BEIRUT, Lebanon — Israel’s parliament has passed a controversial bill expanding the use of the death penalty for terrorism-related offenses, a move critics say institutionalizes a discriminatory legal framework that overwhelmingly targets Palestinians and accelerates executions with limited oversight.
On March 30, the Israeli Knesset passed a bill to expand the use of the death penalty for “terrorism-related offenses,” making it clear that it would primarily be applied to Palestinians, according to Human Rights Watch.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the Center for Preventive Action notes, is a long-standing conflict, stemming from the 19th century, when Jewish people “increasingly migrated to Ottoman Palestine to escape antisemitism in Europe,” which was “intimately linked to Jewish religion, culture, and history.”
According to Reuters, in 1947, “the United Nations General Assembly agreed to plan to partition (Palestine) into Arab and Jewish states.” While Jewish leaders accepted the plan, “the Arab League rejected the proposal.”
Later, on May 14, 1948, “Israel’s founding father … proclaimed the modern state of Israel.” A day after this declaration, “troops from five Arab states” attacked Israel. With Israel coming out victorious, “some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes, ending up in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as in Gaza, the West Bank and East Bank Jerusalem.”
According to Reuters, in 1967, Israel “made a pre-emptive strike against Egypt and Syria,” where it captured “the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt.”
Eventually, in 2005, “Israel unilaterally withdrew settlers and soldiers from Gaza.” This led to Hamas winning “parliamentary elections in 2006” and seizing “full control of Gaza in 2007.”
Since then, there have been “several rounds of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel and is regarded as a terrorist organization by Israel, the European Union, the United States and other countries.”
According to the Center for Preventive Action, in October 2023, “the Israeli cabinet formally declared war against Hamas” and to “carry out a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza.”
With ongoing conflict, there have been “more than seventy thousand Gazan deaths.”
In recent months, according to Mariam Barghouti from Al Jazeera, “not only has the frequency of Israeli attacks against Palestinians increased, but the violence has also become more ferocious and savage.” With these attacks, “not a single Israeli has been held accountable for these crimes.”
Now, Human Rights Watch reports that the new “discriminatory” bill passed by the Israeli Knesset “imposes the death penalty for the deliberate killing of a person with the intention of ‘negating the existence of the State of Israel.’” This approves “execution by hanging, restricts access to legal counsel and visits from family members, limits external oversight, and grants immunity to those involved in carrying out executions.”
What makes this bill discriminatory is that it “imposes the death penalty for killings classified as acts of terrorism, even without prosecutorial request” and “prohibits commutation of sentences and mandates execution within an accelerated timeframe of 90 days.”
In addition, “Israeli citizens and residents are explicitly excluded from this provision,” applying this bill exclusively to Palestinians, “while Israeli settlers are tried in civilian courts.”
Within the military trials that Palestinians face, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem stated that they have “an approximately 96% conviction rate, based largely on ‘confessions’ extracted under duress and torture during interrogations.”
Barghouti cites a U.N. report released in January, stating that “such laws by Israel are designed to obliterate Palestinian self-determination and destroy possibilities of territorial, political, or cultural continuity.”
According to Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, “Israeli officials argue that imposing the death penalty is about security, but in reality, it entrenches discrimination and a two-tiered system of justice.”
Coogle continued, stating, “Combined with its severe restrictions on appeals and its 90-day execution timeline, this bill aims to kill Palestinian detainees faster and with less scrutiny.”
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Not surprisingly given where it was published, this article is missing some crucial elements to even pretend to be objective, i.e. what defined once upon a time authentic journalism.
Starting with the good news, the historical narrative is uncharacteristically accurate for the most part. This is not the usual Palestinian narrative which paints them as hapless, innocent, harmless victims of the mean “colonizing” Jews. The story here clearly shows for once their primary responsibility in getting themselves in the mess they’ve consistently stayed in for more than a century.
Now the bad news. The author failed to look for any source that would balance (i.e. contradict) the statements she borrows exclusively from well-known anti-Israel sources (i.e. not reliable) such as Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, and of course the UN circus. She did not try to understand, let alone analyze the reasons for which an overwhelming majority of the Knesset voted this new law.
