On the Right - Israeli Bully Boy?(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, MARCH 6

The retiring ambassador to France, Mr. Felix Rohatyn, wrote recently an op-ed urging that the United States repeal its capital-punishment laws. The reasons for it begin, he said, with the disgrace attached to civilized (as a diplomat, he did not use that word) nations that still do it. A second reason is the conviction that death sentences do not keep people from doing things they ought not to do, quite the contrary: They encourage people to flame out in the same way. And, of course, the old reason: to sanction the clinical ending of life in an execution chamber stirs up the wrong kind of appetite in the younger generation, acclimatizing them to the culture of violence.

So what are the Israelis going to do with Avigdor Lieberman?

I cannot find that the new "national infrastructures minister" for the upcoming government of Gen. Sharon has actually championed capital punishment. It has, of course, not been used by Israel, with the single exception of Adolf Eichmann, whose hanging was less an execution than a votive candle to 6 million Jews murdered. The Israelis aren't against killing people, but they don't want to do so pursuant to judicial processes. The Israelis are renowned for their ability to fix their sights on especially nubile enemies of the state and dispatching them through well-planned commando strikes.

Such activity is paramilitary in character, but we are entitled to wonder how Minister Lieberman is going to harmonize with the Israeli tradition against capital punishment. A Palestinian straps a bomb to his torso and rides a bus into a crowded neighborhood and kills men, women, and children. Such terrorists are most often killed themselves in the course of the act, but not always. They are caught, tried as terrorists-and imprisoned. There are those who are willing to opine that their lives in prison are worse than execution, but that argument can always be made. Timothy McVeigh has made it. It is said from time to time about Rudolf Hess, sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg. After 40 years or so there were moves to let him go-vetoed by the Soviets; and he lingered at Spandau prison, the sole inhabitant of it, until finally he contrived to commit suicide. But people who are before sentencing judges are ...