Israel to reintroduce death penalty for Palestinians only

[ionelv]

This takes the cake and is frankly callous and deeply racist. Excerpts from the BBC article:

Israel has only twice used the death penalty against a convicted prisoner. The last time was more than sixty years ago, to hang the notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

But in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel's deadliest ever day, there is a political push to pass a highly controversial new capital punishment law, targeting Palestinians convicted by Israeli courts of fatal terrorist attacks.

"It's another brick in the wall of our defence," the far-right chair of the parliamentary national security committee, Zvika Fogel tells me. "To bring in the death penalty is the most moral, the most Jewish and the most decent thing."

Comments

[conuly]

"To bring in the death penalty is the most moral, the most Jewish and the most decent thing."

I’m sure that none of this can possibly be true.

[ionelv]

I don't know about the decency part, but I am quite sure that the first two parts are customary in Judaic law:

In traditional Jewish law there are four types of capital punishment: a) stoning, b) burning by ingesting molten lead, c) strangling, and d) beheading, each being the punishment for specific offenses. Except in special cases where a king can issue the death penalty, capital punishment in Jewish law cannot be decreed upon a person unless there were a minimum of twenty-three judges (Sanhedrin) adjudicating in that person's trial who, by a majority vote, gave the death sentence, and where there had been at least two competent witnesses who testified before the court that they had seen the litigant commit the offense.