On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a law imposing the death penalty by hanging on Palestinian prisoners and detainees convicted by military courts, to be carried out within ninety days of sentencing. This is not merely a legal amendment. It is a qualitative shift in the nature of violence, to a codified and openly declared violence.
The law does not regulate justice, it redefines it to serve a repugnant structure of national oppression within a legally and politically documented apartheid system.
To understand this shift, the law cannot be viewed in isolation from the context that produced it. We face an integrated system in which the structure of occupation intersects with global capitalism, protected by a network of Western political support, foremost being the United States. This transforms killing into a policy, discrimination into law, and extermination into an administrative procedure.
The death penalty, at its core, is an expression of state failure, not strength. It is the most extreme form of official violence, employed when authority is unable, or unwilling, to address the deeper causes of violence and crime. As a principle and from a human standpoint, I categorically oppose the death penalty everywhere. Ast is punitive, inhumane, irreversible, and opens the door to the killing of innocents in the name of justice.
In the case of Palestine, this punishment takes on an even more brutal dimension, being used against a people subjected to occupation, repression, displacement, and daily humiliation. Here, the death penalty becomes a political instrument to eliminate resistance, criminalize the victim, and grant the executioner the power to decide who has the right to live and who must die.
Legalizing Killing and the Rise of Settler Right-Wing Forces Backed Internationally
This law did not emerge in a vacuum. The current Israeli government is the most extreme and racist in Israel’s history. It comprises settler, religious, and ultra-nationalist forces that openly advocate displacement, extermination, and annexation. This government did not reach this level solely because of its internal strength, but because it enjoys extensive international protection. U.S. support, particularly during the Trump era, provided Israel with unprecedented cover and elevated political brazenness from implicit backing to overt sponsorship.
What is new in this law is not that Israel has begun killing now. For decades, Israel has carried out assassinations, targeted killings, and collective bombardment against Palestinians, both within the occupied territories and beyond. The novelty lies in the transition from practicing killing in the field to codifying it legislatively and embedding it explicitly within the legal structure of the state. What was carried out by weapons alone is now also carried out by law. In this way, parliament becomes a direct partner in the administration of death.
This development cannot be separated from the rise of the settler movement. That has moved from the margins of Israeli political life to the core of the state and its institutions. Settlements are not merely residential communities. They are an organized colonial project, militarily protected and politically and economically funded, constituting a blatant violation of international law. The International Court of Justice and numerous United Nations resolutions have affirmed the illegality of occupation and settlement. Yet, the West continues to treat Israel as a normal state, and many governments maintain economic and military relations with Israel. ,It is a glaring double standard that exposes the limits of human rights discourse when confronted with strategic interests.
Legal Apartheid: A Dual System and Executions Without Safeguards
Within this framework, the new law becomes a natural extension of a dual legal system in which Palestinians and settlers are subject to entirely different regimes. Palestinians are tried before military courts lacking the most basic standards of justice. Meanwhile settlers enjoy civil law, broader protections, and a permanent position of privilege. This is the essence of apartheid: the legal and political division of human beings within a national basis, granting one group the right to life and protection while depriving another of the most basic conditions of justice.
What is most dangerous about the new law is that it does not merely prescribe execution, but removes many of the safeguards that might obstruct its implementation. A decision by a military panel is sufficient, avenues for appeal are narrowed, and the judge is placed in a position where they must justify why they do not impose the death penalty.
This is a complete inversion of the very idea of justice. The principle is no longer the protection of life, but the facilitation of its taking. In such a system, the court is not an instrument of justice. The court becomes an administrative component within a machinery of repression.
Describing Israel as an apartheid system is no longer merely a political characterization. Reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, alongside international legal opinions and UN resolutions, have confirmed that what is taking place constitutes a structure of racial segregation and systematic oppression. On the ground, this is manifested in land confiscation, the separation wall, the permit system, siege, displacement, and discrimination in rights, movement, housing, and daily life. The new law adds yet another layer: direct control over the Palestinian right to life itself.
From International Isolation to the Alternative of a State of Citizenship
In confronting this reality, verbal condemnations are not enough. The historical experience of South Africa teaches us that apartheid regimes do not fall through moral appeals alone. They fall through comprehensive isolation and sustained political, economic, cultural, and academic pressure. What is required today is the genuine international isolation of Israel. That should include sanctions, an arms embargo, divestment, boycott, and the prosecution of those responsible for crimes before international courts.
This is a political and moral obligation for every state and every force that claims to defend international law and human rights.
Looking further ahead, it is not sufficient to repeal this law without proposing a radical political alternative. The alternative I propose is a democratic, secular state of citizenship. One in which nationalism and religion are irrelevant to exercise of power; and where full equality is the foundation, not national or religious privilege. This proposal is grounded in a realistic assessment of past experiences that have failed to deliver solutions. All settlement projects based on national division till now, have merely reproduced the crisis in new forms, while consolidating imbalance of power in favor of the occupying state.
A state of citizenship here means dismantling the structure based on national and religious privilege and rebuilding the state on the basis of the individual human being, as a citizen with full rights in accordance with international human rights standards. It means that the law is the same for all, and that the rights to land, life, work, and movement are not determined by identity.
This proposal also recognises the reality that the two-state solution, in its commonly discussed form, no longer exists in practice on the ground. Extensive settlement expansion has fragmented the West Bank into isolated cantons. he presence of hundreds of thousands of settlers and their infrastructures have rendered the idea of a geographically contiguous Palestinian state only a theoretical construct rather than a realistic political possibility.
In addition, millions of Palestinians inside Israel face documented institutional discrimination, for which no solution based on national division offers a just or viable answer. Furthermore, the issue of refugees and the legally guaranteed right of return remains excluded from any settlement based on the logic of two states, where it is treated as a file to be postponed or bypassed.
By contrast, the proposal of a state of citizenship opens the possibility of addressing this right within a comprehensive legal and human framework grounded in equality not demographic majorities.
This does not mean that the path toward this alternative is simple or direct. The issue is complex and intertwined, where history intersects with geography, and identity with politics.
The alternative of a state of citizenship, as an open emancipatory horizon, may take multiple forms. These range from a unified decentralized state to federal arrangements or others, depending on what those living on this land agree upon.
Leftist and emancipatory discourse requires honest critique even in the most difficult moments. Resistance to occupation and national oppression does not negate the necessity of internal criticism. The Palestinian experience has revealed deep crises, from corruption and security coordination to religious authoritarianism and one-party rule, and the resulting division has weakened the emancipatory project.
These issues do not build a genuine emancipatory alternative. Instead they risk reproducing patterns of repression in different forms at the expense of the people and their lives. Critique here is not a weakening of the cause, it is a condition for rebuilding it on progressive foundations.
Opposing the Death Penalty and Racial Discrimination: One Path
The struggle to abolish the death penalty, dismantle the Israeli system of national oppression and discrimination, and isolate the global alliance that protects Israel are not separate battles. They are multiple expressions of a single emancipatory struggle that places every human being, without exception, at the center of value, rights, and equality.
In this context, abolishing the Israeli death penalty law passed on March 30, 2026, becomes an urgent and immediate demand. It is a brutal and racist law, a codified instrument of ethnic cleansing, a war crime, and a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. Demanding its repeal is a moral and legal obligation for all leftist, progressive, and human rights forces, as well as for every state that claims to respect international law and human rights. The demand stands alongside the necessity of ensuring protection for Palestinian prisoners within the Israeli system of national repression.
Let us dismantle the system of racial discrimination in Israel, and let us abolish the death penalty itself. Let the death penalty become the last irreversible victim, everywhere.
