The question is not whether the IDF commits war crimes. That debate is functionally over. The question is why a military that presents itself to the world as the gold standard of ethical warfare operates by rules that no other Western military would consider. The answer is in the IDF’s unique role for War Priests, its official Military Rabbi program that may look like a Western military chaplain’s program, but functions very differently. They don’t help IDF soldiers with their personal or spiritual issues. They’re there to consecrate the bloodshed and justify it by the application of Rabbinic teaching. They’re on the ground, telling the IDF soldiers that their actions aren’t only justified, but they’re required by God.
As I recently reported at NXR, the U.N. just recently placed Israel on its annual “conflict-related sexual violence blacklist” this week, putting what Benjamin Netanyahu and Lindsay Graham have both called “the most moral army in the world” in the company of Boko Haram, ISIS remnants, the Sudanese military, Congolese militias, and al-Shabaab. Although shocking to those not paying attention, Americans who access something besides Fox News probably found their arrival on the U.N. rape report anticlimactic.
This wasn’t a surprise to anyone paying attention. Israel’s civilian kill rate runs roughly ten times higher than that of NATO forces in comparable modern conflicts. Israel’s own classified documents revealed a formal policy permitting the deaths of between 30 and 100 civilians per combatant killed, depending upon their alleged rank in Hamas. I provided Patreon supporters an I2I Intel Drop highlighting the IDF’s systemic sexual assault of prisoners using dogs, along with other horrific attacks and the surprisingly high level of corroborating evidence showing the irrefutable validity of those claims (I’ve no made it accessible to the public; read it by clicking below).
We’ve all seen the stories when, on rare occasions, the Israeli censorship regime lets one breach containment and find its way into our social media feed. A Gaza journalist was blindfolded and held down while a military dog was directed to rape him. A group of soldiers used riot shields to hide their faces from a security camera while they gang-raped a bound prisoner, leaving him unable to walk. The United Nations verified thirty-one cases of sexual torture across Israeli detention facilities and explicitly noted that number was a floor, not a ceiling, because Israel refused to grant investigators access to its own prisons. Israel called the report a “blood libel.” They always do. You can read my article about that here.
None of this is disputed in any serious evidentiary sense. The surveillance footage exists. The military indictments exist. The medical records exist. The bodies exist. All that. But what’s not been adequately explained to the American public - the people who fund and arm this military and provide the diplomatic cover that has shielded it from accountability for fifty years - is why Israel has next-level war crime stats. The claim that it’s a “blood libel,” or that the world’s media have all partnered up to lie about Israel, or that “antisemites” are exaggerating the reporting figures, has stopped working for all but the most gullible out there. This is what Israel and its American fan club claimed about the Gaza civilian death rate for three years - that it was “Hamas propaganda” - until February, when the IDF reluctantly admitted the civilian kill ratio was accurate.
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The question remains unanswered. Why does the IDF operate by rules that no Western military would recognize as legitimate? Why does conduct that would generate an institutional crisis in any NATO country produce celebrations in Israel? Why do they act, and do so brazenly, in disregard of international agreements regarding war ethics, signed onto by literally every other civilized nation?
In the aftermath of two world wars and in the shadow of an impending third one during the Cold War, civilized (Christian) nations formed treaties and built onto pre-existing ones, establishing the boundaries of ethical warfare. But “the most moral army in the world” didn’t sign on to any of those agreements and refused for a reason. For example, Israel refused to sign onto the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. This was the 1977 expansion that codified the “principles of distinction and proportionality” between combatants and civilians, and Israel is formally classified as a “persistent objector” to its provisions. It’s the only state that voted against adopting it at the concluding diplomatic conference in Geneva.
Israel has never joined the Rome Statute, which establishes the International Criminal Court (ICC), having participated actively in its drafting and then declined to ratify it. The U.S. had signed on under Clinton, and then, with immense pressure from AIPAC and John Bolton - the living epitome of a war monger if ever there was one (he’s called for a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea, war with Iran going back to 2015, and preemptive strike on China) - George W. Bush notified the U.N. it would refuse to ratify it because of "illegitimate and unjust efforts to prosecute Israel,” mirroring AIPAC’s statement on their website almost verbatim. As a personal favor to Netanyahu, Trump placed American sanctions on ICC officials, which were repealed by Biden, and then again reinstated at the beginning of Trump’s second term.
