DOES ISRAEL NEED THE DEATH PENALTY?

What child killers deserve


The murder of children makes the blood boil. We find ourselves immersed in the grisly details of how Hodaya Kedem Pimstein, Rose Pizem, Ta'ir Rada and now the Oshrenko children were slain. Often the first thought that comes to mind - and President Shimon Peres articulated this on Tuesday - is that anyone who could murder a child is a monster, not a human being.

A second thought, for some, is: If only Israel had capital punishment, child killers would get the punishment they deserve.

As The Jerusalem Post reported Tuesday, four Knesset members have cosponsored legislation to amend clause 300 of the Criminal Code, to establish the death penalty for the murder of children under the age 13. "Human life is sacred, but murderers of children are not humans, but rather predatory animals," said Carmel Shama of Likud, a co-sponsor.

THE BIBLE instructs: "He that smiteth a man, so that he dieth, shall surely be put to death." (Exodus 21:12) Stoning, burning and hanging are biblically prescribed for any number of capital offenses.

But the tendency of rabbinic Judaism has been toward the abolition of the death penalty. This position is captured in the following Mishna (Makkot 1:10): "The Sanhedrin that executes one person in seven years is called 'murderous.' Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria says that this extends to one execution in 70 years. Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva say, 'If we had been among the Sanhedrin, no one would ever have been executed.' [But] Rabbi Simon ben Gamliel [who believed capital punishment had a deterrent effect, dissented and] said, 'Such an attitude would increase bloodshed in Israel."

Nowadays, the three main streams of American Judaism, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox, are institutionally unenthusiastic about the death penalty. Here, the Knesset abolished the death penalty in 1954, making it an option only in treason-related offenses. The only person ever executed in Israel was Adolf Eichmann, who was hanged in 1962 after being found guilty of crimes against humanity.

Politically, opposition to capital punishment is not necessarily a liberal versus conservative issue. Philosopher Ayn Rand argued that capital punishment was perfectly moral, but she opposed implementation of the penalty out of concern that in rare instances innocent people could be put to death. "Better to sentence nine actual murderers to life imprisonment, rather than execute one innocent man," she famously wrote.

Indeed, the still ongoing case of Roman Zadorov, who is accused of murdering Ta'ir Rada, raises all sorts of concerns about capital punishment. A DNA test failed to match the suspect to the victim. Key evidence which could have exonerated Zadorov has apparently gone missing. And there are misgivings that his confession may have been coerced. Parenthetically, confession alone is insufficient grounds for capital punishment in Jewish tradition.

For many crimes, the sages of Israel laid stress on compensation, making good the damage done, rather than incarceration. Modern Israel demands compensation - where possible - as well as incarceration.

WE VIEW recent calls for the death penalty as reflecting an understandable frustration. In our day-to-day lives, including on the roads, there is the sense that menace lurks at every turn; we're seeing more and more quality-of-life crimes in the public square. The murder of the Oshrenko children rattles us even further. In these circumstances, it is far easier for politicians to call for the death penalty than to undertake the hard slog of reforming the country's police, criminal justice and penal systems.

The finality of capital punishment guarantees zero recidivism, yet criminologists continue to debate whether it has any deterrent value.

While less cathartic, Knesset members should be seeking genuine solutions to make Israelis more secure:

• Improve police professionalism with better pay and training; fund community-based policing, and encourage an emphasis on forensic work over achieving confessions.

• Institute mechanisms to hold prosecutors and judges professionally accountable for plea-bargains gone wrong.

• Mandate sentencing guidelines to ensure that "life in prison" means just that - with the possibility of parole reserved for exceptional circumstances.

ALBERT CAMUS pointed out that the death penalty has been around practically as long as murder itself - yet crime persists.

As for what to do with child-killers? Lock them up and throw away the key.

What to make of the Ya'acov Teitel story

On Jewish terrorists


He acted alone. He might have been mentally unstable. An entire community should not be expected to apologize for, or be put on the defensive over, the behavior of one man.


That is what people said about Husam Taysir Dwayat and Ghassan Abu Tir, the two Jerusalem bulldozer terrorists, and about Alaa Abu Dhein, the perpetrator of the Mercaz Harav massacre.

Leaders of the settlement movement are making a similar-sounding argument about alleged Jewish terrorist Ya'acov Teitel. Yisrael Medad, a veteran settler ideologist, told The Jerusalem Post: "Don't blame the Teitel family, or the 100 families of Shvut Rahel, or the 8,000 residents of Gush Shiloh, or the 300,000 settlers who live in Judea and Samaria for what Teitel is accused of doing."

