Michael Carasyk writes from Philadelphia:
“It might be time for a column on the Hebrew expression tohar ha-neshek, which I haven’t heard in a while.”
The Hebrew words tohar ha-neshek — literally, “the purity of arms,” or “the purity of the gun” — are known to every Israeli, and they refer to the moral duty of a soldier in combat to avoid harming innocent civilians as much as possible. I assume that Mr. Carasyk thought the phrase a timely one because of the fighting going on in Gaza when he sent his e-mail.
But before we get to Gaza, a bit of linguistic history. Although not an ancient Hebrew expression, tohar ha-neshek predates the State of Israel. It was coined following an address given at the 21st Zionist Congress in August 1939 by Berl Katzenelson, a prominent figure in Mapai, the Palestine Workers Party headed by David Ben-Gurion. Widely regarded as Mapai’s moral conscience, Katzenelson spoke about havlaga, or “self-restraint,” the notion that Palestine’s Jewish community should not respond in kind to the anti-Jewish terrorism perpetrated by the Arab revolt that took place from 1936 to 1939. Havlaga was a key issue dividing the fighting forces of the left-wing Haganah and the right-wing Irgun, which advocated and practiced counter-terrorism, and Katzenelson said in his address:
“The meaning of havlaga is that our arms must remain pure [yehi nishkenu tahor]. We must learn to use arms, we must bear arms, we must defend ourselves against whoever attacks us. But we do not want our arms to be stained by innocent blood.”
Yehi nishkenu tahor yielded tohar ha-neshek, which became part of the basic vocabulary of the Haganah and its elite commando unit, the Palmach. With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Jewish state’s new army, the Israel Defense Forces, adopted the term. In the IDF’s official Ethical Code, drawn up in 1992, there is a passage that reads:
“The IDF serviceman’s purity of arms calls for self-control in the use of armed force. He will use his arms only for the purpose of achieving his mission, without inflicting unnecessary injury to human life or limb, or dignity or property, of both soldiers and civilians, with special consideration for the defenseless, whether in wartime, during routine security operations, or in times of peace.”
And now back to Gaza. Mr. Carasyk, I take it, is asking whether tohar ha-neshek was indeed a principle guiding the IDF’s recent operations or if it was mostly honored in the breach.
This isn’t a question that a column like this can answer. There already is, and will continue to be for a long time, a fierce debate in Israel and in the world over the “purity of arms” of the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza, and the issue is obviously not a linguistic one.
Still, a language columnist might be permitted to observe that the crucial word in the IDF Ethical Code’s definition of tohar ha-neshek is the ambiguous “unnecessary,” there often being no objective way of determining what is “necessary” in a war and what is not. If, for example, you are commanding a squad of soldiers that has been pinned down by sniper fire from a four-story building on a street in Gaza, is it “necessary,” in order to protect your own men, to call in a helicopter gunship to rocket the building at the risk of killing, besides the sniper, innocent people in it? The answer given by the soldiers under fire is likely to be different from that given by the civilians in the building. Who is to say which is the correct one?
There have been many arguments in Israel’s military history that concern the interpretation of tohar ha-neshek — one of the first, and probably the best known to this day, dates to the early months of Israel’s War of Independence. In January 1948, a platoon of 35 Palmach soldiers set out on foot from Jerusalem to help reinforce the Jewish settlements of the Etzion Bloc, then besieged by the Arab Legion and Palestinian irregulars. On its way at night through the Judean Hills, the platoon encountered an Arab shepherd. The pace of the platoon’s march made it impossible for it to take the shepherd along as a prisoner, and after a brief debate, it was decided to let him go on his way. This he did — straight to the nearest Arab fighting unit. The 35 Palmachniks were soon surrounded. And in the battle that followed, every one of them was killed.
It had been, it turned out, “necessary” to kill the shepherd — but who could have known this for a certainty in advance? Moreover, if he had been killed, the soldiers who killed him might have been haunted for the rest of their lives by the belief that they had done so unnecessarily.
