On 30 March 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a law that will be remembered as one of the most explicit acts of institutionalised ethnic discrimination in the modern democratic world. By 62 votes to 48, Israel’s parliament approved mandatory capital punishment to be carried out by hanging within 90 days while sharply limiting the possibility of clemency for Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis in acts classified as terrorism.
This law applies in practice overwhelmingly to Palestinians tried in military courts in the occupied West Bank. In theory, Israelis could also be executed. However, in practice, it almost certainly will not, as the law stipulates its passing for attacks intended to “negate the existence of the State of Israel.” This clause is a mechanism for arbitrary prosecution and broad enough to frame any Palestinian defendant as an existential threat. Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, condemned the law as discriminatory and deeply disturbing and would “constitute a war crime.” Supporters of the law argue that such measures are necessary to deter violence in the context of a stark power imbalance between the Israeli state and Palestinians under occupation.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, who championed the legislation, celebrated its passage while wearing a noose-shaped lapel pin. This symbolism is self-explanatory. It is not merely a domestic legal matter pertinent to Israel’s sovereignty. Instead, it is the codification of a two-tiered system of justice based entirely on ethnicity. The international community, as so often, has retreated into selective morality – substituting condemnation for legal action. Before the law’s passage, the foreign ministers of Australia, Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom acknowledged its de facto discriminatory character. After its enactment, that clarity gave way to muted caution, with rhetoric replacing action.
Israel’s Knesset didn’t invent this logic of differential justice, and this tragic development has historical analogues that span three millennia. The ancient Code of Hammurabi delineated penalties by rank, assigning unequal consequences for identical offences. Similarly, Roman law instituted a hierarchy through its divisions between citizens and non-citizens, honestiores (elites) and humiliores (commoners), with radically different punishmentsattached to each. Even in classical Athens, celebrated as the cradle of democracy, legal equality was confined to citizens alone. The resident foreigners, called Metics, who occupied a substantial portion of the population, were excluded from political participation and subjected to legal discrimination. Religious justice is a myth.
Beyond the Mediterranean, similar patterns prevailed. In ancient India, the Manu Smriti codified a system in which punishments varied by caste, embedding hierarchy into the structure of law itself. In imperial China, the Tang Code – frequently cited as a model of early legal ‘sophistication’ – calibrated penalties according to social rank.
In Christian Europe, Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council installed what scholars now recognise as racial law in the Latin West, ordering Jews and Muslims to mark themselves off by a difference of dress. England’s 1275 Statute of Jewry mandated residential segregation for Jews and Christians, inaugurating the beginning of the ghetto in Europe. Medieval Christian theologians recast the killing of non-Christians in moral terms. Bernard of Clairvaux infamously argued that the killing of a pagan was not homicide but malicide – the extermination of incarnated evil, not the killing of a person.
Connecting these historical episodes is indeed cruel. However, it shows the consistent deployment of legal architecture to formalise the lesser worth of a designated group. In such a case, discrimination is not merely a social evil but a statutory fact. Ironically, each such system presented itself as rational, strategically necessary, existentially required and often divinely sanctioned. The Israeli Knesset’s ruling belongs to this lineage and is a stark reminder of the shallow progress humans have made in civilisational terms. The instruments of law are deployed to jeopardise the most basic rights of fellow human beings. As in ancient times, universal justice systems are a myth, even in the so-called knowledge societies of the twenty-first century.
The new law’s discriminatory design is deliberate. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are tried exclusively in Israeli military courts, a system that Israeli civil rights organisations such as B’Tselem, Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), and Yesh Din have documented as inherently unequal. Within this framework, convictions are often extracted through torture.
Into this system, Israel has now introduced mandatory death sentences – with no requirement for judicial consensus, no right to clemency, and execution mandated within 90 days. The legislation stipulates that no pardon may be granted, preventing future political or legal intervention to commute or alter the sentence. The law further forbids prisoner exchanges – removing the diplomatic route that returned Israeli hostages from Gaza just months ago. This law does more than punish; it constrains the legal space within which Palestinians can resist occupation and contest structures of dispossession and dehumanisation imposed upon them.
The passage of this law is the latest and most extreme expression of a socio-legal system that scholars, jurists, and human rights organisations have for decades identified with Israel as constituting a system of apartheid.
