School of War - Ep 117: Shlomo Brody on the Ethics of War

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Rabbi Shlomo Brody, executive director of Ematai and author of Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality, joins the show to talk about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas and the Jewish tradition of military ethics. ▪️  Times      •      01:28 Introduction      •      04:04 Just war     •      07:27 The Bible as a framework     •      13:34 International service      •      18:33 Reprisals     •      21:37 Purity of arms      •      27:09 Collateral damage     •      33:41 International law     •      35:48 Proportionality      •      39:40 A dangerous ideology   Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Israel is entering its sixth month of war in Gaza, and its enemies and critics continue to draw attention to the human costs of the war in an effort to restrict Israel's actions, actions that, in my view, have been remarkably restrained. But broader questions of the justice of war and the ethics of war are as course as applicable here as anywhere else. What does the Jewish tradition have to say about these questions? Is there a Jewish ethics of war? Let's investigate. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a statement. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who not see buildings. We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to be joined today by Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody.

He's the executive director of Emmetai and the Jewish Law Live columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He is also the author, most recently of Ethics of Our Fathers, a Jewish view on War and Morality. Shlomo, thank you so much for joining the show. It's great to be here. As you pointed out to me just before we started recording, your book is sadly all too relevant. I wanted to start just by asking you about you and your family in the aftermath of October the 7th. How has your family been affected by the day itself and everything that is ensued? Well, thank you for asking.

I live in between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Israel. It was a very shocking day, October 7th, on many different levels. On a personal level, it was just shocking because we know so many people were affected in so many ways. I have two friends who have kids who were taking hostage that day, and they're still in captivity. I have four nephews who are all drafted into the Israeli army, one in Gaza, one at Lebanese border, one in Judea and Samaria, once in the middle of the country. And we've had in the city where I live 20 shivas, meaning 20 homes that have lost people since October 7th.

So there's a lot going on. It's been a difficult time in May levels. At the same time, it's also been very inspiring to see Israeli society come together. Really, there would have been a lot of divisiveness in the country beforehand, but people understand what's really important. People are coming together and helping each other a lot of different ways. And also to see, you know, friends and, you know, people of good nature from around the world who have also expressed their support for Israel, both within the Jewish community and beyond.

And I can't tell you actually how much that means to us here in Israel. I'm not sure people even realize how much Israelis follow the way the world is reacting to the news here. And it means a lot when we see support. Yeah. So I think the direction we should go here is your book is this really interesting exploration of the Jewish tradition of military ethics. And as a consequence, it gets a little theoretical. And I thought we might start that way. we'll sort of really zoom out and talk about the ethics of war at a general way.

And then as our conversation proceeds, we'll sort of start zooming back in in the general direction of the war that Israel is fighting right now, primarily in Gaza, but also obviously to an extent on its northern border and even in the West Bank and elsewhere. Can I ask just the most general possible question before we even get to the Jewish tradition of military ethics, say a few words for listeners who may have some knowledge of the military or even experience in the military themselves. but who may not be familiar with, you know, the formal study of ethics in a military context. What does that mean? Yeah, it's, I mean, there's a really rich tradition that began. It's usually thought of as being, you know, originating in medieval period, Aquinas and others, great Christian thinkers. But this has always been an issue that great military thinkers and strategies have wondered about,

which is, should there be restraints on warfare and what? What justifies going to war in the first place and how we fight within war. That's a long tradition known as the just war tradition in many ways in terms of what justifies going to war. That's one major question. And then the second question is, how does one fight in war? What does it mean to fight ethically within war? And there's been a rich tradition on this issue that has different variations over the centuries.

In more recent decades, it's somewhat been dominated by an attempt to create law around these topics, not just to make some form of ethical statements, but to create some form of international law, the international humanitarian law and Geneva Conventions and things along those lines. I'd say that's been a mixed result of how successful that has in terms of both bringing anyone to justice and also the establishing real, genuine ethical standards around the world. But it is at least an attempt to say that when we fight war, we should be seeking deeply about what justifies going to war with all of its bloodshed and how we fight ethically within war. Yeah. And it's it's no surprise when you think about it for a moment or two that the very

issue of international law, which in, you know, in the minds of its proponents and certainly of the original dreamers who invested a lot of work and thought into creating or attempting to create such an edifice, becomes a tool of strategy, becomes a tool for, you know, one power to try to get a leg up over another power at issue that Israel, of course, is very familiar with. Yeah, but it's been an issue even from the get-go. I mean, it's actually in the book, I discuss how many Jews after World War I, which was a horrible, horrible war at many levels. Jews fought on both sides of that war over a million fighters.

