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Counterpoint: No death penalty for Palestinian terrorists

Should Palestinian terrorists be sentenced to death? According to an IJN editorial, published two weeks ago on October 21, the answer is an unequivocal “yes”. On our About Us page, however, we state that “The IJN gives voice to the vast array of voices in the Jewish community.” If one of those voices should happen to come from within the IJN staff and should happen to have a dissenting opinion, well, that’s okay too.

Since the Gilad Shalit exchange, people are saying that the death penalty should be applied to convicted Palestinian terrorists, for example to the two men who in March of this year ruthlessly murdered the Fogel family in Itamar. Why is the topic being discussed now? Because among the 1,027 prisoners released in order to bring Shalit home were terrorists behind deadly attacks and suicide bombings. Many had been serving life sentences, but alas those aren’t what they used to be, and therein the argumentation for the death penalty: had these terrorists been executed, they could never have been released.

This kind of justification is morally bankrupt. Executing someone because Israel may again have to make a disadvantageous deal is the wrong kind of future planning. One is either for or against the death penalty. Possible deals that may or may not take place should not reduce Israel to the role of murderer. If anything, such thinking should force Israel to re-think its current policy of releasing a disproportionate number of murderers in exchange for one person.

For Americans this may be difficult to understand, because we employ capital punishment. But in Israel, the death penalty is reserved solely for former Nazis. And Palestinian terrorists are not Nazis, despite what some may argue. Hating Jews does not make one a Nazi. Neither does killing Jews in cold blood. In the Holocaust, the Nazis created and perpetrated a unique, highly organized and mechanized war whose intended goal was to annihilate Jewry and resulted in the death of six million Jews and their attendant rich religious and cultural life. Israeli settlers are not Nazis. The PLO are not Nazis. End of.

Outlining the heinousness of the crimes committed, as the IJN’s editorial does, is not a legal argument. Opposing the death penalty does not mean defending crime, it means respecting life and respecting that it is God given (and taken). Israel’s legal code does not allow for nuance in this area. Unless the convicted criminal is a Nazi, he or she will not be executed.

The IJN editorial outlines the two arguments against the death penalty: (1) risk of executing an innocent and (2) it is immoral, which is the reason is why the State of Israel, and many Western countries, have banned capital punishment. The editorial’s discounting of this second argument doesn’t hold water.

“To make [a convicted terrorist] a magnet for kidnapping, to make a mockery of his life sentence by letting him out, and to help him kill again, is totally different from the non-Palestinian-terrorist context; and totally transcends the argument that to execute him is to sink to his level of brutality.”

This is not an argument for the death penalty, but is in actual fact a directed criticism of Israel’s prisoner exchange. Who made the mockery? Who created the magnets? Who is setting the terrorists free?

If Israel wants to retain its claims of moral authority (it is currently the only Middle Eastern country without the death penalty) it will continue to apply capital punishment to Nazis only and face its complex problems without resorting to executing inmates.

What’s your opinion? Post a comment or vote in our Facebook poll.



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IJN Assistant Publisher | [email protected]


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