In 1953 the government of the newly founded state of Israel sent an elite army unit to attack the village of Kibiyeh, just across the Jordanian border. The attack was in reprisal for violence against Jewish villages on the Israeli side of the border. Since the end of the 1948 war, armed groups from Jordanian border towns had been infiltrating Israel and terrorizing its citizens, and in one such raid on the village of Yehud, a woman and her two young children were killed. The Israeli attack on Kibiyeh was in response to that incident. Kibiyeh was chosen as the target because the perpetrators of the violence in Yehud had apparently come from there. In the Kibiyeh raid, several dozen Arabs were killed, including women and children. Condemnation of the raid from the international community was swift. Opinion in Israel was mostly supportive of the operation, though a vocal minority opposed it.Footnote ¹

One of the most important Jewish responses to the Kibiyeh operation was a long essay composed in 1954 by Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli (1909–95), a leading rabbinic authority among religious Zionists. This essay was a painstaking examination of whether the Kibiyeh operation accorded with halakhah, and it became the basis of discussion about war ethics in religious Zionist circles for decades to come. To this very day, its analysis is debated by rabbinic authorities in these circles.Footnote ²

The prevailing understanding of R. Yisraeli's treatment of the Kibiyeh affair is that he unequivocally supported the raid. He argued that the raid fell under the halakhic rubric of “war of revenge” (milḥemet nakam), and in such wars Jews are allowed to kill enemy civilians—men, women, and children. Moreover, in R. Yisraeli's thinking, all wars of self-defense waged by Jews are, in effect, wars of revenge in which noncombatants can be targeted. His views on civilian casualties were therefore applicable well beyond the Kibiyeh incident.

Not surprisingly, many commentators have viewed R. Yisraeli's approach as extreme. In a recent article, Yitzchak Roness captures this widespread sentiment by portraying R. Yisraeli's position as reflecting a “radically militant worldview.”Footnote ³ In addition to this negative moral evaluation of R. Yisraeli's position many analysts have expressed consternation about the lack of precedent in halakhic literature for his viewpoint. R. Yisraeli's notion of wars of revenge does not appear in prior rabbinic discussions on war. Thus, his position is not just morally problematic but tendentious from the standpoint of halakhic methodology.Footnote ⁴ This observation has prompted Roness to conclude that R. Yisraeli's analysis of the Kibiyeh affair was inspired more by ideology than by sober halakhic judgment.Footnote ⁵

A factor that helps explain the discomfort with R. Yisraeli's views is the common assumption that Judaism does not encourage revenge, and indeed there is truth in that generalization. In most instances in which revenge is invoked in the Bible, it is only God who seeks it; revenge by human beings is mostly discouraged.Footnote ⁶ How then could R. Yisraeli base his understanding of an issue as important as defensive war on the notion of revenge?

In this paper, my goal is to challenge the common assumptions about R. Yisraeli's essay on Kibiyeh. I will attempt to show that R. Yisraeli's views are, in fact, more complex, ambiguous, and moderate than his readers have assumed. I will also try to demonstrate that his views on wars of revenge were formulated with the help of a creative reading of midrashic sources that has escaped the attention of his interpreters. The assumption that R. Yisraeli's views have no precedent in rabbinic sources is therefore not entirely true.

I should make clear from the outset that my analysis is not intended as an exercise in apologetics. My goal is not to defend R. Yisraeli, and even the more moderate position that I see depicted in his essay is not one I necessarily support. My interest here is only to provide a more accurate reading of R. Yisraeli's essay than that provided by others and thus enhance our understanding of this influential document.Footnote ⁷

In a footnote at the beginning of the essay, R. Yisraeli briefly presents his version of the Kibiyeh raid and the events leading up to it.Footnote ⁸ The description is accurate except for his portrayal of the raid as having been conducted by the Jewish villagers who had suffered from the attacks; in fact, an elite army unit was responsible for the attack. His understanding of events was clearly influenced by initial government reports that identified the raiding party as Jews from the border towns.Footnote ⁹

Yet this misinformation does not affect the major question he asks: whether Jews are allowed to embark on a military operation to kill terrorists who reside among civilians when they know that civilians will be killed in the process. R. Yisraeli is specifically interested in cases like that of Kibiyeh in which the terrorists act with the agreement, encouragement, and perhaps even under the direct instructions of village residents. The question is whether this type of indirect civilian involvement in violence against Jews renders the entire civilian population culpable for the actions of the terrorists. If the civilians are indeed culpable, they would also be legitimate targets in a military operation meant to punish those responsible for the violence and deter them from future violence.Footnote ¹⁰

R. Yisraeli answers his question in several ways, proposing different halakhic models for understanding the situation Israelis faced in dealing with violence along their border. Even though R. Yisraeli prefers his final answer, the penultimate one is also important for his deliberations. Although I will focus primarily on these last two solutions, I will begin by summarizing briefly the initial solutions he offers. He focuses first on the issue of agency. In Jewish law, if one person commissions another to commit a sin, it is only the latter party who is culpable since only the one who actually commits the sin can be held responsible for it. The question is whether this rule applies to non-Jews as well. If it does, then non-Jewish civilians who provide support and encouragement for terrorists to kill Jews cannot be held liable for the terrorists’ actions; only the terrorists can. However, if it does not, those civilians could be held accountable and would be legitimate targets in a military operation meant to punish the responsible parties. After much deliberation, R. Yisraeli ultimately rules that according to halakhah non-Jews are no different from Jews when it comes to the question of agency in committing sinful acts. Arab civilians who support and encourage terrorists to commit acts of violence, therefore, cannot be held responsible for what the terrorists do as a result.Footnote ¹¹

