Hooray for Jew Power?
The Death Penalty Law Reflects the Total Kahanization of Israel's Right
The passing of the death penalty law reflects the normalization of Kahanist ideology and betrays the values on which the state was founded. It sets Israel on a suicidal path
Israel's Knesset passed a law on Monday requiring Israel's military courts in the occupied West Bank to apply the death penalty to Palestinians convicted of deadly acts of terrorism. The law also authorizes civilian courts to apply the death penalty for terrorism charges throughout the country. It is drafted in such a way as to all but guarantee it will never be used against Jews.
"Death to terrorists" has long been a slogan of Israel's far-right, a chant at Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party's rallies, where the yellow flag emblazoned with a black fist and Jewish star – the banner of the banned Kach movement – billowed over seething crowds. For years, it was more a populist provocation than a serious legislative proposal, wielded by the Kahanist fringe to foment anti-Arab hatred and incite public anger, often in the wake of terrorist attacks.
But the Kahanists – the ideological disciples of the Brooklyn-born fascist-theocratic Rabbi Meir Kahane – are no longer fringe. Their representatives are government ministers; their most radical proposals set the country's legislative agenda. Last November, Likud MK and Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi – one of the primary sponsors of
the law, alongside Otzma Yehudit's Limor Son Har-Melech –
proclaimed from the Knesset dais, "Kahane was right in many ways." Today, Kahanism is the operational ideology of the sitting Israeli government.
The death penalty bill's passage was accompanied by a fittingly macabre spectacle in the Knesset. National Security Minister and Otzma Yehudit leader Ben-Gvir attempted to pop a champagne bottle, only to be foiled by the Knesset ushers, who grabbed the bottle. He and his party members then filmed themselves in one of the Israeli parliament's hallways, where they passed out sweets and clinked glasses to celebrate their legislative triumph. "We've made history today," Ben-Gvir proclaimed, lifting his champagne flute, then shouting, "Death to terrorists."
There is a Hebrew word for this sort of conduct: hitbahemut. German has several of its long compound words to describe such behavior – Verrohung, perhaps Verwilderung – but American English has no concise equivalent to characterize what might be called literally en-beastification, or more prosaically, the coarsening of values, the degradation of morals.
The rise of Ben-Gvir and the goons who comprise his party reflects the normalization within Israeli society of not only a violent racism that dehumanizes Palestinians, but also of a form of exuberantly sadistic populism that revels in its own appetite for cruelty. In the months leading up to the bill's passage, Otzma Yehudit members appeared in public sporting yellow lapel-pins in the shape of a noose – an intentional inversion of the yellow ribbon that symbolized the demand to return the hostages in Gaza. Their worldview is one that, literally, celebrates death.
Such political pathologies did not come from nowhere. For years, the routine violence of the occupation beyond the Green Line steadily corroded the democratic political culture in Israel proper. The country's response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 and Israel's subsequent destruction of Gaza then eliminated whatever bulwarks against hitbahemut remained. A country that can kill tens of thousands of civilians without any sort of public reckoning is a country in which the death penalty loses its shadow of moral horror and becomes banal.
Yet Ben-Gvir and Otzma Yehudit did not pass this alone. Sixty-two members of the Knesset voted for it. Netanyahu himself – over and against the explicit objection of the military establishment and the National Security Council – voted for it. If there was ever a test for the parties of the Israeli right to prove their distance from the ideology of Kahanism, this was it. They failed.
It is unlikely the death penalty law will stay on the books for long. Israeli civil society groups and human rights organizations have already petitioned Israel's Supreme Court to strike the law down. That will set up another confrontation between the country's embattled judiciary and Netanyahu's coalition, which seeks to strip the Court of its power. The right will thrill to a new round of attacks on the court if the law is overturned.
Still, even if the Court strikes down the law, the damage to Israel's international legitimacy has already been done. The European Commission issued a formal condemnation of the law on Monday. Israel's European allies had desperately tried to warn Netanyahu against allowing the measure to move forward, hoping that his better judgment would win out, but to no avail.
The prime minister was not going to risk appearing soft in comparison to the far right, especially not in an election year. Instead, he has jeopardized Israel's long-term viability for his own narrow political interests – arguably the most consistent position he has held throughout his career.
This law is a betrayal of the values enumerated in Israel's 1948 "Declaration of Independence," which committed the young country to "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants" and vowed to be faithful to the United Nations Charter.
It is also a desecration of the values central to Judaism. The sages of the Mishna famously recoiled from the use of capital punishment. A Jewish court that authorized the execution of one person in 70 years, Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya is recorded saying, would be considered a "murderous" court.
The Kahanized Israeli right, in pursuit of its lunatic ideal of absolute total victory over the Palestinians, has taken Israel down not only an immoral path but a suicidal one. A country that denigrates its founding principles, whose leaders worship death, lives on borrowed time.
Atoadaso!