The great poet and philosopher Judah Halevi (1075-1141) lived at the height of Jewish powerlessness, eight centuries before the establishment of the State of Israel and the Jewish return to power, what the late philosopher Emil Fackenheim called “the Jewish return to history.” In his Kuzari, a fictional dialogue between a rabbi and the King of the Khazars, Judah Halevi wrote:

The Rabbi: The Christians and Muslims claim to act modestly and to “turn the other cheek,” but for hundreds of years have killed and conquered much of the world. We are closer than they are to God.

The Khazar King: That would be the case if your powerlessness were voluntary, but it results from coercion, and when you have power, you will also kill!

(The Kuzari I:113-114, my paraphrase)

Judah Ha-Levi’s challenge to Jewish moral smugness has become all the more pertinent today, as we in Israel are now in the period leading to elections, with increasingly extreme political verbal violence, as if verbal violence were totally innocent and unrelated to physical violence. At the same time, physical violence, arson, and attacks by Jews on Palestinian-Arab civilians, their homes, property, and agriculture have sharply escalated in the past year or two. On top of which, there have been increasing incidents of verbal and even physical harassment of Christian clergy by Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem. Are we Jews really better than other people, or is the message of the prophets of Israel that we must become better people?

After two millennia of powerlessness, the Jewish People in the State of Israel again have power. However, power is neutral; the question is what one does with it. The same gun can be used for legitimate self-defense or for murder.  As George Bernard Shaw wrote in his play “Major Barbara” (about a pacifist, Christian member of the Salvation Army, whose father was an industrialist arms manufacturer): “You cannot have power for good without having power for evil, too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”

Has the State of Israel, and before it the pre-state Jewish Yishuv, always used its power responsibly?

In a recent article, Prof. Warren Zev Harvey documented the reactions of Hebrew University professors Leon Roth and Yeshayahu Leibowitz to the retaliatory attack on the Arab village of Qibya, some 30 kilometers north-west of Ramallah (and directly north of today’s city of Modi`in) in what was then the Jordanian-annexed “West Bank” on 14 October 1953.  In the attack, which was led by (then) Major Ariel Sharon, 69 civilians (many of them women and children) were killed,........

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