Another solution entertained by R. Yisraeli is that the Arab civilians could be held responsible for the terrorist violence because they did not bring its perpetrators to justice, and this failure would make the civilians, once again, legitimate targets in a military operation. This hypothesis is premised on the existence of the Noahide code, which requires non-Jews to establish courts of law and a penal system to enforce the code, including the prohibition of murder. Yet in R. Yisraeli's thinking this solution also fails because Arab civilians cannot be held accountable for the behavior of terrorists if there is any suspicion that the civilians fear the terrorists and are therefore reluctant to bring them to justice. While he does not say so explicitly, R. Yisraeli seems to think that such suspicion is warranted in the case of the Jordanian border towns.Footnote ¹²

The next halakhic model that R. Yisraeli considers is that the Arab civilians supporting the terrorists are in the halakhic category of “pursuers” (rodfim). In halakhah, a “pursuer” (rodef) is someone who is in the process of attempting to kill another individual, and in such an instance, a third party is permitted to kill the pursuer to save the life of the one being pursued. Might we therefore consider Arab civilians as pursuers if they support and encourage terrorism that threatens Jewish lives? R. Yisraeli answers this question in the affirmative and concludes that Jews may therefore kill Arab civilians harboring terrorists to spare the lives of their future Jewish victims. However, after further discussion, R. Yisraeli concludes that his ruling applies only to enemy civilians who are adults and not to children, who cannot be held accountable for their elders' actions. Therefore, the pursuer model does not justify a military operation like the one carried out in Kibiyeh because in an operation of this sort children are likely to be killed.Footnote ¹³

The last two solutions offered by R. Yisraeli are the most important. R. Yisraeli now entertains the possibility that the Israeli towns along the Jordanian border are really involved in a war. Up to this point, he has constructed his halakhic models from laws that regulate day-to-day interactions between individuals. In considering the possibility that the situation here is, in fact, a war, a whole new set of laws apply. In halakhah, war is regarded as a situation completely different from that involving individuals, and it brings into effect a series of laws that function only in war. Most important is that war confers on a nation a right to kill that is not normally granted to individuals. According to R. Yisraeli's reading of halakhah, when waging war against an enemy, an army need not be careful to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty because that is the nature of war. Thus, if a military raid like the one in Kibiyeh is considered part of a war, casualties among civilians would be acceptable whether or not the civilians had been supportive of the terrorists.Footnote ¹⁴

But what kind of war are we talking about here? Halakhah recognizes a variety of wars. First R. Yisraeli considers the possibility that a military action like that taken in Kibiyeh constitutes a preemptive war. The violence perpetrated against Jews in the past by Arab terrorists living in Jordanian border towns is proof that Jews on the Israeli side of the border face an imminent threat of more violence in the future and they therefore have a right to preempt that violence by waging war. The problem here is that according to most halakhic sources preemptive war falls under the category of discretionary war, and, according to many rabbinic opinions, this type of war requires the approval of a Sanhedrin, a rabbinic supreme court that no longer exists.Footnote ¹⁵ R. Yisraeli, however, gets around this difficulty by arguing that the Sanhedrin is not needed when widespread public support exists for a discretionary war, and this appears to be the case in the present instance. R. Yisraeli seems to have in mind the high level of approval for the Kibiyeh raid among the Israeli public.Footnote ¹⁶

At this point, R. Yisraeli raises another objection that involves the entire category of discretionary war: How can one justify discretionary war in principle if it overrides the prohibition of murder? Is it really within the jurisdiction of the Sanhedrin or the Jewish public at large to initiate a military operation in which innocent enemy civilians will certainly die? R. Yisraeli responds to this difficulty by arguing that discretionary war is a right all nations possess, not just Jews, because of the halakhic principle of dina de-malkhuta dina, “the law of the kingdom is the law.” This principle, which is widely used in halakhah, states that Jews must adhere to the laws of the country in which they reside even if they conflict with halakhah. The principle applies primarily to civil matters, such as taxation—not to purely religious matters.Footnote ¹⁷ What is important for our purposes is that dina de-malkhuta dina confers a degree of legitimacy on laws implemented by non-Jewish nations. R. Yisraeli's innovation is that he also applies this principle to international matters between states; normally, the principle applies only to matters within a state. Thus, for R. Yisraeli, war is a legitimate activity among the nations because it is recognized by the majority of them as a way to settle disputes. And once again, it is in the nature of war that innocent people die alongside the guilty. Jews can therefore kill in a war even if the killing includes the innocent because all nations have a right to do this.Footnote ¹⁸

R. Yisraeli was well aware that he was making the ethics of war in Judaism dependent on the customs of the gentile nations. However, this did not bother him. In fact, he mentions the views of groups in the international community in his own time who believed that war should be abolished, and he states quite explicitly that if these views were to be accepted by the majority of nations in the world, Jews would be required to desist from waging war as well.Footnote ¹⁹

It is important to emphasize that the international norms governing war of which R. Yisraeli speaks are those of international law, not what nations actually do in war. In his discussion, R. Yisraeli frequently refers to these norms as ḥok, which can only mean “law.” He also adduces examples of the types of norms that govern war, such as the rules that regulate the proper declaration of war and those that determine what types of weapons may be used, and these are clearly references to international law.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, if R. Yisraeli had been arguing that halakhah approves of what the nations of the world actually do in war rather than what international law permits them to do, he could have no objection to the atrocities committed in the two world wars, including the Holocaust, and this could hardly have been R. Yisraeli's intent.Footnote ²¹

