of the unique Jewishness of our people, and that there is in it not one thing belonging to us.
War, for the people of Israel faithful to the Tanakh — which, incidentally, is the only document granting the right of existence to the State of Israel and ownership of this land — was never arranged on the basis of the guidelines of a hi-tech company, as in this foolish document, but was a war in the name of a sublime Divine idea, and therefore bore the name “Milchemet Hashem” (the War of God), that is, a war in the name of a values-based, faith-based and Divine identity, and in no way and by no means a war of ordinary human existence; for in the latter the people of Israel knows how to solve its problems without any State, and it proved this in all the forced conversions of its history in all the lands of its exile. And these apostasies too can be “translated” into an updated form: the various assimilations. Leibowitz, the teacher of the chairman of the committee that formulated this document, already determined:
To base the existence of a people — which has no specific cultural-spiritual content and no specific way of life — on the State, that is, on the governmental mechanism, is the essence of fascist ideology. For what purpose maintain a “Jewish” people whose essence is nothing but “Jewish” sovereignty, a “Jewish” flag, a “Jewish” government, a “Jewish” army and the rest of the trappings of national cannibalism?
And although we need not respond here to the claims of that sick philosopher, because our path in holiness continues in defiance of him and in defiance of every militant secularist, an obligation is imposed on those segments of Israeli society that reject and struggle against a universalist identity, to contend with his claims.
Our role in the army is not to engage in philosophical-ethical discussions, and even less to shape values and ethics. Our role is to do everything in order to defend our people and our land at any price, against those who seek to harm them. The cost of the warfare should not be our problem, but rather the problem of the aggressor, and especially with respect to the State of Israel, which never attacked anyone without first being attacked by him. Instead of engaging in an imaginary ethics that sacrifices its sons and its soldiers, the army must seek ways to fulfill its role, that is, to win the campaign. What the army proves in the meantime is that it is incapable of acting as it once did, precisely because it binds itself with a pseudo-morality that places its soldiers and the citizens of the State on the altar instead of its enemies.
Notes
1 This article was published at the time in French in the booklet Israel-Forum N°3, December 2006, editor Dr. Izhak Adda, with the participation of distinguished figures such as Prof. Moshe Sharon, Pierre Yitzhak Lurçat and others.
2 In the original: “compassion surnaturelle,” with the emphasis Levinas’s own. Levinas here intends the distinctly Christian term, which demands participation in any suffering whatsoever in the world, in the sense of “and he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed,” etc.
3 It may also be translated: dread (paltzut).
4 Every pipe, every can, every wall, every floor was booby-trapped.
5 My note: and in its modern edition, the intellectual society or the political society.