P-2 Unsanctity, Jewish Vulnerability and Israel
Why praising Jewish death exposes a deeper view of humanity
In the first part, sanctity was described as a public ethic that binds the state of Israel to protect Jewish life and to honor Jewish death. Against this stands a practice that also claims the language of sanctity yet is its opposite. It is visible in movements shaped by radical Islamist ideology and in the circles that excuse them. Here, deliberate attacks on civilians are clothed in religious language. The killing of Jews is presented as obedience, sacrifice, even devotion. Unsanctity presents itself as sanctity and, for many, the disguise is sufficient.
The inversion begins with the treatment of death. In the ethic outlined in the first part, death is an occasion for identification, burial, and remembrance. Each loss is singular, and the work of the community is to insist that it remains so. In the inverted ethic, death is primarily functional. It supplies images, numbers, and symbols. The dead are not addressed as persons but as material for speeches, posters, and broadcasts. The worth of the act lies not in what it protects but in what it destroys and what it can be made to signify.
This applies both to the killing of Jews and to the handling of the movement’s own losses. When Jews are targeted as Jews, the intention is clear: the victim is chosen precisely because a long history has already marked Jewish life out as vulnerable. The attack is then named as “holy”, as “resistance”, as something higher than murder. When members of the movement or its surrounding population are killed, their deaths are rapidly incorporated into a narrative of martyrdom. They are treated as proof of the cause, not as interruptions in individual lives. In both cases, the human being is instrumentalized.
The difference from the ethic of sanctity inside Israeli Jewish public life is therefore structural. On one side, responsibility is measured by the refusal to treat citizens as expendable. On the other, prestige is gained from the willingness of people to die and from the ability to inflict death. On one side, the dead retain their names and impose a continuing obligation. On the other, they are dissolved into categories that justify further action. The word “holy” is spoken in both contexts, but what it attaches to is different: in one, to the effort to preserve and honor life; in the other, to the exercise of destruction. Is it still possible to speak of a shared moral language when the same term is tied to such opposed practices?
Such unsanctist movements also turn their attention directly to the ethic of sanctity they confront. They target Jews with the understanding that the society they attack will not treat deaths as incidental. Kidnapping, killing, and the holding of bodies are used as methods precisely because each victim will be counted, named, and mourned. The public ethic described in the first part is read as a vulnerability to be exploited. What in one framework is an indispensable rule of responsibility appears, in the other, as a convenient pressure point. What kind of politics treats another people’s sense of responsibility as merely another target?
The societies that organize themselves around this counterfeit pay a price that is not limited to the conflict with Israel. When a culture repeatedly praises violence as a high expression of faith or loyalty, it builds institutions and expectations around that praise. Law is bent to accommodate exceptional measures. Education is colored by the prospect that the young may be required to die or to kill. Trust is damaged, because life is no longer secure as a basic good. The boundary between the external enemy and the internal rival can be easily crossed when killing has already been declared sacred.
There is, in addition, a strategic cost. The actions that unsanctity calls holy make visible its underlying view of human beings. Attacks on Jews as Jews reveal a refusal to regard them as equal members of the human community. Indifference to the deaths of one’s own civilians, when they are used as shields or sent into danger for the sake of a political image, reveals a similar refusal. Over time, the repetition of such acts and the insistence on their justification strip away any ambiguity. The conflict cannot be convincingly presented as a clash of equal moral claims when one side has public rites for the destruction of the other.
For Israeli society, the difficulty is to maintain that ethic under conditions designed to break it. The dilemma for Israel’s policymakers is that the conflict is not only military but also ideological, rooted in the culture, religion, and political organization of its opponents. The temptation, under repeated assault, is either to adopt the adversary’s indifference to life or to allow the adversary to dictate the terms on which responsibility is exercised. To surrender the ethic would be to abandon the core of the political project described in the first part: the insistence that Jewish life is not expendable and that Jewish death must not be anonymous. To let the ethic be governed by the calculations of those who despise it would be to allow unsanctity to determine the meaning of sanctity.
The distinction between the two is therefore not a matter of rhetoric but of structure. An ethic that binds the state to protect and honor is of a different order from a practice that seeks prestige in killing and that consumes its own people for demonstration. When unsanctity borrows the language of sanctity, it does not become less destructive. It becomes more confusing. The practical question, then, is whether political action can still be ordered by an ethic of protection when it confronts a world that has learnt to speak fluently in the language of unsanctity.
