Israel, Apartheid, and the Death Penalty: When Law Becomes a Tool of Ethnic Cleansing
Rezgar Akrawi
The Death Penalty for Terrorists Law was formally passed on 30 March 2026, with a 62–48 vote. Israel's National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, during a session of the Knesset’s National Security Committee. He and other members of his far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party arrived wearing yellow noose-shaped lapel pins to signal their commitment to a controversial bill they were spearheading.
Anti-Apartheid Demonstration UC Berkeley 1985
Israel, Apartheid, and the Death Penalty: When Law Becomes a Tool of Ethnic Cleansing
Rezgar Akrawi
On the thirtieth of March 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a law imposing the death penalty by hanging on Palestinians convicted by military courts in cases involving deadly attacks, with execution to be carried out within ninety days of sentencing. This is not a criminal law. It is a codified instrument of ethnic cleansing, operating within a documented apartheid system, shielded by an unprecedented American political cover. To understand what has happened, we cannot begin with the law alone. We must begin with the complete structure that produced it.
The Death Penalty: The Cheapest Solution of a state in crisis
From my principled and humanitarian standpoint, I reject, completely and categorically, the death penalty. The right to life is an inherent right, inseparable from a person's humanity, and no state, regardless of the legitimacy it claims, has the right to confiscate it.
No one is born a criminal or violent. Every human being is born in the fullness of innocence. It is specific circumstances and conditions that transform a person into a criminal: poverty, unemployment, the absence of social protection, tyranny, and national, religious, and class discrimination and repression. The death penalty provides failed governments with a ready-made pretext to evade their true responsibility for addressing the root causes of crime and violence.
It is the easiest and least costly solution, whereas addressing the roots of crime is expensive and demands serious, genuine work, work that corrupt and incapable authorities show no interest in undertaking.
The death penalty is, in its essence, a violent, retributive, and inhumane punishment, rooted in the logic of vengeance rather than rehabilitation and reform. It is also, by its very nature, a classist and discriminatory punishment: the overwhelming majority of those sentenced to death around the world belong to the popular classes, marginalized communities, and national and religious minorities, people who cannot afford legal representation and have no connection to centers of power and influence. We rarely hear of a wealthy or politically influential person being executed for a criminal offense.
Furthermore, it is an irreversible punishment in a world where courts are riddled with grave judicial errors, and where the overwhelming majority of confessions are extracted under coercion, torture, and psychological and physical pressure. When the death penalty is carried out against an innocent person, no return is possible and no compensation can be made, and this alone is sufficient to reject this punishment at its very root.
The most humane societies in their approach to crime, and the most just in the distribution of wealth, are the most capable of reducing violence. Killing in the name of the law does not produce security. It produces a state that excels at revenge and fails at reform, a state that, through the practice of execution, entrenches a culture of death and spreads it throughout society.
The New Law: Codifying What Was Once Practiced in the Shadows
The current Israeli government is the most right-wing, extreme, and racist in the entire history of Israel. It includes ministers who describe Palestinians in language that explicitly strips them of their humanity, and who publicly defend forced displacement, annexation, and physical extermination as official state policies rather than fringe opinions. This government was not born in a vacuum and did not govern in isolation. It reached this level of audacity in codified crime because it knows it is protected at the international level, and that the price it will pay will not be high enough to alter its calculations.
The most significant political cover today comes from Washington. The Trump administration, which represents the American populist nationalist right in its most unrestrained form, provides Israel with unconditional strategic support that surpasses anything offered by previous American administrations.
This support is not merely a diplomatic stance. It is an ideological alliance between two convergent racist right-wing movements: both regard national supremacy as a source of legitimacy, both use the discourse of security and terrorism to justify crimes against oppressed peoples, and both work to dismantle the international oversight institutions that might hold them accountable.
This alliance grants the Israeli right everything it needs to escalate its violations: protection in the Security Council through the American veto, media cover through the machinery of the American right, and a false international legitimacy that presents the occupation as a legitimate defense and apartheid as a security necessity.
What is new here does not lie in the act itself. Israel has for decades carried out extrajudicial executions through assassinations, field liquidations, and direct bombardment of civilian populations. Many of these operations have claimed the lives of dozens of civilians surrounding their alleged targets, turning them into a form of collective execution wrapped in the language of security and deterrence.