In the next section of his discussion of discretionary war, R. Yisraeli still expresses doubts about whether his insights provide sufficient justification for the killing that takes place in war. The problem is that dina de-malkhuta dina does not normally apply to state laws that involve the taking of life, such as the administration of the death penalty. R. Yisraeli confronts this challenge with yet another innovative move, arguing that nations have the right to wage war with the loss of life it entails because of metaphysical considerations. He cites a source claiming that the souls of non-Jews are inherently different from those of Jews, because non-Jewish souls originate in the physical world while Jewish souls come from God.Footnote ²² Non-Jews therefore have possession over their souls in a way that Jews do not, and they can therefore waive their right to life if they so choose.Footnote ²³ The waging of war is a situation in which they do precisely that. Thus, in this instance, the loss of life is no obstacle to applying the principle of dina de-malkhuta dina.Footnote ²⁴

At the end of his discussion of discretionary war, R. Yisraeli sums up his views on this subject and its relevance to the issues being addressed in his essay:

R. Yisraeli explains that in discretionary war one need not differentiate between the guilty and the innocent because it is impossible to do so. This way of conducting war is halakhically acceptable because it is in accordance with international law that sets the standard for Jewish behavior in matters of discretionary war.

Yet R. Yisraeli's final statement in this passage is somewhat puzzling. He concludes his summation by noting that in order for us to judge whether the Kibiyeh operation was halakhically acceptable, we would have to examine whether it indeed conformed to international law; however, R. Yisraeli provides no such examination. He may not have believed he was sufficiently knowledgeable in international law to do so. In the course of his discussion, R. Yisraeli does demonstrate awareness of certain elements of international law on warfare. As we have noted, he refers to proper procedures for declaring war as well as rules regarding which weapons may be used. However, his opinions are short on detail. Moreover, when it comes to the crucial issue of harming civilians in wartime, his knowledge is clearly limited. He believes that international norms permit the killing of innocents, but his blanket generalization on this matter betrays a lack of awareness of important developments in international law in the years just prior to the Kibiyeh incident. The Fourth Geneva Convention, signed in 1949, dealt specifically with noncombatant immunity during wartime, and while it made no attempt to ban violence against civilians, it certainly placed strict restrictions on such violence.Footnote ²⁶ It is possible that R. Yisraeli sensed his limitations here, and without a detailed knowledge of international law, he may have decided to leave open the question of whether the raid in Kibiyeh accorded with its standards.

R. Yisraeli does not explicitly reject the model of discretionary war for understanding Israel's actions in Kibiyeh, but ultimately he finds it less satisfying than the last solution he proposes. In the final section of his essay, R. Yisraeli concludes that operations like that in Kibiyeh are best understood as falling under the halakhic category of mandatory war (milḥemet miẓvah). Some rabbinic authorities, he notes, consider preemptive war to be mandatory when the danger of enemy attack is imminent; hence operations like that in Kibiyeh would, at the very least, qualify as this type of war.Footnote ²⁷

Yet R. Yisraeli goes on to claim that the category of preemptive war may not be the best model here. The fact that the Arabs have been engaged in violence against Jews over an extended period of time means that this is a war that has already been initiated by the enemy, and the Jewish operation in Kibiyeh is therefore reactive, not preemptive, in nature. That is, it is a war of self-defense. The fact that the attacks by Arabs have been sporadic in nature does not make the situation any less a war than the more formal type of affair in which armies fight each other on a battlefield.Footnote ²⁸

At this point, R. Yisraeli raises an objection. He cites a source in the Jerusalem Talmud stating that wars of self-defense fall under the category of mandatory war and therefore they are wars in which all Jews must fight.Footnote ²⁹ R. Yisraeli is troubled by this ruling because, according to his understanding, one cannot force an individual to endanger himself to defend the lives of others, which is presumably what every soldier in a defensive war must do. Why then does the Jerusalem Talmud consider wars of self-defense mandatory seeing as this type of war gives a Jewish government license to force all Jews into combat?Footnote ³⁰ R. Yisraeli answers that, in fact, the cause of self-defense by itself provides no such license. When Jews go to war in response to an attack by an enemy, the purpose of the war is not merely self-defense, but revenge, and it is only for this reason that the war is considered mandatory and that a Jewish government can force its subjects into battle. R. Yisraeli substantiates his claim by referring to the war against the Midianites described in the book of Numbers that was commanded by God for the sake of revenge.Footnote ³¹ There, the war was clearly mandatory in being initiated by God, and all Israelites were required to fight.Footnote ³² According to R. Yisraeli, the war against the Midianites serves as a model for all future defensive wars: these wars are also wars of revenge, and all Jews must go into battle.Footnote ³³

We should clarify that in the biblical account the Midianites never actually attacked the Israelites; we are told that they tempted the Israelites into idol worship, for which God sought revenge.Footnote ³⁴ Nonetheless, R. Yisraeli treats this war as a response to violence on the part of the Midianites on the basis of a midrashic source that he cites later in his discussion, according to which the luring of the Israelites to practice idolatry was an attack every bit as harmful to them as a physical assault—in fact, more so. While killing someone robs them of their life in this world, tempting them into idolatry robs them of their life both in this world and the world to come.Footnote ³⁵ The Midianite war can therefore serve as a paradigm for any war in which an enemy has initiated hostilities, including a more conventional war of defense against physical assault.Footnote ³⁶

R. Yisraeli also claims that his views on wars of revenge are precisely those of Maimonides. According to Maimonides, mandatory wars include wars for the purpose of ‘ezrat yisra'el mi-yad ẓar.Footnote ³⁷ This phrase, which can be rendered as “aiding Israel when [being attacked] by an enemy,” is normally understood by halakhic authorities as a reference to defensive wars. Yet, in midrashic fashion, R. Yisraeli gives the phrase a different meaning by linking the word ẓar, or “enemy,” with the term ẓorer, or “assailant,” that the Bible uses to describe the Midianites (Numbers 25:18). Therefore, in his opinion, when Maimonides refers to ‘ezrat yisra'el mi-yad ẓar, he had in mind wars of revenge of the kind fought against the Midianites.