Indeed so. What distinguishes one terrorist from another? Answer: the reaction of their communities. There's a world of difference between the settler milieu Teitel called home, and the society that spawned Dwayat, Tir and Dhein.

Settler spokesmen - as well as the rank and file, including the ideologically hardline and Orthodox - are not glorifying the crimes Teitel is alleged to have perpetrated. No one is praising the murders of an Arab taxi driver in Jerusalem and an Arab shepherd in Judea, or the maiming of a young Jew for Jesus, or the bombing of an anti-settler academic.

An extremist voice can always be found to imply that the professor provoked his attacker by advocating that tanks be used to uproot the settlements. And there is the odd conspiratorialist claiming that Teitel was framed as a "gift" to the Left on the Rabin assassination anniversary. Others complain that the media is piling on, or that the charges can't possibly be true because Teitel seemed like a nice man.

But no one is justifying the crimes or saying the ends justify the means.

The Shvut Rahel leadership denounced the crimes attributed to Teitel and said it was praying that the charges would prove unfounded. The mainstream settler leaders at the Yesha Council congratulated the security forces for capturing Teitel and called on all Israelis to denounce such acts.

Here is another difference in societal attitudes toward terrorism, as pointed out by Aaron Lerner of Independent Media Review and Analysis: If found guilty, or criminally insane, Teitel will be incarcerated. The Israeli school system won't teach that Ya'acov Teitel is a hero. No one will name a summer camp for him. His family won't be awarded a monthly government stipend in appreciation for his sacrifices.

But this is not enough.

THE BLANKET repudiation by the settlers of the crimes attributed to Teitel is significant for its resonance within the settler community and beyond. Egregiously, one Hebrew tabloid columnist insisted that the suspect's neighbors could not possibly have been ignorant while he planned his crimes. For many years now, television's popular Eretz Nehederet comedy program has parodied American immigrants in the West Bank as gun-toting religious fanatics.

In that kind of climate, there may be an inclination within the settler movement to circle the wagons and resist introspection. But although the settlers' rhetorical response is to be commended, the movement cannot afford to be sanguine. The crisis created by the Teitel arrest should serve as an impetus for a spiritual and political reckoning, especially within ideological settlements such as Shvut Rahel. This same community was also home to Asher Weissgan, who murdered four innocent Palestinians prior to the the Gaza disengagement. He eventually committed suicide in prison.

A not-insignificant minority of religious settlers has broken away from mainstream Zionism; their allegiance is no longer to the state. To the extent that they listen to anyone, it is to renegade rabbis who countenance political violence. Their followers can be seen accosting security personnel and throwing stones at passing Arab motorists.

Behind the scenes, responsible settler leaders are struggling to end such behavior. Now is the time for communal leaders to demarcate anew an indelible red line against violence - whether directed at Arabs or Jews.

Granted, it is exceedingly hard to stop a Baruch Goldstein, a Yigal Amir or an Eden Natan-Zada if they "hear" God's voice telling them to kill a prime minister, policeman, leftist, homosexual, Jew for Jesus, or Arab. But neighbors, rabbis and community workers need to be more attuned to deviant behavior. Tradition teaches, Kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh. Troubled souls must not be left to their own devices. And settler leaders - especially rabbis - must advocate opposition to murderous political violence as fervently as they champion the Land of Israel itself.

Yemen's Jews ... the larger message?

Yemen's Jews. The End


History will record that 2,500 years of Jewish life in Yemen is now over. As The Wall Street Journal reported October 31, the US State Department has completed a clandestine operation which brought 60 of the country's remaining Jews to America. The newspaper quoted Yeshiva University's Hayim Tawil, a Yemeni Jewry expert, as issuing the certificate of death: "This is the end of the Jewish Diaspora of Yemen. That's it."

As Israelis and Jews we earnestly appreciate the efforts of the Obama administration on behalf of our Yemeni brethren.

THE RESCUE illuminates an often overlooked aspect of the 60-year-plus Arab-Israel conflict. Whereas the Arab world has purposefully maintained the 700,000 or so Palestinian Arabs made homeless in the course of the 1948 war and their descendants as permanent refugees and political pawns, the State of Israel and world Jewry have worked hard to resettle a roughly equal number of Jewish refugees forced to flee Arab lands.

The behavior of Arab leaders toward their Jewish subjects after the creation of Israel was (with notable exceptions) characterized by scapegoating and marginalization culminating in mass exodus. In 1947, Arab rioters in Aden killed dozens of Jews to protest a two-state solution in Palestine. In 1949 and 1950 the bulk of Yemen's Jews, some 49,000 souls, were airlifted here in "Operation Magic Carpet." The broad Arab refusal to accept the legitimacy of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state is partly attributable to Arab attitudes toward their Jewish minorities.

