The American Secretary of Defense once asked Moshe Dayan what the reason was for Israel’s crushing victories in all its wars.
Dayan replied, “We fight the Arabs.”
Now Yossian comes along and tries to convince us that the way to victory is to fight like Arabs.
Am I the only one to whom it seems that Yossian is an Iranian agent trying to destroy Israel from within?

You’ve gone completely overboard here, though admittedly it happens in both directions.
Well, needless to say, it’s extremely unlikely that he’s an Iranian agent. His proposals sometimes sound extreme, but they aren’t always really that extreme. As far as I know, he is not proposing to kill Arabs indiscriminately simply because they are Arabs, but rather in response to their extreme conduct and in order to overcome it. So the distinction still stands.

He is not proposing to kill Arabs indiscriminately. But if there is a wanted man hiding among innocents, his boundaries are broader. In a conversation with Roi Yuzvitz, he talked about how many innocents he is willing to kill in exchange for one wanted man.
Yossian: for “nationalists,” 27 and 52 and 63 — acceptable.
Yuzvitz: And 134?
Yossian: Less so.

I didn’t understand a thing. But it doesn’t seem to me that there’s any point in this strange discussion.

Yossian’s central argument is that we need to fight like the Arabs (“hummus culture”) and not like the West (“sushi culture”).
I’ll ignore Yossian’s ignorance in not knowing that sushi is Japanese (and comes with a militaristic culture), but the desire to turn Israel into a state modeled on the Arab world is a sure recipe for the destruction of the state (if we descend to the level of the Arabs, they’ll win, because they have a lot more Arabs).

I don’t understand this strange discussion. To begin with, we left Gaza in order to give the Gazans independence. And implicit in that is that they are a collective entitled to freedom, but with independence and freedom comes responsibility — the responsibility of the whole people for the actions of the government, and vice versa. This has nothing to do with Arabs. On the first night, hundreds of thousands of Gazans should have been killed if possible, and there is no need whatsoever to topple Hamas, because the government that comes after it will be exactly the same as it (since it grows out of the people). Every child, woman, baby, and old person is equally guilty and responsible for the massacre and deserves death. One may kill 1,000 civilians even if there is not a single terrorist among them.

And to Gabriel,

What does this have to do with descending to the level of Arabs? There’s no descending here to anything. There are no levels or ranks here. You are allowed to do to your enemy whatever he thinks he is allowed to do to you. And if the state is destroyed but the Jewish people survive and not a single soldier dies, I’d sign on to that. The state was meant to serve the Jewish people, not the other way around. It is true that the leaders of political Zionism were a bunch of Dreyfus-types hungry for power and lacking loyalty to the Jewish people, and likewise today the heads of the security establishment and the other senior officials staffing the institutions of the state, but that doesn’t obligate any normal Jew.

Yossian keeps declaring that we need to learn from Hamas, learn from Iran, and fight like Arabs.
He also declares that left-wing voters should be executed (I assume here he wants the German model).

As for what would have been right to do in Gaza — personally, on the morning of October 7, during the massacre, I expected to see the army systematically destroy Gaza (the familiar Israeli model of transferring the fighting to enemy territory), but our prime minister had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for three weeks.
After three weeks, the fighting in Israel was already over, and it was no longer possible to act like a nation at war.

It seems to me that the subject has been completely exhausted. I don’t think there is all that much value in clarifying the merchandise of that righteous man. Why is it important to know what he thinks and whether he is a racist/Nazi or not?! And even the acute question of what sushi culture is can be skipped.

There is no importance to the merchandise of the aforementioned righteous man, but it really seems to me that what he is actually saying is that when facing a moral-less enemy, moral behavior toward him is irrelevant and one should not make moral calculations. In other words, morality is something reciprocal. Alternatively, and equivalently, that this enemy — being devoid of morality — is like animals, and that is the reality in the Middle East.

With regard to left-wing voters, the same principle applies. It is permissible to behave toward them as we assume they would behave toward us (and as they behaved toward us in the past. For example, it is permissible today to refuse orders, based on what we’ve seen in the last year. Pilots would not have dared publicly refuse had they not known that the whole corps stood behind them in a silence of consent). And everyone can make his own calculations. Though in the case of a leftist whom we know has loyalty to the Jewish people (I find it hard to imagine such a one today. Nationalism is taboo for them, and their hatred of Jewishness already erases any basic sense of loyalty, but perhaps I am mistaken), then there is also reason not to take revenge, etc.

I liked the principle that you’re allowed to behave toward left-wing people as you assume he would behave toward you.
According to your principle, the October 7 massacre was justified because Hamas assumes that we would do the same thing to them.
From 1948 to 1977 there was uninterrupted rule by Mapai (the demonic left), and I don’t recall mass executions of right-wing voters.
What’s nice about Yossian is that he helps expose the lunatics among us — every time I happened to talk with a Yossian supporter, I discovered that it was a full-fledged fascist who wants to kill, destroy, and wipe out everyone who disagrees with him, starting with Arabs, moving on through hypocritical Europeans, and always finishing with the left/secular people/liberals/high-tech.

The discussion is both completely exhausted and also getting close to an area that would require deletion.

Hoping I won’t be deleted — and I don’t know why the Rabbi never discusses this matter of reciprocity — of course, according to my principle, the Hamas massacre is justified according to their own view. But objectively it is not justified — not because of the massacre as such as a means, but because of its rationale according to their view. That is, because they are wicked and they are not objectively right. Their view is not correct. After all, they kill us either because of claims of freedom or because they think the whole land is theirs, etc., and after all this time, that is simply no longer true by any criterion of objective justice. And as far as I’m concerned, I say they are simply barbaric, bloodthirsty animals looking for excuses to kill Jews — even ordinary Gazans. And that may be what Yossian meant.

I didn’t understand what it is that I don’t deal with. There is nothing that I am in principle opposed to dealing with. If you are asking about judging a person according to his own view, I devoted column 372 to that.

With God’s help, 9 Adar II 5784

Without knowing Yossian’s views in detail, one can say that on the moral plane it is right to do against the persecutors of Israel whatever is necessary in order to win. Our lives take precedence over the lives of the enemy. However, from the utilitarian side, there is room for caution about “stretching the rope” מול the Western world, of which we are a part and whose economic and diplomatic support we need. The tension between morality, which demands firmness, and utilitarianism, which moderates — is not simple.

With blessings, Fish”l

On the matter that morality is reciprocal. That whatever your enemy thinks is permissible to do to you, it is permissible to do to him. I have not even seen him mention this point.

I remind you that Yossian calls for the destruction of left-wing voters — Jews.

Is this directed at me? If you had asked about the matter of reciprocity, I would have answered. In my opinion, in our context the matter of reciprocity is not relevant. Once the enemy threatens me, I am allowed to do anything to him in order to prevent that. Without any connection to reciprocity in terms of degree of cruelty, etc.
Reciprocity is relevant mainly on the plane of doing good. If gentiles do not return lost property, then we also would not return lost property to them. When there are threats, they need to be dealt with. This is not punishment but self-defense.