But the important point here is that R. Yisraeli is now able to answer the challenge raised by the Jerusalem Talmud about compelling soldiers to fight in wars of self-defense. In the biblical account of the Midianite war, the entire Israelite nation was mobilized, teaching us that in subsequent defensive wars, everyone must fight as well. Once again, these wars are not just defensive wars but wars of revenge, and they therefore impose a special obligation on all Jews to participate.

Yet, R. Yisraeli immediately points out that when it comes to the treatment of innocent civilians, wars of revenge are no different than other wars:

When R. Yisraeli states that in wars of revenge, one applies “all the laws of war,” he seems to be referring back to points he made in his discussion of discretionary war that deal with the phenomenon of war in general.Footnote ³⁹ As we saw earlier, in those wars Jews are not required to take care to spare the lives of innocent civilians on the enemy side because it is in the nature of war that the innocent die alongside the guilty. In fact, war makes it impossible to make this kind of differentiation. The same ethos, it would seem, applies to wars of revenge. As we shall see, these observations have significant implications for our analysis of R. Yisraeli's position on the Kibiyeh episode, but we will have to wait until later to tease them out.

In the next section of his discussion of wars of revenge, R. Yisraeli is troubled by one element in the biblical account of the Midianite war: Moses specifically instructs the Israelites to kill children.Footnote ⁴⁰ Halakhic sources are generally opposed to punishing children for the sins of their parents;Footnote ⁴¹ it is only God who can mete out punishment of this kind.Footnote ⁴² Why then in this instance were children deliberately killed?

We should point out here that R. Yisraeli is not concerned about innocent Midianite adults because his presumption seems to be that they were all guilty of tempting the Israelites into idol worship and were therefore deserving of death. But what then of the children? Why were they killed? R. Yisraeli responds by arguing that there are, in fact, instances in which Jewish law sanctions the punishment of children because of the misdeeds for their parents. For example, in the Bible, when an entire Israelite city has engaged in idol worship, the city is destroyed and all of its residents are put to death—men, women, and children.Footnote ⁴³ The Midianites who tempted the Israelites into idol worship were therefore punished in a similar way. Yet Yisraeli is reluctant to approve of complete annihilation of the enemy in subsequent defensive wars waged by Jews on the premise that, as noted above, tempting Jews into idol worship is a far more serious crime than the physical violence perpetrated in most other wars. R. Yisraeli thus concludes by reiterating that in wars of revenge Jews should conduct themselves “as they normally would” (ka-ragil) in any war, even though they may kill children in the process; however, they should make every effort not to kill children intentionally.Footnote ⁴⁴

R. Yisraeli now concludes his essay by summing up his position:

All wars that Jews fight in self-defense are also wars of revenge, and in such wars one need not be careful in sparing the lives of the innocent. And if anyone is responsible for the death of these people, it is the enemy that has initiated hostilities in the first place, not the Jews. Yet R. Yisraeli finishes with a plea that special care be taken to avoid killing children.

Let us now evaluate R. Yisraeli's essay. As we noted in our introduction, many commentators see his views as radical and militant. A number of them also reject R. Yisraeli's notion of wars of revenge with the claim that it has no basis in rabbinic tradition. The rest of my analysis will be devoted to challenging these assumptions.

We will begin with the second problem regarding the sources of R. Yisraeli's views. The specific difficulty here is that R. Yisraeli seems to build his case for wars of revenge from a direct reading of the biblical story of the Midianite war, not from later halakhic tradition. Wars of revenge are not codified or even discussed in the great compendia of medieval halakhah. As Roness puts it, “nowhere in the halakhic literature do we find this biblical account transformed into a normative precedent for such wars in the future.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, R. Neriah Gutel, despite his respect and reverence for R. Yisraeli's authority, has trouble understanding how he saw the Midianite war as precedent for later wars.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet, not only does R. Yisraeli argue for the existence of wars of revenge, he claims that all defensive wars are wars of this kind. What then prompted R. Yisraeli to adopt a position on such an important issue with so little support to back him up?

As we noted, Roness believes that in this instance R. Yisraeli was motivated more by ideology than by substantive halakhic argument. There may be some truth in this assessment; however, I also believe that R. Yisraeli's viewpoint was based on a key rabbinic source that has escaped the notice of his disciples and interpreters. As we noted in our summary of R. Yisraeli's discussion of wars of revenge, he cites a midrashic passage claiming that someone who tempts another person into idolatry has done them much greater harm than killing them because idolatry affects the fate of the individual not just in this life but in the afterlife as well. This statement is, in fact, part of a larger midrashic passage that comments on the war with the Midianites and appears in Numbers Rabba and Tanḥuma:

The midrash seems to be motivated by discomfort over the harsh punishment meted out to the Midianites, and it therefore suggests that the war against them was actually one of self-defense. The Midianite “assault” on the Israelites consisted of tempting them into idolatry, a crime worse than killing because of its long-term spiritual consequences. But most important for our purposes is that the midrash treats the Midianite war as the source for justifying the well-known rabbinic maxim that one is allowed to kill in self-defense (ha-ba le-horgekha hashkem le-horgo),Footnote ⁴⁹ and given the biblical source upon which it relies, it is clearly justifying killing in self-defense not just for the individual but for the nation as well.

