Portside

At my high school in Jerusalem in the early 2010s, hearing chants of "death to Arabs" in Hebrew – whether in the back of the bus or on the sports field – was not at all unusual.

On Monday evening, Israel's democratically elected government voted to codify this chant into law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in person to the Knesset to cast his vote for the "Death Penalty for Terrorists" bill, which mandates the execution of Palestinians charged with lethal terrorism while keeping alive Jews charged with the same acts. It was led by the party of Netanyahu's Jewish supremacist ally, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

After the vote, the triumphant minister opened champagne, vowing, "We will put them to death one by one."

 

For a few, it was a day of infamy in which Israel crossed a watershed into apartheid – voting for a system of clear legal separation between Arabs and Jews. For others, it was just another Monday, as the bill simply codifies another way of killing Palestinians: beyond extrajudicial executions, there will now be ones planned and ordered by a judge.

After all, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, 2023, and over 80 Palestinian prisoners have died amid inhumane conditions in Israeli prisons.

The law is dangerous even before implementation – if it ever takes effect, given the possibility of judicial review striking it down. But beyond its legal viability lies a deeper question, reflecting a perverse dissonance in Israeli society: Why are Jewish terrorists spared the noose while Arab ones are hanged?

Amid unabated Jewish terror in the West Bank in recent months, ignored and covered up by Israeli leaders, the government at the same time inflates Arab terror. Consider Ben-Gvir and President Isaac Herzog as partners in this effort.

For the ultranationalist minister, being an Arab is synonymous with being a terrorist. Last year, speaking in the Knesset, he lashed out at Arab lawmakers, saying "terrorists, outside," shouting "Bara!" in Arabic, meaning "out!" – or, more fittingly, in German, "Raus!" These are democratically elected lawmakers, many of whom advocate Jewish-Arab coexistence.

Hours before the Knesset vote, Herzog responded carefully to a letter from Diaspora Jews concerned about Jewish terror, describing it as "acts of violence and vigilantism… a crime against innocents" in "Judea and Samaria." By conspicuously avoiding the term terrorism, Herzog, too, downplays settler violence – unlike his right-wing predecessor Reuven Rivlin, who used the term after a Palestinian family was burned to death by settlers in the West Bank in 2015.

The bill's sponsor Limor Son Har-Melech, from Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit party, summed it up best when she introduced this bill last year: "There is no such thing as a Jewish terrorist."

It is deeply unsettling to live in a country that has just voted to create gallows and executioners, devolving to cold, planned, bureaucratic murder. More dangerous still is the supremacist logic underpinning the bill, with Israel overtly declaring – perhaps for the first time through a democratically enacted law – that "death to Arabs" is state policy.

Read more:

■ Racist and unlawful: Israel's death penalty law is driven by bloodlust

[David Issacharoff is an editor and writer at Haaretz English edition. He studied political science and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2024, he is a visiting fellow at Der Spiegel through the International Journalists' Program (IJP).]