Last year, an EU court upheld a Belgian law banning the kosher and halal slaughter of animals. Such regulations, note Baruch Sterman and Judy Taubes Sterman, have a long history in Europe, going back to a Swiss ban from 1893 that remains in effect. In 1934, the Irish senate considered forbidding sh’ḥitah—as the practice is known in Hebrew—leading the country’s chief rabbi, Isaac Halevy Herzog, to address the body and urge it to reconsider. A sympathizer with Irish nationalism, a friend of the Sinn Féin leader Éamon de Valera, and a participant in the drafting of the Irish constitution, Herzog was also a renowned halakhist who would go on to be Israel’s first chief rabbi. The Stermans describe Herzog’s case:

Herzog’s presentation [was] a masterful display of [his] unique capacity, evident throughout his career, to combine various disciplines, secular and Jewish, scientific, political, and philosophic, to make his case. . . . According to Herzog, the clear purpose of [kosher slaughter’s] detailed precepts is to prevent, or reduce significantly, any possible suffering or pain for the animal. “The charges of inhumaneness leveled against sh’ḥitah are either due to the lack of knowledge of physiology, to imperfect information, or to blind anti-Semitic prejudice,” he declared.

As support for this assertion, he submitted into evidence the opinions of no fewer than 457 “continental scientists and veterinary surgeons, mostly Gentile Christians.”

His . . . remarks highlighted a position Herzog would passionately champion again and again throughout his life. Not only did he maintain that Jewish law is inherently just and moral, but Herzog’s unwavering conviction that the Torah and its laws were given by a benevolent and compassionate God meant that, comparatively, it is indeed the most righteous and the most ethical of any legal system that has ever existed from ancient times to the present.

The Stermans quote Herzog’s “chilling” and “prescient” closing:

Lastly may I say how painful it is to the Jew to see and hear his religion charged with cruelty to animals. To those anti-sh’ḥitah humanists, whoever they may be, who charge Judaism with cruelty to dumb creatures, but who are themselves so ominously dumb in the face of the suffering, the cruelty and the agony inflicted upon Jews in Christian lands, I would say that centuries before the Aryans had any idea of humaneness towards human beings, let alone animals, . . . Israel’s Divine law commanded us to help the animal that has fallen down to rise up.

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.