R. Yisraeli undoubtedly had this source in mind in formulating his views on wars of revenge—although he alluded only to its second half in his deliberations. R. Yisraeli drew from the midrash the lesson that the Midianite war was paradigmatic for all subsequent wars of self-defense. Of course, R. Yisraeli went beyond the rabbinic reading of the Midianite war in one important respect: the midrash establishes only that the Midianite war is paradigmatic for wars of self-defense, not for wars of revenge. In other words, R. Yisraeli ended up reinstating the theme of revenge that the midrash seems to have attempted to avoid. However, the theme of revenge in the war against the Midianites is clearly stated in the biblical text itself. When God commands Moses to wage war, he tells him, “Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites…” (Numbers 31:2). Shortly afterward, Moses gathers an army and implores it to “wreak the Lord's vengeance on Midian” (Numbers 31:4). Therefore, by bringing in the issue of revenge, R. Yisraeli is merely going back to the original biblical text upon which the midrashic reading is based.

The question then is why R. Yisraeli would use this particular source to establish the Jewish nation's right to defend itself. R. Yisraeli may have been influenced by the medieval halakhic authority R. Menahem ben Solomon Meiri who, in his talmudic commentary, justifies the principle of self-defense by citing the midrashic passage on the Midianite war.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, other medieval halakhic authorities tend not to cite this midrash in dealing with the specific issue of wars of self-defense, or wars of any kind for that matter. Most striking is R. Yisraeli's determination to read Maimonides’ notion of ‘ezrat yisra'el mi-yad ẓar in light of this source, a reading that seems to have no precedent.

To understand fully why R. Yisraeli resorted to using the midrashic passage about the Midianite war, we must begin by recalling R. Yisraeli's motivation for referring to this passage: the problem of conscription, which is, in fact, a major difficulty for many halakhic commentators. Defensive wars normally require a government to conscript soldiers whether they want to fight or not. Yet, according to most halakhic authorities, no individual can be forced to endanger his life to save the life of another, which is presumably what every soldier fighting in a defensive war must do. The conscription of soldiers for defensive wars should therefore be forbidden.Footnote ⁵¹ Nonetheless, Maimonides establishes quite clearly that defensive wars fall into the category of mandatory war, which means that a Jewish government can force all able-bodied men to fight, and no major halakhic authority subsequent to Maimonides challenges him on this point. As for R. Yisraeli, he also raises the problem of conscription, but instead of citing Maimonides as proof that defensive wars are mandatory, he prefers to cite a source in the Jerusalem Talmud that makes the same point.

A number of solutions have been proposed for the problem of conscription. R. Abraham Isaac Kook claims that defensive wars are instances of hora'at sha‘ah, a situation of national emergency that allows one to temporarily suspend halakhah and therefore ignore the legal obstacles in the way of waging a defensive war.Footnote ⁵² R. Shlomo Goren presents a common approach to the problem by arguing that the right of a Jewish government to draft soldiers is based on the law of the pursuer. A soldier is, in effect, the third party that must intervene to prevent the pursuer—i.e., the enemy—from killing the soldier's fellow countrymen. The problem with this explanation is that, once again, one cannot normally force an individual to endanger his life to save that of another. Nonetheless, R. Goren claims that the cause of national self-defense overrides that halakhic concern and requires individuals to serve and fight on behalf of their countrymen.Footnote ⁵³ R. David Bleich surmounts the problem of conscription by citing a talmudic precedent in B. ‘Eruvin that allows Jews in border towns in the land of Israel to go to war on the Sabbath to defend themselves from enemy attack. This source permits a violation of Sabbath law that would make sense from a halakhic standpoint only if this type of military operation fell under the rubric of mandatory war, and mandatory war, in turn, would assume that forced conscription is permitted.Footnote ⁵⁴ There are other solutions.Footnote ⁵⁵

However, the weakness of all these positions is that they refer to rabbinic sources that either do not cite the biblical text or cite biblical passages that have nothing to do with war.Footnote ⁵⁶ This observation points to a larger problem. There is, in fact, no explicit biblical source that permits defensive wars in the first place. Early rabbinic sources find sanction in the Bible for allowing the individual to kill in self-defense or to kill a pursuer who is threatening someone else's life.Footnote ⁵⁷ Furthermore, there are divine commands in the Bible that mandate wars other than defensive ones, such as the imperatives to make war on the Canaanites and to conquer the land of Israel, and the command to annihilate the Amalekites.Footnote ⁵⁸ The biblical text also contains the vague sanction for waging war in “towns that lie very far from you” (Deuteronomy 20:10–15). Yet the biblical text is silent on the question of whether the Israelites as a nation can defend themselves against an aggressor as a matter of principle. One can imagine that this issue would be of particular concern to R. Yisraeli, who, along with other religious Zionist rabbis in the early years of the state of Israel, was trying to formulate halakhic positions on a host of matters involving the Jewish return to political sovereignty—including national self-defense.

All of this explains why R. Yisraeli was so interested in the midrashic passage about the Midianite war, a source that is striking in several respects. First, it is the only source in the major works of early rabbinic literature that justifies defensive wars by citing the biblical text. Second, the biblical text that is cited concerns national and not just individual self-defense. Finally, the midrash addresses the more specific problem of conscription—at least implicitly—because it refers to a defensive war in the Bible that God clearly required the entire Israelite nation to fight. Hence R. Yisraeli had good reasons for turning to this source in formulating his views on defensive wars. With impressive brevity, it solved the major problems with this type of war more effectively than other sources: it justified defensive wars in general, addressed the issue of conscription, and accomplished both purposes by referring to a biblical source that was specifically concerned with war.