Neither has Israel signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while operating the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East. The Symington-Glenn Amendments to the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976 forbid the U.S. from giving monetary or military assistance to nuclear powers that refuse to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since banning aid, the U.S. has given 234 billion dollars in aid to Israel, finding a workaround on the law by Israel refusing to formally admit to having nuclear weapons, and American presidents refusing to declare Israel a nuclear power. Literally everyone in the world knows it’s a farce designed to circumvent the will of the American people and ignore a law their representatives passed in Congress. The U.S. has known Israel has had nuclear weapons since the CIA informed President Johnson in 1968 that the Israelis had stolen uranium from the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania.
The state that lectures the world about civilizational values has spent seventy years designing its own legal exemptions from the civilization’s rules it claims to represent. But refusing to sign onto treaties that most civilized, first-world nations agree to follow is just the tip of the iceberg, and it doesn’t explain the human justification for Israel’s litany of war crimes. The question is, how do they justify it on a human level?
For example, when IDF soldiers near bread lines regularly use live fire as a crowd control method (an actual war crime), with between one and five unarmed civilians killed daily in 2025, how does the soldier pulling the trigger justify it, and then sleep at night? The Times of Israel - not a hostile source - gives those stats and quotes IDF soldiers calling the breadlines, “the killing fields.” Netanyahu called the report “blood libel,” but they’ve been confirmed by virtually everyone. Is Netanyahu’s “blood libel” claim really enough to justify killing so many unarmed civilians on a regular basis, at least, in the eyes of those doing the shooting?
Or take, for example, fifteen foreign doctors who volunteered in Gaza described encountering hundreds of children under fifteen with single bullet wounds to the head or chest. Forensic pathologists who reviewed the X-rays confirmed the wounds were consistent with long-range sniper or drone fire, not shrapnel from explosions. Former military commanders have reviewed the findings and stated that the sheer number made any claim of accidents implausible, with a Dutch commander saying, “This is not collateral damage. It is intentional.” American doctors who volunteered at the European Hospital in Khan Younis - veterans of humanitarian missions in Iraq, Ukraine, and the West Bank - described it as unlike anything they had seen in forty combined years of working in conflict zones.
Then there is the targeting system the IDF built and named “Where’s Daddy.” The people who built it called it that - not critics - because the system is designed to wait for a Hamas-affiliated male to return to his family home before triggering a strike. According to an investigation confirmed by six Israeli intelligence officers, in one documented case, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single Hamas commander. One source told investigators: “Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed - that it was a price worth paying in order to hit another target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.” That’s a statement confirmed by the facts about the cutting-edge targeting system technology on loan from the U.S.
The truth is, the gap between what Israel says about its military ethics and what its military actually does is a window into a completely different ethical operating system that most Americans have never been told exists. To Americans who are convinced that Israelis and Americans share a “common religious heritage” and “shared cultural values,” it’s hard to believe. As Israel is currently cozying up to India as a Plan B in the event that American support collapses (Israel must maintain a major world power as a proxy to stay viable), those are the same lines that it’s telling Hindus, too. But they’re not any more true for Indians than they are for Americans. The stats prove it.
If you’re wondering how Israeli soldiers sleep at night, given the IDF’s systemic violations of human rights, which would tear at the heartstrings of more civilized nations, the answer is a religious and military office you probably didn't know exists, and the role it plays in setting Israel’s questionable war ethics.
THE WAR RABBIS
To introduce you to the concept of Kohen Mashuach Milchama, let me start with a story. In 2002, a question appeared on Kipa, a popular Israeli religious website. The question asked whether Jewish law permitted Israeli soldiers to rape non-Jewish women during wartime. It was a sincere religious inquiry submitted to a qualified rabbinical authority for a formal legal ruling.
The rabbi who answered was IDF Colonel Eyal Karim, one of the IDF’s “War Rabbis.” His written ruling stated that although intercourse with a gentile woman wasn’t exactly kosher, it was permitted during wartime out of consideration for the soldiers’ “difficulties.” His precise formulation was that it was "It is permitted to breach the walls of modesty and satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive gentile women against their will, out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success."