And Jews suffered greatly amongst many others, of course, during that war. And many of them hoped that international law would be a way to sort of create. some form of justice in this system that seems to just produce all sorts of horrific things. It's been deeply disappointing on many levels in the Israeli context. But I think others as well have seen this. I mean, who's stopping the Russians right now? Does anyone think that Putin's going to be brought to trial? Who's saying anything about the Syrians?

And there are many, of course, examples here. And in that respect, I think it doesn't mean that we should ignore ethical standards. it just means that we can't depend on international bodies to sort of impose or to regulate those standards. So you tell this interesting story in the book that it was, in some ways, this project was inspired by a student who challenged you. I'm going to mess up the details here. You should tell the full version, of course, in your own words, but a student who essentially

challenged you about how anyone could ever use the earliest Jewish traditions, including the Bible as a guide for ethical conduct and war, considering the, you know, the brutal nature of so much that is depicted in the Bible, then you describe this book in some ways as an answer to that question. Did I get the story right? Is that actually the launching off point for the project? Yeah, it's pretty similar. I invited Israel's leading military ethicist to speak about military ethics and how he used what he contributed to the IDF's code of ethics. And one of the students in the room who was coming from a religious background and the religious seminary asked the professor, What does Judaism have to say about this?

I mean, the professor wasn't particularly religiously oriented, but certainly a knowledgeable person and lived in Israel for many, many decades. And his response was, well, the only thing Judaism has to say about this is horrific battles in the Bible. I want to have nothing to do with that. And the room sort of exploded when he said that because many people were pretty insulted by it. But of course, he was raising a point, which is that if you want to bring religion into the conversation, are you so sure you want that? Maybe religion is a source of violence and fundamentalism.

And I understand where that's coming from to a certain extent. I understand, particularly we can see this in the Middle East, of course, and we've seen it throughout history as well. But I always try to remind people that in the 20th century, which is a horrifically violent century with horrific wars, people like Pol Pot and Stalin and Hitler, they had nothing to do with religion. Right?

So to think that religion is going to be a source of violence, violence or these source of violence is really a mistake. And I think that besides that, it's deeply important to recognize that religion actually can be a source of great wisdom and providing a framework for thinking of the ethical dilemmas that come up in war. In your own work in research, and I recognize this is a really big question, how do you balance the inputs into your thinking on military ethics that you derive from Jewish religious texts and what I'll call for lack of a better phrase, you just sort of core, core, you know, liturgical documents, be they the Bible or rabbinical, early rabbinical text, things like that,

on the one hand. And Jewish history on the other, because both obviously in certain respects and perhaps in certain ways in tension with one another contribute to whatever it is that it means to be Jewish and whatever it would mean to think about military ethics in a Jewish context. How do you, how do you, and perhaps there are other major input. but those are the two that seem obviously to suggest themselves. How do you balance that? How do you think about that? Well, it's a great question because Jewish history has had a lot of warfare,

but much of that warfare, Jews have been victims and haven't been able to fight in those wars. We're talking about many, many centuries of Jews effectively being powerless. And that was a great moral travesty, let alone a political problem as well. And I think that one of the questions always comes up is you have certain teachings They'll find in the Bible and the Talmud and other Jewish religious texts. But there's always this question, which is, don't we also learn something from our historical experience?

We've seen the brutality of war. We've seen what it means to be a victim of illicit warfare. And if we ever get the opportunity to have power again, which we, of course, do now today, then the question becomes, is that impact our experience, somehow impact the way. way we fight. And I think that can go a lot of different ways because you, of course, can say, well, we want to make sure we have restraint in the way we fight. This is very important to us. We want to have really high standards of because, precisely because we know exactly what it's like when people fight against us in such horrific manners. But we also understand there's a moral imperative

to defend ourselves because we've learned through Jewish history that if you don't defend yourself, you can't depend on anyone else to do that for you. And in that respect, self-defense is a moral imperative. It's not just a matter of interest. And this is, by the way, one of the things I think is crucially important to understand the Israeli psyche, but to understand anyone when they're thinking deeply about military ethics, which is that sometimes we peg things as, well, it's a matter of interest, national interest versus humanitarianism.

