Germanic in the Midwest

 

“A New Look at the 1948 Arab-Israeli War,”

“Benny Morris on “A New Look at the 1948 Arab-Israeli War,” Wilson Center, 43:15

“The war was definitely not a jihad or a religious war on the Israeli side. On the Israeli side, the Jewish population in Palestine, the yishuv, was 90% secular at the time. And the leadership of the yishuv was almost totally secular. The military leadership, the political leadership. It was a very secular society. You get an optical illusion when you look back from 2016 when Israel has become much more religious or a larger part, segment of its population is religious. But in 1948 the people who counted and actually the vast majority of the population was of course non-religious. In fact they were children, or actually the people themselves, who had rebelled against religion. This is what Zionism was all about, partly, against rebelling against the old world of their fathers, which was a religious world. They rebelled also against God. So they didn’t approach the war at all as a religious war, not the generals, not the politicians, not Ben-Gurion, not Sharet, not Allon, not Dayan. They were irreligious people, maybe even they were anti-religious, so the religious people saw them.”

Benny Morris, a self-proclaimed Zionist and a Jew who himself is not religious, is one of Israel’s leading historians.

and then there's this Germany

 Since I uncharacteristically for a Jew say so many nice things about Germany, I'm sharing this:

Let us not forget. 

José Mujica

 

Rabbi Shlomo Goren on conduct during war

Despite the explicit Torah obligation to wage war, we are also commanded to have mercy on the enemy, and even during wartime, only to kill when it is necessary for self-defense for the purpose of conquest and victory; and not to attack non-combatants, and certainly not to strike at women and children who are not participating in the war effort.  With the exception of obligatory wars about which we were explicitly commanded by the Torah in ancient times, "You shall save alive nothing that breathes" (Devarim 20:16), since the enemies of that time also practiced cruelty, and so the Torah was stringent about them.  Nothing may be learned from them, God forbid, about other wars or about our time.  

Rabbi Shlomo Goren, Meshiv Milchama I, p. 14)[7]

Military Rabbinate: Founded and led the IDF Military Rabbinate from 1948 to 1968 (rising to the rank of brigadier-general), personally accompanying troops into multiple wars including the 1948 War of Independence, the 1956 Sinai Campaign, and the Six-Day War. In 1972 elected Chief Rabbi of Israel; the fourth Ashkenazi Jew to hold office.