The country that executed Eichmann would not recognise this Israel

There is a name that has hovered over every debate about Israel's new death penalty law, passed last month by a Knesset majority. That name is Adolf Eichmann. 

Eichmann is the only person ever executed by the State of Israel after a civil trial. He was the Nazi architect who organised the deportation of millions of Jews to their deaths, a bureaucrat of genocide who sat in a glass booth in Jerusalem in 1961 and told the world he was just following orders. His hanging in 1962 is the single precedent Israel has ever set for state-sanctioned killing.  

And yet, in all the coverage I have read about Ben Gvir's new law, barely anyone is asking the most obvious question: how does the law that just passed compare to the one under which Eichmann himself was put to death? 

Eichmann was tried under the 1950 Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, legislation built for crimes of the most extreme imaginable magnitude. Genocide. Crimes against humanity and war crimes. Under that law, a death sentence required a unanimous decision from a panel of judges. There was a full right of appeal. After sentencing, Eichmann and his German lawyer Dr. Robert Servatius appealed to the Supreme Court, where Israel's five most senior justices deliberated for months. When the appeal was rejected, Eichmann submitted a personal plea for clemency to President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, which was then referred to the full cabinet for an extraordinary closed-door meeting in the Knesset. 

The law was invoked once in more than 60 years, because that was the point. The threshold was meant to be almost unreachable. 

Now look at what passed the Knesset last month in a 62-48 vote. Under the 2026 law, death by hanging is the default sentence for West Bank Palestinians convicted of deadly terror attacks in military courts. Judges can substitute life imprisonment, but only under vaguely defined "special circumstances." The death sentence requires only a simple majority of judges, not unanimity. And there is no right to appeal.