WE OUTLASTED PHARAOH, THE NAZIS, AND THE SOVIETS. MODERN ANTISEMITES ARE NEXT

Israel has also expanded capital punishment this year, so the request is not theoretical.

Were I Rom Braslavski, having endured what he endured, I believe I would ask Ben-Gvir the same thing.

If I had been kidnapped, imprisoned for nearly two years, beaten, humiliated, and sexually abused, I might want the men responsible dead. If they were lawfully sentenced to death, I might want to press the button myself.

I cannot condemn Braslavski for feeling that way. But whether his feelings are understandable is not the real question.

The question is whether the State of Israel should grant his request.

It should not.

This is not an argument against capital punishment. If an Israeli court lawfully tries a terrorist, affords him due process, and sentences him to die, I have no moral objection to Israel carrying out that sentence.

I would also allow Braslavski to witness it if he wishes. But do not make him the executioner.

Punishment imposed by law is different from vengeance carried out by the person who was wronged. A legal system exists in part to put judgment between an understandable desire for revenge and the act of killing.

The Torah — the first five books of the Hebrew Bible — does not pretend vengeance is incomprehensible. In Numbers, it recognizes the go’el hadam, the “avenger of blood,” who may kill an intentional murderer.

But the same chapter puts something crucial between the avenger and the accused: judgment. The community must “judge between the slayer and the avenger of blood.” It distinguishes intentional murder from accidental killing and provides cities of refuge for someone who did not deliberately commit murder.

The Torah recognizes vengeance. It does not simply turn the avenger loose.

Later Jewish law became even more reluctant to use capital punishment. The Mishnah, an early foundational compilation of Jewish oral law, records a debate over the Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish high court. A court that executed one person in seven years was called destructive. One rabbi said even once in 70 years was too much. Rabbis Tarfon and Akiva said that had they served on the court, no one would ever have been executed.

Shimon ben Gamliel objected that such reluctance would only increase the number of murderers.

Jewish tradition, in other words, struggled with restraint in taking a life and society’s responsibility to punish those who take innocent lives.

The Talmud, the great collection of rabbinic legal debate, interpreted “love your neighbor as yourself” to require as humane a death as possible for someone lawfully condemned.

Israel confronted the same distinction in the case of Adolf Eichmann, who helped organize the machinery that transported millions of Jews to their deaths. Israel captured him, tried him, convicted him and hanged him in 1962.

Yet Israeli authorities deliberately separated his punishment from private revenge. European Jewish guards were kept away from Eichmann’s immediate custody because many prison employees had survived the camps or lost relatives in the Holocaust. The man ultimately chosen to hang him was Shalom Nagar, a young Yemenite-born prison guard who had not volunteered for the job.

Nagar later described years of nightmares and trauma from carrying out the execution.

If Israel could preserve the distinction between judicial punishment and personal vengeance when the condemned man was Adolf Eichmann, it should preserve it after Oct. 7.

There is another reason to refuse Braslavski’s request: protecting Braslavski himself.

His captors have already put enough violence into his life. Allowing him to execute one of his tormentors might feel as though it restores some of the power they stole from him. Perhaps, for a moment, it would.

But a man already carrying the memories of nearly two years of brutality should not be encouraged to add the memory of personally taking a life.

Braslavski does not owe his tormentors forgiveness. We should not demand that he stop hating them.

If a court lawfully sentences one of them to death, let him be there if he wants to be. Let him see that the terrorist who once held power over him is now powerless. Let him see a Jewish state governed by law pronounce judgment and carry it out.

But do not hand him the button.

Were I in Rom Braslavski’s place, I might want to press it too. I might have asked Ben-Gvir exactly what he did.

That is precisely why Israel should not let either of us do it.

MY COUSIN COINED ‘GENOCIDE.’ THEY STOLE HIS NAME — NOW THEY’RE CALLING OUR FAMILY ‘GENOCIDE DENIERS’

Let him witness justice.

Do not make him its executioner.

Arie Blitz, M.D., M.B.A., is a retired physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas, who writes on foreign policy, medical ethics, and public policy.