In a commentary published by American Thinker, writer Deborah C. Tyler offers a provocative answer to a question she says has puzzled her for years: why a nuclear-armed, technologically advanced democracy with a highly educated population has struggled to decisively end repeated attacks on its territory. Her conclusion, in the October 14 essay, is theological rather than strategic. Jews have never been conquerors, she writes, because they are forbidden to murder — and conquest, by its nature, involves murder.
Tyler opens the piece by admitting she approached the subject with what she calls an “American-thinking” frame, asking why a nation with 77 years of statehood, a superlative military, and an incomparable determination to survive could not simply deal with enemies whose stated organizing principle, in her telling, is the destruction of Israel. She muses about the concept of sovereignty requiring three steps — claim, conquest, and ongoing military control — and concedes she initially assumed Jewish “conquest and pillaging skills were rusty.” The essay then pivots sharply: she says she was wrong, and that the explanation is embedded in Jewish psychology for all time and everywhere.
The Sinai rule as the hinge of the argument
The heart of Tyler’s essay is her reading of the Sinai covenant. God, she writes, gave the Jews a single unambiguous rule — they are forbidden to murder — alongside knowledge of His omnipresent unity, which cannot be represented or transmuted into any material form, and clear rules regarding righteous worship and self-control. She argues the rules had to be succinct because they were not given to a literate, educated people; literacy and education followed from the rules, not the reverse. The rules, in her framing, are what brought out Jewish brilliance and a reverence for life.
Tyler anticipates a cynical reading of that moment. One could look at it negatively, she allows: God threw down an enormous miracle and all the Israelites got were “these stinkin’ rules” — no God-Man exemplifying perfect love and glorious self-sacrifice, no role model of Truth, just rules. She notes that Judaism is not the first monotheistic religion but contends it is the only permanent one organized around rules, with miraculous origins that define the faith and joy of Judaism — rules she describes as the basis not only of moral self-control for Jews but of Western civilization itself. Zoroaster, she points out, taught “good thoughts, good words, good deeds,” but a drill sergeant does not tell a recruit to “do good”; he issues simple, clear, no-nonsense orders.
From there Tyler draws a direct line to geopolitics. The other side of the prohibition on murder, she writes, is that no human being may be murdered — what is currently called the right to life, which she describes as the natural expression of the only God-given human right. That, she says, is why Jews do not conquer: in seizing land for power and national glory — she cites Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine as an example — it is impossible to avoid committing murder. She adds that even when God fulfilled the promise of a Jewish state, amid what she characterizes as a vast territory of peoples whose religion ennobles the murder of Jews, Israel purchased land, accepted treaties, and did everything possible to avoid violent conquest.
Sinwar, Gaza, and the limits of restraint
To illustrate what she calls the stark contrast between Jewish reverence for life and an Islamist compulsion to heroic murder, Tyler invokes Victor Davis Hanson’s account of Israeli doctors who treated Yahya Sinwar. According to that narrative, Sinwar complained of dizziness while imprisoned in Israel for murder and terrorism, and his captors removed a brain tumor in a difficult operation before eventually releasing him. Tyler asks how he repaid Israel: with what she describes as hideous torture and murder of Jewish children and adults.
Tyler is emphatic that Jews have fought only reactive, defensive wars in response to attack after attack from Islamist Arabs. Any honest person, she argues, recognizes that Israeli control of Gaza is not conquest but a war of survival. She goes further, asserting that there are no civilian Gazans — if there were peace-loving Gazans, she reasons, they would have sought refuge from what she calls the true Nakba of endless terrorism, and the Judeo-Christian world would have helped them begin new lives in new lands.
She dismisses what she terms “Palestinism” as a decrepit hoax and says the name Hamas is transitory because, in her characterization, the terrorists simply change their names. The terrorists, she writes, are Arab Gazans who use preschool children in war zones. Such children, she insists, should be rescued whenever possible, and war criminals should be made to come forward to reclaim them. The harm and death that befall Gazans, she concludes, are their own choice, established year after year through violence upon violence against Israel. She describes the October 7 attackers as animalistic murderers who had spent decades pretending to be friends of Israelis — a long “foreplay” awaiting, in her words, a climax of torture and death.
What Gazans are clinging to, Tyler argues, is not a beloved homeland or a cherished identity but the glorification of murdering Jews and destroying Israel. Her prescription is uncompromising: Israel must prosecute righteous war unto victory over what she calls its blood enemies, because it has no choice.
A theological claim, not a policy brief
The essay closes by returning to first principles. When God gives an order, Tyler writes, He must provide the means for its fulfillment; God never gives an order that cannot be obeyed. It is for His own sake, for His Law, that He shaped the resilience, power, and gifts of the Jewish people — and for His sake that He will grant them the means of survival. The piece ends with a note urging readers who find value in such commentary to support the outlet’s work.
Tyler’s argument is unlikely to persuade readers who see Israel’s military doctrine through a secular or international-legal lens, and several of her assertions — that there are no civilian Gazans, that Palestinian identity is a hoax, that Gaza’s suffering is entirely self-chosen — are contested claims rather than settled facts. But as a piece of religious-political argument, the essay is unusually direct about its premise: that the restraint critics often read as weakness or confusion is, in her account, the deliberate product of a covenant that forbids the very act conquest requires. Whether that reading comforts or alienates readers, it is a reminder that debates over Israel’s conduct at home and abroad are rarely only about tactics. They are also, for many participants, about what a people believes it is permitted to become.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/jews-don-t-conquer-because-they-are-forbidden-to-murder/