Just as Israel’s new racist, vengeful, unjust and dangerous death penalty law defiled last week’s observance of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) and Yom Hazikaron (Israeli Remembrance Day), so, too, does it now violate Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day) commemorating the signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. Israel rightfully marks this celebratory day annually with a variety of official and unofficial ceremonies and observances intended to honor the establishment of a state that its founders intended to reflect the very highest of Jewish values. This year, as Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and countless others have argued, the Knesset’s March 30 passage of the “Death Penalty for Terrorist Law” in Israel betrays the most basic of those values: Judaism’s inherent affirmation of life itself. The monstrous shadow of this abominable law profanes any festivities slated for the observation of Israel’s Independence Day beginning at sunset on April 21.

Current Supreme Court justices need only look to the words of their own renowned forefather, Justice Haim Herman Cohen (1911-2002),  to see how capital punishment is anathema to Jewish – and Israeli – values this Yom Haatzmaut. At the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Cohn was asked to help create its legal system, which he did by combining Jewish, Ottoman, Roman, and British legal traditions. An ardent opponent of capital punishment, including cases against terrorists, he resigned as state attorney to avoid having to serve as a prosecutor in the 1961 death penalty trial of Adolf Eichmann, against which he famously stated: “We cannot uproot evil by recycling it through us.” Cohn was appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court in 1960 and served for 21 years, including a period as the court’s deputy chief justice. He founded the Israeli branch of Amnesty International and was the first president of the Israeli Association of Civil Rights. His books included “The Trial and Death of Jesus” and “Human Rights and Jewish Law,” and he received the Israel Prize in 1980.

In his 1994 essay, “The Values of a Jewish and Democratic........

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