You know how a true friend is one who is candid? They tell you the truth even when you may not want to hear it.
Israel. I love you. But we have to talk.
It seems you are considering a new law—a death penalty law. Death by hanging; which feels particularly archaic and barbaric. It brings to mind the gallows of the old west, the Nuremberg trials, even the Book of Esther.
I suppose I should be thankful stoning wasn’t chosen.
Admittedly, Jews have a history with the death penalty.
The Torah prescribes it for 36 offenses, including murder, kidnapping, and severe religious violations like idolatry and breaking the Sabbath.
However, the rabbis of the Talmud sharply restricted its use. The Mishnah teaches that a court that executes once in seventy years is considered “destructive.”
And of course there is the principle associated with Maimonides: better to acquit a thousand guilty people than to put a single innocent one to death.
For this reason, for many centuries, Jews have not been enthusiastic about capital punishment.
Modern Jewish movements—Conservative and Reform—have explicitly opposed it. Orthodox Judaism has never embraced it in practice either.
As for the modern State of Israel, capital punishment has been carried out only once, in the case of Adolf Eichmann.
Until now—perhaps.
Because this proposed law is not exactly for Israelis. More for Palestinians. Not exactly for crimes inside Israel proper, but in the West Bank.
It targets terrorism: a person who intentionally causes death with the aim of harming a citizen or resident of Israel, and with the intent of rejecting the existence of the state.
The law outlines two tracks: one in Israeli civilian courts, and another in military courts in the West Bank—courts that try Palestinians under military law.
In that system, the sentence could become mandatory: death, and that penalty only.
So not only would a mandatory death sentence be new in Israeli law, it would, in practice, apply almost exclusively to Palestinians.
There is a term for when one law applies to one group and another to a different group: two-tiered justice. A less polite word is discrimination.
History offers examples of such systems. None are remembered kindly. And Israel has long resisted being associated with such comparisons—for good reason.
You might think discrimination only cuts one way. It doesn’t. It's said we've lost the war when we become our enemy's image of us.
I remember learning that, in its time, the Torah was relatively progressive in its treatment of the stranger—precisely because Israel knew what it meant to be one.
“You are to have the same law for the foreigner and the native-born.” (Leviticus 24:22)
On this day, erev Pesach, it bears remembering.
The Israelites were subject to a different law than their taskmasters in Egypt.
It did not end well for Egypt.
