The State That Weakens Itself: Compression, Not Confidence |
The State That Weakens Itself: Compression, Not Confidence
On March 30, 2026, the Knesset passed the Penal Law (Amendment – Death Penalty for Terrorists) Bill (2025) by a vote of 62 to 48.
That fact should not be sentimentalized. Israel faces real threats. The trauma of October 7, the memory of bombings and shootings, the pressure of hostage politics, and the recurring spectacle of prisoner exchanges have produced a broad and intelligible demand for a state that is not porous, not indulgent, and not trapped in a revolving door of capture and release. To acknowledge that is not to endorse every law passed under that pressure. It is simply to begin where reality actually is.
A serious state is not tested when times are easy. It is tested under fear, grief, rage, and exhaustion. The real question is therefore not whether Israel has the right to defend its citizens. Of course it does. The real question is whether a state under pressure preserves measure, or whether it begins to confuse finality with strength.
That is the danger here.
The death penalty is politically seductive because it looks decisive. It promises closure. It offers the public the image of a state that can still act absolutely. But the absolute gesture is not yet statecraft. Often it is what appears when statecraft has thinned out. A government that can no longer produce strategic direction begins to produce terminal symbols. It starts to rely on the theater of irreversibility.
This is why the law should be criticized not from softness, but from severity. A severe state is not one that performs death. A severe state is one that makes punishment inescapable without turning it into a ritual of self-dramatization. Full life imprisonment without political bargaining, accelerated proceedings, and the refusal of theatrical execution would express more control, not less. Such an approach would signal control without crossing the threshold of irreversibility that invites both judicial error and moral hardening. The issue is not whether punishment should be hard. The issue is whether the state still knows the difference between hardness and spectacle.
THE SECOND TRAJECTORY
This law does not stand in isolation. It enters an already transformed constitutional and legal field.
On July 19, 2018, Israel enacted Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People. That did not create Israel’s Jewish character from nothing. But it did harden one pole of an older tension into constitutional language.
Then, on March 24, 2026, the Knesset passed a law allowing rabbinical courts and Sharia courts to arbitrate certain civil disputes by consent of the parties. Formally, the law is limited. It excludes criminal and administrative matters and preserves other civil-rights statutes. But limits do not erase direction. The law still expands the recognized jurisdictional role of religious courts within civil life.
Six days later came the death-penalty law.
These three laws are not identical. They should not be collapsed into one melodramatic formula. Israel has always contained a deep tension between Jewish particularity and democratic-universal procedure. Religious jurisdiction was never absent. Dual legal structures in the occupied territories did not begin yesterday. The point is not novelty in the simplistic sense. The point is acceleration and consolidation.
Under prolonged security pressure, the state is shifting further away from an older secular-procedural self-description and toward a denser combination of ethnonational definition, widened religious jurisdiction, and exceptional punitive force. That is not yet theocracy. But neither is it persuasive any longer to describe this trajectory as a merely secular national framework with some residual religious annex.
A JEWISH QUESTION, NOT A PARTISAN ONE
This is where the deepest issue appears.
The question is not whether Israel should cease being Jewish. The question is what kind of Jewish state it is becoming when Jewish political identity, religious jurisdiction, and irreversible state violence increasingly operate on the same field. That is not a left-wing question. It is not a right-wing question. It is a question of political ethics and civilizational proportion.
Many Jews will answer: after the Shoah, after October 7, after decades of rockets, knives, bombings, and open declarations of exterminatory intent, the Jewish state has every right to become harsher toward those who seek its destruction. That argument cannot simply be mocked away. For many Israelis, the threat is experienced as existential. Any text that ignores this merely flatters its own conscience.
But existential fear does not abolish the obligation of judgment. It intensifies it.
Israel has carried out only one execution after a civilian trial: Adolf Eichmann in 1962. That case belonged to the singular abyss of the Holocaust and was never supposed to become the ordinary template of sovereign self-description. To move from that singularity to a default sentence of hanging in the context of an ongoing ethnonational conflict shaped by occupation is not proof of historical seriousness. It is proof that scale and function have changed.
This is why the issue is ethical in the strictest sense. Not ethical as sentimental pity. Ethical as the discipline of measure under pressure. Ethical as refusal to let fear become a legislator of ultimate gestures. Ethical as the capacity of a state to punish gravely without teaching itself that only death sounds convincing.
WHAT THE LAW REALLY ANNOUNCES
The law announces more than it intends.
It announces that the old formula is weakening. It announces that secular-national legitimacy alone no longer seems sufficient to stabilize the collective imagination. It announces that the state increasingly reaches for a thicker mixture of Jewish exclusivity, religious authority, and terminal force in order to sound persuasive to itself and to its public.
This is not confidence. It is compression.
And compression changes the moral and political atmosphere of a state. It narrows the range of available futures. It teaches citizens that where direction fails, final punishment will speak louder. It teaches the state that when it cannot resolve, it can still terminate. That is always a dangerous lesson.
A state does not become stronger by proving that it can kill. Many weak states can kill. Many frightened states can kill. Many disoriented states can kill. Strength lies elsewhere. Strength lies in maintaining asymmetry between justice and vengeance, between severity and theater, between punishment and symbolic self-repair.
That is why this law should be opposed from the standpoint of a harder ethic, not a softer one.
Not because Israel must forget what it faces.
Not because Jewish life is not under threat.
Not because the state has no right to defend itself.
But because a state that needs the gallows to sound sovereign is already admitting that something deeper – the capacity for strategic patience, institutional self-confidence, and measured severity – has begun to fail.
A Jewish state worthy of its history and its future must demand more of itself than symbolic finality in the face of real danger.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig