The Zionist entity’s latest attempt to legalize genocide is both a horrifying development and a convulsive admission of defeat. Having failed to subjugate the resistance through decades of torture, isolation, and deprivation, a flailing Leviathan now reaches for the noose.
On March 30, the Knesset passed the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law, championed by Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, by a 62–48 vote. MK Limor Son Har-Melech, who spearheaded the legislation, called the vote a day on which “Israel chose life,” and framed this grotesque law as an expression of true “Jewish morality.” This from a woman who, weeks earlier, had posed on social media holding a noose and syringe in gleeful celebration of execution methods. The silence inside Israel says everything, and it is not the silence of a society grappling with its fringe. The majority of Israelis are not horrified, they are on board.
As always, the law presents itself in the guise of neutrality, though its structure is anything but. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are tried exclusively in military courts, where execution is now the default sentence for murder. Even before the passage of this legislation, these courts convicted Palestinians at a rate of 96 percent on confessions routinely extracted through torture and coercion. There is neither a right of appeal nor any possibility of clemency. Executions must be carried out within 90 days. Israeli settlers living in the same occupied territory are explicitly exempt, overseen instead by an entirely different legal framework, built to reward their lust for Arab blood. Tried in civil courts, settlers who murder Palestinians are convicted at a rate of around three percent; IOF terrorists are indicted on those same charges at a rate lower than one percent. These are the monsters who will not hang.
This legislation continues Israel’s escalation of lawfare as an element of its campaign for Zionist supremacy. The 2018 Nation-State Law enshrined Jewish ethno-national supremacy as a constitutional principle. Declaring Israel the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people, it formally demoted Palestinian citizens to second-class status in their own country, stripping Arabic of its status as an official language and making non civilian courts, authority to issue the death sentence has been expanded to apply to any person who “intentionally causes the death of another with the aim of harming a citizen or resident of Israel, with the intent of rejecting the existence of the State of Israel.” In practice, this shields Jewish perpetrators while ensnaring 1948 Palestinians and their descendants, the only population inside Israel for whom “rejecting the existence of the state” could plausibly be treated as a criminal motive. mention of equality. In 2023, the Knesset passed a citizenship revocation law making it easier to dispossess Palestinians of residency or nationality upon conviction for acts Israel defines as terrorism — a law currently being used to deport Palestinians from Israel. Since Al-Aqsa Flood, the Knesset has passed over thirty additional laws targeting Palestinian civil and political life: laws criminalizing consumption of media produced by “designated terrorist organisations,” authorizing the dismissal of Palestinian teachers, revoking welfare benefits from families of those convicted of security offences, restricting access to legal counsel, and making permanent the “temporary” emergency measures that had suspended prisoners’ rights.
History has not been kind to this theory of control. The British hanged Irish republicans and produced martyrs whose names are still invoked a century later. The French executed Algerian militants and accelerated the collapse of their entire colonial project. Apartheid South Africa put ANC members on death row and handed the liberation movement its most enduring moral authority. In each case the skewed logic was identical: Raise the cost high enough and resistance becomes irrational. In each case, that logic catastrophically misread the essence of resistance, the most righteous and rational response.
Resistance is a political response to political conditions that remain entirely unaddressed. Movement, construction, access to water, family unification — all are controlled by the military apparatus of a colonial project intent on the eradication of the Palestinian people, but still failing.
This piece appears in the twenty-first issue of The New York War Crimes.
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