How statelessness shaped Jewish ethics of self-defence

What lesson remains for a people that spent centuries facing declared danger, with protection granted or withheld by others?

Anticipatory self-defence in Jewish political thought begins there. It cannot be settled by repeating the language of restraint, nor by invoking Jewish suffering as sufficient to resolve every dilemma. The starting point is Jewish statelessness, a long political condition in which Jews preserved historical memory but lacked sovereign power.

A stateless people reads threat differently from a secure majority. Jews did not possess the luxury of assuming that the magistrate would protect them, that institutions would hold, or that rhetoric of extermination should be treated as overheated speech. Experience taught harsher lessons. Menace often gathered gradually through exclusion, sermon, social permission, decree, and the loosening of restraints. By the time danger became undeniable, the choices had narrowed. A people formed by expulsions, pogroms, and annihilatory violence will hear threats early and distrust delay.

Memory does not release one from moral discipline; it sharpens perception, but it can also enlarge fear beyond what evidence can bear. One must avoid two vulgar errors. The first claims that Jewish suffering automatically justifies pre-emptive force. The second treats Jewish anxiety as a distortion to be overcome.

What is a state to do when its enemies announce their intentions and then build the capacity to fulfil them? By what logic is Israel expected to regard such preparations as significant, yet not actionable? The question is unavoidable in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which since 1979 has treated hostility to Israel as a strategic commitment and has backed that commitment with missiles, proxies, and direct military confrontation.

No standard of self-defence can require Israel to wait until the blow has landed. That may flatter legal idealists, but it leaves a country exposed to enemies who do not conceal either their armament or their purpose. When a hostile force entrenches itself, expands its military capacity, and states plainly that it seeks slaughter, the demand for a narrow standard of imminence ceases to be prudent and becomes a form of deceit. Under such conditions, Israel is justified in acting before the trigger is pulled, when delay carries a prospect of irreversible loss and no effective alternative remains.

However, anticipatory force carries moral weight, and that does not negate its necessity. Israel is fully justified in striking Iran first while still recognising the human cost that follows from any act of self-defence. A Jewish state does not preserve Jewish life by indulging in war. It preserves life by refusing the old fatal illusion that Jews must absorb the threat and wait for the massacre. Where danger is real, where hostile intent is organised and operational, and where delay invites irreversible loss, action becomes a duty.

A truth that Jewish history has forced into political thought is that sovereignty alters the condition of a people. The passage from stateless minority to self-defending nation brings with it instruments once denied to Jews: intelligence, deterrence, strategic planning, pre-emption, and force. These are among the elementary requirements of survival in a world that has repeatedly shown what happens when Jews are left without power. Israel cannot be asked to apologise for possessing the means to prevent what earlier generations could only endure.

The ethical case for anticipatory self-defence after Jewish statelessness follows directly from that history. Jewish experience gives compelling reason to treat eliminationist threats seriously and to act before catastrophe. The lesson of statelessness was that the defence of Jewish life cannot be subcontracted to wishful thinking, foreign guarantees, or sympathy. Between passivity and survival, Israel has both the right and the obligation to choose survival.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)