MAY 16 • 2024 | 49

evaluations presented by political
leaders, military commanders,
academic ethicists and rabbinic
scholars, all in clear, direct,
readable, compelling prose.
Remarkably, as Brody retells the
military dilemmas in chronological
order, he also presents the issues in
conceptual order. He moves from
considering which circumstances
justify the use of military force and
who should make that decision,
to whether a preemptive attack
can ever be justified, and then to
which activities should remain
off limits even once military force
has initiated. He considers when
it makes sense to apply tests such
as “proportionality” and “civilian
immunity.”
The idea of military ethics
posits that somewhere between
“all’s fair in love and war” and
absolute pacifism, there exist
rational methods for distinguishing
legitimate belligerent actions from
war crimes. Ask your search engine, and
it will find writers who confidently apply
apparently rational methods. These
writers typically appeal to principles as if
they were widely understood, as if their
readers should also grasp the precise
principles of military ethics.
Some of these judgments appeal to
our emotions, others to international
treaties, others to the usual practices
of national armies, still others to
conceptual theories. The judgments have
competing and contradictory bases, and
yet the authors typically claim a high
level of certainty about what behavior
they demand. Often it seems that trying
to follow these recommendations would
lead to disaster.

WHAT ETHICS CAN ACCOMPLISH
About a third of the way through this
book, Brody begins to articulate his own
complex understanding of what military
ethics can, and cannot, accomplish.
He constructs a case for what he calls
Jewish Multivalue Framework for
Military Ethics. In this, as in other areas,
according to Brody, Jewish thinking
rejects categorical slogans and embraces

complexity. Jewish thought stands in
contrast with popular judgments about
military ethics.
In practice, Brody maintains, we
cannot establish a fixed hierarchy
of principles of military ethics.
Commanders and fighters must always
operate with insufficient information:
They will never know enough about
the enemy’s intentions and armaments;
they will never have certainty about the
location of legitimate military targets
and protected civilian assets; they will
always have to rely on speculative
estimates of the probability of success
and the danger of failure. Demanding
that the forces protecting you have
perfect knowledge of the facts before
acting amounts to renouncing your own
defense, with predictable results.
Make a categorical principle, say, that
one may never initiate a preemptive
strike, and you promise to absorb the
first attack, no matter how devastating to
your citizens and forces.
Decide exactly how much collateral
damage requires canceling a military
operation, and you train the enemy to
use the right number of human shields

to operate with impunity.
Decide that the life of non-
combatants takes precedence
over the lives of your own forces
(as respected ethicist Michael
Walzer does), and you neglect the
obligation to protect your own
civilians and sell short the need to
protect your own forces.
On the other hand, we cannot
simply target non-combatants, as
Rabbi Shlomo Goren wrote, “After
all, I was a rabbi, and we had our
moral standards, the Torah’s moral
standards, according to which
every person is created in God’s
image. Therefore, I believed, we
must be merciful and respect each
person’s life, as long as he is not
a danger to us and is not fighting
us.”
After weighing the complex
factors that have confronted
commanders of the Israeli Defense
Forces, Brody articulates his own
unambiguous judgments on the
ethics of actions taken in defense of
the Jewish state, where he believes the
authorities acted wisely and where they
failed.
To even attempt a synthesis of thought
about military ethics requires a thorough
background in several intellectual
disciplines. Brody, a rabbi and teacher
of rabbinic thought, has a graduate
degree in philosophy and a doctorate
in law, and is the father of members of
the Israel Defense Forces. He marshals
extraordinary levels of research in this
book. Even more remarkably, he presents
these complex issues in clear, vivid and
exciting prose.
The Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish
View on War and Morality went to press
shortly after the massacre perpetrated by
Hamas and its allies on Oct. 7, Simchat
Torah. The attack gets a brief mention in
the acknowledgements at the end of the
book. Many pages of this book, though,
seem directly relevant to the issues
raised by that horrifying attack, and to
the quest to find “the tools necessary to
explain to ourselves, and to others, how
we can ethically fight this just war and
emerge victorious.”