By Eddie McCabe
On the night of 30 March, Israeli government members – sporting vile noose-shaped pins on their suits – celebrated with champagne after passing a new law enshrining the death penalty as the default sentence for Palestinians convicted of acts of ‘terrorism’. As the law doesn’t apply to Jewish citizens of Israel, the racist and murderous character of the Israeli State, an actively genocidal entity, is now writ even larger.
The law passed its third and final reading in the Knesset by 62 votes to 48, with the war criminal and Prime Minister Netanyahu voting in favour, along with all the major parties in the ruling coalition.
Until now, the only person ever sentenced to death and hanged in Israel was Adolf Eichmann in 1962. Eichmann was a leader of the Nazi party who was one of the principal organisers of the Holocaust. Yet even he was given the right to a full trial, with access to legal counsel that will be restricted for Palestinians.
Institutionalised murder
Those sentenced to death will be held in a facility with no right to visits, and with legal consultations conducted only by video link. Executions will be carried out by hanging, within 90 days of sentencing. Avenues for appeal or clemency are closed off. Prisoners tried inside Israel could have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, which given the notoriously brutal conditions in Israeli prisons, is but another form of death sentence.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are tried in military courts, where they are convicted at a rate of 99.74%. By contrast, for violent Israelis settlers in the West Bank, tried for crimes committed against Palestinians, the conviction rate is about 3%. In reality, violent settler mobs are supported in their rampages by the Israeli army.
One of the main proponents of the law was the National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a deranged settler himself, rejoiced in its passing, calling it “historic”, and saying the quiet part out loud: “Soon, they will be executed one by one”.
Apartheid
Although it’s still denied by shameless Israeli politicians and their allies in the West, the Israeli State has long been an apartheid state, enshrining countless discriminatory laws and practices that make Palestinians a systemically oppressed nationality denied the most basic democratic rights. Jewish people from anywhere in the world have the exclusive right to immigrate to all parts of historic Palestine, and be granted Israeli citizenship. At the same time, indigenous Palestinians who were expelled during and after Israel’s founding are denied the fundamental right to return to their homeland.
The 2018 ‘Nation State’ law made its status as an ethno-nationalist entity explicit, stating that the right to national self-determination is “unique to the Jewish people” and promoting Jewish settlement as a “national value”.
Hypocrisy and cowardice
Notwithstanding all this and much more besides, governments in the West, including the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael government here, refuse to acknowledge the inherently racist nature of the Israeli state, and take the necessary actions against it. In a joint statement before the death penalty law was passed, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy and the UK expressed their “deep concern” over the bill, saying:
“We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill. The adoption of this bill would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles.”
But this is utter drivel, as these ministers well know. These laws are the logical outcome of Zionism, a supremacist ideology that’s incompatible with ‘democratic principles’. It’s based on violent dispossession, and like all forms of settler colonialism, leads in inevitably to genocide – which we’re seeing today in Gaza, and will see soon in the West Bank too if the Zionist State is allowed to continue. That’s why it has to be smashed; by a revolutionary movement from below of the exploited and oppressed masses, and replaced with a democratic socialist society, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, where all peoples can, sharing resources in cooperation, equally determine their own fates, and live in peace.