That’s a direct quote.
Karim was not disciplined. He was not removed from service as an IDF war rabbi. He continued his military career for fourteen years. And in July 2016, the IDF appointed him as Chief Military Rabbi, the highest religious position in the Israeli armed forces, with the rank of Brigadier General. He is still the Chief Military Rabbi, and his ruling is still out there on the internet. If you’re wondering why none of the war crimes in Israel get prosecuted, it’s because the Chief Military Rabbi has authorized much of the behavior the Military Advocate General's office is supposed to prosecute.
In Israel, stating matter-of-factly what is legal or prosecutable isn’t exactly cut and dry. Why not? Israel is the only democracy in the world without a written constitution, a fact that tends to get lost beneath the relentless American evangelical talking point that Israel is a beacon of Western liberal governance, a plucky little democracy dropped into a sea of medieval despots, spiritually descended from the Magna Carta and constitutionally kissing cousins with Philadelphia in 1787. None of that is true.
In place of a constitution, Israel operates under a series of Basic Laws that the Knesset has passed over decades, alongside a civil legal system, a military legal system, a rabbinical court system with statutory jurisdiction over personal matters, and an informal but institutionally powerful rabbinical authority structure that issues rulings on questions the civil system has never fully resolved. That is not the rule of law as any American Founder would have recognized it. It is, in fact, closer to the parliamentary absolutism the Founders were explicitly revolting against.
These systems - civil, military, rabbinical - do not have a clean hierarchy. They overlap, conflict, and negotiate with each other in ways that produce outcomes with no single system in charge. The question of whether a soldier is bound by his commanding officer’s order, the military advocate general’s legal guidance, the IDF’s own code of ethics, or his rabbi’s halachic ruling on the same question has no definitive answer in Israeli law, because Israeli law has never been forced to give one. Israel advertises itself as a liberal democracy, but it is, in fact, a theocratic ethno-state, not altogether different than Iran.
Both Israel and Iran maintain a formal democratic system alongside a religious authority structure that can override it on questions the religious establishment claims as its own.
Both have a military with an explicit theological self-understanding and a religious mandate that its leadership regards as superseding international law.
Both operate legal systems in which religious courts hold formal statutory jurisdiction over personal status matters and exert informal yet institutionally powerful influence over everything else.
Both have a religious establishment that issues rulings authorizing conduct that international humanitarian law prohibits, and a civil government that treats those rulings as either binding or not worth confronting.
Both are states where religious and civil authority compete without constitutional resolution and where the military operates with a theological mandate, in which religious leaders actually dictate the type and kind of warfare it fights. Jerusalem and Tehran are nearly identical in this regard.
Further, and this will take some explanation, Iran has a Supreme Leader and a Guardian Council, but Israel has a Chief Rabbinate, a network pipeline of IDF leaders called Batei Din, and a military rabbinate that has spent decades installing its graduates in the IDF’s command structure. You’ll understand what that means in a moment.
AMERICAN CHAPLAINS VS IDF WAR PRIESTS
Every American has a mental picture of a military chaplain. He is the man in uniform with a cross on his collar who sits with the wounded, writes letters to the families of the dead, counsels soldiers through trauma, and provides the pastoral infrastructure that keeps human beings functional in inhuman conditions. But the U.S. military chaplain does not issue operational orders, or tell a battalion commander how to treat prisoners, or override the Judge Advocate General on questions of what the laws of armed conflict permit. He is a pastor in a combat zone. His authority is spiritual and personal. It stops at the command structure’s door.
The Israeli military rabbinate is not that institution. It has not been that institution for decades, and under the tenure of Chief Military Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, it explicitly redefined itself as something the Western mind has no ready category for. The rabbinate reframed its mission around a biblical figure called the Kohen Mashuach Milchama. AKA, the “Priest Anointed for War.”
Biblically, this figure appears in Deuteronomy 20. Before Israel went into battle, this priest addressed the army. His function was not to comfort the wounded or bury the dead. His specific role was to stand before the fighting force, invoke divine mandate, and send them into combat with the theological authorization of God behind them. He did not support the army. He consecrated it. His presence transformed a military campaign from a political act into a sacred one, and his rulings on how that campaign should be conducted carried the authority not of military law but of Torah.
