In his keynote speech to the JNS Policy Summit in Jerusalem this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reassured the assembled that Israel would not back down from confronting its enemies.
He invoked the classic Talmudic dictum haba l’horgecha, hashkem l’horgo: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
Naturally, there were immediate cries of outrage. In contemporary diatribes about military conduct, hashkem l’horgo is invoked as evidence of Israel’s bloodthirsty intent. Critics of Israel have seized on this phrase as evidence of what they claim is a uniquely aggressive and immoral Jewish war cry. They characterize it as an expansive doctrine of violence that stands apart from accepted Western legal norms.
This is typical. When Israeli leaders invoke the phrase to a domestic audience that actually understands its import, critics seize on it to condemn it as a theological justification for holy war. In doing so, they invert, as they are wont to do, the roles of aggressor and defender.
Here, it is important to note the difference between preventive and preemptive action. A preventive action or war seeks to eliminate a potential future threat before it materializes. A preemptive action or war responds to a threat that has already become immediate and operational. The difference is not merely semantic; it lies at the heart of both Western legal thought and the Talmudic doctrine itself.
Doctrinally, hashkem l’horgo is not a license for aggression but a narrowly tailored rule governing immediate self-defense. Far from standing outside the Western legal tradition, this ancient Jewish approach to self-defense precedes many of the same principles that later found expression in non-Jewish domestic criminal law, just war theory and the law of anticipatory self-defense.
The phrase appears in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 72a) in the context of a discussion of ba b’machteret: a burglar who tunnels into a home under cover of darkness. The law does not assume that every thief is necessarily a murderer; rather, it recognizes the practical reality that a burglar entering an occupied home understands that the homeowner is likely to resist. Because the burglar proceeds anyway, the law assumes that he is prepared, if necessary, to kill to complete the crime. Thus, the confrontation is no longer hypothetical; it is already underway.
The legal principle that follows is not that one may kill a future enemy whenever one fears danger. It is that one need not wait passively for a lethal attack that has already begun to unfold. A legal system that requires the victim to absorb a fatal blow before defending himself would be one in which self-defense is inherently illegitimate. Thus, the Talmudic doctrine exists precisely because there are circumstances in which waiting is indistinguishable from surrender or suicide.
At the same time, the Talmud imposes strict limitations that sharply constrain the use of force. The first is imminence. The text speaks of one who is coming to kill you. The threat must be active, immediate and manifest. As Maimonides later codified, the doctrine does not authorize violence against someone whose intentions remain unclear or whose capabilities are merely growing. It applies only when the danger has crossed the threshold from possibility to actuality.
Doctrinally, hashkem l’horgo is not a license for aggression but a narrowly tailored rule governing immediate self-defense.
The second limitation is, if anything, even more remarkable. Jewish law insists that if a rodef (“pursuer”) can be stopped without being killed, he must be stopped without being killed. This principle, known as yachol l’hatzilo (“if he can be saved”), requires the defender to use only the force necessary to neutralize the threat. If a pursuer could have been incapacitated via injury and the defender instead chose to kill him, the defender—or an intervening bystander—commits a grave sin and bears moral and heavenly liability, as halachah strictly forbids the unnecessary taking of life even in extremis. This framework, invoked by contemporary Israeli leaders, predates by many centuries modern legal concepts of necessity and proportionality.
Furthermore, the rabbinic expansion of this doctrine into broader laws of the rodef shifts it from a mere individual right to a communal imperative. Grounded in the biblical command, “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16), classical Jewish law obligates bystanders to intervene to save a victim. This codifies a duty to protect human life that long predates modern “duty to rescue” doctrines.
This requirement reveals something fundamental about the moral structure of Jewish law. Even when confronting a lethal threat, Jewish law does not treat the aggressor’s life as entirely devoid of value. The defender’s right to survive is absolute, but the life of the attacker does not become worthless merely because he has become dangerous.
Lethal force is permitted only when lesser force cannot accomplish the same objective. The doctrine, therefore, begins not from a celebration of violence but from a presumption in favor of preserving life whenever possible.
