Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster reflects on ethical questions around war and collateral damage.
Rabbi Shlomo Brody's new book, Ethics of our Fighters, was finished in October 2023, just before the onset of the October 7 Iranian war by proxy against Israel. Two of Rabbi Brody's children subsequently participated as soldiers for the survival of Israel and many more of us also have friends and family involved in this war.
As there is now news of a ceasefire, together with more sleight of hand by Hamas in Gaza, it is perhaps a good time to ponder the findings of this book, based on Bible, rabbinic and philosophy of war experts of all traditions.
In July of 2024 I was in Israel for the birth of my daughter's baby under traumatic conditions. She became pregnant as war started and subsequently moved from the rocket-ridden north to Jerusalem, where she gave birth at the Hadassah Hospital.
Despite no flights from Manchester and abuse of Jewish passengers at UK airports, I completed the harrowing journey and arrived to find daughter, husband, two dogs (one not theirs) and a new granddaughter in a temporary apartment covered in boxes that were being packed up for the normal tenant who was moving elsewhere. I was given the bunker/safe room to sleep in. Plus the temperature was over 100 F every day, which was a heatwave even for Israel in summer.
How to cope? I went swimming first thing every morning and there I encountered fellow swimming addict, Dena Brody. At the end of my stay Dena invited me to hear her son speak on end of life issues at a local synagogue. This was when news broke of the atrocities in Southport where I'd lived as a child.
Surreal or what? But this July talk is the key to understanding Israel's attitude to war, a question which has engaged the Jewish people from time immemorial, given the enmity with which they've always been treated both in Israel and in diaspora.
But how is a talk on end of life issues relevant to the ethics of Israel's fighters, actually a citizens' army in which enlistment at 18 is compulsory?
Rabbi Brody explains in detail on page 287 of his book. He advocates the same incremental approach to fighting as he does to palliative care. Classic post-war theory, he writes, utilized "the doctrine of double effect" (DDE). DDE comprises three parts: Intent, Precautionary Measures and Proportionality".
He explains:
"Intent is defined as follows:
a) the military act is intended as an act of self-defense
b) The collateral damage is not intended
c) The collateral damage is not a means to the end of the act, i.e., one does not intend for the collateral damage to serve as a deterrent or provide some other benefit.
Precautionary Measures
Efforts are made to avoid or minimize collateral damage.
Proportionality
The collateral damage is proportionate to the importance of the mission.
Therefore, proper intent is crucial.
"For, example, most ethicists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, permit administering morphine to alleviate the suffering of terminally ill patients. We brand such treatment as 'end-of-life palliative care'.
"Occasionally, the overall effect of the narcotics might hasten the patient's end; but each dose, gradually administered, is intended to alleviate pain and will not necessarily shorten the patient's life.
"Purposively delivering a more toxic dose, however, is active euthanasia. That line between care and killing is quite thin in practice; as some researchers have noted, there's a 'gray area' between pain relief and mercy killing."
To me this is the most significant passage in the book. As we know, Canada is currently promoting active euthanasia, sometimes in dedicated hospitals. The UK is sidelining discussion of this matter from the 'religious' point of view and Parliament has managed to get through the first leg of the euthanasia bill by suppressing relevant expertise. Incidentally, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams and I have recently written a joint article on this subject for Christian Today.
However, the same arguments against euthanasia and in favour of increased palliative care can also be made for Israel's ongoing asymmetric war against Iran and her proxies. These proxies both surround the Jewish State and are embedded within it.
Most Western pundits on these questions are hostile towards Israel through 2,000 years of anti-Jewish indoctrination, now also embedded in our largely post-Christian societies, where support for Islamism is also predominant.
Another relevant factor is that the rescuing of hostages in whatever circumstances is an important tenet of Judaism. Abduction, kidnapping and the taking of Jewish hostages has never ceased throughout Jewish history, accelerated in Christian Europe and even post-Holocaust when priests and others refused to hand back Jewish babies and children temporarily handed over to the care of the Church by frantic parents often doomed to be slaughtered by the Nazis and their willing allies in Europe.
A third important element which we are now experiencing in the UK with the election of a Labour Party led by a lawyer is that the concept of 'human rights' has come to dominate every sphere, to the detriment of ordinary individuals. This particular mantra has been aimed especially at Israel and the citizens' army which make up her fighters by a number of 'sclerotic' organizations, to use the adjective preferred by the late Jonathan Sacks when he was Chief Rabbi here. These include the UN, the ICC and the BBC. Rabbi Brody demonstrates convincingly that human rights do not override the defence and protection of one's citizens, army and nation. And asymmetric warfare has only exacerbated the situation.
In Genesis 33 the biblical Jacob employs three key strategies in case of warfare with Esau who hates him. These strategies comprise 'divide and rule on two fronts' and offering gifts. If these two preliminary actions don't work, the only solution is war.
In 2005, Israel's war-seasoned assertive Prime Minister, General Ariel Sharon, completely surrendered Gaza to the Palestinians, even though it was part of Israel. Many Gazan Jews were left homeless. Successive Israeli governments also allowed money to be sent to Hamas via Qatar and Western agencies. What is more, Israelis living in the kibbutz border towns offered the hand of friendship to these Gazans, with jobs, lifts to hospitals and educational opportunities.
It is these idealistic left-wing Israeli citizens (those who believed in loving your enemy unconditionally, as well as espousing human rights) who were obscenely massacred by the very Gazans they had so willingly befriended and assisted for thirty years or more. The mass murder of Jewish civilians in their beds had been in the offing for a very long time by people they regarded as friends and neighbours.
Has Israel behaved with restraint? I should say so. Israeli citizen fighters are a fine example to the world, of which a usually very quiet member of our dialogue group stated during our last meeting: 'The antisemitism which was previously latent is now so obviously patent.'
Maybe it is now also time for the incremental palliative care approach to be utilized in our own work against antisemitism which has been flowering for at least 40 years in the woke West. Not for nothing is 1984 a seminal year in the Western psyche.
But now we have this marvellous book with its insights from Bible experts, rabbinic commentaries, Israeli leaders, war experts and even Catholic Elizabeth Anscombe, who was professor of philosophy at Cambridge when I studied the subject there and actually at my own college.
For in her paper, 'War and Blood', Anscombe took pacifists to task for failing to differentiate between killing in cold blood, which is totally unjustified, and killing as collateral damage, which is often necessary, not to be shirked, and the main premise of the book under review.
It is obvious which side in this present war against the Jewish people has been killing in cold blood, and which side has had no option but to rescue their hostages embedded among a people who simply want to destroy them in the most hideous of ways.
Maybe the world will one day wake up and smell the coffee.