We should also note that the midrashic source upon which R. Yisraeli relied is not the only one that sees the Midianite war as paradigmatic for later wars. According to another early rabbinic source, a Jewish army is allowed to surround a city on only three sides, and this rule is deduced from the biblical account of the Midianite war.Footnote ⁵⁹ That principle and its prooftext were later canonized in medieval halakhah by Maimonides.Footnote ⁶⁰ Therefore, this source and Maimonides’ confirmation of it may have also encouraged R. Yisraeli to think of the Midianite war as the model for all defensive wars.

It does not take much reflection to figure out why other rabbinic authorities had passed over the midrash about the Midianite war as a source for justifying wars of self-defense. Halakhic commentators may have been uncomfortable with a midrashic passage that associated defensive wars with a battle that was explicitly depicted in the biblical text as an act of revenge. Furthermore, the sources upon which halakhic commentators base their views of defensive wars are most often from the Talmud, while the midrash about the Midianite war does not appear there and hence may not have been regarded as sufficiently authoritative for a matter as important as wars of self-defense.

In sum, commentators on R. Yisraeli's essay concerning Kibiyeh are certainly correct in seeing his views on wars of revenge as unusual. There is no explicit precedent for such an idea in the halakhah, and the notion that wars of self-defense are permissible is generally supported by interpretive mechanisms other than that chosen by R. Yisraeli. However, it is not correct to say that R. Yisraeli's views have no precedent whatsoever in rabbinic sources. We have shown that he formulated his position by creatively interpreting a midrashic source and that he turned to that source for good reasons.

With all this in mind, it is instructive for us to look at how Rabbi Shlomo Goren used the Midianite episode in his own deliberations about war, in an essay devoted to the Israeli war in Lebanon in 1982, a war dubbed by Israel “Operation Peace for the Galilee.”Footnote ⁶¹ In the essay, R. Goren discusses the sources for the general principle of self-defense in halakhah. The first, according to him, is the law of the “pursuer” that allows an individual to kill someone who is intent on killing an innocent person. The second is the biblical passage in Exodus that allows a person to kill a thief who is attempting to invade one's home.Footnote ⁶² What is most important for our purposes is R. Goren's final source: it is none other than the Midianite war in the book of Numbers. R. Goren explicitly cites the midrashic source in Numbers Rabba and Tanḥuma that bases the principle of self-defense on this war.Footnote ⁶³ Most significant is that, according to R. Goren, this last source is especially useful because it explicitly approves of self-defense for the collective, while the first two address only self-defense for the individual:

Therefore, R. Goren not only calls on the midrashic reading of the Midianite episode to justify wars of self-defense as R. Yisraeli does, he articulates a reason for adducing that source that I suspect was a factor in inspiring R. Yisraeli to use it as well: it provides a justification for self-defense of the “collective”—that is, the Jewish nation as a whole—from a biblical source that refers explicitly to war.

Though R. Goren does not say so explicitly, I suspect that his interpretation of the Midianite war is in response to R. Yisraeli's. R. Goren would have certainly been familiar with R. Yisraeli's well-known essay on the Kibiyeh operation. R. Goren, in effect, pays his respects to R. Yisraeli by accepting the midrashic reading of the Midianite war that R. Yisraeli had adopted, but departs from him by refusing to give any place to the theme of revenge. But even if R. Goren was not responding to R. Yisraeli here, his use of the midrashic reading of the Midianite episode legitimates its use as a source for wars of self-defense and suggests that R. Yisraeli's own choice of this episode for the same purpose was not as unusual as some interpreters have claimed.Footnote ⁶⁵

Let us now address R. Yisraeli's essay from a moral standpoint. Is it as radical and militant as it has been made out to be? From our analysis, not necessarily. R. Yisraeli views all defensive wars fought by Jews as wars of revenge, but in actual practice this equation has limited practical significance. It allows R. Yisraeli to justify defensive wars in general and to classify such wars as mandatory so that a Jewish government can require its subjects to fight. However, none of this has any effect on his beliefs about how wars of self-defense should actually be fought once they are initiated—that is, it has no effect on jus in bello. When it comes to civilian casualties, we have seen that R. Yisraeli's position is the same as it is for all other wars—that is, those that are discretionary: Jews must follow international law, and that law tolerates the killing of the innocent along with the guilty.Footnote ⁶⁶

While this position may seem harsh, it is not exactly radical. In fact, R. Yisraeli is trying quite consciously to align his ethics of war with what he believes to be international standards of conduct. Moreover, R. Yisraeli's formulation falls within the spectrum of views commonly held by Western thinkers who have dealt with the ethics of war. R. Yisraeli's position perhaps corresponds most closely to what we know in the Western tradition as moral realism, an approach arguing that war should be waged for a just cause while largely accepting civilian casualties as a necessary evil that has to be tolerated for the sake of that cause.Footnote ⁶⁷ R. Yisraeli's position would not meet the standards of just war theory. The latter also accepts civilian casualties but insists that they be kept to the minimum needed to achieve victory, and R. Yisraeli is, in general, too accepting of such casualties to be identified with this way of thinking.Footnote ⁶⁸ But being a moral realist does not make one a radical or militant.