When Rontzki’s military rabbinate adopted this as its self-understanding, it was making a claim with direct operational consequences. A Western military chaplain supports soldiers. The Kohen Mashuach Milchama consecrates the killing. The difference between those two functions is the difference between a pastor and a posek, between pastoral care and halachic authorization, between a man who walks beside you and a man whose ruling determines what you are permitted and required to do to the enemy. Americans have military chaplains. Israelis have war priests. They are not the same thing.
THE HOLY WARRIORS IN REAL TIME
Americans who have spent twenty years being told that Islamic jihadists are dangerous because they believe God is commanding their violence should find the following information interesting. The IDF is not a Western military that happens to have chaplains. It is a religious army with an attached legal department. The IDF’s structure that makes it religious is more thoroughly embedded in its daily operations than anything in the militaries of Iran, Saudi Arabia, or any other Middle Eastern state Americans are accustomed to regarding with suspicion.
Under Israeli law, every IDF unit must have a military rabbi assigned to it. The rabbinate is as structurally mandatory in the IDF as the supply chain or the chain of command. There is no IDF unit operating anywhere in Gaza, the West Bank, or anywhere else without a War Priest embedded in it by legal requirement. But as stated before, they’re not there to make sure that the MREs are Kosher or cleanliness rituals are undertaken after smoking some civilians in Lebanon. They are legal advisers on ethical issues and are consulted by IDF soldiers about whether to follow their commanders' orders or international law regarding war crimes.
Those War Priests are backed by a dedicated hotline soldiers can call from the battlefield to receive real-time halachic rulings on whatever question they face. The number is printed in official IDF combat booklets distributed to fighting units. A soldier in an active combat zone with a question about whether what he is doing or is about to do is religiously permitted can call a rabbi and receive a ruling in real time. No Western military has anything remotely equivalent. A JAG hotline tells a soldier what international law permits. The rabbinate hotline tells him what God permits. They are not always the same answer, and when they conflict, IDF soldiers routinely regard the War Priests as a higher authority.
In January 2026, the IDF went further. It launched an AI chatbot called Ravbot, accessible through the official IDF portal after identity verification, designed exclusively for active-duty soldiers, reservists, and career officers, providing real-time halachic rulings on operational and personal questions that soldiers face in the field. When journalists tested it, they asked Ravbot about a female paramedic falling asleep next to a soldier inside an armored vehicle in Gaza. Ravbot responded within seconds with a detailed ruling citing the IDF’s own internal religious doctrine guide, concluding that Jewish law forbids a man and woman from being secluded in a closed space, even in combat zones, unless there is a clear operational or life-saving necessity, and directing the soldier to call the hotline if he had further doubts. The IDF has deployed an AI rabbi who issues real-time rulings on religious law to soldiers in active combat in Gaza. It is not a pastoral resource. It is an operational one.
The War Priest’s founding father was Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the IDF’s first Chief Military Rabbi, who in 1948 carried a Torah scroll and a shofar into battle alongside his rifle. When Israeli forces captured the Western Wall in 1967, Goren was there within minutes, blowing the shofar in a moment that fused military conquest and religious consecration so completely that Israeli military culture has never fully separated them since. He spent his tenure insisting that military operations be accompanied by halachic guidance alongside operational directives, issuing rulings on siege warfare, the treatment of civilian populations, and battlefield conduct, and constructing the institutional apparatus that Rontzki later radicalized and that Karim currently commands.
HOW THE WAR PRIESTS STEER THE IDF’S WAR ETHICS
During Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, the military rabbinate distributed literature to combat troops entering Gaza that made the war priest function explicit in ways that should have generated an international scandal and instead generated almost no coverage in American media.
The primary document, titled Daily Torah Studies for the Soldier and the Commander in Operation Cast Lead, was issued directly by the IDF rabbinate. It declared a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of the Land of Israel to gentiles. It likened today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the Bible, and insinuated the tactics of Samson (knocking down buildings to massacre innocent non-combatants) should be applied today.
