[Avodah] Amalek

[Yisrael Medad]

Eli Turkel quotes a letter of Shmuel Boylan in the Commie who testifies that
RJB said, in response to a query about an opinion he had quoted from his
father, zt"l, that a nation (such as the Nazis) could be transformed into
Amalek and whether such a halakhic designation would then have implications
with regard to innocent wives and children, as well. The Rav, he
wrote, "strongly rejected such a concept, reminding me that the Rambam
required an approach for shalom prior to milkhemet Amalek-and that such a
requirement made action against innocent parties impossible."

Taking into consideration that that was the full extent of the conversation
and that no other discussion occured, and despite his own more interesting
opinion regarding Arabs in Kol Dodi Dofek, I guess we now know that the IDF
doesn't have to take out little Arab children and kill them in a summarily
fashion.  That, of course, we knew before.  What the argument was about a
few months ago was whether the IDF need adopt a la Halacha a stringent code
of morality that was resulting in more Jewish civilians deaths than Arabs in
the war against terror (such as in the case of my neighbor's son, Avihu
Keinan, who was sent into a house in Gaza unnecessarily so as to make sure
that so-called innocent Arabs would not be harmed while they searched for an
Arab terrorist, hiding in the hosue with the aid and succor of these
"innocent" Arabs who eventually shot Avihu in the head).

Another point is that I would presume that the Rav also would consider the
Madrid Conference, the Oslo Accords, the Hebron Agreement and a few others
in-between as more than enough to meet the most stringent of demands of the
Rambam as to "calls for peace".

-- 
Yisrael Medad
Shiloh
Mobile Post Efraim 44830
Israel
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