Itamar Ben-Gvir's new bloodthirsty pin is a cruel mockery of the struggle for hostages' lives

Today, Israel's Minister for National Security, MK Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Jewish supremacist who heads the "Jewish Power" political party, appeared in the Knesset with a new pin attached to his suit. The yellow pin depicts a noose, coiled and waiting for victims, as its bearer pushes for a law that would sentence people found guilty of terrorism to death.

The death penalty has been used once in Israel: Adolf Eichmann was found guilty of orchestrating the deaths of millions of Jews in the Holocaust and was executed. The death penalty has never been used since.

There are good reasons that it hasn't been used since. The death penalty is irreversible. The justice system is not perfect, and wrongful convictions do happen. With a death penalty, there can be no retrial, no reevaluation of evidence, no new witnesses - the person is dead. End of story.

The death penalty is inherently an extremely dangerous tool to hand to a state. Once you have established that the state has a right to kill people as punishment, then you have endangered everyone in reach of that state. Even if there are clearly defined and strictly enforced restrictions on that power, the law can always be changed, and the application expanded, because you have normalized the power over life and death as being in the hands of the state. Who deserves life and who does not becomes a matter to be debated in the lawmakers' halls.

This law is not primarily aimed at Israeli citizens - although it certainly could be used against Arab Israeli citizens, and Betzalel Smotrich (another Jewish supremacist) has already indicated that it could be used against "traitors" from within. The primary target is Palestinians, who are not Israeli citizens, who are not represented in the Knesset, and who cannot rely on impartial judges or competent legal representation. There is no guarantee for a fair trial. The law would hand a state the power to kill individuals convicted in a court in what is to them a foreign state, where the courts may be run by prejudiced judges and lawyers who are culturally trained to accept the word of the prosecuting security institutions (with those institutions themselves undergoing radicalization and politicization under the rule of Netanyahu's far-right government).

A law enacting the death penalty for terror convicts would be a nightmare for human rights, justice, the opportunity for peace - and indeed Jewish values. Jewish tradition states that the death penalty has never been used, and Rabbinic law intentionally makes it practically impossible to convict someone to death even if there were a functioning Sanhedrin (Jewish Supreme Court). The Jewish supremacists don't seem to care much for Jewish values.

And so, Itamar Ben-Gvir now sports a yellow noose pin in support of the death penalty. Why yellow?

A yellow ribbon, often worn as a pin, is the symbol of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which was established after October 7th to advocate for the immediate return of the 251 hostages taken by Hamas and other groups that day, as well as the four hostages who were being held before then (Hisham al-Sayed, Avera Mengistu, and the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul). The Forum declared that they would not rest until the last hostage was returned. (Today, only one hostage is left in Gaza, Ran Gvili.) The Forum organized weekly protests, calling to end the war in exchange for a hostage deal that would see as many hostages as possible return alive, outside of the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv and outside of the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem. (I attended protests in both locations.)

The right-wing parties, intent on "total" military victory, derided those protests, and claimed that the hostage families were acting on behalf of Hamas. Ben-Gvir himself proudly declared that he had personally ensured that hostage deals failed to materialize, preferring instead to prolong the war, at the cost of the lives of hostages, soldiers, and Palestinian citizens. 

Ben-Gvir's yellow noose pin is a mockery of the yellow hostage ribbon pin. After doing everything he could do prevent the return of the hostages, he has now co-opted their symbolism for a bloodthirsty cause. He has perverted a symbol of protest that called for life into a symbol that calls for death. There's been enough death already.