The debate over Israel’s death penalty bill has reignited the question of whether non-Israeli Jews have a right to weigh in on Israeli social issues. Many Israeli proponents of the legislation routinely dismiss Jews like me in the Diaspora who are against it, based solely on the fact that we do not live in Israel and therefore should not have a say in the matter.
One such death penalty supporter wrote on social media that “…although you are Jewish, you are not Israeli, nor do you live in Israel. Stay out of Israeli politics, and I’ll stay out of Canadian politics.”
The potential danger that Israel’s death penalty bill poses to global Jewry makes it entirely necessary for non-Israeli Jews to speak out. In the eyes of antisemites across the world, there is no distinction between Jews and Israelis.
My own personal experience of antisemitic hatred supports this assertion. Israel’s recent war on Hamas in Gaza brought tremendous antisemitic outbursts against the progressive members of my Jewish community here in British Columbia, Canada. The same held when my family and I lived in Washington, DC, at the start of the war. I vividly recall how “Death to Israel” graffiti covered a bus stop just down the road from my children’s preschool in the US capital.
The inseparable connection between Jews and Israelis in the minds of Israel’s enemies is precisely why non-Israeli Jewish voices should be a part of the discussion about an issue as vital as the death penalty to global Jewish safety.
The group “L’chaim: Jews Against the Death Penalty,” of which I am the co-founder, has the right – and obligation – to sound the alarm over this bill. Founded in 2020, L’chaim includes thousands of members in both Israel and the Diaspora who realize that the collective deterrence delusion that sustains this racist bill in the minds of so many proponents blinds them to the most imminent peril this legislation poses.
Death penalty could invite more acts of terror
Not only will it fail to deter terrorists – and betray Jewish values by cheapening life – but it will, in fact, incite and invite more murderous acts of terror. No invocation of the deterrence delusion – not even by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) – can erase the reality that the death penalty will doom Israel to an ultimately catastrophic, self-destructive path that will engender all the Jewish world.
Specifically, the death penalty’s well-documented brutalization effect would entice would-be martyrs to attack Jews. 19th-century writer Eliphas Levi highlighted the well-established relationship between the death penalty and the desire for martyrdom when he wrote that “Every head that falls upon the scaffold may be honored and praised as the head of a martyr.”
Radical Islamist terrorists – like those who perpetrated horrific mass murder on October 7, 2023 – celebrate such martyrdom in anticipation of the supposed rewards awaiting them in paradise. They prefer martyrdom in the actual act of killing, but if they can kill and then be placed on a pedestal – lauded as heroes facing the death penalty for their cause – then all the better. Their idealization of celebrity execution is especially true in a world where so many individuals hate Israel for how it treats its non-Jewish citizens. Why would Israel want to play into the hands of potential terrorists in this way?
A far more severe punishment for such individuals is incarceration, which forces terrorists to confront what they have done while enduring the constrictions of a maximum-security prison every day. As a Jewish prison chaplain, I can personally attest to this harsh reality.
Proponents of this bill maintain that executing terrorists will prevent future hostage-taking for prisoner swaps in Israel. What they fail to recognize is that Israel can avoid this outcome simply by changing the law to forbid including anyone directly involved in murder in any future prisoner exchanges, without exception. Such legislation would solve the problem without creating new martyrs around whose memory other terrorists would assuredly rally.
This perilous bill poses more pervasive dangers for the Jewish world. If the Knesset were to enact it – leading to the unconscionable stain of executions darkening the moral fabric of Israeli society – antisemitic extremists would assuredly blame all the world’s Jews for this state-sponsored killing program. The death penalty would neatly fit into their warped view of Israel – and, by extension, Judaism – as a so-called “death cult.”
Consider the probable future if Israel were to enact this legislation. As Ben Lynfield correctly predicts, the bill, once passed, would mark a “looming death certificate for the Israel that was.” After the shock of the bill’s passage would settle, global nations would realize, as Ron Dudai has compellingly written, that the far-right had cemented its ascendancy in Israeli society.
Jewish death cult claims would gain credence worldwide.
The bill would permanently decimate Israel’s already fragile moral compass in the minds of hundreds of millions of human beings and a majority of nations. As Israel would begin carrying out frequent executions of hundreds of prisoners, human rights activists the world over would continue to make legitimate comparisons with Iran and other global perpetrators of egregious judicial killings. The bill’s inherently racist nature – targeting only non-Jewish terrorists – would give only further weight to the argument that Israel is an apartheid state.
For all these reasons and more, L’chaim members have spoken out vociferously – and will continue to do so until Knesset members heed our voices of reason, for the sake of all the Jewish world.
The author is a cantor (MSM, BCC), a member of Death Penalty Action’s advisory committee, and co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.