National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the Otzma Yehudit Party, offered suggestions on Thursday for a major rewrite of the IDF code of ethics to strengthen the army’s Jewish identity and underscore the importance of victory in battle.
The IDF’s purpose would be defined, first and foremost, as pursuing victory and “decisive defeat over the enemies of the State of Israel and the people of Israel. This emphasis would be reflected throughout the new IDF code of ethics,” his party said in a statement.
Army values would place “central emphasis on Jewish moral values rooted in the Bible [“Tanakh”], Jewish ethics, Hebrew law and the nation’s traditions across generations. The state would be defined as a Jewish national home, and the IDF its ‘Jewish state army,’” it said.
A substantive change proposed by Ben-Gvir is the removal of the concept of “Purity of Arms” and its replacement with “Righteousness of Arms.”
“Purity of Arms” is one of 11 values listed in the current code of ethics. It requires the soldier to use his weapon “only to the degree required,” and for the soldier to “exercise self-restraint to prevent unnecessary harm to human life, body, honor and property.”
Ben-Gvir’s draft removes “only to the degree required” and wording about prohibiting harm to “uninvolved persons.” It then adds a moral principle derived from the Bible: “If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.”
A reference to “universal moral values” in the original version is deleted entirely.
Ben-Gvir’s proposed changes take aim at omissions in the IDF code of ethics that have long been criticized.
Titled “The Spirit of the IDF,” the code was first distributed to IDF units on Dec. 26, 1994. It was meant to serve as an expression of values and a guide for “our soldiers and commanders in their day-to-day and operational activities,” according to the IDF’s website.
However, the code came under fire from the start, notably for its lack of Jewish content. Tzvi Hauser, who would later serve as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet secretary (2009-2013), wrote in Azure magazine in 1997: “The omission of anything particularly Jewish in the armed forces of the Jewish state turns this document into a trophy for Post-Zionist ideology.
“The new IDF code does not reflect or demand any sense of commitment to any of the central tenets of the Zionist idea: It mentions nothing about the loyalty of the army to the Jewish state and Jewish national sovereignty, nor does it provide any expression at all of the country’s bond with world Jewry,” Hauser said then. Any army in any democratic country could “adopt it without changing a word.”
Its omissions marked a break from oaths of earlier Jewish military organizations, all of which expressed a strong commitment to the Zionist idea. These included Hashomer (“The Watchman”), the Jewish Legion and the Haganah.
How and why the IDF code of ethics came to omit all Jewish and Zionist references can be traced to its lead author, Asa Kasher, then a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Kasher, the only civilian member of the four-member committee responsible for authoring the code, held views that were on the extreme political left, Hauser wrote.
Kasher favored revising the Law of Return, which grants Israeli citizenship to Jews seeking to immigrate to Israel, supported the ‘right of return’ for Arab “refugees,” and proposed political autonomy for parts of pre-1967 Israel with large Arab populations, such as the Galilee.
Kasher was also an activist in Yesh Gvul, a radical group that urged refusal of service in the IDF. “Kasher specifically called for refusal to serve in the IDF as a protest against the [First] Lebanon War, against Israeli military activities in the West Bank, and even against the creation of Jewish towns which he considers inappropriately located,” Hauser wrote.
