TEL AVIV – ZAKA, Israel’s emergency response service, slammed the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) decision to treat the most severely wounded person at the scene of a terror attack – even if that person is the terrorist – saying, “No one will teach us what morality is.”
The IMA’s ethics office chairman Prof. Avinoam Reches asserted that “Israel is not Iran” and that Jewish moral values should not be taken into account when treating the wounded at terror scenes.
Yehuda Meshi Zahav stormed out of IMA offices and said, “We will instruct our volunteers to first treat injured Jewish victims without thinking twice. And only after [will they treat] the terrorist murderer who carried out the attack.”
“Despite the ethical code which mandates the most injured victim be treated first, you must know morality has a limit. If we don’t keep our distinction, we will lose our direction. Even in Halacha [Jewish law] it is written: All who merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”
ZAKA also cited Prof. Asa Kasher, an Israel Prize laureate and one of the country’s leading researchers on questions of ethics, who is opposed to the IMA’s new guidelines. “You can’t say considerations should be only medical,” Kasher stated and said it was “inconceivable” for a seriously wounded terrorist to be treated before a less seriously injured victim.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.