Hijacked Airplane, Dilemma In The Sky- Killing Or Saving?

Rabbi Shay Tahan

The horrifying experience surrounding the hijacking of a flight from Dubai raised a profound question in the Israeli security establishment: What should be done if the hijacked airplane is deliberately being flown toward a populated city, with the clear intention of causing the greatest possible loss of life?

This raises a fundamental halachic question: May one deliberately bring about the death of the passengers in order to save those who are about to be killed on the ground?

Let’s open with the Rambam’s ruling (Yesodei HaTorah 5:5): “if enemies say ‘Give us one of you and we will kill him; otherwise, we will kill all of you,’ they should all be killed rather than hand over a single Jewish soul.”
The reason is that we may not choose one Jewish life and kill that person in order to save the others. We do not say that the lives of the many override the life of the individual, because every person is a life in his own right, and we have no authority to commit an act of bloodshed against one person in order to save others.
The Chazon Ish: Redirecting the Arrow
On this basis, the Chazon Ish (Sanhedrin, 25) presents a fundamental inquiry:
“One must consider the case of a person who sees an arrow heading toward a group of people and can divert it to another direction, where it will kill only one person, while those on the first side will be saved. If he does nothing, the many will be killed and the one will remain alive.”
The Chazon Ish considers whether this case can be compared to the well-known case of “Give us one of you,” in which the gentiles demand that the group hand over one person to be killed. He explains that the two cases may be fundamentally different.
When the group hands over one person to the gentiles, the action they are performing is itself the handing over of that person to his death. The fact that this will save the other members of the group does not change the nature of the act. Their action is not directly rescuing the others; rather, they are actively handing one person over to be killed which is a cruel act, and the survival of the others is the consequence that follows from that act.

The Chazon Ish, however, continues and introduces a distinction in the case of the arrow:
“But diverting the arrow from one side to the other is primarily an act of rescue, and has no connection whatsoever to killing the individual on the other side; it is only that, by chance, there happens to be a Jewish life on the other side.”

Applying the Chazon Ish to a Hijacked Airplane
Accordingly, we must consider the case of an airplane that is about to crash into an area where many people are located, when there is an option to divert it to another location where only one person is present. At first glance, this closely resembles the case described by the Chazon Ish. The airplane is already in motion and itself constitutes the source of the danger; the person intervening does not create the danger, but rather attempts to redirect it from a place where it is about to strike many people to a place where it will strike one individual.

There is also a more contemporary case to consider, in which an armed person holds another person hostage and uses him as a human shield, thereby endangering the lives of other people. At times, the only way to neutralize the pursuer and save those in danger is to use a weapon, but doing so creates a real possibility that the hostage himself will be injured or even killed.
At first glance, this case resembles, to some extent, the Chazon Ish's inquiry concerning a person who sees an arrow heading toward many people and can divert it to a place where one person will be killed. Here too, the danger already exists: it is the pursuer who has created the danger to the lives of the people, while the person intervening is not creating the danger itself. His sole objective is to neutralize the pursuer and save those being pursued, although the action required to remove the danger may, unintentionally, injure the hostage.
There is, however, an important distinction. In the case of the arrow discussed by the Chazon Ish, the person himself diverts the arrow toward the place where the individual is located, and the Chazon Ish therefore questions whether the action should be regarded as an act of rescue or as an act of killing. In contrast, when the pursuer himself is holding the hostage and endangering him, the danger was created by the pursuer. The person attempting to save the hostage or the other people does not seek to kill an innocent person; rather, he seeks to stop the pursuer. Nevertheless, at times there is no way to do so without creating a risk that the hostage will be injured.
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