When Israel passed a death penalty law that solely targets Palestinians, it was to be expected that the country’s far right would celebrate. Even though much of the international community condemns Israel for this law – the UN human rights chief has called it a potential “war crime” – there has been little reaction inside Israel.
According to Israeli rights groups and analysts, the introduction of the death penalty to people based on their ethnicity is the latest iteration in a long series of legal measures described as normalizing the “apartheid” legal system, under which Palestinians are subject to codified discrimination for the benefit of their Israeli neighbors and occupiers.
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The new law means that military courts in the occupied West Bank, which solely prosecute Palestinians, will, by default, impose the death penalty on anyone found by the Israeli legal system guilty of carrying out the unlawful killing of Israelis when the act is defined by the court as “terrorism.”
In contrast, any Israeli citizen accused of unlawful killing in the occupied West Bank – such as the seven Palestinians killed during the increase in settler violence following the start of the Israel–United States war on Iran – is tried in Israeli civilian courts.
The conviction rate for Palestinians tried in military courts is 99.74 percent. In contrast, the conviction rate for Israelis for crimes committed in the West Bank from 2005 to 2024 is about 3 percent.
harsh discrimination
“I’m not surprised,” said Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Arab lawmaker from the leftist Hadash party. He reacted to the voting results by leaving the parliamentary chamber with disappointment.
“I knew there would be scenes of joy after it passed, and I didn’t want to be there to see it,” she added. “During the three weeks of deliberations I had already seen enough. I couldn’t see anything more.”
Touma-Suleiman said that although he had expected celebration from far-right anti-Palestine figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, it was particularly “painful” that “the public is feeling exactly the same way”.
laws passed since then Establishment of Israel in 1948 Inequality between Palestinians and Israelis has increased, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being forced to flee their homes.
Some of these include the Absentee Property Law of 1950, which enabled the confiscation of land and homes of Palestinians displaced in 1948, and the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law of 2003, which de facto prevents the reunification of Palestinian families divided by Israel’s occupation.
In 2018, nation-state legislation championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu codified Jewish legal supremacy in matters of identity, settlement, and collective rights; Arabic language downgraded; and emphasized the constitutional priority for Jewish self-determination.
“Basically, it is an apartheid regime,” Yair Dvir of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem told Al Jazeera.
He said, “There are many laws that differentiate between Jews and Palestinians. There is nothing new in this. It goes back to the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank in 1967.”
In this light, Dvir said, the new death penalty law was not so much the exception as it was the rule.
“It’s part of the system and it makes up the daily lives of people here,” he said. “It shapes how people see reality. This is not an extraordinary event. This is just an extreme example – depriving Palestinians of the right to life – of what most people in Israel consider normal.”
According to Dvir and other Israeli analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, the dehumanization of Palestinians has deepened to such an extent that the death penalty can not only be passed with little dissent, but is even openly celebrated by members of parliament.
Harassment is increasing rapidly
“This is the latest example in a series of gross violations of international law and Israel’s own basic laws, which provide at least a semblance of democracy and equality,” Tirza Leibowitz, deputy director of projects at Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, told Al Jazeera.
“It is not just prison conditions,” he said, “under which thousands of Palestinians face inhumane conditions, while often being held without charge.” “This is a legal system that either refuses to investigate crimes against Palestinians or actively protects them from abuse, torture and medical neglect.”
There are currently more than 100 Palestinians whose killings in the West Bank have not yet been fully investigated since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023. Leibowitz pointed to a 17-year-old case walid ahmedwhose death by starvation in custody was declared “undetermined” by an Israeli judge, an example of the limited value placed on Palestinian life.
Similarly in July 2024 charges were dropped against soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee in Sde Temen prison. At the time of his arrest, far-right protesters, including lawmakers, stormed the detention facility where the suspects were being held with the support of soldiers.
He said, “All this sends a message… Essentially, it normalizes the systematic abuse and humiliation of Palestinians.” He said the apartheid nature of the new law is the latest piece of a much larger puzzle.
Touma-Suleiman was equally reluctant to accept the new law in isolation. In his speech in parliament condemning it, he referenced a 2018 law recognizing Israel as a Jewish nation-state.
“I was as disappointed then as I am now,” she said, “As I was leaving the House after that vote I met Netanyahu and found myself face to face with him. I told him then that history would remember him as the founder of Israel as an apartheid state. He smiled at me in the same way and said I should be happy living in the Middle East’s only democracy.”
Four years later, during the last general elections, Touma-Suleiman saw Israeli democracy for the first time. “I saw Ben-Gvir campaigning in a very working-class market. The crowd behind him was chanting, ‘Death to the Arabs’. He said, ‘No. Death to the terrorists'”, knowing that as a politician, he could not be seen condemning such speech.
“He and his allies have now passed a law that makes both of them the same thing.”
