The suddenness of the most recent assault on the Jewish state, as well as its date, has prompted numerous comparisons to the Yom Kippur War. That conflict brough about much political and strategic reconsideration among Israelis. For Religious Zionists, still filled with the messianic hopes inspired by the Six-Day War, it also raised some serious theological questions.

A few weeks after the war ended, Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924–2010), the head of the prestigious Har Etzion yeshiva and a leading Religious Zionist thinker, delivered a discourse to his students about the theological implications of Israel’s near-defeat, which was soon thereafter published in a Hebrew journal and has recently been rendered into English by Ramon Widmonte. A native of Romania and a Holocaust survivor, Amital fought in Israel’s War of Independence. In this essay, he urges his disciples to search for the hand of God in historic events, and to avoid an attitude of recrimination:

According to what is happening now, it is clear that we are in the stages of the redemption brought about through suffering; however, the possibility that the redemption could come in another way draws us into a halakhic obligation—a positive commandment that is a function of our present time. That is, the obligation of crying out, described by Maimonides [in his code]. . . .

This fact—that the redemption could come without suffering, but that it is coming [currently] accompanied by suffering—obligates us in the positive commandment of crying out to God, of introspection, of reflection on our deeds, and knowing that God expects us to repent. . . . What is demanded is our own repentance; not that of others.

Amital also recounts a moving story that he heard from a fellow rabbi:

[The rabbi] had to inform a certain family that their son had fallen in battle. After about half an hour, the bereaved father said, “I survived the Shoah; in it, I lost a wife and five children who did not even merit a Jewish burial. My son now merited to be born in the Land of Israel, to live in it, to learn in it, to give his life on its behalf, and to be buried with a Jewish burial. Despite everything, there is some progress.”

I would not say it is only “some progress”; indeed, I testify that in my youth, when we were caught in the thick of the Shoah, our sweetest dream was that if it was decreed upon us to [one day] be killed, that at least we should fall in a war for the Land of Israel.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.