When viewed through that lens, the similarities between hashkem l’horgo and Western legal principles are difficult to ignore. In international law, the classic formulation of anticipatory self-defense is often traced to the Caroline affair of 1837, which held that defensive action may be justified when the necessity is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”
Although this language is secular rather than religious, the underlying principle is strikingly similar to that of the Talmud. Neither requires an individual or a nation to absorb a fatal blow before responding. Both insist that the threat be immediate and the response limited to what necessity requires.
Conversely, both traditions have viewed preventive war with far greater skepticism. Preventive war seeks to eliminate a danger that may emerge in the future. The Talmudic doctrine, by contrast, is triggered only when the attacker is actively “coming.” It is therefore a doctrine of preemption, not prevention.
To be sure, halachic purists and legal scholars sharply distinguish between individual self-defense—the tort-based rules governing the rodef—and macro-level state warfare (milchemet mitzvah). A nation-state responding to an existential threat operates under public, political frameworks and sovereign obligations, not individual criminal liability. Yet, both systems wrestle with the same underlying moral question: must one wait to be struck before acting against an attack that is already in motion? The answer given by both traditions is a resonant “no.” The deep ethical philosophy underpinning individual preemption—that a defender is never required to absorb a fatal first blow—serves as the conceptual blueprint for Jewish national defense and just war theory.
Hashkem l’horgo is not a mandate for perpetual war, nor a religious exception to otherwise universal legal principles. It is an ancient articulation of a proposition that values even the life of those who wish you harm.
Israel’s military history offers a revealing case study because it demonstrates not an expansive reading of the Talmudic doctrine but a remarkably restrained one. The 1967 Six-Day War is frequently cited as a textbook example of anticipatory self-defense. But Israel did not launch its attack because of a speculative concern about Egypt’s future intentions. Egyptian forces had massed on Israel’s borders, U.N. peacekeepers had been expelled from Sinai, the Straits of Tiran had been closed, and repeated declarations of hostile intent had been made. Whether one evaluates the conflict politically or strategically, the threat confronting Israel was neither abstract nor distant.
Even more telling is the experience of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the hours preceding the coordinated Egyptian and Syrian assault, Israeli leaders possessed compelling evidence that an attack was imminent. Military officials urged a preemptive strike. Prime Minister Golda Meir refused, fearing that Israel would be perceived internationally as the aggressor.
The result was catastrophic. Israel absorbed the opening blow and paid a devastating price in lives before ultimately prevailing. Whatever one concludes about that decision, it is difficult to reconcile with the notion that Israel operates according to a doctrine of reflexive first strikes. If anything, the historical record too often points in the opposite direction.
Even in contemporary counterterrorism operations, the same tension remains. Debates over targeted strikes, warning procedures, proportionality and rules of engagement all reflect variations of the same legal and moral question that occupied the Talmud centuries ago: when has a threat become sufficiently immediate to justify force, and what degree of force is actually necessary to stop it?
Hashkem l’horgo is not a mandate for perpetual war, nor a religious exception to otherwise universal legal principles. It is an ancient articulation of a proposition that values even the life of those who wish you harm, yet asserts that neither an individual nor a nation is required to absorb a blow before acting in self-defense. The right to act first exists only when the threat is immediate, unavoidable and cannot be neutralized by lesser means.
The doctrine’s enduring significance lies in that balance. It recognizes the necessity of self-preservation while simultaneously imposing strict limits on the use of force. Far from erasing the distinction between aggression and self-defense, it exists to preserve that distinction. Hashkem l’horgo is not an argument for violence; it is an argument for the narrow circumstances under which violence becomes morally unavoidable.
Many years ago, a global outcry accused Israel of a “massacre” that never happened, even though Israel had sacrificed soldiers to avoid civilian casualties while fighting in a terror warren. Afterwards, my late rabbi, Yehuda Kelemer, noted from the pulpit: “This is the difference between people waging ‘holy war’ and a holy people waging war.”
It was true then and, if anything, more excruciatingly true today.
