Heroic Sacrifice: The Deconstruction of a Myth
Heroic Sacrifice: The Deconstruction of a Myth
The celebrated statement, “It is good to die for one’s country,” traditionally attributed to Joseph Trumpeldor during the battle of Tel Hai, has become one of the founding myths of Israeli national ethics. It is therefore hardly surprising that it now stands at the center of extensive intellectual and ideological criticism. Like all nations, societies tend to produce national myths designed to serve as educational ideals and to shape a collective memory that fosters a willingness to make military sacrifices. Over time, however, an ever-widening gap emerges between the pathos of such slogans and the realities of civilian life.
National values themselves are not immune to radical criticism. At an international film festival in the Moroccan city of Nador, in which I participated, one of the roundtable discussions was devoted to moral principles and values. I chose to contribute by discussing the film Our Brothers (Nos frères blessés, 2020).
Based on a true story, the film recounts the fate of Fernand Iveton, a young French communist who, out of moral conviction, joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in its struggle against French colonial rule. Shortly after marrying a young Polish woman who had fled the communist regime, he was instructed, in November 1956, to plant a bomb in the gasworks in Algiers where he was employed. Determined to avoid causing any casualties, he deliberately set the device to explode after working hours.
The bomb was defused before it detonated. Nevertheless, the French authorities prosecuted Iveton for crimes against state security and sentenced him to death. Numerous intellectuals petitioned for clemency, but the Minister of Justice, François Mitterrand, rejected every appeal. Fernand Iveton was guillotined, becoming the only European executed by France during the Algerian War. Before his execution, he declared: “One man’s life matters little; what matters is the future of Algeria.”
The film concludes with a particularly moving scene. Fernand Iveton’s comrades come to offer their condolences to his young widow. Seeking to comfort her, they proudly tell her, “You are a heroine.” She responds with a cry of anguish: “I am not a heroine! I want a living husband, not a dead hero!”
It was evident that the festival audience shared her emotional response. As an Israeli, I could not help recalling the maxim on which several generations had been raised: “It is good to die for one’s country.” Yet the message of Our Brothers appears to invert precisely this ideal: what deserves admiration is not dying for one’s country, but living for it.
The philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz regarded this type of slogan as an expression of what he termed “national idolatry”—the transformation of the state into an object of worship. In his view, death can never constitute a positive moral value. Neither the state nor the nation possesses inherent sanctity, and the sacrifice of human lives in the service of a national ideology cannot be regarded as a moral imperative. By contrast, he argued, the Jewish concept of the sanctification of the Divine Name (qiddush ha-Shem) has nothing to do with a cult of death. Rather, it signifies unwavering fidelity to the service of God, even when such fidelity may require the sacrifice of one’s own life.
This issue also divided two of the greatest thinkers of medieval Judaism. Nahmanides regarded martyrdom for the sanctification of the Divine Name as a form of spiritual elevation and communion with God. Maimonides, by contrast, maintained that anyone who allows himself to be killed when Jewish law does not require it bears responsibility for having shed his own blood in vain.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky likewise upheld the ideal of a willingness to sacrifice oneself when the defense of the nation required it, yet he rejected any glorification of heroic death as an end in itself. For him, death was never an ideal; it was merely the tragic consequence of a struggle whose true purpose was the sovereign life of a free people. In Khirbet Khizeh, S. Yizhar adopts a similarly ambivalent attitude toward the cult of heroism. He presents sacrifice not as a romantic ideal but as a tragic experience, revealing the human and psychological cost that every war exacts from those who endure it.
During the formative centuries of Christianity, martyrdom was gradually elevated to the status of the supreme value of the faith and presented as the exemplary response to persecution. One of the Church Fathers, Tertullian, famously declared that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” In other words, it was precisely the sacrifice of these believers that ensured the expansion of Christianity. Throughout the Middle Ages, accounts of the martyrs occupied a central place in Christian piety. Their tombs became pilgrimage sites, their lives were celebrated in sermons, and they were progressively elevated to the status of saints. They were no longer viewed merely as victims of persecution but as figures whose lives and deaths embodied the perfection of Christian faith.
These narratives helped shape a Christian identity according to which the true believer ought to prefer death to the renunciation of faith. The supreme model of martyrdom remained, of course, Christ’s Passion on the Cross. The Catholic Church thus developed a genuine culture of martyrology, founded upon the canonization of martyrs and the veneration of saints.
Contemporary historical scholarship, however, invites a more nuanced understanding of this tradition. A growing number of historians now argue that the conventional narrative of the large-scale persecutions endured by the earliest Christians rests more upon traditions developed in later centuries than upon firm historical evidence.