So you say, well, it'll be great if we attack this place, but, maybe too many civilian casualties. What about humanitarian considerations? And I think that's just a bad framing of the issues. If this attack, this invasion, whatever might be, is necessary for one's self-defense, there's a moral imperative to go through with this act because you're trying to defend your people. Now, of course, you're going to always ask, is there other ways of doing this? It might cause fewer deaths or harm on the other side.

but we shouldn't think of this as pitting interest versus morals. We have competing moral values that are coming into play here. And I think that Jewish history and Jewish text have to be both brought into that conversation. So that way we appreciate, okay, what's that really at stake here? You alluded to the fact that a fair amount of your thinking and of the later tradition, later writing on these subjects is influenced by the long-hills. history of suffering of the Jewish people. And so that gives a kind of moral clarity on the one hand. What are some other consequences of, you know, there's this, there's this long period between

the Jewish states of millennia ago and the modern Jewish state where there's a great deal of suffering, as you point out. But also, as you also point out, a great deal of war fought by Jewish people on behalf of other states. There's always, I always remember much younger and it was sort of this obvious thing, but it just never crossed my mind being jarred the first time I read about a Jewish German veteran of the First World War, which again, makes perfect sense and it's totally natural, but it just, I were, you know, my whole upbringing in World War you was formed by, you know, being the child of a Second World War veteran. Right.

And I remember just being kind of confused by it initially. But there's obviously this long tradition. How does, how does that factor affect the evolution of Jewish military ethics? Yeah, well, when Jews are allowed it to armies, for many, many centuries, when Jews were living different places in Europe or other places around the world, They weren't seen as being loyal enough to be allowed into the army. There were exceptions to this, certainly 10th, 11th century, Spain of Jewish warriors, but by and large, Jews really only entered the military again in the 18th and later the 19th centuries.

And because of that, you are faced with really interesting questions for those soldiers when they don't feel it fully apart of the armies and the countries that they're serving because of the way they're being treated. They're not really full equally citizens, but they've allowed into. to the army. So that certainly raises a lot of questions. But once you get to particularly the 20th century, Jews feel very much a part of a lot of the countries they're in, certainly in Germany and World War I, but other places as well. And I think that there you have this real tension of identity and understanding exactly what you're fighting for and who you're fighting for.

But more than anything, Jews, because of that experience, start to think about the ethical questions that come up. I mean, when you have to start fighting, You have to ask, why am I fighting and who am I fighting? And for Jews, that was also interesting because you sometimes have situations where Jews were fighting on both sides of a war, you know, of a battle. And there are some of these dramatic events that sometimes get ridden about in which one Jewish soldier will kill another Jewish soldier, not knowing that each of them are Jewish. And then the dying Jewish soldier will scream out one of the last rites, you know, the prayer,

of the Shma prayer, it's known as. And it's this dramatic moment when you realize, okay, you've killed someone else who's a co-religionist. So, you know, I think that was always a very difficult experience. But as the 20th century advanced, Jews were fighting for countries like Britain and the United States where they felt very much at home, felt very patriotic, felt very much a part of that country, a lot of those tensions dissipated. I mean, there are many, many proud service, including by the little of my grandfather,

a blessed memory who served during World War II in the U.S. Army. Yeah. There's no reason you would be obsessed with this as I am, but on the off chance that you have, any familiarity with the Apple Plus TV show Masters of the Air? For whom, okay, so the central figure is Rosie Rosenthal, who I don't know if you, you may have heard of him because he is a fascinating figure.

Spoiler alert, anyone who, I mean, it's history, but anyone who's going to be disappointed by learning the rest of what happens to him before watching the show, skip ahead 30 seconds or so. But he's a guy grew up in New York, a lawyer, graduated from, I want to say, Brooklyn College of Law, something like that. And he joins up. He joins up right after Pearl Harbor, becomes a B-17 pilot and goes on to fly an incredible,

I think it's 52 missions, which means he re-ups after his first 25. And this is a period of the war where the average of life expectancy for a B-17 crew was something like 11 missions. Oh, wow. And so he survives this charnel house. And then he's a lawyer. and at the end of the war, he gets sent to Nuremberg. And he participates in the tribunals.

He's on the prosecution team, essentially. It's an incredible American story, incredible Jewish story, and a story of a kind of heroism that's hard to, I mean, it's hard to contemplate in that, you know, there's no shortage of examples in any war of being courageous in the moment, you know, when the bullets are flying, just kind of doing the right thing for the people to your left and right. everyone hopes that they would live up to that standard.

