Israeli apartheid has shown itself again with absolute clarity. Israel wants a new law which would see Palestinians executed for crimes which Israelis are only jailed for. The latest death penalty bill has been heavily criticised by legal experts on that basis.

Lawyers and security experts subjected the bill to analysis. Haaretz reported on 9 February that those experts think the bill would have “grave international implications” and be unlawful.

Haaretz reported on this wild disparity:

One of the bill’s clauses states that the defense minister may allow a military commander to determine that a West Bank resident who intentionally caused the death of a person under circumstances deemed to be terrorism can be punished only by death. The law states that this determination does not apply to an Israeli citizen or resident.

One rule for one group, another for the second.

Killing in the name of…

The Israeli far-right is eager to pass the law. Not that Israeli politics — or the whole ethnosupremacist project in itself — produces much of a left-wing. Of the legal experts who joined the panel to assess the bill:

The only ones who did not express opposition to the law were an Israel Prison Service official and David Bavli, an adviser to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Security minister Ben-Gvir yearns for Palestinians to be exterminated. He visits shackled Palestinians in jail and tells them he wants them to be executed. He does this on camera, for effect.

Tzvika Foghel, chair of the Knesset National Security Committee panel on the bill, is also a far-right figure.

Lilach Wagner, a Justice Ministry official, warned the bill did not reach Israel’s constitutional standards. They claimed that even security officials within the settler state apparatus:

took a cautious approach regarding the question of whether the bill fulfills its stated main purpose, while it is clear that the proposal has weighty international implications.

The bill’s second and third readings lay ahead. And it does not include Hamas members alleged to have carried out the 7 October 2023 attack — a separate bill will cover those individuals.

Apartheid — extermination policy

Middle East Eye reported on 9 February that a ‘Green Mile’-style execution building is already being built to hold and execute Palestinian prisoners:

Training and procedural preparations have also started, while a delegation from the prison service is expected to visit an East Asian country to study the legal and regulatory framework for implementing capital punishment.

The Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said the plans were depraved:

The occupation has not been content with killing dozens of prisoners and detainees since the war of extermination began. Today, it seeks to entrench the crime of execution by enacting a specific law for it.

They added:

This law is an addition to a repressive legislative system that, for decades, has targeted all aspects of Palestinian life. It is another step to entrench the crime and attempt to legitimise it.

A 2017 poll suggested up to 70% of Israelis support capital punishment for Palestinians convicted of terrorism. Israel still has the death penalty on its statutes. The Israeli state appears to have executed two people throughout its brief history. In June 1948, Israel shot one of their own, Meir Tobianksi, for treason. Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi, was the second.

Powerful Israeli figures now seem to want to use the prison system as a new front in its genocide against the Palestinians. Of course, in some way it always was. What lawmakers are proposing is a rapid acceleration. There is nothing anomalous about this. The truth is that settler colonial projects lead here with the sureness of gravity.

Featured image via Amnesty International

By Joe Glenton

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