What to Do With the Terrorists?

One of the critical questions emerging among the Western commentariat regarding the Israel-Gaza war is what to do with the Hamas terrorists captured by the IDF. Should these be detained as POWs and treated tolerantly, as specified by the Geneva Conventions of 1949? A second question on which the answer to the first depends entails the professional nature and capacity of the captives, that is, are they indeed “soldiers “as understood by the term — members of a nation’s armed services that conduct military operations? Are they members of a resistance “army” who continue to abide by the rules of war, treating captives humanely, caring for the wounded, and sparing vulnerable civilians? Or are they something else, requiring the question to be reformulated or dismissed as immaterial or peripheral?

To put the question more specifically: are Hamas fighters members of a regular army? After all, they do not wear uniforms. They are not regarded as enlisted citizens of a recognized country with its embassies, cadre of ambassadors, ministers of trade, and international alliances. Are they a part of a historically verifiable irridentist force, a company of freedom fighters? The documentary evidence proves otherwise. Are they civilians who have spontaneously taken up arms, as did the American revolutionaries against the British in 1775-83? The obvious answer is that they are not. Are they merely “militants,” as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has piously instructed its journalists to refer to them?

Or are they, to put it bluntly, terrorists — incendiaries, assassins, guerillas, fanatics, savages, avatars of what French philosopher Pascal Bruckner calls “the genocidal imagination” — who do not acknowledge the 1949 Conventions, for whom the internationally validated rules of combat mean nothing, who launch rockets indiscriminately into civilian centers, who hide among their own population and set up command posts and arms depots in hospitals, private homes, religious institutions and schools, who kidnap, rape, mutilate, torture and kill captives and innocents with bestial impunity. The answer is indisputably "Yes." These are war crimes. Anyone who denies that such is the case is personally and ideologically an accessory to terrorism and complicit with the Hamas monstrosities we have witnessed, whether they are members of the elite like the Ivy League university presidents of an antisemitic stripe or the lumpen mob rampaging through the streets and vandalizing Jewish property in Los Angeles.

The question then becomes: Are such proud and jubilant practitioners of war crimes themselves entitled to the provisions and exemptions of the Geneva Conventions designed to prevent the commission of these very war crimes? As to be expected, the jury is out — though, it would appear, not very far out. According to Penal Reform International, “The best—the only—strategy to isolate and defeat terrorism is by respecting human rights, fostering social justice, enhancing democracy and upholding the primacy of the rule of law.”

Similarly, the UN “insists that counterterrorism measures be based on human rights.” Human rights, social justice and the rest of the high-sounding bombast never stopped a terrorist from massacring innocents and rampantly violating every civilized convention. The framers of such noble policies and recommendations never had a child cooked in an oven or a daughter raped, broken, and dispatched with a gun muzzle in her vagina — Hamas specialties.

Writing for National Defense University Press, Nicholas Rostow is more preoccupied with measures intended to prevent terrorist attacks, dwelling on “the difficult legal and policy issues including so-called targeted killing, or the killing of specific individuals because of their involvement in terrorist organizations and operations… [A] state should weigh the totality of the circumstances and conclude that no other action is reasonable to prevent a terrorist attack before engaging in the targeted killing.” We know where his political sympathies lie when he cautions the United States “to apply the Geneva Conventions of 1949 in the conflict with terrorists whether or not it is legally required.” Lucky for Rostow, he was not in the Twin Towers when the planes hit or visiting Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak when the terrorists struck on October 7. Were his daughter among the hundreds of environmentally conscious young people raped, tortured, and shot at the Tribe of Nova Sukot music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, Rostow might have changed his tune.

The general consensus among a myriad of articles, essays, official papers, prestigious sites, journals, wire services, newspapers, and magazines is unsurprising, especially as they proceed from the pens and keyboards of people who have rarely or never had to deal with the barbarous atrocities associated with Islamic terrorists. They write from a “safe space,” clueless and hypocritical. Like bad gamblers, they are determined to keep chasing their losses.

The argument against the death penalty for terrorists whose heinous crimes and inhuman cruelty are their stock in trade is advanced not only from a humane and civilized perspective but also from a presumably strategic standpoint. An earlier and notable example is provided by author and former National Security Council officer Jessica Stern, who made the point in a Feb. 28, 2001, article for the New York Times titled “Execute Terrorist at Our Own Risk.”

