Hi Michi,
The field guard on my kibbutz, Meir Shapir, caught Bedouin grain thieves in the early 1940s. He stripped them naked, and that’s how they went back to their encampment, and from then on there was quiet in the fields.
At around the same time, an Arab resident of Beit She’an raped a Jewish woman from one of the kibbutzim in the area.
Palmach men caught him and castrated him.
But when in 1992 the cattlemen of Moshav Moledet caught two Palestinian Arabs in their grazing areas, they assumed they had come to steal cattle, stripped them, and painted them green. The Palestinians complained to the police, and the cattlemen from Moledet were sentenced to prison and to pay compensation to the Palestinians. At that time I was a volunteer in the Border Police, and we “persistent volunteers” felt great frustration over that sentence, because we had to deal with many thefts.
As outrageous as that sentence may seem, it still has to be understood, because the cattlemen took the law and judgment into their own hands without anyone authorizing them to do so, and without even having evidence against the suspects!
In response to my proposal to castrate murderers, you mentioned a proposal that was rejected—to bury Muslim murderers wrapped in pigskin.
For the sake of discussion I am ignoring the question whether these murderers would be executed as punishment, or killed in exchanges of fire with the security forces; in such a case perhaps they would not even be considered murderers at all. In any case, Muslim clerics would be happy to issue a fatwa declaring that these are shahids, and therefore they are entitled to paradise and the 72 virgins.
But if a murderer is castrated, he will have a problem with social norms, whose force, as you know, exceeds that of religious ones!
I relate to one method of punishment or another as a weapon system—and therefore, like any weapon system, sophisticated as it may be, we must take into account its shelf life: at some point a countermeasure will be devised that neutralizes our weapon. In this case I of course mean some kind of conceptual weapon.
And, in my usual holy fashion, I leap from here to a different matter:
The laws of the State of Israel are to a large extent similar to the laws of other Western countries. And the fact is that in most Western countries the death penalty has been abolished. But it seems that today more and more thinkers in the West are wondering whether there is not a need to recalculate the route regarding the wave of terror. Because terror is a global problem, there is security coordination among most Western countries. But perhaps it would be good if an attempt were made at coordinating international sanctions.
For example—if a situation were created in which it was agreed by the majority that in the State of Israel the punishment of castration would be imposed on murderers [assuming most perpetrators of terror are men!], there would be an enormous uproar in the Western world that would cause Israel to be ostracized.
Therefore it would be good to prepare the conceptual groundwork—to hold discussions in which thinkers from all over the world would participate and try to find effective solutions against terrorists that would meet, as much as possible, the criteria of ethics and philosophy.
It seems to me that in such a situation, even if the discussions in the worldwide forum I am proposing do not succeed in producing a solution, still the position of the State of Israel would be better than if it were to decide unilaterally on very vulgar punitive measures—all the more so if the announcement of implementing such punishment were accompanied and backed by explanations of the security and moral dilemmas we are facing.
I mentioned the “shelf life” of a weapon system—which is relevant to methods of punishment—what may be effective for a certain period of time, because surely with time those who dispatch terror will find a way to overcome that punishment.
Here my worldview comes into the picture regarding the purpose of the commandment of settling the Land of Israel: I have already raised several times the claim that the definition of an unintentional killer greatly sharpens our obligation to “turn over every stone” in order to prevent unintentional killing.
And I want to apply this to the commandment of settling the Land of Israel, because implementing this commandment causes us to face countless violence-saturated situations. Violence that I am sure could often have been prevented or significantly reduced by more measured thinking.
And this is the place where we—the Jewish people—can initiate the beginning of a discussion like the one I proposed earlier: an ongoing dialogue in which thinkers and statesmen from all peoples and religions would participate, centered on searching for ways to reduce violence in the world as much as possible.
I think the last 20 years in the history of the human race have given us blood-soaked lessons in insights about the limits of good intentions. Documentation has also come to light, and books have appeared such as the book by McNamara, who was U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, who admitted that this war could, if not have been prevented entirely, at least have been greatly reduced.
All these are supposed to teach us into what horrifying traps mistaken or distorted norms of conduct among senior decision-makers can lead. I did not mention Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, because I haven’t read it, but from my late father-in-law I heard a great deal about it and about the lessons it draws.
The least bad political system—democracy—assumes that the voting public is intelligent enough to choose worthy leaders. This matter is of course relevant only to countries that are truly democratic, as opposed to countries in which the parties are merely an expression of tribal clustering. I raised the matter of democracy because in my view it is essential that candidates “running” for senior state positions show expertise and understanding in ethics and in history from the modern era onward.
In my mind there constantly echoes the hubris of the State of Israel after the Six-Day War.
All these are subjects that we—an ancient people with a tradition of repairing the world—can and must bring into global political discourse.
As for tradition—perhaps it is more correct and meaningful to emphasize the tradition of deep study and dialectical analysis, which, if directed toward understanding the various causes of violence in the world and the obligation to seek solutions, would give the very existence of the State of Israel universal human value.
For from Zion shall go forth Torah, etc.
All the best

