Studying War: A Response to Matti Friedman

“He teaches my hands for war and my fingers for battle.” (Ps. 144:1)

I want to thank the Jewish Review of Books for reviewing my book, Khazo ve-khazeh tokhal he-charev: Antropologiya be-milchama, yoman sadeh (Anthropology at War: Iron Swords, Field Notes) (“A Terrible Price,” Spring 2025), and Matti Friedman for writing a serious piece about events that still need to be deciphered.

Two types of people come to mind as the usual suspects for reviewing a book like this. The first is someone with a military orientation who can understand the field, and the second is someone with anthropological training who can evaluate the analytic framework. Of course, both orientations can coexist in a single person. Thus, the title of my book is not just a biblical citation of the verse “This and that the sword shall devour,” but also the subtitle, “Anthropology in War: Iron Swords, Field Diary.”

Friedman reviews my book primarily from the perspective of someone with a military orientation who lives in Israel. In my response, I will focus primarily on the anthropological perspective, which will address some of the criticisms raised in the review.

I am a cultural anthropologist by training, and my attempt to decipher what happened to Israeli military personnel during the first months of the war in Gaza uses anthropological tools to understand modern war in general and the Gaza War in particular: the “Iron Swords” war. I use anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s concept of “key symbols.” In the context of war, these are not only tangible symbols but also dominant values and emotional states.

Friedman suggests that I chose to focus on revenge at the expense of heroism, on organizational indiscipline at the expense of determination and sacrifice, and that my account lacks battle stories or real encounters with Hamas. Regarding battle itself, Friedman argues that an outsider cannot comprehend the very friction of combat and quotes a battlefield veteran he knows to support his claim that “even Israeli generals who fought in older wars can’t fully understand.”

As an anthropologist, I find it hard to accept the claim that an outsider cannot understand this war. My human task is to try to understand. I do this through an effort of self-reflection, asking what surprises me. This question echoes the abductive logic, or the third logic, of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, which begins with surprise and then uses surprise to search for the how and why.

Themes of heroism, determination, and sacrifice are not surprising to me, nor to most Israeli Jews. Heroism, determination, and sacrifice are not organizational or societal mechanisms in themselves—and as someone who observes society, it is mechanisms that I am interested in. Since these themes are unsurprising and are said to be beyond understanding, reports about them have a few possible goals, including cheering on the heroes, memorializing the fallen, and reinforcing values of solidarity. They also may be used to generate criticism—taking on the role of the victim and exhausting it excessively, without giving further accountability.

The goal of my book is neither to cheer nor to criticize but to observe with an anthropological eye. I am aware that I wrote more of an edited field journal than a definitive statement, because we are still close to October 7, indeed enwrapped within it.

So, what surprised me in the war?

I was surprised by the dominance of revenge and the character this took. Not burning revenge or calculated revenge, but sad revenge. I neither have seen nor felt this kind of revenge before and have not read about it in efforts to theorize war. Sad revenge clearly stood at the center of my inquiry.

I was surprised by the organizational indiscipline because an army is built on coordination and organization. To be fair, there were instances of impressive coordination during the fighting, yet alongside them there was the erratic wildness of indiscipline. This was surprising and calls for examination.

And, last, there was the surprise of those who had seen the Gorgon—as I describe the immediate shock of the war’s start. This was a surprising, scary, and singular gaze, at least for my generation. I did not encounter it during the Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah in 2006, nor during Operation Defensive Shield or Operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge, all against Hamas.

These three keys, I thought, are effective key symbols for decoding the war that has befallen us, which the Israeli army calls “Iron Swords.”

This is also what I hinted at with the biblical verse quoted in the book’s title. My intention was not to allude to the fatalism of war, as was claimed in the review, but to consider the concealed meaning of “a devouring sword.”

In the Bible, a devouring sword is an expression of intimate warfare. The well-known quote “How long will the sword devour?” describes a skirmish that begins with “Let the young men play before us.” Abner and his army, and Joab and his army, spill blood in vain until Asahel, swift of foot, meets his death. Dangerous play. Intimate play.

“This and that the sword shall devour” (2 Samuel 11:25) refers to an episode in which Joab deliberately fights foolishly before a city gate. He fought that way because King David desired Bathsheba and needed to position her husband, Uriah the Hittite, at the front of the battle. This is not fatalism—rather, it is the intentional exploitation of fatalism. A passion whose result is war—and not necessarily a sophisticated one.

This current war is an intimate one, both in terms of our relationship with Hamas and in terms of what we tell ourselves about ourselves (as anthropologist Clifford Geertz might have said).

My book primarily deals with what we tell ourselves about ourselves—and how we do so. We tell a biblical, ancient story of combat in the fields of the Philistines, with all that that entails.

In this context, the debate over the righteousness of the war is not the subject of my book. Hamas’s cruelty and the massacre it carried out are not the subject. Our actions, and the explanations we give ourselves, are certainly among the book’s topics. In relation to revenge, the enemy is certainly relevant. But surprisingly, Hamas is absent from the battlefield discourse—perhaps because revenge is blind.

Yet once again, an important organizational question arises. We were taught that the army is responsible for organized violence on behalf of the state. But when it is difficult to organize—either because one is caught in the gaze of the Gorgon or blinded by revenge—how does the military organize itself? After ] October 7, the answer lay in the broad enlistment of reserve soldiers and in the creation of a world of meaning that provided purpose, at least for the first months of the war.

Thus, “Together We Will Win” was an effective slogan that essentially celebrated the notion that “togetherness” of the whole country wins, rather than just the traditional army.

The verse I have chosen for the epigraph of this response, “He teaches my hands for war and my fingers for battle” (Ps. 144:1), does not distinguish between battle and war. Yet in modern warfare, battle and war are two different phenomena, even if related. We manage war and engage in battle. A “battle” is a one-time event, an encounter, the friction of combat that potentially can occur at any moment and that is then over and done with. “War” on the other hand is a sequence of battles, between which there are many nonbattles (operational presence) often organized into campaigns; war is formed and shaped from what I will call “professional military routine.”

We manage war, and that includes resources: time, legitimacy, ammunition, and more. Warfare, especially in the present era, is also a matter of civilians, blurring the categories of front and rear, in what is commonly referred to as “war among people.”

Despite the reservations expressed in the review, this book is an anthropology of war—even if it does not necessarily depict the daily friction of combat against armed soldiers in uniform or RPG operators dressed as civilians.

Exploring the challenge of managing this war was the primary concern of my book. The challenge was and is compounded by features of warfare that are new to the Israelis—the total surprise, the initial blow, the prolonged duration of the war (not the six days of 1967, not the thirty-three days of 2006, and not the fifty-one days of 2014), and the unique battlegrounds—Hamas tunnels. Anthropology enables us to decipher the meaning around the daily acts of war. Indeed, through the lens of anthropology, this war called “Iron Swords” becomes something of a unique world of meaning, perhaps a cosmos that also needs to be understood within and through itself. Understanding this departure from the usual commonsense perspectives about this and other wars is a challenge for the reader, yet one that will offer a deep and profound comprehension of what happened within the Israeli army during the first months of this war of massive destruction and death.

Matti Friedman’s original article can be found here.

His rejoinder to Asaf Hazani can be found here.