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As a nation, she writes, especially considering the career to that date of “Mr. Bin Laden,” as she bizarrely addresses the terrorist-in-chief and future mass murderer, “we have decided that terrorism that results in loss of life should face the possibility of the death penalty. But is this wise?…One can argue about the effectiveness of the death penalty generally,” she continues. But when it comes to terrorism, the execution of terrorists “plays right into the hands of our adversaries. We turn criminals into martyrs, invite retaliatory strikes and enhance the public relations and fund-raising strategies of our enemies.” Rather, “Our most powerful weapon against terrorists is our commitment to the rule of law.” In other words, the very rule of law which allows the terrorists to operate freely among us. The issue is moot.

Israel’s penal code includes capital punishment but only for exceedingly rare cases — Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann was one of only two people executed by the state in almost 75 years. The other was patriot Meir Tobianski, an Israeli Defense Forces officer who was falsely arrested and executed for treason in 1948, a terrible injustice scarcely redeemed by posthumous exoneration. Eichmann’s case argues for invoking capital punishment, Tobianski’s for sober judgment and administrative reticence. Although Israeli military courts retain the power to hand down the death penalty by a unanimous decision of three judges, this has never again been implemented.

The debate both in Israel and the so-called international community about the applicability of legal execution for terrorists who violate all the civilized norms of conduct in peacetime and the rules of engagement in war and whose feral viciousness is almost beyond description shows no sign of relenting. In my estimation, there can be no forgiveness for acts of such indescribable barbarity as evinced by Hamas. In an address given by Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand to the United Nations, she spoke of “raw footage” she had been shown that “takes your breath away with the sheer level of evil it depicts.” These human aberrations should be shown no mercy.

But it doesn’t stop there. More detail is required concerning not only the actions of Hamas but also the anti-Jewish and antisemitic rhetoric befouling the public forum. As Monica Showalter writes in American Thinker with regard to the latter, “The clowns howling said nothing about Israeli women being raped, or Israeli men being raped, or women and children tied together and burned to death. They said nothing about a mass spray shooting at a concert that left more than 200 dead in that place alone. They said nothing about the taking and torturing, raping and beating of hostages. They were silent when a young Israeli woman was dragged through the streets of Gaza, nearly naked, spat on, danced around, and then beheaded and some of her remains left in some road where people could find it. They said nothing when Hamas baked a baby in an oven.” They would probably mourn the death in an Israeli air strike of the Gaza academic who jokingly wondered whether the baby was “baked with or without baking powder.”

In justifying or supporting Hamas, such people merit neither respect nor civil companionship. Though not themselves in the field of slaughter, they share the podium of infamy with the terrorists. For the fact is that Hamas killers deserve neither sympathy nor acquittal. Those who have been taken captive by the IDF are not merely enemy combatants, they are war criminals. Neither clemency nor strategic considerations apply. The gentle ladies writing for the site Imamother concur. One asks why there is no law allowing capital punishment for terrorists, “So they are never released on exchanges.” These Hamas terrorists are beyond the pale of civilized humanity, freaks of the demonic substratum of the human soul, killers from the egg. Repercussions be damned. The death penalty is their condign reward.

In conclusion, it is only fair to state that there may be one exception to the rule of execution I have proposed, and that involves the thorny and perhaps insoluble, subjective-objective problem involving hostages. If one were a hostage of the terrorists, or if a loved one or fellow citizen were held by a ruthless tribe of ideological maniacs, one would almost surely argue against the death penalty and insist on a prisoner swap. On the other hand, one recalls that in 1989, Yahya Sinwar, the political leader of Hamas and the mastermind behind the October 7 bloody incursion into Israel, was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences for abducting and murdering two Israeli soldiers, but was released in 2011, part of a massive prisoner exchange in which Israeli officials freed more than 1000 Palestinian jihadists for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been captured by Hamas.

The chickens came to roost some twelve years later in the form of unspeakable horror, over 1,200 Israeli casualties, and 240 abductees. Many of the thousand prisoners freed by the Israelis were undoubtedly part of the invasionary force and, as of this writing, Sinwar is still at large. I cannot resolve the issue. If my wife were a prisoner of Hamas, I would lobby for clemency, knowing full well that I would be putting the wives of many other unfortunates in future jeopardy. This probably makes me as culpable as those cheerleaders for Hamas whom I find despicable — though, of course, they have nothing and no one at risk, so perhaps they are merely terrorists by proxy and thus even more inexpiable than those trapped in a double bind.

But in situations where there is no need to resolve the issue of hostages, the sentence stands. Evil demands its recompense. The death penalty for sadistic and unpardonable acts of terrorist depravity is not up for dispute. It is mandatory.

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