A man is attacked in a parking garage at night. He has under a second to read intent, distance, and the possibility of a weapon. His heart rate climbs past 150 and his fine motor skills begin to fail. He acts. Weeks later, people who slept well that night replay the footage in slow motion and ask why he did not choose differently. I have taught self-defense for decades, and most of our moral confusion about war lives in the gap between those two moments, the second of violence and the months of judgment.

Self-defense law understands something public opinion forgets. A person who is attacked is judged by what a reasonable person would have done under those conditions, with that fear, with that information. The attacker, by choosing violence, forced the defender into a world of bad options, and the law refuses to pretend otherwise. The question is never whether the defender’s choice was perfect. The question is whether it was reasonable inside a situation he did not create.

I teach my students that self-defense in NYC is not recreational or seeking a fight. The goal is to go home safely, to yourself and to the people who depend on you. You do not choose every fight. Sometimes the fight chooses you, and the only question left is how you respond.

On October 7, the fight chose Israel. Whatever anyone thinks about Israeli policy before that morning, the families in Be’eri and Kfar Aza woke up inside a situation they did not create. A nation in that position deserves the same standard of judgment the law gives an individual: reasonableness under the conditions of the attack, with the information available at the time.

To understand why this question is particularly painful for Israel, one must first understand the burden of Jewish morality.

Judaism built a civilization around a radical idea: human life has infinite value. We are commanded to pursue justice, care for the stranger, protect the vulnerable, and remember that every person is created in the image of God.

For thousands of years, Jewish morality did not measure greatness by the ability to conquer. It measured greatness by the ability to hold power without losing compassion, to possess strength without worshiping it, and to carry the responsibility of violence without becoming comfortable with it.

The Jewish warrior was never meant to love war. The........

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