The God-Honest Truth About Israel’s Death Penalty Bill
Repeat killers, hostage deals, and media spin led Israelis to a breaking point.
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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In 2003, Limor Son Har-Melech was seven months pregnant and driving home with her husband, Shalom, an ambulance driver, when Islamic terrorists attacked them.
The car rolled over, killing her husband and injuring Limor. Seriously injured, the 24-year-old mother survived. So did her newborn daughter. Limor, still carrying the scars of the attack, married again, had children and decided to run for public office in Israel to protect others from what she had suffered.
Last year, Limor, a member of the Knesset, was stunned to learn that her husband’s killer was being freed as part of the disastrous deal trading 2,000 Islamic terrorists for hostages.
“This morning I woke up to the news that the terrorist who murdered my husband was released in a deal — no one told us about it,” she said.
So she sponsored a new bill, the “Death Penalty for Terrorists Bill.” The bill calls for the “death penalty” for anyone “who intentionally caused the death of a person in an act of terrorism.”
The bill was supported by family members of the victims of Islamic terrorist attacks in Israel.
Deborah Gonen, the mother of Danny Gonen, a young man murdered in a terrorist attack, who founded the Choosing Life Forum to stop terrorist funding, endorsed the bill, saying: “We, the bereaved families, demand the death penalty so that there will be no more victims like my son Danny.”
Haim Smadar, a Jewish refugee from the Muslim world working as a security guard, and a father of deaf children, died stopping an Islamic terrorist from blowing up in a supermarket, telling him: “You are not coming in here. You and I will blow up here.”
“I call on all Knesset members to vote for this bill, as it saves lives, stopping those who are coming to kill us again and again,” his son said.
Eliyahu Libman, who lost his brother in a terrorist attack, and who lost his son, a security officer who was saving lives at the Nova Music Festival on October 7th, declared that a terrorist “doesn’t deserve to live after he took the lives of others. And I say this from my personal experience.”
“The killers of my brother were freed in the Gilad Shalit deal (during which over 1,000 Islamic terrorists were released in exchange for one Israeli hostage in 2011). They killed my son and all the others. The terrorists want to kill and go on killing. When they are executed, it saves many lives,” added Libman.
When an Islamic terrorist burst into the Solomon home on the Sabbath, the family were celebrating the birth of their grandson. The terrorist stabbed to death the 70-year-old grandfather, Michal Solomon managed to hustle her three children, including two infants, into a room and held the door against the attacker. Her husband was murdered.
Dan Landau, Michal’s father, endorsed the bill saying: “Enough with terrorists who get vacations, enough with terrorists who receive good conditions in prison. It’s time they pay the full price for the blood they spilled.”
The parents of Rita Gusak, 21, murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova Musical Festival on October 7th, spoke out in favor of the bill. “The terrorist standing before us doesn’t even try to hide it — he proudly publishes it and documents it.”
“I am in favor of the death penalty law for terrorists, because they murdered my father,” the son of Meir Lixenberg, a murdered father of five, said.
Many other family members also spoke out in favor of a death penalty for terrorists.
However, once the bill was signed, it was immediately condemned by European governments, and a social media campaign based on lies was quickly whipped up, claiming that the bill was racist because it would execute Arab Muslims rather than Jews.
All of that is completely false.
The bill only applies to non-citizen terrorists who live under military jurisdiction. It doesn’t apply to Israeli citizens, Jews or Arabs, or whatever their religion may be. The legal basis for this is much the same as the Article III military tribunals that were used in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp after 9/11.
Media and social media accounts chose to completely ignore Member of Knesset Limor Son Har-Melech, whose bill it was, because her story was too sympathetic, in favor of retweeting a brief clip from a Hamas-linked account, featuring Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, a leader of her party, clowning around and celebrating the bill.
There was no mention that the bill had come from a survivor of terrorism, that it had been championed by family members of terror victims, or that it was made necessary by disastrous hostage deals like the Gilad Shalit deal and the more recent Hamas hostage deal which freed thousands of Islamic terrorists to kill again and which incentivized future attacks and future hostage-taking.
The European Union claimed that the bill was “deeply concerning” because “the death penalty is a violation of the right to life.” Meanwhile, the terrorists facing the death penalty violated the right to life of others and will do so again if they are set loose.
The UK, French, Australian, and German governments claimed that the bill was “discriminatory” and would undermine “Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles,” contending that “the death penalty is an inhumane and degrading form of punishment without any deterring effect.” If their countries had the death penalty, their crime rate wouldn’t be out of control. The UK has resorted to banning kitchen knives rather than cracking down on criminals.
France last executed a Muslim pimp by guillotine in 1977 for running a sex-grooming gang and kidnapping, torturing, and strangling a French woman to death. Imagine if France were willing to do that today. And would thousands of girls have been raped in the UK if the Pakistani Muslim sex-grooming gangs knew that they faced not a cushy few years in prison, but death?
European foreign ministers have had little to say about Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, Brunei, and Mauritania’s Islamic death penalties for gay people. They don’t mind when Muslim countries kill gay people in the name of Islam, only when Christians and Jews stand up to Islamic terrorism. The Palestinian Authority has a law on the books calling for the death penalty for their own people who sell land to Jews. And there are of course no objections to that racist decree.
Israel has lived through generations of Islamic terror and genocide. Only now, after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, did it pass a death penalty bill to end a revolving-door system that rewards terrorism.
It’s time to stop worrying about what Europe thinks. Their default position is permanently anti-Israel regardless of what’s being discussed.
Thank you for the clarification. I 100 percent support this law for ridding the earth of these killers. What moral right do they have to life?