But imagine being the guy, this is what I can't get my head around, imagine being the guy who does 25 missions. You know, you've survived somehow. And then you just sign up for 25 more. I mean, that is incredible. Anyway, sorry, that's a bit of a rant. Well, it's very relevant because it helps those types of stories help transform the self-image of Jews.

And, you know, the whole idea of even writing a book about Jewish. military ethics would have been so foreign, let's say, you know, a 19th century Jew. And the type of, you know, even though, of course, these books are being written, and there's a Libra Code that's being written for the U.S. Civil War, you know, Lincoln commissions, and there are other ideas that are out there percolating, but the Jews didn't see themselves with this type of image, and in the 20th century, that changes with very powerful effects. How does the early Jewish state, how do the, the, the, the, the, the,

the leaders of Zionism as the state finally becomes a real, who, and I am not expert in these issues, so I may embarrass myself with some of these questions, but who, you know, that period of Zionism is heavily inflected with left-wing political ideology, right, and sort of socialist visions. How did they think about fighting in war in ethical terms? Are they more influenced by left-wing influences than they are by Judaism? How does that balance out? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think really the great debates emerged in the late 30s as the Zionist leaders are trying to get the British to give a state, the mandatory Palestine.

And there's a great Arab revolt between 36 and 39. And much of the Arab revolt wasn't really against the British, but was killing Jews who were living in Palestine at the time. And there's a big debate about how Jews could fight back. Everyone agrees we have to do self-defense. But there's a whole conversation about, well, is it a big debate. it legitimate to do reprisal attacks, which of course were well accepted in the world during that time period, but to do tip for tat would be very, very, you know, difficult for someone who

thinks ethically to do these types of things, right? So can you really justify such behavior? And I think some of the early Zionist thinkers were, you know, partly influenced just by the European experience and where they were coming from and just how they think about those issues in general. But there was definitely a impact from the Jewish tradition as well. well, some of the great leaders like Ben-Gurion looked to the rabbis of the time and said, okay, let's see what Judaism meant to say about it. And it was a really fascinating moment because Jews who hadn't thought about these issues for a long time were sort of searching through our text and to see, well, what do we have to say

about it? And in the end, actually, there's some very interesting and deep teachings that emerge in the medieval and beyond period, which Jews in the 20th century are able to invoke. But of course, part of what they're invoking as well is just ideas and norms that are percolating in the Western tradition that they feel and they understand from the 20th century. So you have some really interesting figures. There's like the Ashkenazic chief rabbi of mandatory Palestine named Rabbi Isaac Herzog. He had been the chief rabbi of Ireland during the Irish Revolution as well. And so you know very well what a revolutionary war looks like and what war looks like.

And he brings that to the table to that experience as well when 10, 15 years later, he's a mandatory Palestine. And so you have this really interesting phenomenon of figures, Zionist political leaders, rabbinical leaders and others who are sort of trying to merge together some form of Jewish thinking on the topic, but of course incorporating Western thought and their European experiences as well. So let's start maybe going thematically. Our conversation has kind of arrived at the time of Jewish.

statehood and go through issues that naturally come up in these discussions. And maybe you give us sort of tutorials on where the debate, what the stakes of the, well, maybe not the stakes, what the terms of the debate are within the Jewish tradition and where you come out or where you think things ought to come out. You mentioned this question of sort of tip for tat retaliation. And I guess in the context of the Arab Revoltax, we're talking about against civilians implicitly, right? Right. Absolutely. You're attacking Jewish civilians. So the question on the table is, can you attack Arab civilians in return? How did that actually shake out?

What were the terms of that debate? Well, there were some splinter groups, if you will, the Etzl group that did take part in such attacks. And they would shoot at, you know, some buses and other types of really clear civilian targets. And there was a majority of the Zionist leadership was very, very against it. And partly for moral reasons, they developed a term called purity of arms, which is still a term that gets invoked in Israel today, which says that we're going to fight, but we are going to fight in a way in which we promote a certain type of moral vision. And that idea of purity of arms

is very, very relevant, still gets invoked by the IDF today. There's also an interesting question on a pragmatic level, does it work? Meaning, if you actually attack civilians, does it work? And I think a lot of historians think it's not a very effective tactic. We see this, you know, when the British do what they'd call the morale bombing in World War II. And then afterwards, they'd say, listen, it didn't really help that much. Because when you do indiscriminate bombing, and certainly when you target non-combatants, it gets people very upset and they want to fight when they were fighting in return. The British, of course, understood that well from Coventry in London when the Blitz,

