Biblical ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ not an unlimited charter for vengeance

Among the welter of debate around Israel and Gaza, none is more odd than the moral one.

On the morning of Sunday, 3 December, the US Secretary for Defence announced that in addition to assuring Israel that the US will support them in defending their territory (which one, Mr Secretary?) he has firmly told Israel’s leaders that protecting civilian lives in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic necessity.

Given the nature of Israel, that is a thought which might already have crossed the minds of its citizens — without the Secretary of Defence reminding them.

Also rather oddly, there has been some discourse around the claim that Israel alone in the Middle East operates off a moral base.

When I was little, we were taught that the lex talionis — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth — was not as it appeared, a charter for vengeance. In the primal society in which it was forged, it was a restraining principle, designed to stop warring tribes from engaging in endless vendettas — if something terrible happens, you may ONLY take a tooth for a tooth. That is, the punishment may fit the crime but not grossly exceed it in scale or brutality.

That principle has long been cited as a gift from Israel to humanity, an assertion of proportionality which found its way with other principles into the medieval theory of the just war which — however ineffectively — acted to restrain medieval princes from attacking civilians or bullying minorities in their squabbles (until Archbishop Michael Ramsey observed that you can’t have a just holocaust).

The principle of restraint and proportionality was a civilising principle which became embedded in European moral thinking. Of course, there can be no such thing as “guidelines for a civilised war”, but at least there were certain agreed guidelines such as combatants would only fight other combatants, and the conflict would be contained to roughly the scale of the original offence.

All of that found its way into modern international law and the laws of war. This was the principle of equivalence or proportionality; you bash me and I will bash you back — crude but at least comprehensible.

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When the events of 7 October 2023 began to be understood, both the Israel Defence Forces and the Government of Israel began issuing a message which did not change for at least 36 hours — “we will do to them what they have done to us”.

So then we all watched to see if they meant what they said — that they would do to their enemies what their enemy had done unto them.

In only days it was clear that they had no intention of heeding their own ancient principle of equivalence and proportionality, nor that of combat with combatants; they had every intention of deliberately and intentionally killing and injuring women and children in vast numbers and justifying this on specious grounds of military necessity; a second atrocity, similar in quality and far greater in scale.

Is this why the US Secretary of Defence, of all people, has to be the moral voice which warns the leaders of the damaging long-term effects of their actions — and is 7 October at the end of the day another pretext to continue ridding the land of the unwanted? DM