A separate publication available in military synagogues told soldiers that Palestinians were tantamount to foreigners and that “soldiers should show no mercy” to them. It made no distinctions between combatants and civilians. It was printed by the rabbinate’s own department for Jewish awareness, a unit Rontzki created specifically for soldier outreach. Another document told soldiers directly that they needed to fight to expel the non-Jews “interfering with the conquest of the holy land.” Additional pamphlets from radical rabbis affiliated with the settler movement, which circulated on IDF bases alongside the official publications, told soldiers the civilian population was not innocent and to ignore any orders that limit civilian injuries or death, including international humanitarian law, which they called “strange doctrines” akin to religious heresy.
Rontzki himself addressed soldiers during Cast Lead at a Hesder yeshiva, and told them directly that in times of war, “whoever keeps his sword from bloodshed is damned,” and that showing mercy toward an enemy when no mercy should be shown made a soldier “cursed before God.” Another rabbi attached to front-line units told soldiers that showing mercy to an enemy was immoral. Then, he emphasized that all Palestinians are enemies.
When he died, Netanyahu eulogized him as a fighter and Torah scholar who loved the Jewish people.
The pamphlets told soldiers that mercy was a moral violation, that Palestinians were obstacles to a divine conquest, and that the example of Samson pulling down the building was operationally relevant. The institution that produced them was thanked for its contribution to morale. The soldiers who read them went into a densely populated civilian area.
What was the result of the War Priests taking over the ethics instructions for Operation Cast Lead? It produced a 575-page UN war crimes report known as the Goldstone Report in which 188 interviews, 10,000 pages of documents, identified 36 specific incidents in which Israeli forces were accused of violating international law, including the deliberate targeting of civilians, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. Israel refused to cooperate with the inquiry, denied investigators access, and called the report antisemitic “blood libel.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch independently reached the same conclusions.
And all of them were excused, blessed, sanctioned, and/or consecrated by the Israeli War Priests ahead of time.
RABBIS BEHAVING BADLY
Americans trying to understand how the IDF military commits so many war crimes and gets away with it, need to understand that Rabbi Karim’s “you can rape gentiles” ruling was not an aberration produced by one War Priest with bad theology. It was just one example in a documented pattern of rabbinical rulings issued by men holding official state and military positions, communicated through official and semi-official channels to soldiers and commanders, and never prosecuted, formally repudiated, or treated as disqualifying by the institutions that employed them.
Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, one of the most senior theological figures in Israel, serving as former Sephardic Chief Rabbi, issued a formal ruling that there was no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a military offensive on Gaza. Not combatants. Not “people in proximity to military targets.” Civilians. Indiscriminately. The ruling was published in the Jerusalem Post. Eliyahu was not disciplined, not removed from his state-funded position, and not formally repudiated by the Israeli government that paid his salary. He was giving God’s sanction to what any Western nation would consider a war crime, and what international law certainly does.
Rabbi Dov Lior, Chairman of the Jewish Rabbinical Council and one of the most institutionally influential figures in the settler movement, issued multiple rulings over several years that non-Jewish civilian lives had no sanctity during wartime. His precise formulation was that a thousand non-Jewish lives were not worth a Jew’s fingernail, that killing non-Jewish civilians was permitted if it saved Jewish lives, and that Israeli soldiers should never hesitate. In a formal letter to Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, a group of prominent rabbis cited a Talmudic edict stating “our lives come first” and told the sitting Defense Minister that killing enemy civilians was normal during wartime and that the IDF should never hesitate to do it to save Jewish lives. Lior also publicly praised Baruch Goldstein, the American Jewish settler who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at prayer in Hebron in 1994, calling him “a great saint.” He holds institutional positions in the Israeli government, and his rulings carry weight throughout the religious nationalist community, whose students populate the IDF officer corps.
Chief Sephardic Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef delivered a sermon in 2016 in direct response to the IDF chief of staff’s instructions to soldiers to limit lethal force. His ruling was that it was a religious commandment to kill any enemy soldier on the spot, and he told soldiers explicitly to ignore the chief of staff’s guidance. His words were not ambiguous. “Let them afterward take you to the High Court of Justice, or bring some military chief of staff who will say something else. It is a religious commandment to kill him.” The sitting Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, in a state-funded position, issued a ruling to soldiers stating that rabbinical law overrides the chief of staff’s orders. He was not disciplined. He was not removed. He continued in his position.