and that got people to say, okay, we're going to fight them on our beaches. And it doesn't work well with Israelis. When Israelis get attacked and we have terror bombings, were ready to fight and get up. So I think that was really a very telling moment. And by the time that the Zionists after World War II began a fight for independence, probably against the British, but also against Arabs living in mandatory Palestine, there's a much stronger understanding that we're not going to target non-combatants. It's really one of the first and important principles that gets established then. And it's one that I think continues to, you know, drive the IDF

today as well. And say a little bit more, if you would, about, I mean, you make reference to these pragmatic justifications. But what are the, you know, the rabbinic justifications or what, what comes from the tradition that's most significant that weighs into this position? Yeah. I mean, I think that the theological principle here, that all humans are created in the image of God, teaching of the book of Genesis has great moral implications as well. And that was invoked repeatedly by the rabbis of this era who said quite simply that while it's true we understand that warfare is a collective entity and we understand that people will be killed on both sides, including non-combatants. But the fact that all humans are created in the image of God views all humans

with a certain inherent dignity, and we don't want to desecrate that dignity by purposely attacking non-combatants, by purposely targeting non-combatants. Of course, certainly in the 30s and 40s, this is still an issue today, but certainly then, it's not like we had a precise warfare, right? It's not like we had these weapons that can, you know, exactly target and hit the exact, very specific targets like we do today. But there was at least an understanding that some form of random indiscriminate shooting is just morally inappropriate.

It's something that we just want to do. It was seen as a form of a tarnished form of nationalism. And Zionism wanted to see itself as an upstanding form of nationalism. And so I think that was a very important point where the notion of theology and religion came and brought an important balance to the potential excesses of nationalism. And that's, I think, in a healthy relationship a lot of ways,

when you can have religion and nationalism as you do with Zionism, working together but also balancing one another. Of course, the Zionist part was very critical because it pushed the rabbis to understand that after many centuries and not being able to fight, you have to realize we need a fight in order to defend ourselves, which was something that the Jewish tradition just didn't have that much of an imperative from because it didn't develop that type of tradition over the centuries. And the political movement forced the rabbis in many ways to confront this issue. So in that respect, I think it's a fascinating example of the relationship between religion and nationalism. So the Jewish tradition then, like most strands of tradition,

mum will find in the West, seeks to avoid or even prohibits the intentional killing of civilians. What about collateral killing of civilians? This is obviously a more complicated and more difficult thing. Israel's critics say, of course, it's committing to genocide in Gaza right now, which is, I think, offensive and ridiculous claim for anyone who wants to give it a moment's thought. But there's a related question, which is a more serious question. I think Israel has very strong grounds to defend itself on here, but I want to hear your take on it, that whatever Israel's legitimate goals may be, or whatever the legitimate cause of action that October the 7th gave it, the rate of civilian death in Gaza is simply so high that, you know, this manner of operations can't be justified and the war needs to

stop. Feel free to respond directly to that, but I also am curious to know about the sort of ethical framework in which thinking about civilians who die in war, which unfortunately, and as you point out at the end of the book, you know, precision weapons are hardly a cure all here is simply a factor. And it's a factor in Gaza today. Yeah, absolutely. No, collateral damage is understood as being morally complex, but justifiable. I think there are two different elements to this. One, it has to do, of course, with what your intent is, right? Your intent is to harm the combatants.

And this is a known idea of double effect theory, right? That's out there in other traditions as well, that says, well, what your intent really matters quite a lot here. Now, of course, we also understand, though, that there is an inevitable amount of damage that will happen anyway. So how much can intent really obviate that? problem. And I think that there are different answers to this in different traditions. I think in the Jewish tradition, there is also understanding of not so much collective punishment, which we don't believe

in, but we do understand that you cannot ignore on a human reality level that people are part of a collective entity and there's going to be collective implications in these types of situations. And that's a tragedy in many ways. Sometimes, of course, it's a great phenomenon, right? We all benefit when our collective does great things, we live in successful societies, America, Israel, Canada, Britain, whatever else you are, we benefit from that, right? Even though we don't necessarily deserve credit for a lot of the things that we benefit from. But so, too, there is a certain amount of a collective identity that can cause you harm. That's part of the human reality, and that's a tragic element of the human reality and comes to war. And so I think that there's a combination

here are factors which understands that, A, we don't intend to harm the non-combatants, but B, we have to understand that much of the responsibility here lies with those in the other side that are causing these damages. And so, you know, in the case of Gaza today, and first of all, you know, the numbers are hard to know exactly because the number of casualties coming out of Gaza are being supplied by Hamas, right? But let's even say they're right. Let's say it's about, I don't know, 30,000. That's what they're talking about right now. And let's say the IDF is right that's killed about 12, 13,000 fighters of Hamas. Well, if you take that into consideration, and then you also take consideration, we think that about 2,000 of the Gaza casualties came from

