(RNS) — The death penalty law targeting Palestinians that passed the Israeli parliament on Monday (March 30) has been roundly denounced among liberal Jewish movements in Israel and abroad.
In the U.S., the largest Jewish denomination, the Reform movement, strongly condemned passage of the “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law,” which makes hanging the default punishment for murderers who kill “with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel.”
“This legislation represents a sharp and dangerous departure from Israel’s long-standing reluctance to employ capital punishment,” the Union for Reform Judaism said in a statement. “It also contradicts the Jewish tradition’s teachings about capital punishment that emphasize the rarity with which it should be applied.”
The death penalty has only been applied twice in the modern state of Israel’s history — once in 1948 against a soldier who was wrongly accused of treason and later posthumously rehabilitated, and the second, in 1961 against Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
Until Monday, capital punishment for murder had been outlawed since 1954, and only remained on the books for crimes against humanity, such as Eichmann’s.
Monday’s bill was the project of far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in recent months sported a lapel pin in the shape of a noose to show his support for the measure.
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Ben-Gvir and his allies argued that the finality of the death penalty would protect Israelis by removing the possibility for prisoner exchange as an incentive for hostage taking. Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel, was famously freed from Israeli pri …