Last week’s opinion piece on instituting the death penalty for terrorists ignited a firestorm of responses – more than any article I have ever written.
Hundreds of people reached out, their voices filled with raw emotion. Some commented publicly on the online thread, engaging in intense debates, while others went a step further, searching for my personal email and sending heartfelt messages directly to me. Their words were impassioned, urgent, often laced with deep anger and an overwhelming thirst for justice – sometimes even for revenge.
As I wrote last week, this subject is a deeply difficult one for me. I struggle with the push-pull between my Western values, my medical training and career – dedicated to preserving life – and the harsh, undeniable reality that we must also preserve our own lives through deterrence and punishment. I believe in justice, but I also believe in humanity. The two, at times, seem to be at war within me.
And yet, as I sifted through the hundreds of responses, one truth became disturbingly clear: the depth of rage in the hearts of so many of my fellow citizens. A rage that, while entirely understandable, felt dangerously close to crossing a line.
A burning anger
Many of those who wrote to me did not simply agree with my argument in favor of the death penalty for terrorists – they wanted something far beyond it. Their words carried a burning anger, an almost primal need to inflict suffering upon those who have inflicted suffering upon us.
Suggestions ranged from beheading to burning alive, with public hanging being the most frequently proposed punishment. Some wanted to make an example of terrorists in the most graphic way possible, ensuring that their deaths would be remembered as a warning. The sheer brutality of some of these suggestions shocked me.
This is not what I had in mind when I made my case for the death penalty.
Don’t misunderstand me – I, too, have my moments of rage. Who wouldn’t, when watching our hostages, desperate and dehumanized, paraded like trophies before the world? Who wouldn’t feel the boiling fury when terrorists laugh at our pain, when they revel in their slaughter of innocents? There are times when my own heart aches with an unspeakable fury, when the thought of retaliation creeps into my mind like an uninvited guest.
But we must not give in to these thoughts. We must resist them.
We are not them.
We are not monsters.
We are not barbarians who delight in bloodshed.
We are a people of morals, of justice, of deep and sacred values. If we must fight – and we must – then let it be with a heavy heart. If we must execute those who pose an existential threat to us – and I believe we must – then let it be done out of necessity, not out of vengeance.
A just war in an immoral world
We are a moral nation fighting a just war. But we are also fighting in a world that has lost its moral compass.
The kangaroo court of the International Criminal Court dares to accuse the victims of genocide, while the true perpetrators – Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian puppet masters – openly declare their intent to wipe an entire people off the map. And yet, where is the world’s outrage? Where is the justice? Instead, we see Western liberals – naïve at best, outright antisemitic at worst – marching in the streets, chanting for our annihilation, calling for our destruction with slogans like “From the river to the sea.”
We are alone.
And so, we must do what we must do.
But we must do it with dignity.
We must not revel in it.
We must not let the depths of our enemies’ depravity pull us down into the same abyss.
Yes, we must eliminate the threats that endanger us. As one correspondent put it: “Kill or be killed.” But we must never lose our sense of humanity while doing so. We must never let the necessity of war make us forget who we are.
The burden of killing
Golda Meir once said in a 1969 press conference in London:
“When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”
These words haunt me because they are so profoundly true.
This is how we must feel.
Even as we fight, even as we kill those who seek to kill us, we must feel the weight of it. It must never become easy. It must never feel good.
If we lose that sense of burden – if we begin to take pleasure in destruction – then we have lost something greater than a battle. We have lost ourselves.
What disturbed me most about the responses to my article was not the overwhelming support for the death penalty itself, but the near-total absence of moral struggle. Where were the voices arguing against it? Where were the people questioning whether state-sanctioned killing, even of the worst monsters among us, is still a moral stain?
Only one thoughtful reader challenged me on this point, arguing that if murder is wrong, then state-sanctioned execution must also be wrong. I argued back, passionately, that this is different – that this is a matter of self-preservation. I pointed to the Torah, which explicitly permits killing in cases of rodef – when someone is actively pursuing another to kill them.
Yet, I remain troubled by the ease with which so many accept killing.
People of the book, not the sword
We are the people of the Book.
We are meant to be a light unto the nations.
We are a holy congregation, a nation of priests (Exodus 19:6).
We are not a bloodthirsty people.
Yes, we must do what is necessary. But we must not thrust in the sword and twist it with relish, as Richard Nixon once put it. We must not let our enemies’ darkness become our own.
Because if we do, then they have won.
The true battle is not just on the battlefield. It is within our own souls.
Hamas has already sullied our souls. I did not fully realize how deeply – until now.
They have made us capable of thoughts we never believed we could think. They have made us fantasize about brutality. They have turned us into something we were never meant to be.
And we must fight against that.
Because if we lose ourselves in this war, if we allow our rage to consume us, then we will have lost something greater than land, greater than security, greater than even lives.
We will have lost our identity.
And that is something we can never afford to lose.
We are better than that – we are better than them.
The writer is a rabbi and physician who lives in Ramat Poleg, Netanya. He is a co-founder of Techelet-Inspiring Judaism.