[Avodah] pikuach Nefesh

[Eli Turkel]

<<Both arguments are right; some passengers might have survived a crash and
the terrorists might have decided not to crash the plane.  But based on
hindsight we know that the odds are strongly against both those scenarios.
 What if the the person making the decision has enough expertise to know
that the odds are long that there will be any survivors on the plane no
matter what happens and that the odds are short that if the plane isn't shot
down there will be many deaths on the ground and all the passengers on the
plane will also die.  He still has to make a decision.  What should he do?>>

R Bleich has an article in a recent Tradition and concludes that there is
absolutely no heter to shoot down a plane with innocents on board.
R Zilberstein in discussing similar cases seems to hold like the Meiri that
the threatened person can shoot the plane but not an outsider. R. Bleich
quotes an opinion that the Meiri is a daas yachid.

For the case of a terrorist holding captives R. Zilberstein says that
perhaps the captives can be considered dead already (gavra katila) and is
worse than an enemy surrounding a city. He seemed to recall that Rav
Elyashiv held this opinion. Finally he pointed out that a terrorist is like
a war and the laws of a war are different. One can certainly bomb an enemy
fortification even though there may be civilians there who would be killed.
Since he did not discuss 9-11 I don't know if R. Zilberstein would equate Al
Quadi terrorists on 9-11 to terrorists in Israel who are bent on destroying
the country

-- 
Eli Turkel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20110613/b5a2d959/attachment-0002.htm>