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tohar ha-neshek. Consequently, we are left to
wonder whether the doctrine of “purity of
arms” has much operational significance for the
IDF today.
To confront this prospect is to surrender,
and quite painfully so, the claim of Jewish
moral exceptionalism. Perhaps we need to
consider the notion that tohar ha-neshek was
— if not a historical myth tout court — widely
and regularly violated throughout the history
of the long conflict between Jews and Arabs
in historic Palestine. While surely practiced in
some instances, it has served in others as a
shield of self-justification, at once capable of
deflecting criticism and asserting a Jewish
moralism that Israelis invoke selectively (e.g.,
when not dismissing it as the limpid product
of the galut Jew).
In this, as in many matters, the irascible
and always trenchant Jewish philosopher
Yeshayahu Leibowitz has much to teach us. In
October 1953, an Israeli army unit commanded
by a young Ariel Sharon led a reprisal raid in
the Jordanian town of Kibya to exact revenge
for an Arab terrorist act in which a Jewish
woman and her two children in the town of
Yehud were murdered. Many decried the disproportionate violence of the reprisal in which
some 60 people were killed as a violation of the
exalted norms of Jewish morality.
Leibowitz, though, dissented. “The morality of Judaism,” he pronounced, “is a most
questionable concept. Morality, after all, does
not admit a modifying attribute and cannot be
‘Jewish’ or ‘not Jewish.’” Leibowitz understood
a half century ago the dangers of cloaking oneself in the veil of purity — in ways that speak
directly to the veil of moral exceptionalism that
has long cloaked tohar ha-neshek. “For the
sake of that which is holy,” he warned, “man
is capable of acting without any restraint” —
Jacob, no less than Esau.
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