Extremist Israeli Rabbis Instruct Gaza-Bound Soldiers to Kill Palestinian Civilians, Including Children

Patrick Delaney has penned a barn-burner of a news analysis piece for LifeSiteNews on the religious and ideological background to the atrocities ongoing in Gaza. What needs to be known up front is that, though the racist and predatory views espoused by these Rabbis (see bellow) are indeed “extreme,” they are not the views of an insignificant or uninfluential minority. Indeed, these Rabbis have adherents among up to 40% of soldiers including 88% of those in combat roles in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). They also have a lot of support, if only for cynical reasons, among the so-called “right wing” of Israel’s political class. This is important as it means that their ideology — steeped in frontal attacks against just war doctrine — are being absorbed by the fighting men and women themselves. This perforce translates into actual war crimes, as praxis in this area inevitably follows upon theory.

These Rabbis invoke both the Torah (the Pentateuch — i.e., the five books of Moses, and by extension, the book of Joshua, which describes the conquering of the Holy Land), and the Babylonian Talmud to justify grave sins against the Natural Law and actual crimes against international law. The Torah is true Scripture, while the Talmud is a hodgepodge of authentic Old-Testament oral tradition mixed with anti-Christian blasphemies.

Kill Them All!

Before proceeding to explain what the Talmud is and why it is important to these considerations, a word is necessary to refute the Torah justification these Rabbis employ, namely, the so-called “ban” (Hebrew: charem) that God occasionally imposed in the Old Testament, during the conquest of the Holy Land and in other isolated incidents.

God made specific commands in specific contexts that He wanted obeyed, and these include killing every man, woman, and child — and even beasts — in the conquest and defense of the Holy Land. God literally spoke through the prophets to issue these commands ad hoc. They were not instituted as a general policy for how to carry out a just war, but were divine responses to grave injustices perpetrated by wicked people who did not take His warnings to leave the place that He Himself set aside for His People. The modern state of Israel has not been given such commands by the Almighty. The migration of European Jews to the Holy Land in 1948 — what the Arabs call, “The Nakba” — was not a divine project but a human one, as the largely secular Jews who spearheaded it would have readily admitted.

To learn more about the charem and the so-called “Dark Passages” of the Old Testament — and how they do not apply to Israel’s aggression against Palestinians and other Arabs —  listen to my interview with Old-Testament scholar, Dr. Nathan Schmiedickie, or read two articles I’ve penned on the subject: KILL THEM ALL! and More Old-Testament Violence, and Bluegrass.

After Jesus Christ’s most merciful coming and His institution of the Church, the Jews have lost their monopoly of being the people of God, or the “Chosen People.” The Church is the New Israel, the New Jerusalem, and it includes men called “out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Apoc. 9:5) — and this includes Jews, by the way. For good reason, the Church herself has never seen fit to use these few Old-Testament precedents as a general policy for the prosecution of a just war.

Besides that — and if you are a Catholic, please heed this — the Church formally rejects the idea upon which this entire criminal enterprise is predicated. Just last week, Bishop William Shomali, Auxiliary Bishop of Jerusalem, “reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s rejection of any interpretation that seeks to claim the land of Palestine for the Jewish people based on the Torah, as promoted by Christian Zionism in the United States.” This is not some Modernist ecclesiastic making it up as he goes along. Bishop Shomali’s statement stands in continuity with what Pope Saint Pius X told the Zionist pioneer, Theodor Herzl, in 1904.

If you are not interested in background on the Talmud, then please skip the next part to see Mr. Delaney’s fine analysis summarized.

What is the Talmud?

I don’t want to pass over mention the Talmud lightly. This, recall, is one of the sources for the Rabbis justifying war crimes in Gaza. We need to know what it is and at least some of what is in it if we are to understand how it can be weaponized in such a violent, racist, and anti-Christian way.

Keep two passages of the Gospel in mind before reading further:

  • “But he answering, said to them: Why do you also transgress the commandment of God for your tradition? For God said, Honour thy father and mother: And: He that shall curse father or mother, let him die the death. But you say: Whosoever shall say to father or mother, The gift whatsoever proceedeth from me, shall profit thee. And he shall not honour his father or his mother: and you have made void the commandment of God for your tradition. Hypocrites, well hath Isaias prophesied of you, saying. This people honoureth me with their lips: but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrines and commandments of men” (Matt. 15:3-9).
  • “And in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrines and precepts of men. For leaving the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men, the washing of pots and of cups: and many other things you do like to these. And he said to them: Well do you make void the commandment of God, that you may keep your own tradition” (Mark 7:7-9).

