Haaretz
The study hall of the Torat Hamedina organization is located in the Beit Orot neighborhood on the northern ridge of the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Last Monday evening, a few dozen men, most of them dressed in the Haredi-nationalist style, some of them armed, were taking their seats in the hall where a book launch was about to begin for ‘Mashiv Haruah’ (‘Restorer of the Spirit’), whose aim is to replace the IDF’s current ‘Code of Ethics’ with a more ‘Jewish’ alternative.
When MK Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism) entered and hugged the heads of the nonprofit group, its real purpose became clear: This was the kickoff of a campaign to change the Israel Defense Forces’ Code of Ethics by subordinating it to ‘halakha’, i.e. Jewish religious law.
This will apparently be achieved, above all, by doing away with the approach that sees war as an unpleasant but necessary evil. ‘For years we have been habituated to think in terms of war being a dark task – an approach that leads directly to the ongoing attempt to restrain the fighter and to stop him, for fear of moral corruption,’ the authors, Rabbi Yair Kartman and Rabbi Yaakov Yakir, wrote in an article published on the eve of the book launch. ‘However, the sources of the Torah teach us a different and refreshing approach. War is a commandment, it is a divine mission, and it is our way of repairing the world.’
Moreover, they added, ‘Instead of a document whose goal is to restrict the fighter, we need a ‘motivational’ document, one that will remind every soldier that he is continuing along the same path as King David and the Maccabees, and that he is fighting in the name of God and in the name of all of the People of Israel.’
Rothman, chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, opened the evening. ‘This book frightens a lot of people, and you are to be congratulated for that,’ he said, addressing his friends at the Torat Hamedina organization, with whom he has extensive connections.
From Rothman’s point of view, the era of the IDF’s ‘Code of Ethics’ is over. He referred to it as ‘the document that was once the Spirit of the IDF’, but no more.
He described the IDF’s ‘Code of Ethics’ as ‘no longer appropriate for the only Jewish state on Earth, the only state that combines nation, land, Torah, and combat, and that derives its identity from holiness and heroism.’
Another key figure involved in the launch is Meir Ben-Shabbat, former head of the National Security Council.
Rabbi Kartman, who heads Torat Hamedina along with Rabbi Yakir, told the audience that ‘Ben-Shabbat has been with us from the start’ and was also involved in drafting the new manifesto. ‘He told us: ‘You can say that I am an ardent supporter of this project and of changing the ‘Spirit of the IDF.’
But with all due respect to Rothman, Ben-Shabbat, and even the wife of the ultranationalist Rabbi Dov Lior, (who sat in the audience as his representative while he himself was among the project’s promoters) the real star of the evening was Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, head of the pre-military academy in the settlement of Beit El.
Zarbiv gained fame during the war in the Gaza Strip as the reservist who operated a Caterpillar D9 machine and developed a method for razing buildings quickly and efficiently. He boasted at the time: ‘Tens of thousands of families don’t have any documents, don’t have childhood pictures, don’t have ID cards. No home – they have nothing.’
Zarviv interspersed clips of the demolition of buildings in the Strip with religious sayings from the Torah and blasts on a shofar. The man whose name became synonymous with the devastation there and was even turned into a verb – ‘Zarbiv-ing Gaza’ – is today revered by the right wing and received the ultimate seal of approval last month when he was chosen to light a torch in the Independence Day eve ceremony on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Introducing Zarbiv at the book event, Rothman said he was astonished that there had been a public backlash to the rabbi’s participation in that ceremony. Zarbiv, he said, ‘fuses Torah spirit with combat, and as such should be part of the absolute consensus,’ given that he embodies ‘the greatest ideal that there is: One hand holds a D9, the other holds the Hebrew Bible, and together they are building the Kingdom of Israel.’
He paused for a moment and then added, with a grin, ‘actually, not as much ‘building’ as destroying, in this case.’ Laughter from the audience.
Zarbiv opened his speech, timed to be the high point of the evening, by citing a statistic he had heard from the head of the IDF’s Manpower Directorate, according to which ’70 percent of reserve soldiers are from the religious Zionism movement, and another 20 percent are formerly religious.’
Yet despite its overwhelming presence among the command ranks, the national-religious public had not yet actually dared to shape the IDF in its image, he said.
‘We occupied ourselves with questions of kashrut, modesty, and proper integration [of the genders], but we have never occupied ourselves with the holiness of war itself,’ Zarbiv said. ‘We left morality in the army to all kinds of wanton men. To wanton women. We let ‘them’ decide the fate of our children.’
‘We have been habituated to think in terms of war being a dark task – an approach that leads directly to the attempt to restrain the fighter,’ Kartman and Yakir wrote. ‘However, the sources of the Torah teach us a different, refreshing approach. War is a commandment, it is a divine mission.’