What is new today is that the state is no longer content with killing in secret. It now does so openly, granting it legislative legitimacy and incorporating it into its declared legal arsenal. This is not courage in acknowledging what happens in the shadows. It is the audacity to normalize crime.
The Dual Legal Structure: Two Paths to Execution
This law does not arise in a legal vacuum. It falls within a dual legal structure that has existed for years, built on two distinct tracks that may lead to death sentences. The civil track, inside Israel, defines certain acts within a "terrorism" framework and establishes special legal conditions that could theoretically open the door to applying the penalty. This track may encompass some Arab Palestinians inside Israel or detainees in connection with events such as the attacks of October 7, 2023, according to some analyses. The military track, applied in the West Bank to Palestinians under occupation, operates within an entirely separate judicial system. This legal duality reflects a colonial structure that places two human groups under two radically different legal systems.
The death penalty in Israel is not entirely new, though historically it was almost frozen and rarely applied, used only in a very limited number of exceptional cases, the most notable being the execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1962. The current shift is not merely a reactivation of the penalty. It goes further, expanding its scope within a clear political and colonial context.
The Palestinian in the occupied territories is not tried before a system of legal equality. He is tried before a military court operating within a colonial structure, stripped of the most basic guarantees of a fair trial, with conviction rates approaching totality, and with the majority of confessions extracted under coercion and psychological and physical pressure.
Conviction is almost predetermined before the trial even begins. By contrast, the Israeli Jewish citizen who commits a comparable offense is tried within an entirely different legal system, one that does not subject him to military courts or the same exceptional procedures.
This discrimination is not a flaw correctable by amending a text. It is the very essence of a legal structure that divides human beings into distinct categories of life and rights. When a system like this is granted the authority to execute a person within ninety days on the basis of a military trial with near-automatic conviction rates, we are not facing criminal law. We are facing a codified instrument of ethnic cleansing.
The Details of the Law: Barbaric Execution Without Safeguards
What distinguishes this law from other criminal legislation is not only the punishment itself. It is the systematic design to remove every legal safeguard that might prevent its execution. The prosecutor does not need to request the death penalty, and the approval of a panel of three military officers is sufficient to issue a death sentence. Judges are required to record exceptional justifications if they wish to replace execution with life imprisonment, which inverts the logic of justice entirely: the default has become execution and the exception is mercy. Avenues for appeal and review are severely restricted, with any possibility of pardon eliminated, while the convicted are held in near-total isolation with a severe restriction on the right to legal representation, as a lawyer is only permitted to communicate with their client via video call.
Alongside this enacted law, there is another bill still being prepared before the Knesset, known as the law on prosecuting participants in the events of October 7. It establishes exceptional military courts with retroactive jurisdiction to prosecute those accused of participating in the October 7, 2023 attacks. These courts are authorized to depart from standard rules of evidence and procedure, and to impose the death penalty by a simple majority without the prosecutor requesting it. Together, the two laws constitute an unprecedented expansion of the scope of the death penalty and eliminate the procedural safeguards that had constrained its application for decades.
At the international level, the European Union explicitly warned that carrying out execution by hanging constitutes an absolute violation of the international prohibition on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. UN experts confirmed that Israeli military trials of civilians do not generally meet the standards of a fair trial under international law, and that any death sentence issued by them constitutes a further violation of the right to life. They added that deprivation of a fair trial is itself a war crime.
The Settlement Movement: From the Margins to the Heart of Decision-Making
This escalation cannot be separated from the growing role of the settler movement in the West Bank, which has transformed over decades from clusters on the fringes of the political map into an influential political force within the structure of the Israeli state itself. This movement now pushes for increasingly extreme policies and drives the expansion of tools of repression and punishment, including the harshest legislation such as the recently passed law. This shift is the product of a systematic strategy to build a demographic and political presence in the occupied territories, accompanied by continuous government funding and permanent military protection.
Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories represent a clear and documented violation of international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its citizens to the territories it occupies. The International Court of Justice confirmed in its advisory opinion in 2024 that the ongoing Israeli occupation and the establishment of settlements are unlawful under international law, and called for their termination. Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted unanimously in 2016, affirms that the settlements have no legal validity whatsoever and constitute a major obstacle to peace. On the ground, the number of settlers today exceeds seven hundred thousand, in a reality that fragments Palestinian geographic continuity and transforms the West Bank into isolated enclaves.
