Justifying War Crimes in the Name of Judaism

HAARETZ – In 1905, the Jewish psychoanalyst Otto Rank published a short essay called “The Essence of Judaism.” Rank, who at the time was one of the students closest to Sigmund Freud, sought to explain the excellence of Jews in the fields of art, journalism and medicine. His explanation was rather surprising.

In his view, the Jews were closer to nature than the other European nations, particularly in their sexual habits. In contrast to other peoples, the Jewish sexual drive had not undergone repression over the centuries, he observed. Accordingly, whereas other peoples had become passive or masochistic, the Jews succeeded in resisting neurosis, thanks to which they had survived from antiquity.

In the modern era, Rank maintained, the professions pursued by the Jews embodied an ability to express and exteriorize the sexual drive in diverse ways. This, then, was the Jews’ mission, which they had preserved rigorously: to disseminate among the nations unrestrained, primitive sexuality.

Rank’s theory may sound odd, but it was not exceptional in its time. From the mid-19th until the mid-20th century, Jewish thinkers espoused a variety of peculiar theories (even if not as peculiar as Rank’s) about the Jewish people’s mission in the world.

Philosopher Moses Hess believed that their role was to spread social justice among the nations, while the Reform rabbi Ludwig Philippson maintained that their historic mission had been to “import” the banking profession from the East to backward medieval Europe.

During World War I, German socialist leader Eduard Bernstein averred that the task of the Jews, scattered across the globe, was to establish peace between nations. Jewish leaders in the United States, for their part, put forward a host of other notions in an effort to instill content into the traditional concept of “tikkun olam” (literally, repair of the world).

The goal of these thinkers was to rebuff the contention that Judaism is a zealous, restricted religion that espouses a particularist worldview summed up in the phrase “a people that dwells apart” (Numbers 23:9). Therefore, they argued that the Jews were the first to possess a universal message. The idea that they had a universalist mission became a cornerstone of modern Jewish identity. In the wake of the Holocaust, this view gained further credence inasmuch as the Jews’ historical experience as a persecuted people was seen to have imbued them with an exceptional moral sensitivity.

Moreover, Jewish jurists were among the pioneers of international law and were instrumental in formulating the 1951 Refugee Convention (which defined the status and rights of refugees, and states’ legal obligations toward them), under the auspices of the United Nations. The State of Israel, too, believed it had a mission to spread morality and justice among the gentiles. For this reason, the menorah was chosen as the state’s symbol, since it embodied the idea of “a light unto the nations.”

Negative moral role

What is the situation of the universal mission of Jews today, as the Hebrew new year gets under way? Surely it has never been worse. For reasons of its own, for instance, Israel is today one of the most vociferous opponents to the idea of extending the authority of the International Court of Justice in the Hague. It is therefore playing a negative moral role: preventing the spread of international law.

In addition, Israel is one of the world’s largest arms dealers. And the percentage of thos seeking asylum here who have been granted legal refugee status in the country is one of the lowest in the world. In general, in the eyes of local politicians, international problems are a matter for “the world” to deal with – meaning every country other than Israel. MK Yair Lapid (head of Yesh Atid) expressed this approach well when he recently declared: “The refugee crisis is a European matter, there is no reason for us to be part of it.”

More than ever before, Israel is scornfully rejecting the demand of the international community that it act according to universal principles. Yet the vision of the Jewish people’s universal mission is thriving in contemporary Israel. It is espoused vigorously in settler circles, who believe that the Jewish people and the State of Israel are entrusted with a special mission vis-a-vis the rest of humanity. They ground this approach in the doctrine of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook (1865-1935), who contended that it is the Jews’ purpose to bring salvation to every person on the face of the earth.

In a similar vein, Rabbi Dov Lior, the former rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement in the West Bank, frequently declares that the obligation of the Jewish people is “to stand out in terms of leadership, morality, faith, integrity, love of justice” and so forth. That notion did not prevent Lior from developing a doctrine of his own in regard to the laws of war. During last summer’s Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip, he declared: “In all wars, the nation that is attacked is permitted to fight back forcefully against the nation from which the attackers came.” His conclusion: Israel has the right to raze Gaza to the ground.

How can that perception be reconciled with the idea of a universal moral mission? The approach of the Israeli right is based on the presupposition that the Jews are the world’s most moral people. Precisely because of that, they are permitted to dissociate themselves from every conventional moral criterion. National-religious rabbis explain, for example, that the relationship between Israel and the rest of humanity is like the relationship between the brain and the rest of the human body. Israel must on no account take into consideration the opinion of the gentiles, certainly not where moral issues are concerned, these rabbis say.

In this manner, the idea of the Jews’ universalist mission has morphed into sweeping justification for war crimes. It’s not surprising that some are urging Israel to discard the idea of such a mission once and for all. “No, we are not a special nation – we haven’t been for a long time. Nor are we chosen, certainly not above other nations,” Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz a few years ago. And yet the left, too – and actually its most radical wing – also harbors a perception of the Jewish people’s moral exceptionalism. Otherwise it’s hard to explain why left-wing Jews in Israel and elsewhere are so shocked by their nation’s moral deterioration. Many claim that original, traditional Judaism carries a universal message of morality that was vitiated by Zionism – and that, they argue, is one of the great crimes of the occupation. For example, renowned linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky, one of Israel’s fiercest critics, says that his political critique is based on the morality of the prophets of Israel, who in his view fought injustice and other wrongs that marred their society.

Manifestly, then, the belief in the Jewish people’s universal mission is espoused across the whole political spectrum. It is shared by right and left, religious and secular people, Zionists and anti-Zionists. It’s hard to escape it. The story of a small nation that has educated all of humanity from the dawn of history down to our own day is too powerful for us to agree to discard it.

It affords meaning to Jewish existence and the fears that are part of that existence. It’s an idea that makes it great to be a Jew. There are some who want to set aside the idea of Jewish singularity, but this perception gets in the way of their doing that – one reason being that non-Jews, too, believe that the Jews are the most special nation in the world