April 5, 2026

As if Israel didn’t already engender enough reasons for an antisemitic world to despise the Jewish state, its parliament, the Knesset, came up with another one last week—a real doozy.

A majority of Israel’s elected representatives voted to impose the death penalty against Palestinians—specifically, death by hanging—for acts of murderous terror intended to end Israel’s existence. The legislation is ostensibly deterrence-minded: making Palestinian terrorists think twice before killing Jews. Israeli citizens and residents are exempt from this law—including Israeli Arabs and Muslims.

As a specific anti-terrorism measure, the legislation distinguishes between ordinary criminal offenses and crimes against the state or against humanity. The problem is that it contravenes a fundamental rule of the country. In 1954, a mere six years into Israel’s modern existence, capital punishment was effectively abolished. To this day, the only person ever executed in Israel for a capital crime was Adolf Eichmann, the architect of both the Holocaust and what became known as crimes against humanity.

Eichmann set the high bar to what constituted evil. He received the ultimate punishment because his crimes were extraordinary. The Final Solution to the Jewish Question was more than mere premeditated murder. It had the ironic consequence of giving birth to an entire nation of Jews after slaughtering Six Million of them.

Had the Dr. Frankenstein of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, been captured before his death, he, too, would have received the hangman’s noose. Until last week, capital punishment in Israel was reserved for Nazis alone.

It forces a reexamination of national first principles. Are acts of terror committed by Islamist Arabs no less culpable than the handiwork of Nazis? Shouldn’t those who torched, raped, and mutilated on October 7, 2023 receive the same punishment that was set aside for Nazis? When terrorists chant, “Death to Israel!” and then act to realize that objective, they should receive no less of a punishment than what they had sought to achieve—death.

Israel will soon showcase the separation of powers that is the hallmark of Western democracies, despite being the sole practitioner of such governance in the Middle East. Courts will weigh in on the lawfulness of this revival of capital punishment. Israel’s Supreme Court, with its long history of invalidating governmental policy by exercising the Reasonableness Clause under its Basic Laws, will determine whether the death penalty can be justified as a legitimate and proportionate way to achieve national security.

It’s a tricky question when applied to Islamists. With the afterlife as their fallback, terrorists are never truly deterrable. In committing crimes apocalyptic in nature and in the service of Allah, their motivations are decidedly unlike the calculations of ordinary criminals.

With the afterlife as their fallback, terrorists are never truly deterrable. In committing crimes apocalyptic in nature and in the service of Allah, their motivations are decidedly unlike the calculations of ordinary criminals.

Meanwhile, many Israelis have their own reservations about this law. The law could be misapplied to Palestinians merely for being Palestinian. Another measure is making its way to the Knesset that would provide greater procedural and evidentiary safeguards.

But many still believe that capital punishment is appropriate for the 250 convicted of serving in Hamas’ Nukhba unit, which was directly responsible for planning and directing the terrorist attack on October 7.

As we have come to learn, however, it makes little difference to Israel’s Western critics how the Jewish state deals with terrorists—as long as they don’t kill them, and especially not after they are captured, tried and found guilty. France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom swiftly condemned Israel’s new death penalty law.

Laughably, so, too, did Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—Muslim nations where death by execution remains the law of their lands, for nearly any crime at all. Saudi Arabia, in fact, still practices state-sanctioned beheadings. The highest numbers of executions on the planet belong to Arab and Muslim nations. And, yet, they have a problem with Israel sentencing terrorists to death.

At least Europe practices what it preaches: the death penalty has been abolished on the continent—except for Belarus. Democracies have settled on the moral principle that human dignity, and the right to life, supersedes all considerations of criminal justice.

The United States, however, is a democratic outlier when it comes to free speech and capital punishment—more permissive on the former and still practicing the latter. Federal law permits the use of the death penalty; 27 states make capital punishment available under their penal codes—even though many have placed moratoriums on its use and have not executed anyone in over a decade.

The United States continues to regard the death penalty as a matter of fighting crime and not human rights.

That may soon change. Recent polling in the United States shows declining support for the death penalty—the lowest it has been in more than 50 years. Only a slight majority of Americans favor it. (In 1994, 80% approved.)

