‘The only execution law in modern history against one ethnic group’

With Israel’s passage of a law specifying hanging as the punishment for murder of Israelis by Palestinians, bitter consequences loom on both sides of the Green Line.

Inside Israel, the law’s passage promises to fuel the governing coalition’s anti-democratic drive to eliminate checks on its power. At the same time, the law is already further escalating tensions among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Touted by Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as a deterrent to Palestinian attacks, the law stipulates death by hanging for terrorists who kill “out of an intention to negate the existence of the state of Israel”. That wording will exclude from execution Jewish terrorists who murder Palestinians during burgeoning settler violence or under other circumstances.

The idea is that only Palestinians get hung.

While hanging is the default punishment, the court is permitted to apply life imprisonment to Palestinians if there are “special circumstances.” But these are not specified.

Although the IDF carries out extrajudicial killings of those it defines as security threats, judicial executions have been shunned since Nazi holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichman was hung in 1962. Israel used to take pride in this record.

Now there is a sense that the law’s passage is accelerating the society’s moral deterioration. “One of the tests of a cultured society is that it doesn’t hang people,” said Salim Brake, a political scientist at the Open University.

“It’s a slippery slope,” he added. “It starts with Palestinians and then it could be other enemies at home,” Brake said.

Talya Sasson, former director of the New Israel Fund, said the law tramples on Israel’s declaration of independence which projects that the state will express just values and equality while being a country for the Jewish people. She said one danger is that the death penalty law will be a law that shapes the values of Israeli youth.