Hello A.,
I’ll begin examining this in one of the upcoming columns, and by that I exempt myself from answering here.
Here is where I’ll surprise you. I definitely agree that there is importance to a discussion about punishment and morality, as distinct from the second discussion you proposed about peace and against violence.
I asked myself what the difference is. I found at least two differences:
1. Morality comes from “above,” meaning from thinkers and people of spirit, and from them it is passed on to the public. But violence comes from “below,” and therefore learned discussions about violence and peace won’t help.
2. Regarding peace and violence, the outcome of the discussions is trivial. Everyone will agree that peace is good and violence is bad. But precisely because of that, nothing will change. By contrast, moral values that come from the head (as distinct from the belly) are apparently not all that trivial, and so such a discussion can renew something for people that they hadn’t thought about and perhaps they will reconsider their path.

Hi Michi,
A few weeks ago R. asked me to prepare a salad for our youngest daughter and her boyfriend.
R. said that I should cut the cucumbers not into thin slices, but only a little, so that it would be possible to put the cucumber pieces into the salad-cutting machine, and afterward I would only need to turn the handle and the cucumbers would be cut. Okay—I understood, and that’s what I wanted to do, but my hands were trained to slice cucumber into thin slices. So, because for dozens of years, the moment one hand gets a cucumber and the other a knife, my hands know how to cut thin slices, and they are unwilling to let me tell them what to do! And so, despite myself and to my annoyance [and R.’s too], I cut thin slices!
I remembered this incident after I looked at the calculations the engineer made regarding my invention.
At our meeting I got the impression that he understood the essence of my idea very well, so much so that he suggested an idea for making the structure simpler. But when he performed the calculations, the basis of his calculations was the fan, so it turns out that he is already so accustomed to calculating the lift caused by a fan [propeller] in the way one calculates lift caused by a helicopter—that is, to relate to the downward thrust of the air stream—which is not relevant in the case of my idea, where the basis is the area of the fan. So just as habit dictated to me how to cut the cucumber, habit dictated to him how to perform the calculation. Now I’ll have to wait until the 20th of the month, when he returns from vacation…
To avoid excessive frustration, I comfort myself that this is not the hand of chance, but rather the original intention of the Holy One, blessed be He!…
To conclude—in my previous letter you referred to what I said about our obligation to contribute to reducing violence, and you claimed that:
2. Regarding peace and violence, the outcome of the discussions is trivial. Everyone will agree that peace is good and violence is bad. But precisely because of that, nothing will change.
My answer was:
I proposed discussing how to reduce violence, and I argued that one of the ways is to learn from history what not to do—for example, it is not a good idea to wait for a phone call from a defeated enemy declaring that he promises to be a good boy.
And it is advisable not to fantasize about regime change—see the case of Ariel Sharon in Lebanon, or the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the Americans, without understanding what they were getting into. Should I bring more examples?
I hoped, and still hope, that you would address these points.
Now that I think about it once again, it occurred to me that perhaps there will be a need to establish a binding norm in countries with democratic rule, such that just as it is impossible to elect to office a person who has been proven corrupt or violent, so candidates should be required to demonstrate knowledge of world history over the last 150 years, which is the period most relevant to the challenges of governance today.
It has just occurred to me that the state of the world today requires that anyone aspiring to rule in any country would do well to take a course on the history of Islam, so that he can understand this religion in all its complexity, and know what challenges and possibilities it presents to him!
So all the best, and Sabbath peace

When you show me one thing that people learned from history and that is agreed upon, maybe there will be something to talk about. Nobody learns anything from history, and it always strengthens in all of us what we thought in the first place. As Ben-Gurion already said, all the experts are experts in what was, not in what will be.
By the way, even the lesson that you yourself brought up (waiting for a phone call from a defeated enemy) cannot be learned from history. You have a few specific examples before your eyes (like Germany after World War I), and they are really not representative for many reasons. And so too regarding regime change. In short, studying history is like studying the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) (= interesting but devoid of any practical or educational value). Everyone takes out of it what he thought in advance. So too with us: every event is viewed by the left as strengthening its approach and by the right as strengthening its approach.

Well then—what you say fits with the results of a study I read about people’s unwillingness to vaccinate their children against childhood diseases.
A proper experiment was conducted with control groups and so on; once people locked onto a certain idea, it was no longer possible to budge them from their opinion.
What do you think—maybe one of the characteristics of the messianic era will be a willingness to change positions?

Maybe. Let’s hope.