Defiling the Land — And Us

“Do not leave the body hanging overnight…for it is an affront to God; do not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Deut. 21:23)

On March 30 the Knesset passed a law mandating the death penalty for terrorists. While execution has always been a legal option in Israel, Israel has executed only one person in its entire 78-year history—the exceptional case of Adolph Eichman. The recent law marks a radical departure from Israeli policy and values.

The Otzma Yehudit party spearheaded the new law. Immediately after the law was enacted, Itamar Ben Gvir boasted, “This is a day of justice for the victims and a day of deterrence for our enemies.” Another Otzma Yehudit MK, Limor Son Har-Melech, claimed, “This is a day on which the State of Israel chose life,” calling the law “an example of true Jewish morality.”

Ben Gvir and Son Har-Melech are bringing us into a perverse Orwellian universe where revenge is justice, death is life, and pagan impulses masquerade as Jewish morality.

Scientific research shows that capital punishment does not deter people from committing murder. Many studies indicate that deterrence is not merely an illusion. In fact, capital punishment is counterproductive. Executions engender more rage, often causing violence to surge. Additionally, Palestinian terrorists idealize their own “martyrdom,” and are aware that when they murder Israelis they will likely be tracked down and killed by Israeli forces. They will not be deterred by the specter of execution. The IDF, the Shin Bet, and Israel’s National Security Council understand this and it is one of the reasons they oppose executing terrorists. Quite simply, the claim of deterrence is false, and people who make the claim are either ignorant, disingenuous—or, most likely in our case, manipulative demagogues.

The Foreign Ministry also argued against this law. It knows that executions will lower Israel’s image around the world, putting Israel in the same category as brutal totalitarian countries that are our enemies. China executes more than 1,000 people each year, Iran carries out more than 550 executions every year, and Hamas publicly executes homosexuals and people they claim to be collaborators. Do we want to be grouped with these abhorrent regimes?

The new law calls for the death penalty for Palestinians who murder innocent Israelis, but rules out execution for rampaging Jewish terrorists who murder innocent Palestinians and Bedouin in the Palestinian territories. This renders the law’s claim to justice a fraud because the essential character of justice is impartiality. True justice is “blind,” not favoring some persons over others. Being rich or poor, influential or unimportant, Jew or Arab are irrelevant to administering justice. For the law to be just, it must either mandate death for all terrorist murderers or for none. This is fundamental both to Israeli democracy and Jewish ethics. The Torah insists on this: “You shall not judge unfairly, nor show partiality” (Deuteronomy 16:19); “There shall be one law for the citizen and the stranger in your midst” (Exodus 12:49). As enacted, the law is blatantly unjust, and executing Palestinian murderers of Jews but not Jewish murderers of innocent Arabs is overtly racist. The law represents not justice, but revenge.

We all sympathize with Limor Son Har Melech, whose husband was cruelly murdered by a Palestinian terrorist, who after being caught, convicted, and imprisoned by Israel was later released in the deal to free Israeli hostages from Gaza. That release was an injustice. Yet the correct response to preventing Palestinian murderers from going free is an impartial law prohibiting Israel from releasing such murderers in the future—not a discriminatory law selectively mandating the death penalty for Arabs but not Jews.

Finally, the death penalty law is a thorough corruption of traditional Jewish morality. While the Bible prescribes execution for certain heinous crimes, Jewish morality has been defined for thousands of years by our rabbinic tradition. That tradition established the policy of non-execution that is remarkably similar to the long-standing Israeli policy of not carrying out executions. The talmudic authorities decried putting anyone to death, calling a Sanhedrin that carried out an execution only one time in 7 (or perhaps 70) years “a bloody court.” And the most influential rabbi in the entire Talmud, Rabbi Akiva, ruled out implementing the death penalty in principle.

The new law calls for execution by hanging because the Israel Medical Association has prohibited its doctors from administering lethal injections as a form of punishment. In fact, Jewish tradition regards hanging as particularly repugnant on theological and moral grounds. According to halakhah, death by hanging was never the method of punishing criminals in Jewish society. Criminals were put to death before the brief hanging ritual. Deuteronomy 21:23 proclaims that a hanging human body is an affront to God, since even a loathsome criminal still reflects God’s holy image. Rather than achieving justice, the Torah understood that a dangling corpse brutalizes the executioners as well as the society they represent.

The new law should strike terror in the hearts of Jewish believers. The Torah asserts that Jews must pursue justice in order to remain living on their covenanted land: “Justice, justice you shall pursue that you may thrive and live on the Land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deut. 16:20). If so, executing Arabs unjustly will imperil Israel as a Jewish State and continuing Jewish residence on our homeland.

The new law of mandatory execution therefore has no strategic, moral, or religious justification. Contrary to the claims of the law’s promoters, the law will not save Israeli lives, will not achieve justice, and will not implement Jewish morality. Quite the contrary, the law undermines all these ideals. It is a step backward for Israel as a just nation and for Jews as a moral people.

Despite the zealotry and jingoism of its champions, the new law contradicts Jewish morals in the most fundamental way. So if Ben Gvir and friends wish to advocate for executions, they should at least remove their kippot, which have always symbolized an awareness of God and fidelity to Jewish tradition. Because their law violates Jewish ethics, Zionist values, and the God of Israel, when they don religious garb they corrupt those religious items, transforming them into emblems of brutality, transgressions of halakhah, and reversal of Zionist tradition. On their bodies, the knitted kippah has become a symbol of desecration and vengeance.

Rather than justice, the law mandating execution for Arab terrorists expresses a primitive bloodlust and glorification of racism that inches Israel closer to fascism than to Jewish values.

Unless we put an end to this law, it will defile not only our homeland, but also ourselves.