After a long delay, the Israeli military's advance into Rafach, the city in southern Gaza on Egypt's

border, is now underway.

Here, IDF officials tell us, resides the last stronghold of Hamas's fighting force. As we've seen over the last many months

of Israel's campaign to defeat Hamas in Gaza, and as we will see with special intensity in the

coming days and weeks, Israel's critics assert that IDF personnel engage in unethical and even

genocidal actions, targeting Gazaazan civilians and civilian infrastructure and causing

excessive Palestinian casualties. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. This

week we focus not on any particular criticism of Israel's military ethics, but instead on Jewish ways

of thinking about war and the moral constraints that the Jewish tradition imposes

on the conduct of warfare. My guest is the rabbi and scholar Shlomo Brody, the author of a new

volume on Jewish military ethics, Ethics of Our Fighters, published in 2024 by Magid

books of Koran publishers. It is traditional in the intellectual and philosophical

tradition of just war theory to draw a distinction between the ethics of going to war and the

ethics of fighting in war. This week, Rabbi Brody and I discuss that latter subject,

ethics in war, as it is seen through the Jewish tradition and the historical experience of

the Israeli military.

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Here now is my conversation with Rabbi Shlomo Brody.

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