The Sanctification of Death Is Becoming Israel's Political Norm

Haaretz Editorial

Dec 9, 2025

https://archive.ph/jxT0m

"A wide and deep moral abyss separates us from our enemies," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasts at every opportunity. "They sanctify death, we sanctify life." But this week, his ministers provided depressing proof of the extent to which that statement has turned on its creator. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and members of his party came to a Knesset committee hearing on a bill to mandate the death penalty for terrorists wearing pins shaped like a noose on their lapels.

This pin is "a nauseating takeoff on the hostage pins" commonly worn while the Israeli hostages were in captivity, as MK Gilad Kariv (Labor) aptly said. But the original pin symbolized the sanctity of life, while the pin worn by Ben-Gvir and his colleagues sanctifies death. It's hard to imagine two symbols more opposed to each other. It's no accident that the politicians wearing the noose pins were the same ones who opposed every proposed hostage deal.

Sanctifying death has become blatant, public and demonstrative in Israel, whether through calls for starving residents of the Gaza Strip, celebrations of the massive death toll in Gaza or the normalization of violent attacks in the West Bank. This pin fits its wearers like a uniform. If Israeli society doesn't eject them from its midst and put this worldview back on the fringes from which it came, the sanctification of death will become the political norm in Israel.

During the committee session, a representative of the Israel Medical Association said that Israeli doctors are bound by international conventions that completely forbid them to have any involvement, whether active or passive, in executions. "Our knowledge must not be used for any purpose that doesn't involve promoting health and welfare," he said. But the bill Ben-Gvir is pushing would require doctors to be hangmen. It demands that they choose the poison and the dose and then prepare the body for the lethal injection.

A legal opinion drafted by the committee's legal adviser also thoroughly eviscerated the bill. The problems are obvious. It would eliminate judges' discretion; it would make the death penalty mandatory, which isn't true even of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law; it would apply only to Palestinians in the West Bank, thereby violating the principle of equality before the law; and it completely contradicts international conventions that Israel has signed.

The opinion also noted that no legal system is immune to error, and the death penalty leaves no way to correct a mistake. But then, we shouldn't forget that in the eyes of Ben-Gvir and his Kahanists, even babies are potential terrorists if they are Arabs, so no mistake is possible in imposing the death penalty.

The law isn't just unacceptable from a constitutional and moral standpoint. It is also completely pointless from a security standpoint. Not one single study has ever shown that the death penalty deters terrorists. If Israel still wants to see itself as a country that sanctifies life, it must throw the noose pin and the worldview it represents into the dustbin of history.