The Torah's Excellent Foreign Policy Advice

Moses urged his congregation and its descendants to choose life and good over death and evil, that they may live and prosper and dwell in the land. His teachings are as relevant as ever.

Jews praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem (photo: Anton Mislawsky/Unsplash)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Stephen Schecter of Stephen’s Substack.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

“When you go forth to battle” — so this past Sabbath’s Torah portion begins.

What follows is a cascade of laws that have little to do with warfare, but offer a broad indication of the kind of society the Israelites were to establish once they conquered the land and dwelled therein.

That, after all, was the great innovation that ancient Israel brought to the history of societal evolution and the very reason for the Exodus from Egypt. God took one nation out of another to introduce a new wrinkle in how society was to be governed: not by imperial edict but by law, whose word was to go forth from Zion and eventually wind up, thousands of years later, in the great change wrought by modern society which present-day democratic Israel shares with like-minded nations.

But at the very end of the portion read on the Sabbath called Ki Teitze (“When You Go Forth”) the text returns to a military injunction. Remember, the Torah says, what Amalek did to you when you came forth from Egypt and attacked you when you were at your most vulnerable. Therefore, Moses adds in his address to the assembled Israelites, when you are finally at home in your land which God gave you for an inheritance to possess, remember Amalek and blot out its memory from under heaven.

And since we Jews say in every generation Amalek rears its ugly head anew, as in ours the Palestinians have done, the injunction of the Torah in this portion stands as a reminder to the present-day Israelites how they must behave with respect to the Palestinians who have abused the Jewish desire to live in peace with their neighbors by hitting them when they were most vulnerable.

The kibbutz which was so viciously attacked by the people of Gaza on October 7th was a kibbutz full of Israelis who had gone out of their way to live in peace with their neighbors; who were so committed to that end they were defenseless before the slaughter that assaulted them on that day from these latter-day Amalekites.

Fortunately, the rest of Israel rallied, came to their defense, and then went forth to do battle with the depraved Palestinians who attacked them. Depraved and murderous as they have been for over a century, attacking Jews when the latter were weak, subjects of Ottoman and British rulers who turned a blind eye to the pogroms which Muslim Arabs periodically unleashed on the Jews who lived amongst them.

And so, when Jews wonder and argue about what to do the day after Israel has conquered Gaza and uprooted Hamas, they ought to bear this Torah text in mind.

“Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven,” the Torah says, adding: “Thou shalt not forget.”

And so it is. Israel must act to blot out the remembrance of Palestinians from under heaven. Not murder all the Palestinians; but blot out their claim to the land and all remembrance of the murderous ideology with which they have infected it. Israel must act so that the whole slew of slogans to which the world has been subjected for over half a century now — “the Nakba,” occupation, apartheid, genocide, self-determination, even the terrible misnomer of the two-state solution — shall disappear from public discourse.

For that to happen, Israel must exert sovereignty over Gaza and Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), subject the Muslim Arab population that elects to reside therein to strict control and extirpate every vestige of Palestinian ideology. The Arab Muslims who live there will be free to work and free to leave, but not to vote and not to claim Israeli citizenship.

The mosques must be closed, the education system changed, the weapons confiscated, the movement of people monitored and curtailed so that ordinary life proceeds apace, but devoid of the Amalek-like bloodlust that has characterized the land for so long. Thus will remembrance of Palestine be blotted out from under heaven.

The wags who opine about a two-state solution and other such garbage like to say that you cannot extirpate an ideology. But you can, and all the more so when that ideology is based on nothing but destructive impulses. Palestinian refusal to live in peace with Israel has its roots in the phantasmagorical nature of their politics.

Their raison d’être was never the establishment of a state but always the liquidation of the Jewish one. The founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization himself stated even in 1964 that “Palestine” was nothing but southern Syria. One of Yasser Arafat’s henchmen declared, even after Israel and the Palestinians signed the 1990s Oslo Accords agreements, that the demand for a Palestinian state was but a stepping stone to folding “Palestine” into a re-established caliphate of the Arab nation.

And since Palestinianism has always been nothing but a masked call for the annihilation of Zionism, it is no surprise that in practice it has only led to murder and mayhem. An ideology rooted in destruction has no future except extirpation, for it has nothing positive on which to build. The destructive impulses it unleashes can only in the end rebound against those who hold on to it, as is now going on in Gaza.

Which is why remembrance of “Palestine” — however crazed, sexually demented, and fanatic it now is — is destined to be wiped out under heaven. All that is required for that to happen is for Jews to read their Torah and follow its excellent foreign policy advice. Once again. To pay attention. To uphold the covenant which has proved so prescient and so powerful. Or do they want to be evicted from their homeland once again?

You will have a choice, Moses told his assembled flock in his final discourses to them in the coming chapters of the marvellous Book of Deuteronomy, when you finally reach the land God has promised you. For the people shall be divided into two, one half to stand upon Mount Gerizim and one half on Mount Ebal, and you shall hear the blessings that shall accrue to you when you adhere to the covenant and the curses that shall befall you when you do not.

And Moses urged his congregation and his congregation’s descendants to choose life and good over death and evil, that they may live and prosper and dwell in the land. His teachings are as relevant as ever, his admonitions as pertinent, his counsel as wise.

Surely now that the Jews have returned once again to their ancestral homeland, it is time for them to embrace the covenant wholeheartedly, to extirpate the remembrance of Palestinian Amalekites under heaven, and to let the words of the Torah go forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem.

Only thus shall Israel be saved, and with it modernity itself.

---