“Until victory!” has become an Israeli rallying cry since the atrocities of the Hamas invasion on October 7, 2023. But one of the primary drafters of the Israel Defense Forces’ modern code of conduct says “victory” isn’t part of Israel’s military lexicon.
“When the government of Israel uses the term ‘victory,’ it steps beyond the bounds of morality,” insisted Prof. Avi Sagi, one of the authors of the “Spirit of the IDF” that guides the Israeli army.
Prof. Sagi and his fellow drafters produced the revised version of the IDF’s official ethical doctrine in 2000. Then-IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz wanted to add a commitment to victory, but Sagi and the others refused.
“We told [Mofaz] that victory is not the purpose of defending the citizens of the State of Israel. The purpose of the IDF is to be a defensive force,” Sagi explained to interviewer Tuvi Pollack.
They ended up compromising with Mofaz and including a “commitment to mission and striving for victory,” but Sagi noted that the real focus is on mission, not victory. If the two coincide, so be it, but if not, “we’ll leave talk of ‘victory’ to basketball and chess.”
What’s wrong with victory?
Why keep the kind of victory Israelis are talking about today out of the IDF’s official code of conduct? Why should Israel’s military not seek outright victory over its enemies?
Sagi and his fellow “Spirit of the IDF” authors were adamant that seeking “victory” in the military sense would negatively impact the traditional values that guided the Jewish people.
For a nation like Israel, war is solely for self-defense, they maintained, noting that one of the goals of Israel’s enemies is to disrupt her system of values. Seeking military victory, even conquest, would change the Jewish nation for the worse, they feared.
“Within an ethical worldview, there is only one valid reason for the use of military force, and that is the principle of self-defense. Victory does not justify the use of force,” stated Sagi. “The pursuit of victory…creates moral blindness.”
So, how does Israel win?
As with many of Israel’s “pragmatic” voices, Prof. Sagi appears to sidestep the long-term implications of his position in service to short-term gains. Many now argue that similar thinking brought Israel to surrender the Gaza Strip in 2005, which resulted in it becoming the most heavily-armed terrorist haven on earth, culminating in the savage Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel.
It is true that Israel does not seek military conquest. Rather, Israel wants peace and stability.
But that was also true of the Allies in World War II, and to achieve their aim of peace and stability required decisive military victory and a long military occupation to ensure the forces against whom they fought could never again threaten them.
Prof. Sagi, like many other military and political figures today in Israel, emphasizes that “it is impossible to guarantee the absolute elimination of evil from any source, because humans tend to do evil, especially those educated to do evil as part of an ideology.”
Again, this is true. The ideology that drives Hamas will not be eradicated. It will live on regardless of the outcome of the Gaza war.
But, that is again also true of the Nazis. Or of Al Qaeda. Or of ISIS. Nazism and jihadism live on. But that fact did not deter the Allies in World War II, or coalition forces in more recent decades from seeking decisive victory over those forces of evil.
No doubt a man like Prof. Sagi knows all this. Where he differs with most Israelis today and with Allied and coalition leaders in those previous conflicts is that he doesn’t view it as necessary to fully eradicate the enemy’s potential to carry out evil in order to achieve the desired level of self-defense.
More specifically, he feels Hamas no longer poses a threat, at least in the short-term, and thus the Gaza war should come to an end.
