We at T’ruah are deeply saddened by last Friday’s violence along the Israel/Gaza border, which resulted in the deaths of at least sixteen Palestinians, and injuries to close to 800 others among the thousands of Palestinians protesting as part of a “March of Return.” We are grateful that there were no deaths or serious injuries to Israeli soldiers or civilians, and pray that the anticipated protests this coming Friday will not lead to additional deaths or injuries.
T’ruah supports the right to non-violent protest, whether here in North America or in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, as a fundamental right of civilians. Thankfully, the vast majority of the Gazan protesters refrained from violence, though some resorted to throwing stones, burning tires, and Molotov cocktails at soldiers, and a few tried to breach the border fence. We reject these and other modes of violence, and call for a commitment to nonviolence.
Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5 teaches:
אמר ר’ מאיר: בשעה שאדם מצטער מה הלשון אומרת, קלני מראשי קלני מזרועי, אם כן המקום מצטער על דמם של רשעים שנשפך קל וחומר על דמם של צדיקים
“R. Meir said: When a human being suffers, what does God say? My head is too heavy for me, my arm is too heavy for me. Thus God suffers over the blood of the wicked, how much more so over the blood of the righteous.”
Since Friday’s bloody events, some have tried to justify the death count by pointing to some of the protesters’ affiliation with Hamas, or to the stated intent of the march to return to land from which Palestinians fled or were evicted in 1948. We reject Hamas as a terrorist organization, and support the right of Israel to exist within internationally-recognized boundaries. However, affiliation and intent alone do not justify killing. The response to death must always be grief—just as God feels desperate pain over the loss of any of God’s creations, whether righteous or wicked, and whether Jewish or not Jewish. As we sat down to our sedarim just hours after the violence began, our joy was lessened, like the wine we spill from our kiddush cups in commemoration of the biblical suffering of the Egyptians.
Israel certainly has the right to defend itself and its borders, particularly from terrorism and rocket fire. However, the decision to place snipers on the border in advance of the planned demonstrations, and to respond with live fire without first attempting other tactics to calm the situation virtually guaranteed major loss of life.
The Talmud enjoins us to do everything in our power to avoid loss of life, even in cases considered self-defense. It relates a Biblical episode in which Avner, the commander of King Saul’s forces, kills a man named Asahel. Avner insists that he killed only in self-defense, as Asahel was pursuing him to murder him. Ashel’s brother Yoav presses him, “You could have saved yourself by wounding him in one of his limbs!” Avner insists that he was unable to do so. Yoav insists, “Since you were able to aim at his fifth rib (a particularly sensitive spot), could you not have hit him in one of his limbs?”
Yoav, himself, subsequently kills both Avner and a military commander whom he believes to have rebelled against the king. The same page of Talmud imagines Solomon taking Yoav to task for his hotheadedness, which ended in two preventable deaths.
The rabbis’ message is clear: Human life is so precious that even in military situations, one must take every precaution to avoid killing, even of an enemy or of one perceived as endangering the government.
In alignment with the ancient rabbis and our deepest Jewish values, we call on Israel to find ways to respond to the demonstrations planned for this coming Friday and the next few weeks in ways that will not escalate the situation or lead to injury or death, to investigate the decisions that led to live fire being used on demonstrators, and to refrain from revising the rules of engagement to permit the expanded use of live fire.
In the long term, only a peace agreement will end the on-again, off-again violence on the Gaza border, which endangers residents of Gaza, along with Israelis living near the border, and the soldiers sent to protect this border. In the short term, Israel must play an active role in ameliorating the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The closure of the borders with Israel and Egypt severely limits the import of needed goods as well as the exports necessary to allow for economic growth. The people of Gaza have limited access to electricity, clean water, and medical support.
The Hamas government, no doubt, shares significant blame for the situation in Gaza, as a result of their repression, corruption, and continued violent rejection of the existence of Israel. So does Egypt, which has largely closed its border with Gaza. But the vast majority of Gazans alive today never voted for Hamas, and do not deserve to be punished for this party’s policies. Israel, which continues to control Gaza’s borders, air space, and population registry even after the official disengagement, maintains major responsibility for the humanitarian crisis there. We encourage Israel to deploy all of the creativity of the start-up nation to ameliorating this crisis, refraining from escalating violence at the border, and ultimately working toward a two-state solution that will keep both Israelis and Palestinians safe.