In 1994, three rabbis wrote a letter suggesting that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his government, because of their peace negotiations with Palestinians, were guilty of acts that under Jewish law should be punishable by death. The letter invoked din rodef, the “law of the pursuer.” Rabin was assassinated the following year. His killer, Yigal Amir, told the court he was following a valid halachic ruling that authorized the killing as a religious obligation. He was not claiming insanity. He was presenting a legal defense grounded in rabbinical jurisprudence. Multiple rabbis declined to condemn the ruling on which he relied. The same theological infrastructure that authorizes violence against Palestinians authorized the murder of an Israeli Prime Minister pursuing peace.
In 2026, a rabbi and state rabbinical judge named Avraham Zarbiv was filmed throwing grenades at unarmed Palestinian civilians in Khan Younis during the Gaza campaign. Not only was he not punished, but he was also subsequently selected to light the torch at Israel’s national Independence Day celebration.
In 2009, two rabbis at a West Bank settlement called Yitzhar published a 230-page halachic legal compendium titled Torat Hamelech, which translates as “The King’s Torah.” American readers should understand what the term “halachic” means in this context. This was not an opinion piece or a sermon or a provocative essay. It was a formal work of Jewish legal scholarship, written in the same jurisprudential style as any other rabbinical legal ruling, making a systematic case for when killing non-Jewish civilians, including children, is religiously permitted or required under Jewish law. It was the kind of document that carries binding authority for soldiers who regard rabbinical rulings as superior to military orders.
The book’s core argument was that the prohibition “Thou Shalt Not Murder” applies only to a Jew who kills a Jew. Non-Jews are uncompassionate by nature, their argument goes, and attacks on them curb their evil inclination are justified. Babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed because it is clear they will grow to harm them. Rabbi Shapira explained that if killing enemy children is necessary to win a war and preserve Jewish soldiers’ lives, then killing them is not merely permitted but is the right thing to do, and that harming a wicked king’s children to break his will and stop him from sending soldiers to war is halachically permissible. So, we aren’t talking about a bizarre ethical dilemma in which it’s necessary to down a plane with babies aboard to stop it from flying into a skyscraper, killing an exponentially higher number of dead babies. What the rabbis approved was the killing of babies as a tactic of psychological warfare.
Dov Lior, one of the most influential figures in religious nationalist Judaism and the same man who told the Defense Minister that a thousand non-Jewish lives were not worth a Jew’s fingernail, said, “At a time of war, the nation under attack is allowed to punish the enemy population with measures it finds suitable, such as blocking supplies or electricity, as well as shelling the entire area according to the army minister's judgment, and not to needlessly endanger soldiers but rather to take crushing deterring steps to exterminate the enemy.”
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of the settlement movement’s senior spiritual figures and the same man whose words appeared in Rontzki’s Cast Lead pamphlets distributed to soldiers entering Gaza, defended the book’s arguments as a legitimate stance that should be taught in Jewish seminaries. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi, blessed the authors and wrote that many disciples of Torah were simply unfamiliar with these laws and needed to learn them. When Israeli police arrested Shapira for incitement, dozens of rabbis and several members of parliament condemned the arrest. Shapira expressed no regrets. He said only that he wished certain sections had been written more clearly for a wider audience.
Five years earlier, in 2004, a group of prominent rabbis had sent a formal letter to Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz making the operational version of the same argument. The letter stated that killing enemy civilians was normal during wartime, that the army should never hesitate to do it to save Jewish lives, and explicitly invoked a Talmudic edict stating “our lives come first.” It closed by noting that the Christian teaching of turning the other cheek did not concern them. The signatories included Rabbi Haim Druckman, a former Knesset member and head of the Bnei Akiva national religious youth movement, the largest religious Zionist youth organization in Israel. Another signatory headed a Talmudic college that combines religious study with active military service, which is the Bnei David model applied directly to a formal policy communication addressed to the sitting Defense Minister.