This shift in national consensus on the death penalty should come as no surprise. We are living through the golden age of consequence avoidance. Our newfound progressive politics comes fully equipped with an anti-establishment, easy exoneration ethos.

Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, cashless bail, excusing the crimes of illegal immigrants, the universal acceptance of white blameworthiness, “Globalize the Intifada!”—each has, in its own way, eroded distinctions between right and wrong, moral relativism and absolute truths, deserved punishment for criminality and resistance “by any means necessary.”

It’s utter lunacy for the muddled logic of political correctness to nullify the moral imperative of punishing crimes deemed the “worst-of-the-worst.” Capital punishment has been co-opted by cultural elites, rendering it as forbidden as racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia. Just deserts is as repugnant and unseemly as American Exceptionalism, white privilege, nuclear families and “the most qualified person should get the job.”

But terrorism is the very definition of “the worst-of-the worst”—where guilt is not circumstantial but definite, and the crime committed shocks the conscience even in a world increasingly inured to shock.

Terrorism is the very definition of “the worst-of-the worst”—where guilt is not circumstantial but definite, and the crime committed shocks the conscience even in a world increasingly inured to shock.

Does anyone really have a problem with the hanging of Eichmann or the assassination of Osama bin Laden? Do Martin Luther King Jr. and Ayatollah Khamenei exist on the same moral plane? Mass murderers do not provide the essential spark of life and benefits to humankind that the world can’t live without.

Terrorists deserve what they get. Under-punishing them presents the same kind of moral asymmetries as applying international humanitarian law to the barbarian tactics they deploy in waging war. One side abides by the rules of engagement; the other weaponizes the laws of armed conflict by ignoring them.

All human life is not the same; we are not equal in moral worthiness. America’s Founding Fathers did not have the Boston Marathon Bombers in mind when they amended the Constitution to outlaw “cruel and unusual punishment.” Everything terrorists do qualifies as cruel and unusual; the punishment they are owed—the payback they receive—should not be shortchanged.

Moral blame creates an obligation of just desserts. The wrongdoer supplies the justification. Terrorists terrorize. Governments are left with little choice but to respond in kind. The moral authority to do so was set in motion by the wrongdoer’s own misdeed.

Deterring crime is not the sole reason to punish wrongdoers. A more important consideration is retribution itself—the poetic justice of just desserts. The worst-of-the-worst evoke moral revulsion and therefore deserve to be punished in kind.

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People far removed from communism can’t understand how anyone these days can be drawn to an ideology whose horrors are so well established. They assume that the young people joining far-left groups today—the Democratic Socialists of America, or the Party of Socialism and Liberation, or the tiny Trotskyist organization I once belonged to—are ignorant, and that protecting this generation is a simple matter of arming them with the gruesome facts. So they teach about the millions murdered by Stalin and Mao, how much of the world suffered under relentless terror, and assume that any decent person will henceforth recoil at the mention of socialism. Well-meaning as this is—and I’m all for presenting these truths—it largely misses the point.

The first time I met a self-described communist, which happened when I was a freshman at Berkeley, I was shocked to discover that such people still existed, in 1985. Didn’t he know about the gulags? That communist, and the others I went on to meet, certainly knew about the Stalinist labor camps and bloody purges, the misery and death. They swore that that was not their vision, that they were as repelled as I at the crushing of freedom and lives. And since I could see that they were not evil people, but were remarkably intelligent and committed to a better world, I started listening to their arguments—about why what existed in the Soviet Union and China wasn’t genuine communism, and why under different circumstances history would unspool differently, allowing humanity to usher in a new age of peace, plentitude, justice and equality. It was an intoxicating vision, and once I’d become convinced that it just might work, the thought of turning my back on it seemed cowardly and selfish.

There really are no compelling substitutes in the secular world for communism, or its progressive 21st-century permutations, which is why it endures and attracts despite the best efforts at education. Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist, put it better than anybody. In his brilliant memoir “Witness,” he comments that “Communism makes some profound appeal to the human mind. You will not find out what it is by calling Communism names. That will not help much to explain why Communism whose horrors, on a scale unparalleled in history, are now public knowledge, still recruits in its thousands and holds its millions—among them some of the best minds alive.” He explained its appeal in “a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world. … Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die—to bear witness—for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.”