Representatives of this movement today hold pivotal ministerial portfolios, and the state's policies toward Palestinians directly reflect their agendas. What was until recently considered fringe discourse within Israeli society has now become official state policy, translated into binding laws that directly affect the lives and rights of Palestinians. This places the international community before a greater responsibility in confronting a system that no longer conceals its objectives.
Apartheid: A Legal Designation, Not a Political Insult
Describing Israel as an apartheid system is no longer merely political rhetoric. It has become a documented legal designation, upheld by major international human rights organizations. Amnesty International concluded in its 2022 report that Israel practices a system of apartheid against Palestinians built on systematic repression and institutional discrimination, extending across the occupied territories and within Palestinian communities inside Israel itself. Human Rights Watch confirmed in its 2021 report that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution through policies aimed at entrenching the dominance of one national group over another.
These conclusions come from serious international organizations working according to rigorous legal methodologies and precise field documentation. They cannot be dismissed except by invoking the same defensive logic used by the architects of South Africa's apartheid system in the past.
When the new death penalty law is placed within this context, it becomes clear that it is a logical link within an integrated system of domination that controls land, movement, and identity, and now adds to these a direct control over the right to life itself. Apartheid does not merely suppress the other. It works to erode the other's human value to the point of rendering them suitable for subjugation and annihilation, without triggering a proportionate moral response from the major powers that sponsor this system, finance it, and arm it.
Comprehensive International Isolation: The Obligation of Every State in the World
South Africa's apartheid system did not fall through a sudden awakening among its ruling elites. It fell under the weight of accumulated pressures from multiple directions: comprehensive international isolation, political, economic, academic, and cultural; a long and costly internal struggle; and the gradual erosion of the system's legitimacy as the costs of isolation began to affect ever-wider segments of white society itself. This is the historical lesson that cannot be ignored.
Today, every state in the world is called upon to impose comprehensive international isolation on the Israeli apartheid state. This is not an appeal for symbolic solidarity or quickly forgotten rhetorical declarations. It is a description of a political and moral obligation binding on every state that claims to respect international law and human rights.
Severing diplomatic relations, imposing economic sanctions, freezing arms agreements, withdrawing investments, imposing academic and cultural boycotts, and pursuing responsible officials before international courts are all available and necessary tools. The only obstacles to their application are political will and submission to American pressure.
The current international position reveals a shameful equation. States that speak of international law and human rights in their official forums simultaneously continue normalizing their relations with Israel and silence their criticisms out of fear of right-wing American pressure.
This submission to coercion constitutes active participation in sustaining and prolonging the system. States that remain silent in the face of Israel's crimes bear a share of the moral and political responsibility for every victim of this system. Popular pressure in these countries, through social movements, left and progressive forces, and human rights organizations, is the necessary tool to break this complicit silence and compel governments to align their policies with their declared principles rather than their narrow interests.
At the same time, external pressure alone is not enough. Radical change requires the struggle of all who live on this land, Jews, Arabs, and all other peoples, against the system itself. The Israelis who reject this path exist, and their voices deserve support, not isolation.
Building a truly equal citizenship state, founded on full equality of rights for all inhabitants without national or religious discrimination, a civil democratic state that transcends the logic of national supremacy and places the human being at the center, is the only viable horizon for anyone who genuinely seeks a way out of this historical impasse.
Against a Logic, Not Against a Punishment Alone
Justice is not achieved through killing or revenge. Crime and violence are social phenomena deeply rooted in occupation, poverty, displacement, and accumulated repression across generations. When an occupying state resorts to the death penalty against an occupied people, backed by the most partisan American administration in modern history, it is not addressing violence. It is inflaming it, reproducing it, and adding to it a new layer of injustice and grievance.
The real question is not how to end the life of someone who has committed an act of violence. The honest question is: why do human beings resort to armed struggle and violence in the first place, and who bears true responsibility for the colonial system that produces, perpetuates, and finances it.
The genuine struggle is not confined to a specific legal punishment, however grave. It targets an entire logic that transforms the state into an instrument of death, the law into a cover for discrimination, and national belonging into a criterion for the value of human life. Those who feed and protect this logic at the international level bear their historical and moral responsibility, whether they sit in Tel Aviv or in Washington.
The struggle to abolish the death penalty, to dismantle the Israeli apartheid system, and to isolate the racist right-wing alliance that protects it are not separate battles. They are multiple expressions of a single liberation struggle that places every human being, without exception, at the center of value, right, and dignity. Let us execute the death penalty itself, and may it be its own final victim.
Comments