[2] Biblical law explicitly mandates the death penalty for 36 offenses, from murder and adultery to idolatry and desecration of the Sabbath.
Jewish scholars since the beginning of the common era have developed such restrictive rules to prevent execution of the innocent that the death penalty has become de facto abolished.
Moses Maimonides argued that executing a defendant on anything less than absolute certainty would lead to a slippery slope of decreasing burdens of proof, until we would be convicting merely "according to the judge's caprice".
[3] Conservative Jewish religious leaders and scholars believe that the death penalty should remain unused, even in extreme cases such as political assassination.
[4] When the modern state of Israel was established in 1948, it inherited the British Mandate's legal code, with a few adjustments, and thus capital punishment remained on the books.
During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the first execution took place after Meir Tobianski, an Israeli army officer, was falsely accused of espionage, subjected to a drumhead court martial and found guilty.
In 1962, the second execution—and the only civil execution—in Israel took place when Adolf Eichmann was hanged after being convicted in 1961 of participation in Nazi war crimes relating to the Holocaust.
In 2010, Member of the Knesset Ayoub Kara called for the imposition of the death penalty on the perpetrator of the Tapuah Junction stabbing (2010).
[16] In 2017, political figures including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the penalty to be imposed on the perpetrator of the 2017 Halamish stabbing attack.
[17] In January 2018, a bill making it easier for military courts to hand down death sentences, proposed by members of Yisrael Beiteinu, was approved by the Knesset in a preliminary vote of 52-49 and transferred to the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee to be prepared for its first reading.