Hamas' own weapons, which just failed to cross the border. And so their rockets land within Gaza. You're actually talking about like a one-to-one ratio. And that's incredibly low. I mean, incredibly low. I don't think there are many countries around the world, U.S. included, who can claim that when they fought in wars, the number of the ratio between non-combatants to combatants is so low. So the claim of genocide, of course, is absolutely ridiculous. But I think in general, Israel is taking a certain amount of, not pride, but satisfaction,

the fact that they've been able to fight a war in a way where a proportionality is being very much respected and that we're trying to make. minimize that cloud damage. I think the biggest question we're going to have to be asking. I think this is a question the West desperately needs to ask itself, is when push comes to shove, if you think there's a justification to get rid of an evil threat on your borders. But at some point, you're going to have to take actions that are going to need to be decisive,

particularly when, in the case of Hamas, now are they hiding amongst their civilians, but literally underneath them. And if the West doesn't develop an understanding of just warfare, which says that when your intent is to kill the combatants, and because they are a real threat, you have to be willing to accept a certain amount of collateral damage. And we see the West is having a very hard time with this concept right now. You see it with Trudeau and Canada. You see with President Biden as well, you know, talking about horrible pictures. And yes, they're horrible pictures. They're tragedies.

But it doesn't mean that there's moral responsibility here on the Israeli side. And if the West doesn't get that soon, we're going to have a lot of issues, but not just in Israel. We're going to have it when America has to fight and Britain has to fight and many others. And, of course, the war could stop today if Hamas released all the hostages and surrendered. They're obviously not going to do that. Right. To be frank with you, the war would stop today if Hamas would just release all the hostages. Right.

I mean, I'm not saying that's a good thing, but I think Israel would just accept it there and they have a lot of international pressure because of that. And so I read like right before he got on, you know, New York Times headlines discussing two parts, one of which is Hamas isn't satisfied with the new deal that's being offered to them for hostage release. They released, you know, convicted terrorists. And then the second one is about world leaders pressuring Israel to do X, Y, or, or, you know, and Z and ceasefire, whatnot. And that's a losing formula for the West. And we need to understand that. Well, and ruthless men who don't give a fig for the ethical considerations that you

are studying, whether in the Jewish tradition or in any tradition, or simply have an ethical vision that's much darker. Maybe is a different way of putting it. Yeah, it's much darker. And it's absolutely correct. And we have to recognize the fact that's going to impact the way we fight. Right. Well, like my reference to international law earlier, which,

you quite rightly push back on a little bit and pointed out that, you know, the great promise of international law is for the weak and the oppressed. But in a similar way, just as how international law can become a battleground in which states or entities seek to gain their own advantage and harm their enemies. So here, so in this question of what is normal and what is acceptable in terms of civilian casualties, that itself becomes part of the battleground. And part of, you know, Hamas is very obvious operating concept. You know, if we imagine, this is a little whimsical, but if you sort of imagine the Hamas briefing room on October the 6th and the slide deck going through, you know, what we're going to do in the worst case scenario of Israel really comes in

force after we, after we do this crazy evil thing, you know, obviously the use of civilian casualties, the use of the hostages, these are all elements in a defensive plan. And it takes a very blinkered view of strategy to miss that, that this is all part of the point, that leveraging international diplomatic pressure to stop the Israeli advance is obviously what you're going to do is a relatively weak military force. Lawfare, law force they refer to today now as is a real issue. And we have to recognize the fact that Hamas is essentially using the perception of what international law is as a human shield. They're using international law. to shield them from a proper military response.

That's an outrage. Now, one of the things I try to argue in the book is that when one understands both ethics, and for that matter, international law properly, you will understand that this shouldn't be the case. But there's no doubt there are many NGOs and many governments out there who are more than willing to play along with that game with Hamas.