Coexistence was possible - so long as Jews knew their place.

JEWISH life under Muslim rule was historically neither the utopia Arab propagandists claim nor the purgatory Jewish polemicists assert. As the doyen of Middle East studies Bernard Lewis wrote in The Jews of Islam, the actual state of affairs varied depending on the era, locale, political and economic conditions, the stability of the ruling Islamic regime, and on developments within the Jewish community.

Jews were granted Dhimmi or tolerated status. They paid a special jizya tax to underscore their subordinate position in society. If they missed the point, Islamic tradition allowed for the local Muslim authority to deliver a ceremonial slap on the neck to the Jew upon payment of the levy. Jews were required to wear distinguishing clothes; they were expected to deport themselves deferentially in the presence of Muslims. And unlike everyone else, Jews were not permitted to carry weapons.

On the other hand, Lewis wrote, Jews were not required to convert to Islam, and could enjoy a high degree of acculturation. (They were certainly better off than their coreligionists living under medieval Christendom.)

At any rate, this social contract crumbled in part because the Zionist movement was a direct assault on the Dhimmi principle.

The Yemen experience also reminds us that the Arab world's antagonism to modern values has led it to extended periods of internal instability as well a visceral rejection of Israel for embodying the Western liberal idea.

POLITICAL instability is always "bad for the Jews," and Yemen has long been a volatile mess. The ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden is burdened by internal strife, poverty and a dysfunctional regime. The north and south (where the oil is) are at odds.

The secular-oriented government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Shi'ite, is corrupt and undemocratic. He is battling an insurrection by Shi'ite religious extremists who were once his allies against fanatical Sunnis. Extremist Sunnis, supportive of al-Qaida, are also battling the regime and attacking Western targets.

Yemen has a Sunni majority with a large Shi'ite minority. On top of all this, there are also tribal tensions; the president's tribe dominates the security services.

But the Yemeni masses were able to put some of these differences aside during Operation Cast Lead... and attack the Jews. With few friends, Yemen's president sought to stay in Washington's good graces by trying to protect the besieged remnants of Yemeni Jewry.

AS THE saga of Yemen's Jews now comes to a close, our thoughts are also drawn to Israel's treatment of its Arab minority. Any one of 10 Arab Knesset members could persuasively argue, Jewish Israelis have nothing to be smug about.

Yet if they were fair minded, they might grant that the Jewish state has done a comparatively decent job in bringing its minority citizens into the mainstream.

The War of Civilizations... Continued

[ This is a belated posting of what I wrote for Friday]

The week in blood


It's been another dreadful week in the war of civilizations. On Sunday, 153 people were killed and more than 500 wounded in back-to-back car bombings in Baghdad. On Tuesday in Kabul, five UN staffers and three Afghans were killed in an attack on a UN guesthouse. And on Wednesday in Pakistan, 100 people - mostly women and children - were killed and 160 wounded in a shopping district bombing in Peshawar. The week also saw 24 American service personnel killed in Afghanistan, making 58 fatalities for the month - the deadliest since 9/11.

This is a war of civilizations in the sense that Muslim extremists with imperial ambitions are engaged in a zero-sum struggle against the values associated with modernity - liberty, enlightenment and tolerance.

For now, the battle is being played out mostly in Muslim-majority lands, though New York, London, Madrid and Israel's cities have also been killing fields. Western elites have tended to deny, downplay or reject outright the systemic nature of the Islamist menace. Under these circumstances, there has been no real will to mobilize Western publics for the sacrifices ahead.

IN THIS context, a policy review by the Obama administration is now under way, aimed at developing a strategy for Afghanistan. The mission is to keep the country from again becoming a staging area for attacks against Western targets.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000 US and NATO forces on the ground, is asking for an additional 44,000 troops in order to create a string of Taliban-free zones. But regardless of how many more troops are inserted and how they are deployed, no one suggests the Taliban can be defeated militarily or politically.

This week also saw Washington stunned by news of the poignant resignation of Matthew Hoh, a 36-year-old State Department Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain, out of exasperation over the Afghan war.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote to his superiors. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Hoh continued: "If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaida resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen…"

Hoh's well-founded fear is that a troop presence in xenophobic landscapes fuels indigenous support for the Islamists.

While each front in this global war has its own set of historical, ethnic and religious circumstances, any approach that requires permanently holding territory, combined with an open-ended commitment to nation-building, will prove so costly as to sap what little resolve the American and other Western publics have for the fighting.

Arguably Osama bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks to draw the US into an Afghan quagmire that had chastened the British Empire in the late 1800s and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the late 1900s. Then-president George W. Bush wisely avoided falling into that trap, but tragically fell into another: Iraq.