Most important, contrary to what is often assumed about R. Yisraeli, he does not approve of killing enemy civilians if there is no military benefit. Despite his limited understanding of international law, he must have known that this kind of killing was forbidden by international standards, and once again, it is those standards that determine his view of Jewish conduct in war. Nor does R. Yisraeli support the indiscriminate killing of enemy civilians for no other purpose than revenge for the killing of Jewish civilians. It is important to realize that R. Yisraeli does not use the concept of revenge in the conventional and colloquial sense of taking action to inflict suffering on an enemy as payback for previous injuries. For R. Yisraeli, the phrase “wars of revenge” is nothing more than a halakhic label for defensive wars in which a Jewish government can conscript soldiers and force them to fight against their will. In light of these observations, R. Yisraeli falls short of true militancy.Footnote ⁶⁹

All of this still leaves many questions unanswered. If according to R. Yisraeli Jews are permitted to the kill enemy civilians during wartime, which civilians are fair game? Is it just those who are in the direct line of fire? Or would R. Yisraeli include those outside the theater of combat who might have a more indirect role in the war? The exact parameters of R. Yisraeli's views on noncombatants are never worked out, but again, on the basis of what he says, it is hard to see him as a radical.

Yet did R. Yisraeli not approve of the Kibiyeh operation in which dozens of civilians were killed? Does this not prove his militancy? Here too matters are not as simple as interpreters have assumed. R. Yisraeli certainly endorses the type of military operation conducted in Kibiyeh in principle. According to his understanding of the situation leading up to the Kibiyeh raid, the perpetrators of violence against Jewish civilians in Yehud were from Kibiyeh and therefore a military raid to root out those perpetrators would have been perfectly acceptable, even if it meant civilian casualties. However, once again, this position would not necessarily make R. Yisraeli a radical. Some just war theorists would also support a military operation in these circumstances and would tolerate civilian casualties. The situation R. Yisraeli was grappling with is referred to by modern war theorists as irregular warfare, which includes wars against terrorists and guerillas who do not function as a regular army, do not wear army uniforms so that they can be identified, hide among civilians, and therefore cannot be attacked without significant loss of innocent life. In recent years, ethicists have had heated debates about how to deal with these kinds of enemies, as guerilla warfare and terrorism have become increasingly common. Some just war theorists believe that one must go after the terrorists militarily despite the risk of civilian casualties, and this approach is justified by a number of moral arguments. One such argument is that the terrorists themselves are responsible for the civilian deaths among their own people, not those who attack them.Footnote ⁷⁰ In fact, this argument is made explicitly by R. Yisraeli himself in the concluding section of his essay in a passage that we have already cited: “whatever disaster and harm is inflicted on the [enemy] perpetrators [of violence], their associates, and their children, it is their very own responsibility, and they will bear their sin.”Footnote ⁷¹ Therefore R. Yisraeli's views, while perhaps harsh, are not out of the mainstream here.

Moreover, while R. Yisraeli may have supported a military raid in Kibiyeh in theory, a careful reading of his essay will show that he never actually voices approval of the raid as it was carried out in practice! In fact, he explicitly eschews judgment on this matter. In a central statement examined earlier in our discussion, R. Yisraeli says quite clearly that “with regard to the matter under discussion (concerning Kibiyeh and similar situations) one must examine if a [military] response of this kind is upheld and accepted among the nations.”Footnote ⁷² However, as we have noted, R. Yisraeli himself refuses to make a determination on this matter.

That R. Yisraeli does not grapple with what actually happened in Kibiyeh is also evident from a careful reading of the final passage of his essay where he summarizes his position. Let us look again at that key statement:

We should not be misled by the belligerent tone of this passage. His references to revenge have to be understood in light of what he said earlier; R. Yisraeli's notion of revenge is of limited significance in his ethics of war and is called upon primarily to require the conscription of soldiers. Even more important, there is no mention of the Kibiyeh raid here. R. Yisraeli's conclusions are framed in a distinctly prescriptive manner. All that he tells us is that “there is room” for wars of revenge and recompense. He seems more interested in setting forth principles as to how Jews should deal with the Arab threat in the future than in commenting on events that have already occurred. Therefore, the most we can say is that R. Yisraeli supports the military option against the Jordanian border towns, but it is not at all clear that he endorsed what actually happened in Kibiyeh.

Why did R. Yisraeli not make a ruling that specifically addressed the events in Kibiyeh? As we suggested earlier, he may not have been in a position to. He may have recognized that his knowledge of international law was not detailed enough to determine whether the actions in Kibiyeh conformed to its norms. Therefore, he preferred to lay down a prescriptive position on the killing of enemy civilians so that others with more knowledge of international law could make that determination. Another possibility is that R. Yisraeli had mixed feelings about what happened in Kibiyeh. He is quite emphatic that in war, special care should be taken not to kill children; yet, in Kibiyeh children were indeed killed. It is therefore possible that in his mind the military operation in Kibiyeh had gone too far. This may explain why he voices special concern for the killing of children and why he concludes his essay by mentioning that issue. Thus, his essay may have been as much an attempt to place restrictions on Jewish military action as it was an attempt to determine what was permitted. It was more a guide for how Jews should conduct themselves in future raids than a stamp of approval on what had happened in Kibiyeh. This would explain R. Yisraeli's prescriptive language when arriving at his final conclusions.

I would like to examine briefly one more element in R. Yisraeli's essay that has aroused a good deal of criticism. As we have seen, R. Yisraeli bases his justification of discretionary war on the notion that the principle of dina de-malkhuta dina applies to international laws governing the relationships between nations. Since the gentile nations permit war, Jews can wage war as well. Yet, in order to justify the killing that takes place in war, R. Yisraeli makes use of a metaphysical argument predicated on the notion that there is a fundamental distinction between the souls of Jews and non-Jews. While Jews have souls that belong to God, non-Jews have full ownership over their souls, and therefore the non-Jewish nations as a group have a right to permit wars in which their lives may be taken.

