On August 5, 2025, Israel’s
prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all
of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he
“hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former
Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly
22-month war.”[1] Roughly
thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel
destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process
of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting
Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of
2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a
man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine,
sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel
felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death
would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity,
whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas
attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children
who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two
years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by
Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.
In The Eight Chapters,
the medieval Jewish scholar writes, “If you consider most of the commandments
in this way, you will find that all of them discipline the powers of the soul.”[2]
Such disciplining is necessary for a person to keep the mean (i.e., feelings
and actions that are fitting and proper, rather than too little or too much)
and thus be virtuous in Aristotle’s sense of virtue. “For example,” Maimonides
continues, “they [i.e., most of the commandments] eliminate revenge and
vengeance by His saying: You shall not take revenge nor bear a grudge, You
shall surely release it, and You shall surely help to lift them up, etc.;
these aim at weakening the power of rage and irascibility.”[3]
A person who ignores or dismisses these divine commands and violates them “does
not know that he goes all the way to one extreme, completely leaving the mean,”[4]
by which Maimonides means Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean as pertains to the moral
virtues.
Given that the ongoing,
gradual decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure and of the residents themselves by
the Israeli government for more than a year and a half by the late summer of 2025,
it is evident that the vice (i.e., extreme) of hateful vengeance had become a habituated
pattern for those officials in charge of the Israeli government, and especially
in the military. Allowing oneself to continue in a bad (i.e., not virtuous)
habit is antipodal to Maimonides’ advice: “the perfect man needs to inspect his
moral habits continually, weigh his actions, and reflect upon the state of his
soul every single day. Whenever he sees his soul inclining toward one of the
extremes, he should rush to cure it and not let the evil state become
established by the repetition of a bad action.”[5]
A person having intentionally or unwittingly developed such a sordid habit “should
attend to the defective moral habit in himself and continually seek to cure it,
for a [human being] inevitably has defects.”[6]
Even though “Solomon said absolutely: There is no man who is just
upon the earth, who does only good and does not sin,”[7]
by no means does this justify going to the other extreme and remaining there,
such that a habit of vice can establish deep groves in the road such that turning
around becomes virtually impossible, given the human penchant for stubbornness
and intractability. For I submit that by
the summer of 2025, Netanyahu and his cabinet officials had reached such a
point that only external force could be capable of pushing those men back from
the extreme in the sense of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean.
Moreover, it is so easy for
humans to will to stay the course in what is an immoral extreme that Yahweh
issues divine commands concerning particular actions, such as to forbid daytime
sex so to keep lust in moderation rather than going to an extreme. Maimonides
views such laws as being oriented to Aristotle’s philosophy on virtue, and thus
risks reducing theology to ethics. This risk may be worth it, given the stubborn
presumptuousness of Netanyahu in the presumably righteous determination to exterminate
a subjugated people in Israel’s Gaza territory in a habituated extreme case of
vengeance. Nietzsche points out that positing Yahweh as both omnibenevolent and
vengeful is self-contradictory and thus discredits that concept of God.
Even given Netanyahu’s extreme vengeance as routinized as a genocide and even holocaust,
the divine command not to be vengeful does not need the additional scriptural text,
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. To leave a vacuum without a credible
concept of a deity puts too much weight on human subjectivity to fill the gap—hence
Sartre claimed that human choices are so weighty and Husserl treated
subjectivity as the only possible basis for a philosophy. In other words, that
the Nazi Holocaust and the Gaza Holocaust have both followed the Age of Reason
and Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead leaves us with the vital question of
what is left upon which a moral and, moreover, existential philosophy can be built.
In short, even without positing vengeance as pertaining to Yahweh, Maimonides’
reading of the Torah and the Talmud in line with Aristotle’s moral philosophy
(without conflating the two or reducing one to the other) is enough to base the
claim that Netanyahu and his cabinet members have become extremists both in
terms of their religion and an established theory of virtue. It is upon this
basis that the Gaza Holocaust rests.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 73.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
