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PAGE TITLE: FrontPage Magazine
ARTICLE TITLE: Judaism’s Pro-Death
Penalty Tradition
DATE: Thursday 22 April
2004
AUTHOR: Steven Plaut
AUTHOR
INFORMATION: Steven Plaut (born 1951) is an
American-born Israeli associate professor of Business Administration at the University
of Haifa and a writer. Plaut is a member of the editorial board of the Middle
East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum think tank.
 |
| Steven Plaut |
Judaism's Pro-Death Penalty Tradition
By: Steven Plaut / JewishPress.com
Thursday,
April 22, 2004
Why the
Israeli Left's opposition to capital punishment is politically naive
and spiritually unsound.
One of the most popular causes among Jewish
liberals is opposition to capital punishment. The Religious Action Center, the
political SWAT Team of the Reform movement, has long considered opposing
capital punishment to be one of its highest priorities. Many other groups of
Jewish liberals, and some non-liberals, oppose all forms of capital punishment,
supposedly in the name of Jewish ethics and the invariably misrepresented tikkun
olam.
Whenever one comes out in favor of capital
punishment, one inevitably hears shrieks from such folks about how execution is
inhumane, how it violates human dignity, how every human soul, even that of
murderers, has been created in God`s image and so should be preserved at all
costs.
This is all very interesting. There’s just one
little problem, though. The Bible makes it crystal clear that the way one
acknowledges that human souls are created in God`s image and deserving of
respect and dignity is through capital punishment. Just read Genesis 9:6:
"A man who spills human blood, his own blood shall be spilled by man
because God made man in His own Image." Not just among Jews, by the way,
but among all sons of Noah.
In other words, the preservation of human dignity
requires capital punishment of convicted murderers. The position of Judaism is
the opposite of the position espoused by liberals. It is precisely because of
man`s creation in God`s image that capital punishment is declared justified and
necessary. Human dignity requires execution of murderers, not compassion for
their souls.
Moreover, capital punishment is regarded by Judaism
as a favor for the capital sinner, a form of atonement and redemption. Ordinary
murderers are allowed to achieve atonement for their souls in their execution.
Only especially vile murderers — such as a false witness whose lies are
discovered after the person who was framed has been executed, or a man who
sacrifices both his son and his daughter to the pagan god Molokh — are denied
execution because they are regarded as beyond redemption through capital
punishment. Again, execution preserves human dignity, it does not defile it.
Israelis have for years debated the pros and cons
of capital punishment for convicted terrorist murderers. Up to this point,
Israel has never had a death penalty, the lone exception being the execution of
the Nazi beast Eichmann. Naturally, the Beautiful Left is vehemently opposed to
the very idea of capital punishment.
So maybe the time is right to take a deep breath
and step back and re-examine the issue. Should Israel have a death penalty?
Opponents of the death penalty say it does not
deter terrorism or violence. But how do they know? How do they know the level
of violent crime the United States would experience if it did not have a death
penalty — or if it had a more widely applied one? How do they know whether the
level of terrorism would decrease in an Israel with a death penalty compared to
an Israel without one?
Actually, the death penalty should be implemented
against terrorists even if it doesn’t deter terrorism. It should be implemented
because it represents a great moral statement. It is the moral and ethical
thing to do. Executing terrorists makes a statement that they are scum with no claim
a right to life. Capital punishment represents a moral and just vengeance. It
represents a declaration of good and evil. We do not build statues of heroes
and otherwise honor them because we necessarily believe these are utilitarian
and will lead to the emergence of new heroes, but rather because we are making
a statement as a society regarding our values and what we honor. Executing
terrorists is precisely the same sort of societal statement, in the opposite
direction.
It is for this moral reason that traditional
Judaism unambiguously endorses the death penalty for premeditated murder .It
does not do so because of any sociological speculation about the powers of
deterrence, and it is clear that the death penalty is viewed as a just
punishment even if it deters nothing at all.
Opponents of the death penalty argue that
implementing it would represent capitulating to the populist demands and
pressures of the public. Huh? That is essentially a concession that the general
electorate favors it and so its establishment would be the democratic thing to
do. Denying the death penalty is elitist and anti-democratic.
Opponents of the death penalty in Israel argue that
Arab terrorists would retaliate by mistreating or killing Jews they capture.
One does not know whether to laugh or to cry at this claim. The PLO and its
sister organizations already lynch, torture and murder every Jew they can lay
their hands on, including children — all this while Israel has no death
penalty. So what exactly is there to lose?
Opponents argue that it would be dehumanizing to
ask an Israeli to act as an executioner, as the one who would push the button
or pull the switch. They worry it would be hard to find someone to play the
executioner. My guess, however, is that the number of volunteers for any such
switch-pulling would be so large that the Israeli government could balance the
budget by auctioning off lotto chances to pull it. Personally, I would offer
family members of victims of terrorism first "dibs."
Opponents of the death penalty in Israel and
elsewhere argue that errors in judgment might be made and innocent people might
be executed. This is a fallacious argument even when discussing execution of
criminals, but even more so when discussing terrorists. There is no serious
evidence I know of that any innocent person has ever been executed in the
United States. But more generally, everything we do (and everything government
does) carries some risk that an innocent person might be killed as a result of
those actions and policies. Should we shut down the post office because postal
trucks sometimes run over innocent people? Should we ground all planes because
sometimes innocent people are killed in accidents? Even if there were a
non-negligible risk of such errors, that is certainly no reason not to have a
death penalty.
Opponents of the death penalty argue that it is
expensive to implement. This is absurd. Room and board for terrorists for life
in prison are exorbitant. The death penalty is "expensive" in the
U.S. only because of America`s judicial system, which allows endless expensive
appeals to proceed forever. Israel has no jury system at all. In any case,
these costs can be contained by restricting the options of appeals of convicted
terrorists.
Opponents of the death penalty in Israel argue that
terrorists might resist capture by fighting to the death and so harm police and
soldiers. I say let`s take our chances. Better the soldiers than the children
on the school buses or the women in the cafes. That is why we have soldiers. I
am sure they will cope. And suicide bombers are not exactly likely to turn more
deadly because they face the death penalty if captured.
One shouldn’t be shocked that the most vociferous
opposition to the death penalty for terrorists comes from the same Israeli leftists
who always put the rights of Arab murderers ahead of the rights of innocent
Jews. These are the same people who turned most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
into cities of refuge for terrorists, bases for launching murder atrocities
against hundreds of Israelis each year.
Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School
of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist
for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current
events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.
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