A number of commentators have been disturbed by this argument for obvious reasons: it seems to assume that non-Jewish life is cheaper than Jewish life.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet a closer examination of R. Yisraeli's essay will reveal once more that the issues are more complex than they seem. First of all, let us not ignore the irony that while R. Yisraeli appears to denigrate non-Jews here, he does so while arguing that the rules of war for Jews are determined by non-Jews! While non-Jews are inferior in a metaphysical sense, it is they who decide how Jews should conduct themselves when it comes to the practice of war in the real world.Footnote ⁷⁵

Second, R. Yisraeli is not entirely lacking in compassion for non-Jewish life. As we have seen, R. Yisraeli at no point endorses the wanton killing of non-Jews. He expresses concern throughout his deliberations for innocent non-Jewish civilians who die in war. Most poignant are his views on the killing of non-Jewish children, an issue that seems to have particularly disturbed him.

His method of dealing with the collateral deaths of children is also noteworthy. As we saw, R. Yisraeli addresses the killing of children when discussing the Midianite war in which children were deliberately put to death. Why, R. Yisraeli asks, were they killed if there is a prohibition in Jewish law against holding children responsible for the sins of their parents? R. Yisraeli answers that children were killed in the Midianite war only because the Midianites had “attacked” the Israelites by tempting them into idol worship, an assault far worse than a physical war. That is why there is also a biblical mandate to kill children when destroying an Israelite city that has adopted idolatry. The Midianite war therefore does not provide precedent to act in a similar manner in defensive wars when the enemy has attacked in a more conventional manner. What is striking about this interpretation is that R. Yisraeli treats the matter of killing non-Jewish children with halakhic principles and injunctions that normally apply to Jews. In their biblical and rabbinic contexts, the prohibition against holding children responsible for the sins of their parents and the case of the idolatrous Israelite city are focused on Jews. Therefore, in this instance, the distinction between Jews and non-Jews seems to melt away.

In conclusion, my analysis challenges the common assumptions about R. Yisraeli's essay on Kibiyeh on a number of levels. First, R. Yisraeli's concept of wars of revenge is not invented out of whole cloth. Certainly there is no precedent for this idea in the great codes of halakhah. However, I have demonstrated that R. Yisraeli formulated his notion of wars of revenge with the help of a creative reading of a midrashic source on the Midianite war.

Even more important, R. Yisraeli's essay on Kibiyeh appears to be more moderate than commentators have assumed. His use of the concept of revenge served a limited purpose in his deliberations, one that ultimately detached that term from its conventional meaning. His views on violence toward enemy civilians in Jordanian border towns were aligned with what he believed were the rules of international law regarding war. He also emphasized that special care should be taken to spare the lives of children in military operations. R. Yisraeli certainly did not believe that Jews should conduct military raids in Jordanian villages for no purpose other than to kill Arab civilians in retaliation for the killing of Jewish ones. Raids of this sort had to be conducted according to the rules of war specifying that the individuals who had actually carried out the violence were to be the primary targets and that the killing of civilians was acceptable only so long as it was part of that overall effort. As for the actual raid that took place in Kibiyeh, R. Yisraeli offered no clear statement about whether it actually conformed to halakhah. A judgment on this matter would have required a discussion of whether the raid was acceptable according to international law, and this was a discussion R. Yisraeli did not provide. He appears to have been more interested in establishing prescriptive principles for future military actions than in making judgments about past ones.

Yet it is understandable that commentators have read R. Yisraeli's essay as representing an extreme position. R. Yisraeli was bound to mislead readers by his use of the incendiary concept of revenge. That term is sufficiently charged that the subtleties of R. Yisraeli's arguments could easily be overwhelmed by the powerful overtones it evoked. The same could be said about R. Yisraeli's use of the idea that the souls of non-Jews souls are fundamentally different from those of Jews. R. Yisraeli's views on non-Jews are a good deal more complicated than this notion would suggest, and yet here too the complexities of his thinking are easily lost due to the negative impressions that this concept brings to the fore. Thus, if R. Yisraeli has been misunderstood, it is partly his own fault in not being sufficiently careful in the way in which he bandied about controversial terms and concepts.

Such lack of care can have dire ramifications. R. Yisraeli's perceived extremism has served as precedent for subsequent interpreters with a militant bent. An excellent example is the way his views on the “pursuer” have been used by subsequent right-wing Zionist rabbinic authorities to justify violence not just against Arabs but against other Jews. As we have seen, R. Yisraeli rejects the use of this concept to justify the type of military raid that was conducted in Kibiyeh. However, as Gerald Blidstein has shown, this has not stopped several rabbis from using this idea for radical purposes.Footnote ⁷⁶ What we therefore learn from our analysis is that when dealing with sensitive ethical issues such as the killing of innocent civilians, great care must be taken not just in delineating one's positions; one must also be cautious with the words and ideas used to formulate those positions, seeing as they often have unintended consequences.

The irony is that if R. Yisraeli had been more informed about international law, his position would have been even more moderate than our interpretation suggests. As noted earlier, the Fourth Geneva Convention had placed significant restrictions on warring nations when it came to civilian casualties, and if in R. Yisraeli's thinking international law was determinative of how Jews should wage war, those restrictions would have made it difficult for R. Yisraeli to speak as cavalierly as he did about the innocent dying with the guilty in war. And there is good reason to believe that R. Yisraeli would not have been hesitant to follow the Geneva Convention. He says explicitly that if the international community were to abolish war altogether, Jews would have to do so as well.