She should have mentioned at least two of them. The first one is to discourage the still ongoing “pay-for-slay” policy of the Palestinian Authority rewarding Palestinian terrorists for having killed or maimed Israelis (most of them civilians, which is the very definition of terrorism). The prospect of being hanged instead of enjoying a comfortable retirement pension should diminish some Palestinians’ urge to choose that (bad) career move. The second one is to put an end to the favorite Palestinian tactic of kidnapping Israelis and then negotiating their release in ridiculously lopsided deals such as 1 Israeli (Gilad Shalit) freed in exchange of more than 1,000 Palestinian killers. If these would-be killers are instead killed rather than imprisoned with good chances of being freed later, there are also good chances that the number of candidates will nosedive sharply.
Yes, JJS, that was exactly my impression of the article. I was lured in by the surprisingly fair and balanced brief history leading up to the main points at the end. I hesitate to give credit for that due exactly what you noted, the one-sided sources of the modern day — and the reason is that the most brilliant propaganda is made up mostly of truths so that the reader is lured in “oh yeah, that’s all true”, so when the statement is made the author is making, you may assume as a casual reader, ‘oh, this is probably true, too’. In the middle east especially, if one isn’t taking in multiple sources often with conflicting viewpoints, one don’t stand a chance of understanding what is going on. I appreciate an Israeli perspective being given as well by JJS. I do not say this to even condone the law, just in expanding understanding. I also do not believe the current system in Area C of the West Bank is sustainable or even morally Ok, and goes for actions on both sides of the wall and of sides, and I wouldn’t even try to suggest a solution as it is so complex and disputed and no one’s side of this is clean. Is eternal conflict or genocide on either side the only solutions? God I hope not.
I concur with your assessment A.M., of course, but not on your views regarding Area C. There is nothing “immoral” there:
1. the “West Bank” didn’t belong to anyone since the time of the Ottoman Empire (i.e. until the end of WWI).
2. Jordan appropriated it illegally during the war of independence that led to the birth of Israel in 1947, when the Jordanians tried precisely to prevent that birth).
3. Jordan attacked Israel again in 1967 but lost this time and that’s how the West Bank fell into the hands of the Israelis, who had never intended to appropriate it the way the Jordanians had one in 1947, with the exception of Jerusalem. When a country attacks another (in violation of Art. 2 of the UN Charter – adopted in 1945), the country attacked has every right to defend itself (Art.51 of the same UN Charter). That’s all Israel did, and no one should fault it for that.
4. For years after that, Israel nurtured the illusion that it would eventually trade the West Bank against peace with the newly invented “Palestinians” (created out of thin air in 1965 by Arafat), but said Palestinians rejected every offer. It was never enough. 92%? Not enough. 98%? Not enough. Etc…
5. The Israelis under Rabin thought they’d be really smart and offer a deal that Arafat could not refuse:
a) end of exile in Tunis (where he and his merry band of terrorists had been shipped from Lebanon after the Israeli army reached the Lebanese capital).
b) recognition by Israel of the PLO as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and the official interlocutor of Israel to negotiate a peace.
c) abandonment of all terrorist actions by the Palestinians.
Everyone, even the least informed, know what happened next. One Intifada (insurrection), two intifadas, three intifadas, non-stop Palestinian terrorist attacks to this day. And in the meantime, tired of waiting for the Palestinians to behave like responsible adults, more and more Israelis moved to the West Bank (renamed appropriately Judea and Samaria after the two old Jewish kingdoms that existed there millenia ago), making it more and more difficult for the Palestinians to have a homogeneous territory that they could call their own. Well, when you want to make a deal with a partner that keeps putting you off, you’d be a moron to not conclude at some point that it’s never going to happen, so why waste more time with that partner? That’s the game the so-called “Palestinian Authority” put in place by the Oslo Accords has been playing non-stop, and it’s now reaching the end of that road.
In one last delusional attempt at appearing as the good guy (particularly to counter an ever more critical world opinion), Israel vacated Gaza in 2005 and gave it all free and clear to the Palestinians. We also know what happened next: five successive wars started by Hamas, the last one triggered by the horrendous 10/7/23 massacre of 1200+ defenseless Israeli civilians including children, women raped before they were killed, elderly people shot on the spot and 250+ hostages dragged into the living hell of the Gaza tunnels). If you were an Israeli, don’t you think you’d get a little tired of having tried to be so nice for so long and only gets killings and condemnations in return?
Conclusion: Israel has every right both under international law and from a moral standpoint to claim and keep the entire West Bank and annex it in full. The Palestinians were offered to turn it into a peaceful neighboring state of Israel many times, and they systematically rejected every one of those offers. Their time is up. They blew it (no pub intended).