Among the clearest articulations of this assessment came from Israel’s human rights organisation B’Tselem, which concluded as early as 2002 that Israel has created in the occupied territories a regime of separation based on discrimination by applying two different legal systems in the same area. Ethnicity and nationality became determinants of individual and social rights, reminiscent of apartheid South Africa. This view has also been echoed by Israeli leaders such as Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet. In his memoir, he wrote, “Israel is an apartheid state…two sets of laws, rules and standards, and two infrastructures…we’ve already created an apartheid system in Judea and Samaria, where we control Palestinians by force, denying the self-determination.”
These accusations have since been reinforced by most human rights agencies and legal institutions in the world. Amnesty International has concluded that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control, amounting to apartheid as prohibited in international law. The International Court of Justice, in its 2024 advisory opinion, found that Israel’s occupation constitutes systemic discrimination in breach of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid.
Here, the South African experiment with apartheid finds resonance. The UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, who lived through apartheid, reported after extensive study that Israeli practices in the occupied territory are not only reminiscent of – and in some cases worse than – apartheid as it existed in South Africa. The West Bank’s Area A enclaves and the Gaza Strip have been compared to the Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa – territorial segregations designed not just to deny political freedom but to subjugate a population designated as subhuman.
International law provides clear prohibitions regarding the actions of occupying powers. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs the conduct of occupying powers, prohibits the application of legislation by an occupying power to an occupied population that is not applicable to the occupying power’s own citizens. Under international law, Israel’s parliament should not be legislating in the West Bank, which is not sovereign Israeli territory. The Palestinian Authority has described the law as a war crime that breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Israel is a signatory, requires that the death penalty be imposed only for the most serious crimes, subject to full fair trial guarantees, with the right to seek pardon or commutation. This law removes all three conditions simultaneously. The Rome Statute – under which Prime Minister Netanyahu is already subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant – recognises the persecution of an identifiable group through discriminatory denial of fundamental rights as a crime against humanity. A law that mandates death for one ethnicity while explicitly exempting another is not a borderline case. It is a textbook case of apartheid.
The philosopher David Livingstone Smith has argued that dehumanisation is a central precondition for atrocity – it removes the psychological inhibitions that ordinarily prevent normal human beings from inflicting monstrous harm on fellow humans. This new Israeli law has evolved from the endpoint of a longer psychological process – the gradual normalisation of a target population as subhumans in the political and cultural imagination of the dominant group.
This dehumanisation has been systematically constructed over decades through the language of Israeli political and military discourse – the routine description of Palestinians as human beasts, terrorists by nature, existential threats rather than people with rights. It corrodes the institutions and the society that permit it. A recent survey indicated that 82 per cent Jewish Israelis favoured the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. A parliament that passes a racially discriminatory death penalty law has not merely violated international norms. It has retrogressed its own moral architecture.
It is interesting to note that the same Western governments that invoked the language of international law and the rules-based order to justify sanctions against apartheid South Africa have responded to the formal codification of ethnic discrimination in capital punishment with diplomacy of convenience. This is the hypocrisy trap in its most naked form. Amnesty International has called on the international community to exert maximum pressure on Israeli authorities to immediately repeal this law, fully abolish the death penalty, and dismantle all laws and practices that contribute to the system of apartheid against Palestinians. That call will, in all probability, go unheeded by governments with the leverage to act on it.
In 1962, Israel executed Adolf Eichmann – the Nazi war criminal – the only person put to death under Israeli law in the state’s history. Capital punishment was reserved for crimes so inhuman, so historically singular, that they stood apart from ordinary legal categories. Sixty-four years later, Israel has passed a law that could send Palestinians to the gallows by simple judicial majority, without clemency, within 90 days, for acts defined under a terrorism framework that explicitly excludes Jewish perpetrators of equivalent violence.
The distance between 1962 and 2026 is profoundly moral. What makes it particularly disconcerting is not merely the moral decline but its ideological foundation. The Holocaust’s memory, rather than becoming a moral obligation to resist dehumanisation wherever it appears, has been instrumentalised by the Israeli state as a shield against accountability – a permanent claim to victimhood that sanitises its crimes against humanity. This inversion – where the memory of genocide becomes the justification for institutionalised discrimination – is not a failure of Judaism. It is a failure of the political class and its paranoid sympathisers who have weaponised that memory into a permanent alibi for impunity.
The noose on Ben-Gvir’s lapel is not a provocation. It is a window into the dehumanising logic that made the law possible – the display of an execution instrument as a badge of pride. It is also an emphatic statement of confidence – the confidence of a government that has learned, through long experience, that the world will watch, express concern, and do nothing. Hannah Arendt understood this indifference with chilling clarity: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.” In that hesitation, in that quiet abdication of judgment, the outcome is grimly predictable. And the noose tightens.
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