For magicians and illusionists, distraction – luring an audience’s focus away from what they wish to hide – is a trick of the trade. Adroit politicians have been known to employ it too, as members of Israel’s governing coalition are today.
Under the cover of the fog of a justifiable war that most Israelis support, given the existential menace of a nuclear Iran and its decades-long backing of Hamas and Hezbollah, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has advanced two highly controversial and consequential efforts: one in the West Bank and the other in parliament.
Israeli terrorism in the West Bank
While settler attacks on West Bank Palestinian villagers and farmers continue to escalate, the government has done little but turn a blind eye, failing to prosecute most perpetrators and even deporting international activists who came to bear witness in protest.
IDF soldiers recently assaulted a CNN news crew covering the violence. Last week, more than 1,000 Jewish leaders from around the globe signed a letter to President Isaac Herzog urging his intervention: “Mr. President, the terror, death, and destruction inflicted by Jewish-Israeli extremists against innocent Palestinians across the West Bank is an abomination. It is not only morally shameful but a strategic threat to the future of Israel. It damages world Jewry and the relationship of future generations with Israel.
“Sadly, based on events and on the statements of the most extreme coalition partners, it can be concluded that the violence now engulfing the West Bank is not only condoned by the government but is in fact policy.”
Both Herzog and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir have unequivocally condemned the settler violence.
A law of discrimination
Nonetheless, while these Israeli settlers, a minority though they be, are terrorizing West Bank Palestinians, the Knesset just passed a law making death by hanging the default punishment, with limited exceptions, for non-Israelis convicted of terror-related murder in military courts where their trials will be decided by a simple majority, with no right to pardon.
In contrast, Israelis are tried in civilian courts and verdicts require unanimity. One can well understand why Israelis might advocate the death penalty for terrorists, given that too many Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks have been released only to commit other atrocities, including Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack.
But the Bible insists “there shall be one law for citizen and stranger.” And Israel has conducted an execution only once in the nearly 78-year history of the state, for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, convicted in a public trial.
Finally, there is no concrete evidence that the threat of capital punishment serves to deter terrorists, and certainly not Islamist radicals driven by the prospect of martyrdom and its promised rewards.
The choice of this moment of distraction, when Israelis are scrambling into bomb shelters, and soldiers are fighting and dying, to enact such a controversial law and support the creeping annexation of the West Bank, constitutes yet another instance of Israel’s hard-right government steering the country away from principles most democracies in the world deem fundamental.
For those of us in the Diaspora who will nonetheless continue to stand up for Israel’s rights and needs, and against the anti-Zionism and antisemitism of those who call it an apartheid state, our task becomes that much harder.
One may ask: When this justifiable war with Iran ends, and Israelis are safer, the state more secure in the region, what kind of nation will it be? Will it remain the liberal democracy its founders envisioned?
The writer holds the Peter and Mary Kalikow Senior Rabbinic Chair of Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York.