A law built to land on Palestinians
When Israel passed a death penalty law aimed only at Palestinians, no one was exactly shocked by the enthusiasm from the far right. The surprise, such as it was, came from how little resistance the measure found inside Israel, even as much of the international community condemned it and the UN human rights chief warned it could amount to a possible “war crime”.
Israeli rights groups and analysts say the law is only the latest in a long series of measures that have normalised what they describe as an apartheid legal system, one in which Palestinians are governed by codified discrimination that benefits Israeli settlers and occupiers.
Under the new law, military courts in the occupied West Bank, which try Palestinians only, will by default impose the death penalty on anyone convicted by Israel’s legal system of carrying out an unlawful killing of Israelis when the court classifies the act as “terrorism”.
Israeli citizens accused of unlawful killings in the occupied West Bank, including the seven Palestinians killed during a recent surge in settler violence after the start of the Israel-United States war on Iran, are instead tried in Israel’s civilian courts.
The numbers tell their own cheerful little story. Conviction rates for Palestinians tried in military courts stand at 99.74 percent. For Israelis tried between 2005 and 2024 for crimes committed in the West Bank, the conviction rate is about 3 percent.
“I wasn’t surprised”
Arab lawmaker Aida Touma-Suleiman of the left-wing Hadash party said she was not shocked by the vote. She left the parliamentary chamber in disgust after the results were announced.
“I wasn’t surprised,” she said. “I knew there’d be scenes of happiness once it passed, and I just didn’t want to be there to see it. I’d already seen enough through three weeks of deliberations. I couldn’t see any more.”
Touma-Suleiman said she expected celebration from far-right anti-Palestinian figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, but found it especially painful that “the public feel exactly the same way”.
She pointed to a broader pattern of laws passed since Israel’s founding in 1948, after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, that have locked inequality into the system.
Among them is the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, which allowed the state to seize land and homes belonging to Palestinians displaced in 1948. Another is the 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which effectively blocks reunification for Palestinian families divided by Israel’s occupation.
Then came the 2018 Nation-State Law, pushed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which enshrined Jewish legal supremacy in identity, settlement and collective rights, downgraded Arabic and declared a constitutional preference for Jewish self-determination.
“Fundamentally, this is an apartheid regime,” Yair Dvir of 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 that context, Dvir argued, the death penalty law is less a departure than a neat summary of the system already in place.
“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.”
He and other analysts said the dehumanisation of Palestinians has gone so far that capital punishment could pass with little opposition and even open celebration from members of parliament.
A legal system that shields abuse
Tirza Leibowitz, deputy director of projects at Physicians for Human Rights - Israel, said the law fits into a wider pattern of violations of international law and Israel’s own basic laws, which at least pretend to uphold democracy and equality.
“It’s not just the prison conditions,” she said, referring to the thousands of Palestinians held in inhumane conditions, often without charge. “It’s a legal system that either refuses to investigate crimes against Palestinians or actively shields the abuse, torture and medical neglect of them.”
More than 100 Palestinians have had their killings in the West Bank since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023 left without full investigation. Leibowitz pointed to the case of 17-year-old Walid Ahmad, whose death from starvation in custody was ruled “undeterminable” by an Israeli judge, as one example of how little value is placed on Palestinian lives.
She also cited the dropping of charges against soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman prison in July 2024. When the arrests were made, far-right protesters, including lawmakers, stormed the detention facility to show support for the soldiers.
“It all sends a message,” Leibowitz said. “Essentially, it normalises the systematic abuse and denigration of Palestinians.”
Touma-Suleiman said she saw the new law as part of the same larger picture. In parliament, while condemning it, she recalled how she had challenged Netanyahu after the 2018 Nation-State Law vote.
“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.”
She also recalled campaigning against Ben-Gvir during the last general election.
“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,” she said.
“He and his allies have now passed a law that makes them both the same thing.”