AN ALTERNATIVE approach, workable in many theaters, is to employ advanced technologies, preemptive strikes and overwhelming firepower to make it hard for the enemy to organize attacks against Western targets. Of course, this would mean disregarding the whinging of the UN Human Rights Council's Philip Alston, who this week took the Obama administration to task for its policy of targeted assassinations of terrorist chieftains.

Israelis have demonstrated that it is possible to defend their country with precisely the means Alston finds so distasteful against an enemy that is driven by an unfortunate - some would say perverted - reading of Islam. Like other Islamist groups, both Hamas and Hizbullah have no compunction about launching attacks from behind their civilian populations. Yet contrary to the mendacious assertions of the Goldstone Report, our army has protected us without losing its soul.

IT IS too early to say whether the attack on two members of a California synagogue early Thursday was the work of a Muslim extremist. But Thursday's shootout between FBI agents and the imam of a jihadi sect in Detroit can legitimately be tallied together with the week's litany of mayhem - in a war some deny is taking place.

Did Abbas really say he's ready to call its quits?

Let Palestinians challenge their leadership


Can it be that we won't have Mahmoud Abbas to "kick around" much longer? Abbas is fed up - with Israel, with Hamas, and with the Obama administration for not delivering Binyamin Netanyahu prostrate.

Abbas reportedly told President Barack Obama that he would not be a candidate in the next Palestinian elections he's called for on January 24 unless Israel capitulated to his demands. He supposedly told aides: "Let the Palestinian people go to elections. If it wants to elect Hamas, let it. If it wants to elect Fatah, let it. What will be is what will be, that's not my business any more."

In an interview with Israel Army Radio yesterday, Saeb Erekat, Abbas's negotiator, replied "No comment" when asked if it was true that his boss, currently on a junket to Casablanca, had told Obama he was considering quitting.

Abbas has certainly done little to extricate himself from an admittedly difficult set of circumstances. Egged on by the White House - which has now apparently reversed course - he refused to negotiate with Israel absent a settlement freeze everywhere over the Green Line. The freeze has always been a red herring. Were a peace deal agreed upon, settlements on the Palestinian side of the divide would anyway be uprooted - so how much difference does it make if a settler family in a place destined not to be incorporated into Israel refurbishes its guest room?

Abbas also insists that negotiations pick up from the point where he rejected Ehud Olmert's final, unprecedentedly generous offer. That is not the way of give-and-take. He should have thought harder before walking away from the best offer the Palestinians ever got from an Israeli prime minister.

Even if negotiations resumed, Abbas's intransigence would obstruct progress.

He insists on an Israeli pullback to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines. He says that after a Palestinian state is founded, millions of Palestinians, descendants of the 700,000 original 1948 refugees, should have a right to return to Israel proper. He would insist on creating a militarized state with the power, for example, to invite Iran to set up military bases just a few miles from Tel Aviv. And he has refused to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

Fatah's General Assembly held in Bethlehem during the summer heard Abbas promise that Fatah would liberate Palestine and "purge" Jerusalem of its "settlers."

If Abbas has been a disappointment to Israel, he must be an even bigger frustration to his own people. The Palestinian polity is today more fragmented than at any time since Yasser Arafat went to his Maker. Chances are slim that presidential and parliamentary elections will actually be held in both the West Bank and Gaza. If they are conducted in the West Bank only, they are likely to harden divisions and only cultivate a deeper sense of disenchantment about the Palestinian future.

It is simply undeniable: Neither Fatah's crooked, dead hand nor Hamas's firm grasp of belligerent medievalism is going to lay the groundwork for a viable Palestinian state.

WHAT TO do? One way forward is to let the Palestinian Authority die a natural death and encourage its replacement with a completely new, apolitical and technocratic provisional Palestinian government.

Its task, with Europeans playing a trusteeship role, would be political institution-building, socialization toward tolerance, the development of transparent government, and day-to-day administration of Palestinian affairs.

Such a provisional government would also assume the PLO's legal standing as representing the Palestinians. But the idea would work only if the Palestinians - perhaps via a referendum in both the West Bank and Gaza - were given the chance to embrace a new beginning... and did so.

A recent New York Times dispatch from Gaza revealed just how fed up modernizing Palestinian elites are with both Fatah and Hamas - while pointing out that they had no mechanism for effecting change.

A referendum that proposes to replace the Fatah-dominated PA and Gaza's Hamas government with an apolitical provisional regime could at least offer Palestinians a means to choose between more Fatah and Hamas, or something far better.

If Abbas is really fed up and ready to go, his departure could presage a revolutionary opportunity.