it [The Talmud] is harmful only to jews in that it keeps them in a work righteous mindset...so the talmud is not the true source of judaism's problem...
below are voices rarely heard. not because they're not out there but because they are 'inconvenient':
~
We, reserve combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who were raised upon the principles of Zionism, sacrifice and giving to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel, who have always served in the front lines, and who were the first to carry out any mission, light or heavy, in order to protect the State of Israel and strengthen it.
We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty all over the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people.
We, whose eyes have seen the bloody toll this Occupation exacts from both sides.
We, who sensed how the commands issued to us in the Territories, destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country.
We, who understand now that the price of Occupation is the loss of IDF’s human character and the corruption of the entire Israeli society.
We, who know that the Territories are not Israel, and that all settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end.
We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements.
We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.
We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel’s defense.
The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose – and we shall take no part in them.
Current signers number: 550
~
[below THE HEART OF THOSE ADHERING TO MOSES AND THE PROPHETS - REAL TORAH........not some insane ramblings of centuries of supremacist rabbinic midrash contained in the Talmud]
REFUSING TO SERVE IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES: SOME JEWISH SOURCES
Ruling Over a Hostile Population
Our rule over three million Palestinian Arabs in the territories has perforce put us in a position of committing a number of moral outrages. Continued rule will necessitate not only continued denial of many basic rights to Palestinians, but will require our taking additional steps which are reprehensible, if not morally questionable. While we certainly did not set out intentionally to take drastic measures to buttress our rule, these are willy-nilly consequences of such a position. To maintain our rule we will have to continue to mete out collective punishment that often cruelly affects those who are not guilty.
Among the steps we have taken is the enclosing of millions of humans in their cities, towns, and villages. We often deny basic rights such as the right to earn a living, , to study, to move freely, to purchase basic necessities, to vote, to travel for medical care, to move sick or injured to medical facilities, etc. But most severe is that innocent civilians die. While this occurs in every violent conflict throughout the world, and throughout history, what is happening now is more than unintentional collateral deaths of civilians. Ruling over millions of people who despise your rule necessitates such deaths of youngsters, women, and elderly.
The IDF, like any army, makes both avoidable and unavoidable mistakes; but it is certainly not bloodthirsty and has no daily quota of corpses. It is not an oxymoron to term the IDF a humane army. Nevertheless, it seems that a large number of the hundreds of Palestinian civilians who die are not killed because Israeli armed forces are acting in self-defense. The IDF maintains that these are victims of such unavoidable actions that must be taken to quell unrest. In this respect, the IDF is correct because to put down a popular uprising drastic measures (i.e., maiming and killing civilians) are often needed, in addition to the enforcing of curfews, establishment of blockades, abrogation of civil rights, and condoning of inhumane treatment. The governmental decision to remain in the disputed territories leads to the viewing of most, if not all, Palestinians as enemies and anyone who is connected to the enemy is a fair target.
Collective Punishment
Issues related to the practice of collective punishment (where this involves punishing innocents who are part of the collective) appear in a number of instances in Jewish sources.
Abraham's Refusal
One could consider our forefather Avraham as the first “conscientious objector to collective punishment” for his refusal to participate in or condone collective punishment. He was even willing to risk punishment himself in order to try to dissuade G-d from His intention to mete out collective punishment to Sodom and Gemora. His argument with G-d is described in Genesis:
“If there are fifty righteous within the city, will You indeed sweep away and not forgive the city for the fifty?…It is far from You to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked… Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justly?” (Genesis 18:24-25).
Here Avraham courageously questions G-d and appeals His decision to destroy entire cities. Avraham’s questioning of the impending collective punishment succeeded in persuading G-d, so to speak, to reconsider. The implication is that collective punishment, where it includes innocents, is not acceptable, and only those who have sinned should be punished for their own wrongdoing.
Avraham held himself to a very high standard. He feared that he may have killed innocent people during the wars he waged (described in Genesis 14). According to midrash Tanhuma:
“Avraham excoriated himself mercilessly saying, ’Perhaps among those whom I have killed there were some righteous men…’ (Tanhuma 3:14 on Gen. 15:1 )
Massacre in Nablus
This principle of not harming innocents appears elsewhere in the Torah. Our forefather Yaakov severely rebuked two of his sons, Shimon and Levi, when they massacred the city of Shechem (Shechem/Nablus today) as a form of revenge. This act of reprisal, shading over to vicious vindictiveness, was executed by the two brothers as retribution for the rape of their sister Dinah. Despite this seeming justification tendered by the brothers, Yaakov censured his sons in one of the most caustic statements in the Bible, when he reproved them:
“Simon and Levi are brothers; weapons of violence are the means of their livelihood. Let my soul not be coupled with theirs; into their assembly let my glory not be united. For in anger they slew men, and in their willfulness they continued in their destruction of cattle. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath for it was cruel.” (Genesis 49:5):
Yaakov was shaken by what his sons did, and does not mince words in his reproach. Similar words might be said in reaction to our attempts to justify aerial bombing of Palestinian cities as retribution for attacks by terrorists. If we do not want to be cursed, we have to decline to participate in these actions, even if we have to refuse to serve in the territories altogether.