And that's a very dangerous phenomenon. Let me ask about another sort of common topic in military ethics, which is the question of proportionality, which often comes up in sort of tactical terms. You know, they shot at us with a rifle. Can we drop a bomb on them? But we can zoom out and sort of see it in conflict level terms as well. And I'll be really crude in the way I ask this question, and you will know where my sympathies lie, but I'm curious to know your answer. So October the 7th was responsible for the death of some 1,400. Is that where we are roughly? Fourteen hundred Israelis or mostly Israelis, some people also living in Israel.

to include quite a few Arabs. We are, however you count it, we are many, we are, what, an order of magnitude higher in the operation in Gaza. And we're recording this here on Tuesday, February the 27th. So we seem to be on the eve, potentially of some hostage deal, ceasefire, also potentially a major ground incursion into Rafah, the last remaining sort of Hamas stronghold on the border with Egypt, which would be very violent if it occurs. there's going to be a lot more destruction.

And if the Rafa operation goes off, then it seems like the government will be sticking to its stated goal of the destruction of Hamas, the destruction of Hamas, as a war aim. How is it, Shlomo, that the murder of 1,400 people justifies in return the deaths of tens of thousands and essentially regime-changing Gaza? How does that ethically work? Yeah, sure.

So I think that the issue of portionality is sometimes misunderstood. Portionality doesn't mean, oh, well, they killed 1,400 of ours, so we can kill 1,400 of them. And that's not really what it means, and certainly in the ethical context. There are two ways of think about proportionality. One is to justify going to war in the first place. Is there a type of attack? Is there a type of harm that's been done to you, which justifies you going to war, right? Do you feel that certain threat?

I think everyone understands that what happened on October 7th is of the level of the threat, of an attack. It could have been a lot worse, by the way, in October 7th. We know now that Hamas had many more aggressive and ambitious plans for that day. And so, however bad it was, it could have been a lot worse. I think people understand that Israel was justified to have a military response. There's a second question of proportionality, which is a different type of equation, which says the following, given the military advantage of a certain attack or a certain invasion, whatever might be, and given the understood inevitable collateral damage,

that will happen in such a scenario, is the military advantage gain proportionate to the collateral damage that has caused? And so Israel and other countries have to ask this question because you don't want to do something where you destroy the class example on international law that books is given,

you're going to destroy a whole village in order to kill one off-duty officer. And so that would be disproportionate. It's a very unhelpful example because it's so extreme that it doesn't really help the much more nuanced cases. But proportionality, though, isn't about total numbers. It's about every time you do some form of attack or invasion, you have to ask, given the military advantage gained, is it justified?

Is it sufficient to justify the inevitable or what we think is going to be the damage caused? And here, I think Israel, as I mentioned, based on the numbers, is being super careful. And this is a matter that we understand this, it continues to be a threat. So if it's going to end up taking another invasion into a city like Rafa and some other work as well, that's what it's going to take in order to deal with the real, clear, and present danger on our borders. And, you know, people have asked me, what if it becomes 50,000 casualties?

Well, that would be really sad and tragic in many ways. but that might be what it's necessary, given the way Hamas is fighting, given the threat they are. And let's remember, Hamas could stop this. They could easily stop it right now, like I said, by just giving back the captives. And so, you know, I think that people have to understand that the numbers is not indicative of a moral judgment. And that's very hard because we see numbers, we see pictures. in my book I call it the CNN effect. I'm sort of dating myself.

I should call it now the TikTok effect, right? Or the Instagram effect. But, you know, we see these numbers. We see these pictures and we're horrified. But it doesn't tell us anything about the moral responsibility for these actions. No, I, well, I'm the right age to call it the CNN effect. And I'm a veteran of Afghanistan where it was very much part of the Taliban operating concept to put civilians at risk.

I actually, I would say based on my personal experience with less, with actually less recklessness and bloodthirstiness than I see from Hamas. With Hamas, maybe it's also part of a function of being an urban environment. With Hamas, it seems more systematic and deeply baked into the plan. The Taliban was a little bit more opportunistic. But they certainly, it's not like they lost any sleep at night or really, you know, were upset when there was some civilian casually incident where the Americans had clearly, you know, killed a bunch of Afghan civilians.

