| Writing more than a century ago, the social psychologist George Herbert Mead argued that legal punishments serve as a socially acceptable device for channeling society’s most primitive, hostile instincts. When we punish a criminal, what Mead called an “attitude of hostility” is trained on the criminal, who is seen “as an enemy to the society to which we belong.” |
| Punishment, in his view, is never pretty. Just beneath all the surface talk of justice, he says, lies “all the animus which the threat to our own interests calls out.” |
| Punishing criminals, he observed, “provides the most favorable condition for the sense of group solidarity” because it organizes an “attack upon the common enemy.” Societies treat criminals as enemies to be vanquished and, sometimes, extinguished. |
| This is especially true in capital cases when the crime is heinous or in mass killings when many innocent people lose their lives. |
| That is why Mead would not have been surprised by the news that on March 30, the Israeli Parliament passed a bill “approving the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis.” |
| When the parliamentary votes were tallied, Israel’s minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said, “This is a day of justice for the victims and a day of deterrence for our enemies. No more revolving door for terrorists, but a clear decision. Whoever chooses terrorism chooses death.” Another of the bill’s supporters “called the occasion a day where Israel 'chose life’ and said the decision is an example of 'true Jewish morality.’” |
| Ben-Gvir “brandished a bottle in celebration.” But, in truth, there is nothing to celebrate. |
| And thinking that the way for the state to choose life is by killing criminals and terrorists seems positively Orwellian. |
| The new death penalty law is a serious mistake. It is unnecessary and discriminatory. |
| It is a betrayal of Israel’s history and further diminishes its rightful status as the only democratic beacon in the Middle East. As Professor Smadar Ben-Natan explains, when the state of Israel was established in 1948, its founders were deeply suspicious of the death penalty, having experienced its misuse by the British Mandate government that ran Palestine for the preceding decades. They “identified the death penalty with the oppressive rule of the Mandate government.” |
| “One of the first legal reforms,” Ben-Natan adds, “that Israel introduced into British legislation was to abolish the death penalty for murder in 1954, replacing it with mandatory life sentence. However, the death penalty was not abolished for treason.” It seems that some of today’s Israeli leaders have forgotten that history and the linkage between oppressive rule and capital punishment. |
| As an AP report notes, “The law makes the death penalty — by hanging — the default punishment for West Bank Palestinians convicted of nationalistic killings (even if the killings were not intentional). It also gives Israeli courts the option of imposing the death penalty on Israeli citizens convicted on similar charges….” The AP quotes experts who say that the bill “effectively confines those who can be sentenced to death to Palestinian citizens of Israel and excludes Jewish citizens.” |
| It, in essence, applies only to killers who do not believe that Israel has a right to exist. “That means,” says Amichai Cohen, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for Democratic Values and Institutions, “Jews will not be indicted under this law.” |
| Among its other troubling features, Palestinians would be tried in military courts, where a death sentence would be mandatory if they are convicted. As a United Nations report suggests, “Mandatory death sentences are contrary to the right to life. By removing judicial and prosecutorial discretion, they prevent a court from considering the individual circumstances, including mitigating factors, and from imposing a proportionate sentence that fits the crime.” |
| And as if that were not bad enough, Palestinians could be convicted and sentenced to death even when the verdict in their case is not unanimous. |
| On the other hand, Israelis, who can only be convicted of intentional killings, would be tried in civilian courts. Verdicts in those courts have to be unanimous, and they have the option to punish Israeli offenders with either death or a prison sentence. |
| The law condones hanging members of an ethnic group for crimes against members of another group. But we know, the United Nations notes that “'Hanging amounts to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment under international law.” |
| Hangings are frequently botched. Instead of a quick death, as Amnesty International reports, “If the rope is too long, the inmate could be decapitated, and if it is too short, death by strangulation could take as long as 45 minutes. |
| It is a supreme irony that Israel and its arch-enemy, Iran, are one of a handful of countries where hanging is still legal. |
| The new law is a step away from Israel’s restraint in imposing death sentences and carrying out executions. While capital punishment has been legal in Israel for a long time, death sentences have rarely been handed down, and the last person executed there was Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962. |
| The new law exemplifies what Ben-Natan calls the “deeply political” nature of the death penalty in Israel. “While the death penalty was abolished for criminal murder, it was kept for political offenses: terrorism, treason, and genocide.” |
| Following Mead, Ben-Natan notes that “the death penalty and its de facto abolition formed part of the construction of political categories and national symbols of Nazis and Palestinians as enemies and Jews as victims.” That way of seeing the world, he adds, “Create[s] an enemy-victim binary whereby Jews are constructed as a single and ahistoric category of victims, leaving no symbolic space for Jewish perpetrators in Palestinian victimhood.” Moreover, the kind of death penalty law just enacted means that Palestinians will “live in the dark shadow of state-inflicted death.” |
| Using violence and the threat of death as an instrument of state policy has, in the last few years, become an all-too-common feature of Israel’s approach to the world. Given all that has happened to the Israeli people, their anger and determination not to be injured is surely understandable. |
| But Israel’s history and values call out to it to be better, to contain anger in the service of creating a more just and humane world for itself and its neighboring nations. Today it should take inspiration from the biblical passage in which the Lord says to the prophet Isaiah, “I have a greater task for you, my servant. Not only will you restore to greatness the people of Israel…but I will also make you a light to the nations—so that all the world may be saved.” |
| The death penalty law neither helps make Israel great nor a light to the world. |
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