The Israeli Knesset voted unanimously in May to allow capital punishment for terrorists who participated in the October 7, 2023, attacks. That vote was not a close call, not a partisan skirmish — unanimous. The Israeli justice system must now determine whether capital punishment will go forward, and exactly who it will be allowed to ensnare.
Israel prohibits the death penalty for most offenses. The Knesset's decision carved out a specific exception, one tied to a specific atrocity. The legal and moral weight of that exception is now in the hands of the courts.
Into that serious space has stepped Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's minister of national security, doing what he does best: making a grave question harder to think about clearly. According to Douglas Murray, writing in The Free Press, Ben-Gvir has worn a golden noose lapel pin, celebrated his 50th birthday with execution-themed cakes featuring nooses, and last week posted a video online in which he gloated about building a gallows for public executions, complete with viewing rooms for the families of victims.
Murray's verdict on Ben-Gvir is direct: he is 'a man who harms any cause to which he fixes himself.' That is not a small charge. When a minister of national security turns a question of justice into a personal brand, he does not merely embarrass himself — he contaminates the deliberation that must follow.
And yet the contamination does not settle the underlying question. Murray argues, on the record, that there are urgent reasons not to spare the October 7 perpetrators. The death penalty, he writes, 'is an issue that should be discussed with awe' — one that even its advocates recognize to be solemn and severe. That framing matters. The argument for capital punishment in this case does not require Ben-Gvir's theatrics. It stands or falls on first principles: the nature of the crime, the limits of incarceration as a response, the signal a society sends when it decides some acts place a person beyond the ordinary calculus of rehabilitation.
Those are not easy questions. They are, however, answerable ones — if the people responsible for answering them are allowed to do so without a minister turning the gallows into a birthday cake.
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Say it plainly: the unanimous Knesset vote reflects something real about Israeli public sentiment after October 7. A society that watched what happened that day and then watched its government deliberate carefully before authorizing the ultimate penalty is not a society that has lost its moral bearings. It is a society trying, under enormous pressure, to keep them.
What is at stake is not only the fate of specific defendants. It is whether Israel's institutions can demonstrate that justice and spectacle are different things — that the former can proceed even when a minister is determined to turn it into the latter. The record will show which one won. Follow the institution, not the press release, and certainly not the birthday cake.