Now consider what the IDF has been running in Gaza. The Lavender AI system marked tens of thousands of Palestinians as potential targets and operated on a formally approved civilian kill ratio of 15 to 20 deaths per junior operative. The Where’s Daddy system was built specifically to wait for targets to return to their family homes before triggering a strike, because family homes are easier to confirm and easier to bomb than military positions, and because the IDF decided early in the campaign that bombing people in their homes was the preferred first option. The Gospel system generates targets at machine speed, producing what one Israeli intelligence officer described as a mass assassination factory. Officers described their role as a rubber stamp, spending 20 seconds per target before authorizing a strike.
None of those systems required a specific rabbinical sign-off before deployment. They did not need one. Torat Hamelech had already ruled that enemy children may be killed to break the enemy’s will. The 2004 letter had already told the Defense Minister that killing civilians was normal and the army should never hesitate. Lior had already ruled that a thousand non-Jewish lives were not worth a Jew’s fingernail. Rontzki had already told soldiers the civilian population was not innocent and that mercy was forbidden. The rabbinical permission structure for every operational decision those AI systems make had been formally written, published, endorsed by major institutional figures, and transmitted through official and semi-official channels decades before the first algorithm was coded.
The War Priests did not approve the kill list. They wrote the theology the kill list implements. The machine didn’t need a fatwa. It was built by people who had already received one.
THE BNEI DAVID PIPELINE
It’s not just about prominent Rabbis serving as War Priests to consecrate war crimes. There’s also the Bnei David pre-army academy, which sits in the Israeli settlement of Eli in the West Bank. It receives funding from both the Israeli Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Defense, and it was founded with the explicit stated mission of producing a generation of “religious nationalist officers who would rise to the IDF’s high command and reshape the military from within.”
In other words, its purpose is to reshape the IDF by stacking its leadership with rabbinic extremists. It’s been successful at placing the War Priests’ religious proteges in charge of the IDF.
Rabbis Eli Sadan and Yigal Levinstein founded Bnei David for a specific reason. The secular Ashkenazi Labor Zionist institution that had run the IDF since 1948 was, in their assessment, insufficiently committed to the theological project of Greater Israel and insufficiently formed in the religious nationalist worldview that regards Israeli military operations as participation in a divine plan to ethnically cleanse much of the Middle East of Arabs and annex it to Israel to finally obtain the land that God promised to Israel. The solution was not to argue with that institution. The solution was to replace it, one officer class at a time, by producing graduates formed in Religious Zionism’s most militant theological tradition and inserting them into the command structure until the institution’s character changed.
Levinstein has publicly framed Bnei David's mission as producing officers who will reshape the IDF according to Torah values rather than what he calls “Western liberal values,” meaning the Geneva Conventions, international humanitarian law, and the IDF’s own written code of military ethics. When Israel First influencers in the American media list “it’s the only liberal democracy in the Middle East” as a reason to support it, they are glossing over the fact that the IDF is currently captive to the very antithesis of classical liberalism, far more similar to something you’d see in Saudi Arabia or Iran. The difference is that only one is funded by the United States taxpayer.
The numbers document the success of that mission. In the 1990s, religious nationalist graduates of hesder yeshivot and institutions like Bnei David represented a small minority of IDF combat officers. By the mid-2010s they represented roughly forty percent of infantry officer graduates. Today, it’s likely 70-80%. The secular Labor Zionist officer class that founded the IDF has been substantially displaced at the command level by officers whose primary formation happened inside institutions where the differential worth of Jewish and non-Jewish life is a baseline assumption, where Israeli military operations are understood as theologically mandated, where international humanitarian law is a foreign doctrine creating moral confusion, and where the rabbi’s ruling supersedes the commanding officer’s order when the two conflict.
Those officers do not arrive at their postings as moral vacuums who then make bad individual choices. They arrive with a coherent and complete theological framework that has already told them the enemy is not innocent, that mercy is forbidden, that the foreign doctrines telling them otherwise are confusing, and that their posek’s authority is higher than their JAG officer’s. They are not deviating from their religious instructions. They are applying it.
UNDERSTANDING JEWISH WAR THEOLOGY
There is a concept inside religious nationalist Judaism called milhemet mitzvah, or obligatory war. Not a war of choice, not a war of defense in the conventional sense, but a war that God commands and that carries the full weight of Torah obligation. In the halachic framework that now dominates the IDF’s officer corps, milhemet mitzvah does not merely permit killing. It requires it. Refusing to kill, showing restraint, extending mercy to an enemy who has not earned it - these are not just tactical errors. They are religious violations. They are sin.