That is now ‘over and done with’, Zarbiv declared, going on to describe his role in shaping a new era: ‘I intend to lead it, publicly. Not long ago I told the commander of the Givati Brigade that my selfless devotion is not seen in the fact that I survived dozens of explosive devices, but that I went on to be interviewed and we succeeded in breaching the consciousness of the people of Israel, in creating a mass movement that demands victory. All the talk about ‘Zarbiv-ing,’ and so on … To sweep up a mass movement and fire up a nation, you need edgy words.’
The jargon he brought to center stage is already being translated at the operational level, he added.
‘Like the decision to destroy Gaza, so too in Lebanon…There is a consciousness of victory and of the burning need for victory. The enemy understands that there is a cost for provoking the Jewish people, and it’s a high cost. In Gaza, too, in the tens of years ahead, a million children in the Strip won’t have any place to sleep. They will be hot and then cold, and they will all want to get out of there.’
Zarbiv emphasized that in the ‘Spirit of the IDF’ document – which he and his cohorts hope to shred – the word ‘victory’ is missing. ‘If we do not go into [battle] with the consciousness of victory, the home front will collapse. And if the home front collapses, the [war] front collapses. Without spirit it won’t work.’
Quite a few high-ranking officers share his approach, he said, but he criticizes them for being ‘chickens’ due to their refusal to declare public support for his ideas. In conclusion, he called on his listeners ‘to embark on a confrontation’ with the media.
‘There is a minority here with a great many microphones,’ he said, referring to journalists who criticize him. ‘How do I know they are a minority? Because I walk around on the street. The people of Israel are with us; there’s no reason to be afraid. I pity them. Their leprosy may not be manifested in a bodily way, but it is a spiritual disease.’
Religious Remake
Despite the urgency exuded by ‘statesmanlike’ individuals (Rothman, Ben-Shabbat, Zarbiv), last week’s gathering in the small kollel (yeshiva for married men) might have seemed like another off-the-wall initiative from the fringes of the nationalist-ultra-Orthodox, or ‘Hardali’, stream.
But that would be a mistaken impression. ‘Torat Hamedina’, whose name means both ‘Torah of the state,’ and ‘doctrine of the state’ – enjoys free access to government power centers and is working through the government to recast the State of Israel in the spirit of halakha, i.e. Jewish religious law based on the Torah.
In recent months the nonprofit group has scored a series of achievements. One was the passage of legislation, sponsored by MKs from the Haredi United Torah Judaism party, to expand the authority of rabbinical courts to adjudicate in civil matters.
‘If the State of Israel is to be governed according to Torah, it should ask those of us who are sitting here, the rabbis, how to run the state’s affairs,’ the rabbi said recently in a talk in a pre-military academy, summing up his vision. ‘We want the system of laws of Israel to be based on Torah, and our role is to lure the Jewish people into understanding that this is the best thing for them.’
The job of ‘luring’ the Jewish people into accepting a Torah-based Jewish state is entrusted to the Yachin Research Center for strategic and national studies, in which Kartman, Yakir, and other right-wing figures are also active. The law to expand the authority of rabbinical courts, which was approved by the Knesset in March, is based on policy papers authored by the center, which focuses ‘on advancing policies rooted in Jewish religious values and Jewish identity,’ according to its English-language website.
Yachin Research Center has aligned itself with the ‘Roots’ reform launched by Education Minister Yoav Kisch (Likud). Its goal is to reinforce Jewish and Zionist identity among primary and high-school students by augmenting Judaism studies, classifying Torah as a ‘core subject’ and demanding that teachers take courses on Judaism-related subjects.
Another legislative initiative by Yachin, which is being promoted in cooperation with MKs Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit) and Ohad Tal (Religious Zionism), aims to expand the powers of the State-Religious Education Council to enable it ‘to decide how to behave when a contradiction arises between different values, and to determine what the religious way of life should be in state-religious educational institutions.’
Rabbi Dani Isaac, former head of the Beit Orot Yeshiva, also located in East Jerusalem, appeared to be astonished at Torat Hamedina’s broad range of influence. ‘When we established the organization, we didn’t know how far the dream would go,’ he said at the event last week, adding that he would never have imagined, for instance, that Rabbi Yakir would be a regular guest at Knesset committee meetings. ‘But something wonderful has happened here, which goes beyond the plan.’
Isaac also addressed the organization’s current incarnation. ‘The initial thought when we established it was to educate pupils, but it became a research institute known for its achievements and activities worldwide.’ But the developments he described didn’t occur in a vacuum, rather they are subsumed within a broader strategy that has spread among the right in recent years, i.e. the creation of ‘research institutes’ as a cover for promoting an extreme agenda that garners very little public attention.
After years of activity within the framework of right-wing, religious organizations whose actual influence on the ground was limited, the Yachin center and similar facilities simply rebranded themselves as research institutes. As such, they ‘skip over’ the public and operate directly vis-à-vis policy makers. To achieve this, they brandish professional and ostensibly neutral tools such as ‘expert opinions’ and ‘policy papers’. And with the aid of Yakir and Kartman’s close connections in the corridors of power, they promote issues for which, again, public support is negligible.
