Had Avraham Zarbiv, who lit a torch this week, flattened Gaza from the air with an F-16 rather than with a D9 bulldozer, and had Zarbiv been wearing a flight suit and pilot's helmet instead of the attire of a rabbinical judge, a frock coat and black hat, it is highly doubtful anyone would have made a fuss over the honor the State of Israel bestowed on him on its national holiday.
But Zarbiv, much like David Zini, both of whom face intense media hostility, is not really the story here. At the root of the matter lies a primal fear of the "Zinis" and "Zarbivs" who grew in the wrong patch, of the different world of values they bring with them and even of their different appearance, along with the automatic labeling of anything that is not "us" as a threat: right-wingers, Mizrahim, ultra-Orthodox Jews, settlers, people of faith and observant Jews.
There are similarities between the personal biographies of Zini and Zarbiv. Both grew up in Kiryat Moshe in Jerusalem and passed through yeshiva institutions in the settlements. Both established admirable large families: Zini has 11 children and Zarbiv has 10. Both combine the book and the sword, are sons of well-known rabbis, married women from the elite of the settlement movement and grew up under the guidance of the late Rabbi Hillel Palser at the Moreshet Talmud Torah in Jerusalem, who served for them as a model of courage, determination, faith, modesty and humility.
The two adopted this model not only when they built families, but also when they shaped their Jewish and national identity and faith, integrating it as an inseparable part of their military and security service. Both Zini and Zarbiv never concealed their Jewish identity, and often even displayed it openly. Sometimes through prayers and the blowing of the shofar before going into battle, and sometimes by sharing Torah thoughts on the weekly portion or arriving at discussions with a holy book tucked under their arm.
But instead of the media and the elites counting this in their favor, as a credit, they count it against them and treat it as an inferior starting point. The attitude toward them becomes even more hostile when they insist on a different kind of Jewish morality, one that places defeating and eliminating the enemy ahead of a universal morality of warfare, which is often characterized by refined, theoretical and self-righteous ethics. The anger at them grows further when they openly prefer the lives of their soldiers, our soldiers, over the lives of the "enemy population."
Modern Sodom
The Israeli philosophers of universal battlefield morality choose to ignore the fact that destroying and flattening entire areas of Gaza, and now also Shiite villages such as Bint Jbeil in Lebanon that served as hosts and bases for the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations, is necessary not only so fewer soldiers' families will sit shiva for them, but also to set a price tag that will deter future generations from further massacres. The insistence on this morality of warfare does not come from someone's messianic gut. It comes from the head. It is strategy.
In the first weeks after the massacre, we heard similar sentiments precisely from figures who do not belong to the ranks of the Right. Tel Aviv University President Professor Ariel Porat, for example, used the phrase "erasing the memory of Amalek"; Ben Caspit spoke about the possibility of "erasing Gaza"; Yaron London thinks "Gaza must be flattened even at the cost of harming innocents"; Idan Raichel defined most residents of the Strip as "involved." Even President Isaac Herzog made clear that one could not ignore the broad civilian support in Gaza for the crimes and atrocities of Oct. 7.
That spirit blew with such force because Gaza, the world's largest terrorist metropolis, conducted itself like a modern Sodom. Its population elected Hamas, supported it and identified with it. It was involved up to its neck in the massacre, the kidnappings or the cult of shahids, death and murder. Masses of Gazans took part in digging tunnels under Gaza and in the smuggling and weapons-production industries. They made a living from this enterprise of death and kept its secrets. Many of them took part in the "return" terror marches. Some 20,000 "uninvolved" Gazans were employed in the Gaza border communities before the massacre. Many of them provided Hamas with the detailed intelligence that helped enable the massacre. This was part of the infrastructure of the pogrom, the "uninvolved" contribution to the horror.
That is how Gaza became a case in which collective punishment is moral, because the collective itself supports or engages in terrorism and deserves to be punished. Therefore, one should not get overly worked up about the "Zarbivization," as it is now called, of a terror-supporting environment, whether in Gaza or Lebanon, especially after the October massacre and a similar massacre that nearly came to fruition on the northern border.
For the sake of life
Rabbi Zarbiv, then, is not a "war criminal," as some of those who were shocked this week recoiled and claimed, but exactly the opposite: He punishes war criminals and the environment that supports them. The combat engineering company of the torchlighter does not act contrary to morality, but strengthens it within a completely rational concept of "crime and punishment," and of "if someone comes to kill you, rise early to flatten him." This mode of action, incidentally, was approved during the war both by the IDF chief of staff and by the former military advocate general, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi.
Zarbiv and Zini are also attacked along the way because, supposedly, "the land is holier to them than human life." But here too, the opposite is true: Sacred lives are saved by plowing through hostile villages and refugee camps and by holding onto the land. While Jewish "sumud" on the soil of the land of Israel, with which Zini and Zarbiv are also identified, is branded by the "enlightened" as dark false messianism, Palestinian sumud, amazingly enough, is treated by them with respect and understanding.
Rabbi Zarbiv also does not hate Palestinians, as he was smeared. He simply adheres to Jewish logic: the lives of your brothers or the lives of your enemy's citizens? The lives of your brothers come first, even if the Israeli progressive camp turns up its nose at that. Before the war, even figures with major credentials from the heart of the consensus, such as Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, were confused about this. Gantz said he had endangered Golani soldiers in order not to harm an enemy population in Shujaiyya. Eisenkot described a 13-year-old Palestinian girl holding scissors or a knife and admitted that he would not want "a soldier to empty a magazine into her." Today, one may believe, the two are already in a different place.
The "Zarbivs" and "Zinis," as a phenomenon, today create a far more balanced moral equation than Alexander Penn's popular "Land, my land, I have betrothed you to me in blood." The overt public Jewish identity that today characterizes ever-widening circles, which Zini and Zarbiv reflect, is also far more harmonious than the one that sees danger in the normalization of public Jewishness.
"A time to kill" and "a time to build" and "a time to break down," Ecclesiastes said, first and foremost for the sanctity and benefit of life. The rabbinical judge Zarbiv, who has served 800 days of reserve duty since the start of the war, understands this. His torch has risen.