This is the theological architecture beneath everything I’ve described for you. Rabbi Karim did not invent his rape ruling in a vacuum. Rabbi Lior did not invent his ruling that a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail in a vacuum. Torat Hamelech did not appear from nowhere. They are all drawing from the same well, a coherent body of halachic reasoning that has been developed, refined, and institutionalized across decades, the reasoning that the current war in Gaza is not a political conflict governed by international law but a sacred campaign governed by Torah, in which the ordinary categories of combatant and civilian, guilt and innocence, do not apply to the enemy population in the way that Western ethical frameworks assume.
The word that ties it all together is Amalek. In the Hebrew Bible, Amalek is the archenemy of Israel, the nation God commanded the Israelites to exterminate completely - men, women, children, infants, livestock. Not to defeat. Not to subjugate. To blot out entirely, so that their memory would be erased from under heaven. The command appears in Deuteronomy. Its fulfillment is demanded in 1 Samuel. No mercy. No survivors. The theological term for this is herem, or total devotion to destruction, sacralized annihilation. For centuries, mainstream Jewish interpretation treated the Amalek command as a historical artifact or a spiritual metaphor, a relic of a pre-exilic world with no modern application. Religious Zionism changed that.
The same Yigal Levinstein who founded Bnei David to replace the IDF’s secular officer class with religious nationalist graduates is among the contemporary religious Zionist rabbis who have argued that Palestinians constitute a living embodiment of Amalek, and that the war in Gaza is therefore an opportunity to fulfill the biblical commandment to wipe them out. He is not fringe. He is the man who built the pipeline that now produces seventy to eighty percent of the IDF’s infantry officers. In 1980, Rabbi Yisrael Hess, the official campus rabbi at Bar-Ilan University, wrote in the student bulletin that “the day will soon come when we will be called to fulfill the mitzvah of this jihad to annihilate Amalek, the mitzvah of genocide.” That was four decades before Gaza. It was not suppressed. It was not retracted. It was the ideological groundwork.
When Benjamin Netanyahu stood before his soldiers on October 28, 2023, as the ground invasion of Gaza was beginning, and told them, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember,” he was not reaching for a vague inspirational metaphor. He was invoking a specific halachic category with a specific halachic obligation attached to it, one his audience - trained at Bnei David and institutions like it - understood precisely. His Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called the people of Gaza “human animals.” His Army Coordinator told troops that “human animals are dealt with accordingly.” These were not rhetorical slips. They were theological statements that translated the Amalek framework into operational language. You cannot commit a war crime against Amalek. You can only fulfill or refuse to fulfill your religious obligation toward it.
This is why the IDF’s written ethics code -the doctrine of tohar haneshek, Purity of Arms, which instructs soldiers to protect civilian lives and use force only to the extent necessary - has become increasingly irrelevant to a fighting force whose officers were formed in institutions that regard that doctrine as a Western liberal foreign imposition. The Purity of Arms was written by secular Labor Zionists in the 1990s. The officers now commanding IDF combat units were formed by men who explicitly regard it as the enemy of proper Torah warfare. You cannot have both. You cannot simultaneously tell a soldier that he is fighting a milhemet mitzvah against the living seed of Amalek and that he is bound by a proportionality doctrine derived from international humanitarian law. One of those authorities is going to win. In the IDF of 2025, the one that has won is not the one with lawyers.
This is what the American evangelical church has been funding with its political support and its advocacy for military aid. Not a democracy defending itself. Not a Western ally with shared values. A theological war machine whose operating doctrine was written by men who believe that Palestinians are Amalek, that mercy is a sin, that the biblical command to leave no one alive is not a metaphor but a mitzvah, and that the War Priests embedded in every combat unit are not there to comfort the troops but to consecrate the killing. The most moral army in the world does not need to be moral. It needs to be obedient. And toward that obedience, it has built the most sophisticated institutional apparatus for the religious authorization of atrocity that the modern world has ever produced.
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