Israel Considers Instituting a Death Penalty for Palestinians--but Not for Jews [View all]

Determined to prove that Zionism is indeed racism, a sizable minority of Knesset members backed that legislation.

https://prospect.org/2025/11/11/israel-considers-instituting-death-penalty-for-palestinians-but-not-jews/


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses lawmakers in the Knesset in Jerusalem, November 10, 2025. Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP Photo

A significant share of the current Israeli government appears bound and determined to show the world that Zionism is racism. Yesterday, the Knesset voted by a 39-to-16 margin to advance legislation that would impose a mandatory death penalty on Palestinians who kill Jewish Israelis, while Jewish Israelis who kill Palestinians—a not-infrequent occurrence in the West Bank—would suffer no such consequences (currently, they invariably incur no penalties at all).

The bill has not been passed. It now has to go to committee, and if passed there, it has to be put before the Knesset two more times, where it would require 61 votes (that is, a majority of the 120-member Knesset) to be enacted. But while the bill was introduced by Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right Jewish Power party, whose support Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu needs to keep his government in power, the two far-right parties in the Knesset have fewer than 39 members. Some members of Bibi’s own Likud party also voted for the measure.

Now, it’s possible that Bibi allowed them to vote that way just to show his far-right backers that he hadn’t sold them out to occasional Middle East peacenik Donald Trump, and that he will rein in his backers on subsequent readings so that they deprive the bill of a majority. The legislation is so outrageous that a majority of Knesset members boycotted the vote altogether, reflecting the opposition coming not only from Israeli Arabs, but also from the nation’s centrists and its shrunken left, determined to resist the nation’s formal embrace of lynch-law racism.

Or it’s just possible—unlikely, but possible—that the hatred in which Bibi’s government holds Palestinians, and its need to retain Ben-Gvir’s support, could eclipse all other considerations. If the bill were to become law, those considerations would include the very real possibility that those nations that recently recognized a Palestinian state—chiefly, Israel’s longtime European and Anglophone (except the U.S.) allies—might feel compelled to sever diplomatic and other relations with the state of Israel. They’d certainly come under popular pressure to do that. The bill’s enactment would almost surely push those nations toward adopting a policy of BDS—boycott, divestment, and sanctions—against Israel. Since it was founded in 1948, trials in Israel’s civilian courts have led to just one execution: that of Nazi genocide COO Adolf Eichmann in 1962. That, as the saying goes, was then.

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