The Fading Faith of a Jewish
Moral Exceptionalist
DAVID N. MYERS
SHMA.COM
Writing a few years after the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish thinker Simon Rawidowicz asserted that the
age-old “Jewish question” had become the “Arab
question.” Jews were no longer a minority seeking to survive in the face of an often hostile host.
They had assumed sovereignty in 1948, and with
political power they had the responsibility to behave as they would have wanted their hosts to
behave toward them over the centuries.
Observing developments from his perch at
Brandeis University, Rawidowicz was gravely
disappointed by the failure of Jews, in the form
of the State of Israel, to act on the lessons of their
historical experience. Rather than evince sympathy for another national minority, the state
treated the Arab population in its midst (as well
as the refugees who took flight or were expelled)
with contempt, hostility, and discrimination.
What was especially unsettling to Rawidowicz
was that the state’s behavior marked a precipitous moral descent. Jacob, he lamented in his
characteristic language, had assumed the ways
of Esau; the ethical code of the Jew had become
indistinguishable from that of the gentile.
Rawidowicz thus positioned himself as an
unreconstructed Jewish moral exceptionalist,
firmly wedded to the belief that Jews, by virtue
of their past travails, demanded more of themselves as ethical beings. Ironically, it was a similar belief that undergirded the worldview of the
Israeli political leaders whom Rawidowicz took
to task. Already in 1939, the influential Zionist
leader Berl Katznelson spoke of the Jewish and
Zionist moral imperative of maintaining purity
of arms when engaging the Arab enemy.
Subsequently, Israeli political leaders insisted
that purity of arms, known in Hebrew as tohar
ha-neshek, was the code of honor that would
guide soldiers of the Jewish state in battle. And
purity of arms, it is said in stridently defensive
tones today, continues to guide soldiers of the
Jewish state in battle.
Is this so? The current version of tohar ha-neshek in the IDF manual declares:
The IDF servicemen and women will
use their weapons and force only for the
purpose of their mission, only to the nec-
essary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers
will not use their weapons and force to
harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do
all in their power to avoid causing harm
to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.
We are left to wonder whether the doctrine of “purity of
arms” has much operational significance for the IDF today.
And yet, the recently released report of the
United Nations (UN) Fact-Finding Mission on the
Gaza Conflict, headed by the widely respected
South African jurist Richard Goldstone, casts serious doubt on the veracity of this formulation.
The controversial report catalogues instances in
which Israel attacked impermissible targets (a
mosque, a hospital, a UN compound), employed
illegal arms or techniques, and in fact, to borrow
from the IDF’s own code, “use(d) their weapons
and force to harm human beings who are not
combatants or prisoners of war.” Though incomplete (Israel did not cooperate with the
Goldstone mission), the findings are sobering,
and they are echoed by the testimonies of Israeli
soldiers collected by the Israeli nongovernmental organization (NGO), Breaking the Silence.
These findings led the UN Fact-Finding Mission
to best conclude that “some of the actions of the
Government of Israel might justify a competent
court finding that crimes against humanity have
been committed.”
The response is sadly familiar. Attack the
messenger. Goldstone is a bad Jew. The soldiers
of Breaking the Silence are traitors. The world
is against us. Contrary to appearances, the IDF
claims that tohar ha-neshek was indeed upheld,
at great cost — and not just in Gaza, but in
Lebanon (I and II) and in every other military
conflict in which it has been engaged.
Although many Israeli soldiers undoubtedly
believe that it is better to incur risks to their own
wellbeing than to incur civilian casualties on the
other side of the battle line, I am no longer certain that a markedly higher percentage of Israeli
soldiers than, say, American, Russian, South
African, or Egyptian soldiers would agree to —
and more importantly, act on — the principle of
David N. Myers teaches
Jewish history at UCLA. He
has authored Re-Inventing the
Jewish Past: European Jewish
Intellectuals and the Zionist
Return to History (Oxford
University Press), Resisting
History: Historicism and its
Discontents in German-Jewish
Thought (Princeton University
Press) and, most recently,
Between Jew and Arab: The
Lost Voice of Simon
Rawidowicz (Brandeis
University Press).