Indeed, Torat Hamedina and Yachin are in it for the long haul. ‘To get to the point at which we can implement the laws of Shabbat, we need to be in a situation where it is clear to everyone that desecration of Shabbat is bad and one must be severely punished for it,’ Kartman explained in a 2023 interview.
‘We will get there, but it will take time,’ he continued. ‘In the end, every regime must resort to the application of force, and I want this to also be the case for us.’
The thrust to revise the IDF’s Code of Ethics dovetails with a relatively new trend, in which both groups mentioned here are extending their purview to encompass security-related issues. During the war in the Gaza Strip, Yakir and Kartman published a pamphlet entitled ‘Release of Hostages in Wartime,’ underlying their rationale, based on Jewish religious sources, for their opposition to any hostage release deals.
‘Anyone who says that the return of hostages takes precedence over victory is mistaken,’ Yakir explained. ‘That is not the position of Torah. We are at war, and in war, the principle is that we must triumph.’
Human rights cult
The ‘Spirit of the IDF’ was formulated in the 1990s. The chief of staff at the time, Ehud Barak, assigned the drafting of the document to a committee headed by Maj. Gen. Yoram Yair, on which the dominant member was Prof. Asa Kasher, an expert on ethics. The resulting Code of Ethics sought to enshrine moral principles that would guide the army’s activity and define its operations within a ‘values-based framework’. The idea was that the IDF would strive for operational efficiency, but at the same time would be committed to basic principles such as human dignity and loyalty to the state, and to upholding the law. From these principles emerged 10 core values, including ‘perseverance in the mission and the pursuit of victory,’ ‘the critical importance of human life’ and ‘purity of arms,’ meaning the use of weapons only to fulfill a mission and only when necessary.
The document is not legally binding; it serves principally as an educational-moral compass for the military, and has become a reference point for discourse relating to norms in the IDF and deviation from them. Just last month the IDF chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, decried a video showing a soldier smashing a statue of Jesus in Lebanon, and asked, ‘Where does this overlap with the ‘Spirit of the IDF’?’
Over the years, right-wingers have complained that the concept of ‘victory’ has been marginalized in the document and that it lacks a call to ‘vanquish the enemy.’ These voices have maintained that the values-based language of the ‘Spirit of the IDF’ is too ‘restrictive’ and weakens soldiers on the battleground.
In the year 2000, the army’s chief education officer, Elazar Stern, sought to amend the Code of Ethics and appointed a new committee, with the participation of commanders, jurists and intellectuals. The new version added the basic value of ‘love of the homeland’ under the rubric of ‘patriotism and loyalty to Israel’ – an addition that was ridiculed at the recent book launch. Some of the participants expressed disappointment that even Prof. Avi Sagi, a central figure on the new committee who comes from the heart of religious Zionism, made do with a bland and vague text, detached from its national contexts. ‘What homeland? A homeland can be of all peoples,’ one of the speakers remarked, referring to the word used in Hebrew.
Kartman and his associates view Israel’s military failures and disasters as a result of the restrictions imposed by the Code of Ethics, such as the fundamentally mistaken distinction, in their view, between combatants and noncombatants.
They date the start of their campaign to revise the code to an interview that an Armored Corps officer gave after October 7. He related that his force had refrained from opening fire at Palestinian civilians because they weren’t armed.
For Kartman and his ilk, that testimony sums up in a nutshell the ‘distorted conception of morality’ that they believe has taken root in the IDF.
Kartman also cited another interview, with former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, in which he reconstructed the 2002 battle in Jenin, in the West Bank, during Operation Defensive Shield. Kochavi noted that the unit under his command had cleared the area of militants in a house-to-house ground operation, on the day that 13 reserve soldiers were killed in an ambush. That contradicted the alternative proposed by Rabbi Kartman, who has said that it’s necessary ‘to flatten the whole area, to bomb it in advance.’
In general, Kartman and his associates draw a connection between the concept of morality that underlies the Code of Ethics, and military failures and even disasters. In their view, tragic events are a result of the restrictions imposed by that ‘moral straitjacket’, such as the fundamentally mistaken distinction, in their view, between combatants and noncombatants.
The people behind Torat Hamedina believe that the current ‘Spirit of the IDF’ is disconnected from genuine Jewish religious identity. In their view, the IDF’s moral ID card has fallen prey to individualistic conceptions that are tainted by ‘alien concepts’ of morality – one that draws its essence from the ‘cult’ of human rights.
Moreover, they reject the perception that war is just a matter of ‘necessity’.
‘Wars are the onset of redemption,’ the chief rabbi of the settlement of Psagot, Shlomo Weitzen, stated at the book event. ‘Wars are part of our dream. Accordingly, when a war comes to us, we do not detest it. War comes because we need to grow, to progress, to rise. It’s not that we have any choice. It’s built into the code of our redemption.’