Religious Zionism, Jewish Law, and the Morality of War

Abstract

When the state of Israel was established in 1948, it was immediately thrust into war, and rabbis in the religious Zionist community were challenged with constructing a body of Jewish law to deal with this turn of events. Laws had to be “constructed” here because Jewish law had developed mostly during prior centuries when Jews had no state or army, and therefore it contained little material on war. The rabbis in the religious Zionist camp responded to this challenge by creating a substantial corpus of laws on war, and they did so with remarkable ingenuity and creativity. The work of these rabbis represents a fascinating chapter in the history of Jewish law and ethics, but it has attracted relatively little attention from academic scholars. The purpose of the present book is therefore to bring some of their work to light. It examines how five of the leading rabbis in the religious Zionist community dealt with key moral issues in the waging of war. Chapters are devoted to R. Abraham Isaac Kook, R. Isaac Halevi Herzog, R. Eliezer Waldenberg, R. Sha’ul Yisraeli, and R. Shlomo Goren. The moral issues examined include the question of who is a legitimate authority for initiating a war, why Jews in a modern Jewish state can be drafted to fight on its behalf, and whether the killing of enemy civilians is justified. Other issues examined include how the laws of war as formulated by religious Zionist rabbis compares to those of international law.