If anyone had any doubts after Hamas’s October 7 mega-atrocity, the terrorist organization has now made it clear: to deter terrorism, civilized countries need a death penalty, implemented swiftly, after mass terror events. Allowing terrorists to hang out in prison until they are traded for innocents taken hostage is absurd, spurring more terrorists to violence.
The Gaza ceasefire agreement has condemned Israelis to ride an emotional roller coaster for the next few weeks. First, Hamas releases some hostages, drip, drip, three, four at a time. Israelis try looking past their drug-induced smiles, hoping to see the strength that sustained them, fearing a glimpse of the brutality Hamas systematically imposed on them for nearly 500 days.
While delighting in the hostages’ liberation, calling these strangers by their first names because they feel like family, everyone braces for the hangover. That includes the anguished cries of families whose relatives are not on this cruelly truncated list, or yet another story about yet another terror victim whose life was cut too short by the mass-murdering evildoers Israel keeps releasing to free innocents.
It’s a grotesque exchange. Philosophers – and propagandists – can contrast Israelis’ cult of life, and the price Israel pays to free each holy hostage, with Hamas’s death cult, as they deify murderers of children, of students eating at Hebrew University’s cafeteria, of a shopper going about his business on a sunny day.
Still, people of conscience worldwide have to wonder: how can we prevent this spectacle – and are our leaders enabling it?
When politicians say: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” it’s as credible as debtors saying: “The check is in the mail.” Most Western leaders don’t just negotiate with terrorists, they facilitate the sick black market whereby innocents kidnapped are considered suitable currency to liberate homicidal maniacs.
Have terrorists received a new incentive?
Today’s approaches doubly incentivize terrorists. They know that if they survive the attack, they face years in well-tended jails, bonding with like-minded buddies. And, in Israel’s case, they know they can spend those years suing its Supreme Court, demanding rights and indulgences for themselves that their tyrannical leaders don’t grant others. Meanwhile, their presence in prison encourages future murderers to go violent, hoping to “liberate” these imprisoned comrades.
A SPECIAL death penalty for terrorists – imposed swiftly – will help break the cycle. It won’t eliminate terrorism, or even hostage-taking to free other, less wicked, prisoners. It will, however, minimize the pain Israelis are currently enduring. Perhaps, next time – and there will be a next time – survivors won’t be forced to watch the murderers of their loved ones go free, and then brazenly celebrate their “victory” over human decency.
Urging any country to put individuals to death through a legal process is not a stance to take casually. The subject is especially sensitive in Israel, having been founded after the Holocaust and after thousands of years during which Jews were unfairly put to death for worshipping incorrectly.
But today’s terrorism epidemic is so out of control that it requires extreme measures. The death penalty will deliver justice, restore some deterrence, and is a merciful move: for those murdered and for those unknowns who might be future targets if the terrorists roam free again.
Even former president Joe Biden, as he went out in a blaze of pardons and clemencies, singled out terrorism as particularly heinous. He commuted the death sentences of 37 cop killers, prison-guard murderers, and deadly bank robbers. But he kept three mass murderers on death row, including two terrorists.
Last fall, the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that in the US, “the number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined.” The New Year’s Day jihadist attack in New Orleans proved that the Islamist threat from abroad – including the threat of outsiders manipulating American citizens – also looms.
Safeguards are essential. Limit this death penalty to mass terrorists who killed three or more, or terrorists who slaughtered minors under 18. But justice must also be swift. Appeals after exceptionally speedy trials should be allowed only within three months and expedited by special tribunals. Within a year of any terrorist attack, punishment should be meted out.
Although Israel needs such legislation most acutely, other Western democracies should pass similar laws. The message to an Israel still reeling from October 7’s mass murders – and thousands of attacks since – would be: “We’ve got your back.”
Terrorists command attention by preying on people of conscience while sowing confusion. Terrorism must be fought resolutely – and with moral clarity.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest book, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, was just published.