The argument is made that we have no choice and that the IDF must take such steps to preserve the security of the State. I cannot be convinced that the existence of the State of Israel hangs on the killing of children in refugee camps. The rule over another nation, a hostile population, does not strengthen our defense posture; rather it weakens us. It prolongs the necessity for curfews and blockades of millions of humans, for abrogation of their elementary rights, and for physically injuring them.
In the case of Shimon and Levi, they defended their action as being of deterrent value. Yaakov rejects this argument because even in military conflicts there are acts that are prohibited. This can be derived from the comments of Ramban (Nachmanides) on the episode. He discusses the claim (heard today as well) that Shimon and Levi were justified in attacking and murdering the men of Nablus and sacking the city because the citizens did not bring the rapist to justice. After discussing this line of defense of Shimon and Levi, Ramban rejects it unequivocally. There is no justification for harming innocents. This is a basic tenet of justice.
Contrast Shimon and Levi’s headstrong cruelty with the earlier introspection of their father. Yaakov feared killing innocents. When his brother Esau approached Yaakov with four hundred armed men for a face-off, we are told that :
“Yaakov was greatly afraid and was distressed.” (Genesis 32:8)
Rashi explains the seeming redundancy (afraid and distressed) by saying that Yaakov was afraid he might be killed, and distressed that he might kill Esau, in the event that Esau had innocent intentions.
Individual Responsibility - A Religious Norm
The concept of individual responsibility for wrongdoing is encapsulated in the prohibition towards the end of the Torah:
“The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” (Deuteronomy 24:16)
This moral and religious norm appears elsewhere in the Tanakh. For example, the prophet Ezekial warns that:
“The soul that sins, it shall die. The son shall not hear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself alone.” (Ezekial 18:20)
This pertains to all Jews (and is not restricted to ‘teary-eyed left-wing liberals’
. In the territories we are violating this precept daily by destroying houses of families of terrorists, preventing food and medical supplies from reaching villages, and physically harming blameless civilians -- acts that would be forbidden under the rubric of “
the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself alone.”
This dilemma has preoccupied military officers around the world in the past as much as it baffles us today. How can you fight an enemy that intentionally blurs the lines between the military and the civilian, an enemy that uses that very ambiguity to its own advantage? It would be simplistic to dismiss all military operations that affect civilians as morally indefensible, especially in the context of vicious guerilla and terrorist attacks. This conundrum has always been with us. For example, a member of the pre-State Jewish Special Night Squads (that were trained to fight Arabs by the British Major General Orde Wingate) observed, “The problem of punishment and.. the morality of battle was something that concerned Wingate greatly. On the one hand, he demanded that the innocent not be harmed. On the other hand, he knew that he faced a dilemma: Can one observe this rule in battle against gangs that receive assistance from the residents of the villages?”
[Bierman and Smith, Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia, and Zion, p. 11, as quoted in Azure, No.10, Winter 2001, p. 46, published by the Shalem Center]
I wish that I could agree with those settlers who claim that we can humanely and fairly occupy and rule those over-the-Green-Line portions of the Land of Israel, as precious to me as it is to them. But there ain’t no such animal as an “enlightened occupation.” The rule over 3 million antagonistic people, stripped of their rights, will necessitate, nolens volens, cruelty on our part. It will require us to violate normative prohibitions of Jewish law. Therefore the refusal to participate in actions directly related to the occupation is a religious imperative. We hope that every soldier, in the standing army and in the reserve, will ponder these dilemmas and draw conclusions himself.
Blind Obedience to One’s Country
Blind compliance can lead to bestiality, for animals live without morality and law. While there is a halakhic principle of dina demalkhuta dina (the law of the land is obeyed when it does not contradict Jewish law), obedience to the state is not an ultimate Jewish value. The Prophets riled against those regimes in the Jewish past that used their powers to the disadvantage of weak populations. They did not hesitate to call for disobedience to such wicked regimes. (E.g. see the episode over Navot’s vineyard involving Ahab and Jezebel in I Kings 21). Law abiding citizenship is encouraged; but obedience per se as a value is not sacrosanct.
Questions of immorality and illegality waft above the orders to serve in the territories. We must continue to serve in the IDF, as a defence army, but not as an occupying force committing crimes against humanity.
We dare not become soldier robots. We may have to suffer the consequences of refusal , which can run the gamut from ridicule and social ostracism to imprisonment. As soldiers we not only have to obey orders, but we also have to be aware that they may violate our most basic moral, legal, and religious norms.
Updated February 7 2002
