Communications

Professor Asa Kasher does not make any discounts. He himself is the code of moral behavior of the Israeli army, the IDF: in fact, he is the author. The severe expression of the 83-year-old philosopher and linguist, his vital determination to discover the meaning of what is right or wrong even when it is almost impossible, make it a decisive interlocutor in times when his army...

Professor Asa Kasher, the man we were going to visit when we had to dive for cover, is a philosopher who co-wrote the IDF’s first Code of Conduct in the early 1990s. "Non-combatants shouldn’t suffer," he says. "We keep this regulation very carefully. We will never just drop a bomb like during the Second World War, [when an airforce would] take a city, a place full of...

As Israel begins the first stages of Operation Swords of Iron in response to Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks, many questions have been raised about the moral and legal aspects of the war. In Gaza, units of the Israel Defense Forces will confront tens of thousands of heavily armed Hamas fighters deeply embedded in a large noncombatant population. Given this highly...

No one better than the philosopher Asa Kasher to address the monstrous moral dilemmas in which Israelis are immersed. Consulted thirty years ago to write the code of ethics for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), he was also a member of the Shamgar Commission a decade ago, alongside generals, to establish a conduct guide in case of hostage takings, following the case of Gilad...