“One day in the future,” wrote Arieh O’Sullivan in the May 16 Jerusalem Post, “the image that will most likely illustrate the present conflict with the Palestinians and the inner turmoil tearing apart every Israeli citizen will be of [Israeli] combat troops in full regalia on their knees sifting with their bare hands for even the tiniest remains of five dead soldiers.”
The writer was referring to one of the grimmer recent developments in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Last week in the Gaza Strip, two Israeli armored personnel carriers — one carrying six soldiers, the other five — were blown up by Palestinian Arab terrorists, and the explosions dismembered the soldiers’ bodies and scattered parts of them over a wide area.
News reports further said that some Palestinian Arab terrorists and civilians made off with pieces of the dead soldiers. Some Palestinians displayed and played with the remains in front of news media representatives. Some terrorists offered to exchange body parts for prisoners, a proposal Israel rejected.
Apparently, even Palestinian Authority officials found this behavior to be over the top. According to an article on the Ha’aretz Web site, P.A. officials, in a statement on May 11, called on the terrorists responsible to return the body parts and not “tarnish the image and values of the Palestinians.”
These incidents also led to Israeli soldiers being ordered to comb the areas of the explosions in search of parts of the killed soldiers for burial. The soldiers, according to a BBC report on its Web site, at one point came under fire while doing so, yet they continued.
Moreover, the Arutz Sheva Web site quoted an Israel Defense Force rabbi saying that the search would continue even during the Sabbath.
This search displays something about Jewish and Israeli values — the Jewish principle of respect to the dead, and the Israeli policy of striving never to abandon soldiers, alive or dead.
“The halacha [Jewish religious law] is that all body parts are supposed to be buried,” said Rabbi Shlomo Levin of Milwaukee’s Lake Park Synagogue. This can be ‘a difficult thing to do when death is due to violence.”
But efforts to do so are regarded as “a noble act,” said Rabbi Mendel Senderovic, dean of the Milwaukee Kollel Center for Jewish Studies. Moreover, Levin added, the principle of striving to bury a whole corpse is of such importance that one may pull a corpse from a burning building on the Sabbath — provided the rescuer’s own life is not risked by doing so.
Senderovic and Levin both said that in most circumstances, one should not risk life in order to recover bodies or body parts.
Moreover, ransoming a body or body part should not be done if it looks like doing so may set a precedent of rewarding criminals, said Senderovic. He mentioned that such incidents have occurred in Jewish history.
Nevertheless, Israel’s policy in this matter “can’t be taken out of political or military context,” said Levin. “We know there is desire to have a proper burial [but there also are] security issues, and the government has to judge what the political and security ramifications are.”
Moreover, added Senderovic, there might be an issue involving morale of IDF soldiers, and in war that can be “a life or death issue,” he said.
Alon Galron, Israel emissary to Milwaukee and director of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel Center, appeared to agree that morale is a crucial consideration in Israel’s policy.
The “policy code” in the IDF “that you don’t leave a fellow soldier behind,” whether alive or dead, “provides to soldiers and their families a strong sense” that “someone cares for them” and soldiers “won’t be deserted,” Galron said.
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