At the time of our Lord, this false law — this body of “doctrines and precepts of men” that “void the word of God,” which Protestants manage to confuse with the inspired oral tradition of the New Law — was only an oral tradition, but from the second to the sixth centuries, it was written down in order to preserve it faithfully. This produced an enormous work, occupying “fourteen folio volumes and 6000 crowded pages.”

Here is a famous ex-Rabbi, Monseur Drach, giving his description of the Talmud:

The Talmud is divided into the Mischna, … which forms the text, and the Ghemara, which is the commentary and development of the text. The Ghemara is twofold, comprising both the Commentary of Jerusalem and the Commentary of Babylon… In the Ghemara, there are at least a hundred passages which are insulting for the memory of Our Adorable Saviour, the more than angelic purity of His holy Mother, the Immaculate Queen of heaven, as well as the moral character of Christians, whom the Talmud represents as practicing the most abominable vices. There are also passages which declare that the precepts of justice, equity and charity towards one’s neighbor do not bind where Christians are concerned: nay more, they even go so far as to condemn as guilty of crime anyone who observes these precepts in his relations with his Christian neighbors. The Talmud expressly forbids a Jew to save a non-Jew from death or restore to him his lost possessions, etc., or to take pity on him. The Rabbins declare also: ‘Since the life of an idolator is at the discretion of the Jew, a fortiori his goods.’

Orthodox Rabbis have two sayings about the Talmud: “The Bible is like water, the Mishna like wine, the Gemara like aromatic liqueur,” and, “Jehovah himself studies the Talmud, standing out of respect.”

There are non- and even anti-Talmudic religious Jews. Secular and liberal (Reformed) religious Jews tend, more-or-less, to disregard the Talmud. There are also Talmudic Jews who are anti-Zionist. (Jews and Judaism are hardly monolithic in their religious beliefs and political views.) That said, the Talmud is considered sacred to the influential Rabbis who are the subject of Mr. Delaney’s article.

Summary of Patrick Delaney’s Article

Now, with these introductory words out of the way, here is an AI summary of Mr. Delaney’s fine piece:1

Rabbi Eliyahu Mali instructed students that in Gaza, soldiers must “not spare any soul,” explaining that “today’s terrorists are the children of the prior operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists.”

When asked if children should be killed too, Mali replied, “the same thing…When the Torah says, ‘do not spare any soul’ then you must not spare any soul.”

Rabbi Manis Friedman similarly stated: “I don’t believe in Western morality.” He went on: “The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).”

Rabbi Meir Maroz claimed, “If they [people of Gaza] were humans, we would have sent them humanitarian aid…but this is about animals.”

Religious Zionists make up only 12-14% of Israel’s Jewish population but comprise approximately 40% of infantry school graduates, with 88% serving in combat roles compared to the 30% national average.

Israeli leaders have echoed these sentiments. Defense Minister Gallant ordered “a complete siege on Gaza…No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” President Herzog declared “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.” Minister Kisch called Palestinians “animals” with “no right to exist.”

Forty-five American medical volunteers reported treating children “shot in the head and chest” daily. Dr. Perlmutter testified that victims were “almost exclusively children” who were “incinerated,” “shredded,” or “crushed by buildings.”

Israeli polls show strong public support for these actions. A December 2023 survey found over 80% of Jewish Israelis believed Gaza civilian suffering should be considered only “to a very small extent” or “to a fairly small extent” in military planning. Another poll showed 68% supported ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza.

By April, Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of explosives on Gaza — equivalent to five atomic bombs — destroying or damaging an estimated 69% of structures.

Here are some important links included in the original article:

Lastly, here are some embedded media that were also included in Mr. Delaney’s analysis, even a rapid perusal of which is, well, very damning:

  1. All AI-produced content on Catholicism.org is clearly marked as such and is reviewed, edited, and, if necessary, corrected, by a human editor before publication (policy implemented Oct. 15, 2024). ↩
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