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 as much of the international community roundly condemns Israel for the law – with the United Nations human rights chief calling it a possible “war crime” – there has been little pushback inside Israel.
According to Israeli rights groups and analysts, the introduction of a death penalty targeting people by their ethnicity is just the latest iteration in a long line of legal measures described as having normalised an “apartheid” legal system under which Palestinians are subject to codified discrimination to the benefit of their Israeli neighbours and occupiers.
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The new law means that military courts in the occupied West Bank, which solely try Palestinians, will, by default, impose the death sentence on anyone found guilty by Israel’s legal system of carrying out an unlawful killing of Israelis when the act is defined by the court as “terrorism”.
Conversely, any Israeli citizen charged with an unlawful killing in the occupied West Bank – such as the seven Palestinians killed during a spike in settler violence that has followed the start of the Israel-United States war on Iran – are tried in Israel’s civilian courts.
Conviction rates for Palestinians tried in military courts run to 99.74 percent. In contrast, the conviction rate from 2005 to 2024 for Israelis tried for crimes committed in the West Bank is about 3 percent.
Hardwired discrimination
“I wasn’t surprised,” Arab lawmaker Aida Touma-Suleiman of the left-wing Hadash party said. She responded to the voting results by leaving the parliamentary chamber in disgust.
“I knew there’d be scenes of happiness once it passed, and I just didn’t want to be there to see it,” she continued. “I’d already seen enough through three weeks of deliberations. I couldn’t see any more.”
Touma-Suleiman said that while she expected celebrations from far-right anti-Palestinian figures, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, it was particularly “painful” seeing “the public feel exactly the same way”.
Laws passed since Israel’s inception in 1948 at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced to flee from their homes have entrenched inequality between Palestinians and Israelis.
Some of these include the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950, which enabled the seizure of land and homes belonging to Palestinians displaced in 1948, and 2003’s Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which in effect blocks reunifications for Palestinian families divided by Israel’s occupation.
In 2018, the Nation-State Law championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu codified Jewish legal supremacy in matters of identity, settlement and collective rights; downgraded the Arabic language; and asserted a constitutional preference for Jewish self-determination.
“Fundamentally, this is an apartheid regime,” Yair Dvir from the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told Al Jazeera.
“There are entire sets of laws that differentiate between Jews and Palestinians. There’s nothing new in this. It goes back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 and the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank in 1967,” he said.
In this light, Dvir said, the new death penalty law was not the exception as much as it was the rule.
“It’s part of the system and what makes up daily life for people here,” he said. “It shapes how people see reality. This is not an extraordinary incident. It’s just an extreme example – denying Palestinians the right to life – of what most people in Israel accept as normal.”
According to Dvir and other Israeli analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, the dehumanisation of Palestinians has deepened to the point where capital punishment not only can pass with little dissent but is also openly celebrated by parliament members.
Fast-tracked oppression
“This is just the latest example in a series of blatant violations of international law and Israel’s own basic laws, which provide at least the fig leaf of democracy and equality,” Tirza Leibowitz, the deputy director of projects at Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s not just the prison conditions,” under which thousands of Palestinians are subject to inhumane conditions while often being held without charge, she said. “It’s a legal system that either refuses to investigate crimes against Palestinians or actively shields the abuse, torture and medical neglect of them.”
There are currently more than 100 Palestinians whose killings in the West Bank since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023 have yet to be fully investigated. Leibowitz pointed to the case of 17-year-old Walid Ahmad, whose death by starvation in custody was ruled “undeterminable” by an Israeli judge, as an example of the limited value placed on Palestinian lives.
Equally telling was the dropping of charges against soldiers alleged to have sexually abused a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Temain prison in July 2024. At the time of their arrests, far-right protesters, including lawmakers, stormed the detention facility where the suspects were being held in a show of support for the soldiers.
“It all sends a message. … Essentially, it normalises the systematic abuse and denigration of Palestinians,” she said, adding that the apartheid nature of the new legislation was just the latest piece in a much larger puzzle.
Touma-Suleiman was equally reluctant to regard the new law in isolation. In her speech in parliament denouncing it, she referenced the 2018 law enshrining Israel as a Jewish nation-state.
“I was as disgusted then as I am now,” she said, “I met Netanyahu as I was leaving the chamber after that vote and found myself eye to eye 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 way he does and said I should be happy to live in the Middle East’s only democracy.”
Four years later, during the last general election, Touma-Suleiman witnessed that Israeli democracy firsthand. “I saw Ben-Gvir campaigning in a fairly working-class market. The crowd behind him was chanting, ‘Death to Arabs’. He turned, saying, ‘No. Death to terrorists”, knowing that as a politician, he couldn’t be seen condoning such speech.
“He and his allies have now passed a law that makes them both the same thing.”