It was all part of their vision for how they were ultimately going to be successful on the battlefield. It's a dangerous ideology which the West has to understand is something which seems so foreign to us because we think of the purpose of going to war is to protect our civilians, to protect our non-combatants. But if your ideology is based on certain fundamentalism, which glorifies martyrdom, so you're going to be a lot easier for you to justify the deaths of your own people. Yeah, there's something that we, and I say we very broadly here, Westerners, to include Americans and Jews and Israeli Jews all, all, and more beyond. There's something that we struggle to understand when we, when we try to put ourselves in the,

you know, in the shoes or sandals of a Yahyahia sinwar, or a Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. I would actually, you know, Putin, Putin is arguably, Russians are arguably Western up to a point. You know, it's kind of a weird middle ground, geopolitically speaking. But we sit here and as you say, you know, we think of the point of war to be some kind of restoration of peace. Like that is deeply baked into our vision and our worldview across these different Western traditions. And to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody who may think of war as a perfectly worthwhile and good thing in itself. And to think of forms of strategy as not in any way immoral, but actually, highly defensible. I think we have this initial barrier that we struggle to get over to even

accept that that's what we're dealing with. We tend to lie to ourselves and try to pretend to ourselves that monsters like Sinwa are actually sort of recognizable figures. There's sort of, you know, social justice, you know, agitators who have gotten the short end of the stick. And it's, you know, I was in Israel for a week in December. I went down to Niraaz, one of the communities on the border with Gaza that was attacked on the seven that I think it's a little but further south than some of the others that were really hit hard. And so I don't think there had been as many visitors like me and like my group through when we got there. And it was, you know, it was, it was, it's difficult to describe in words what it was like to walk through this community

because it was so bucolic and, you know, it was a nice place. It looked really nice. And I could imagine a sort of suburban street, you know, where I had grown up, you know, in certain respects it looked alike and to just imagine, you know, that early morning and the terror of people coming house to house to murder you and your family, as their goal, by the way, not as some sort of collateral effect. And then to, and then to conclude from that, that, you know, one would have to just live with the possibility of this happening next year or the year after? No, I mean, that's insane. And my personal view is that the government, having decided to set its goal to destruction of Hamas has to stick with it and has to finish the job. And I really do think that Israel right now

is on a front line. There are others, but a front line with forms of non-Western traditions that are very dark and that we in the West struggle to understand. Yeah, I think so. And it's not only that Israel has a son, the Gaza border, of course, but if we don't finish that job there, it's going to be a lesson for a lot of different, you know, actors, bad actors in our neighborhood and around the world. So, of course, I'm thinking and very nervous about the situation on the Lebanese border with a group like Hezbollah, which is much stronger than Hamas.

But I think there are other actors in the world as well that are looking to see what happens here and how the West is willing to respond to these types of situations. So, you know, I do think that if we don't see some stronger support of Israel to finish the job as necessary to be done. And of course, we have to ask here in Israel, what's realistic and what can be done, given the constraints that we have and, you know, given the situation, which is a mess, right? We were really caught in a bad situation. It shouldn't have been. But you don't, just because you're embarrassed by what happened on October 7th doesn't mean you still shouldn't think level-headedly and think carefully and strategically. Of course, you should. But given the fact that we think we can, if we just keep on going, rid ourselves of this leadership in going.

Gaza, then we got to follow through with it. If we don't follow through with it, we're all going to be in danger, but not just in Israel, I think other places around the world as well. No, it's like suggesting that, you know, in the aftermath of Nazi aggression, Japanese aggression, savagery in the Second World War, that somehow unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan was an illegitimate goal. That's just too far. It's disproportionate, not in strategic terms, but in moral terms. Absolutely. There are many people. It's a suicidal thing to believe. There are many people who look back on World War II and say, well, maybe the Germans, it was one thing. But why do we need unconditional surrender from the Japanese?

And I don't think they understood what the Japanese were doing even before World War II. And I think that just is a real flawed understanding that sometimes there's evil in the world and evil in your midst. And I understand why people get nervous when I say, we have to destroy evil. You know, that can create a lot of crusaders. that can create endless wars. I get that. But at the same time, you have to recognize there's evil that has a real threat.

And when you have that real threat, you've got to eliminate it. Shlomo Brody, author of Ethics of Our Fighters, a Jewish view on war and morality. I have very much enjoyed our conversation. I wish you and your family and Israel. My prayers and wishes here, and I hope that Hamas is destroyed

and that the people of Israel are safe. And then we can come back and talk about Hezbo, a few weeks and what to do up there. Thank you so much for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.