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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.” 