Multiply this kind of dilemma by a thousandfold, and you have the fighting in Gaza. And there is not much time on the battlefield to make such decisions; often, they have to be arrived at in a matter of seconds. As a principle, tohar ha-neshek is an admirable one; in practice, it can be excruciatingly difficult to apply. One would have to study what happened on a case-by-case basis in order to come to any reasonable conclusion about how well the IDF applied it in Gaza.
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The story of the Arab shepherd who betrayed the 35 Palmach soldiers has no basis of fact and was part of the myth surrounding the concept of tohar ha-neshek. This story fits folklore - not history. I agree that the concept of tohar ha-neshek is an impractical idealism. If possible, no army should kill defenseless people.
Well, I suppose it's good luck for the IDF that they're fighting a people whose popular support of terror is so clear. Less moral ambiguities that way.
Gilad, can you provide references for the assertion that the account of the slaughter and mutilation of the 35 was false? I read that British soldiers found the corpses and that Rabbi Aryeh Levin was asked to help identify the remains. Todah rabbah. Avraham
In reply to Avraham ben Yaakov: The 35 Palmach soldiers were indeed murdered by Arabs and Reb Arye Levene was involved in their burial with the famous lottery to identify the bodies. I cannot prove a lack of evidence for the story of the Arab Shepherd, nor can anyone else. It is rather for those who claim that there was such an incident who need to prove it. It appears that the only one who could prove it are the 35 who were gone. I read over the years in various publication that the story had elements of legends rather than reality.
Many years ago in Jerusalem a tour guide told us the story of the 35 but it was a group of Arab women, not a shepherd whom they came upon but left unharmed and sounded the alarm to arab fighters. The tour guide thought the 35 should have shot them first. Others thought if they had tied them up, the villagers would come looking for them the next day.
"One would have to study what happened on a case-by-case basis in order to come to any reasonable conclusion about how well the IDF applied it in Gaza." Respectfully, as a non-Jew American it seems so much simpler to me. If your citizens are attacked you do whatever is necessary to protect them to the best of your ability. That is the reason you have a state. That goes also for the soldiers in the Palmach in 1948 and for your hypothetical soldiers in Gaza. They too are Israeli citizens. They are in Gaza to defend other Israelis. Of course, their lives should be of greater concern to their commander than the lives of Palestinain civilians that might be lost in their defense. That would be regrettable but is a decision you made when you decided to go into Gaza. If you made that decision morally, for the right reasons (which obviously you did) then you defend the lives of the men you sent in there with however much force is necessary to do that. If you did not go in morally, for the right reason, then anything you do there is illegal and immoral and you should be punished for war crimes. Obviously, that is not the case. I see no moral dilemma there. War is like a tsunami or an earthquake. Once someone (or a state) violently attacks another they have set in motion forces that will end in the deaths of many innocent people, no matter how it plays out. The moral (defending) party to the conflict has a first responsibility to save every life on its side of that moral equation. Underestimating what is "necessary" in a defensive war can prolong it and thereby result in many more innocent deaths than overestimating it can. And even worse, it can jeopardize the ability of the moral (defending) party to survive it. That, in my opinion, is what is immoral.
"There already is, and will continue to be for a long time, a fierce debate in Israel and in the world over the “purity of arms” of the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza" Evidence? (Outside of some tiny intellectual ghetto, that is.)
Reflecting on the story itself, it must be a matter of legend rather than history. If all 35 Palmachniks involved in the decision not to kill the Arab shepherd were surrounded and killed that night, who reported the seizing of the shepherd and the kill/not kill debate to those who later found the bodies? There's a similar problem with the part of the story that reports the shepherd's immediately going to the nearest Arab forces to report the Palmach intrusion. How was this observed and reported to the Israelis who found the bodies? Summarizing, you need two unobservable or unreportable events to put together the story as recounted. It may have happened, but there's absolutely no way for anyone to know that it did.