That it is necessary to change the world still sounds to me today, at face value, far more inspiring than the implicit counterargument that the world should be largely left alone. The left seems to have all the best props—the heartbreaking stories of poverty and oppression, the necessarily righteous struggle, the dream of worldwide redemption—while the right is easily charged with idealizing a system that benefits them but leaves so many others behind. As a leftist, I honestly couldn’t understand how conservatives live with themselves. It took experience—above all October 8, when my ex-comrades joined the rest of the left in baying for Jewish blood—for me to really begin shedding my astonishing degree of naïveté and self-righteousness, and recognize how a movement cloaked in justice actually serves evil.

As a leftist, I honestly couldn’t understand how conservatives live with themselves. It took experience—above all October 8, when my ex-comrades joined the rest of the left in baying for Jewish blood—for me to really begin shedding my astonishing degree of naïveté and self-righteousness, and recognize how a movement cloaked in justice actually serves evil.

And yet teaching young people to look for evildoers will only disarm them. They won’t find nefarious gnomes cackling and plotting world domination. Instead they’ll find men and women who are funny, smart and warm, who break into Judy Garland numbers at odd moments and coo over their cats, and who make them feel like part of the noble quest for humanity’s salvation. They’ll have a history filled with revolutionary heroes and martyrs—a sort of “Lives of the Saints” for the Godless. Larger-than-life leaders who give them a fleeting sense of protection. A community of comrades who make them forget their crushing loneliness. The excitement of rebellion. Secret knowledge that seems to explain everything. A cause to give otherwise empty lives meaning. And, of course, enemies: the sinister forces arrayed against them whom it is righteous to hate, and hating whom is so strangely invigorating. By the time the conscript should realize that this hate signals something dark and monstrous, it’s too late, because it’s become part of them.

Which brings me to the question that confounds so many in our post-October 7 world: How do otherwise seemingly good-hearted people deny, or even celebrate, atrocities as “resistance”? Shut their eyes and ears to undeniable accounts of mass murder, rape, torture? What accounts for such indifference to human suffering?

Terrible violence and pain are endemic to our world. They are found, distressingly, even in the most righteous of causes. General Sherman’s troops inflicted horrendous suffering on Southern civilians in the Civil War, but moral people generally accept this as the cost of ending the scourge of slavery. The carpet-bombing of German cities, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were the monstrous corollary of defeating the Nazis and their allies. Today, scrolling through X, I’m bombarded with allegations of Israel’s depravity. I dismiss most of them as the smears of people blinded by Jew-hatred, but sometimes the account contains an element of truth, and I’m forced to sit with it as the cost of defending Israel’s existence. Our world makes all of us harden our hearts, sometimes, to pain we don’t want to think about. We may question whether this or that act committed by our side is justified, and must always try to remain sensitive to suffering—but in the end we are forced to take responsibility. The critical issue is the cause itself—whether it truly is just.

That’s where the problem with communism lies: in the very nature of its vision, in what it seeks to do. The ostensible aim of liberating humanity by destroying everything—private property, the family, religion—can only end in a hellscape because it denies unpleasant truths about human nature. I used to insist that no such thing really exists—that humans are entirely a product of their environment, and that if we only do away with material want and other sources of misery, a new, glorious, socialist man will emerge. Yet the first step toward this paradise is giving all the power to a supposedly enlightened elite—the polar opposite of freedom—ushering in a regime that can only be marked by extreme, and intractable, repression and brutality. The utopian vision turns into nightmare every single time—because it must.

The utopian vision turns into nightmare every single time—because it must.

Chambers concluded that “Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God. … There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died.” The Western world also discarded, with God, the belief that evil exists. Fashionable liberals smirk at the word, which they associate with snake-oil preachers warning childishly about hellfire, or Dr. Strangelove schemes to nuke evildoers. But they dismiss the idea at their own peril, because they fail to see how easily it enters their bloodstream. And the good and evil that fight for supremacy in all of us.

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Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”