On Wednesday, March 1, the Israeli Knesset Plenum approved a preliminary reading of a new bill to enforce the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners convicted of “terrorism.”
In a vote of 55 to 9, the bill, supported by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was pushed by MK Limon Sonn Har Melech of the Otzma Yehudit party and sponsored with another similar bill by MK Oded Forer from the right-wing party of Yisrael Beiteinu as an attachment.
The bill stipulates that the death sentence should be enforced on those who “intentionally, or out of indifference, causes the death of an Israeli citizen when the act is carried out from a racist motive or hate to a certain public… and with the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland.”
During the presentation of the preliminary reading on Wednesday, MK Har Melech explained that this bill “has come after decades of disgraced national pride and thousands of people murdered, until the nation of Israel cried out: Enough.”
An explanatory note to the bill clarified that there would also be a crackdown on prisons with so-called “all-inclusive conditions.”
The latest push by Israeli policy-makers comes as part of a recent Israeli onslaught on Palestinian political detainees, especially following the Freedom Tunnel escape of 2021, where six Palestinian detainees broke themselves out of the notorious maximum security Gilboa Prison.
The institutional expression of ‘Death to Arabs’
The stated purpose of the bill is to “nip terrorism in the bud and create a weighty deterrent,” as explained by the preliminary reading’s explanatory note.
During the Knesset’s meeting on March 1, Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, expressed support for the bill, stipulating that the “law will not eradicate terror entirely, but this punishment is morally justified.”
A number of international institutions and governments responded to the recent bill with derision, challenging the reasoning that such a bill would deter Palestinian action.
The spokesperson for the EU’s foreign affairs, Peter Santo, told the Times of Israel that the bill represents “a cruel and inhumane punishment, which represents an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity, and fails to act as a deterrent to crime,” while the German government has released statements suggesting that relations with Israel will be negatively impacted should the bill pass.
Human rights groups, UN experts, and legal representatives have called for pressuring Israel to forfeit its adoption of the death penalty, emphasizing that the nature of the bill targets Palestinians exclusively and by design.
While the push for the bill represents a new development, it is the institutional expression of a de facto policy that has already existed for years, especially with the resurgence of extrajudicial executions of Palestinians throughout Operation Break the Wave in 2022, and well before it. These killings are described as field executions or “liquidations” because they are often carried out when Palestinians pose little or no threat to the Israeli army and are, in fact, targeted as a form of deterrence.
During the Unity Uprising of 2021, Palestinians from across Palestine faced the revived ferocity of settler violence amid a protracted system of impunity. Israeli settler mobs were publicly rallying for the death of Palestinians.
“Mavet La-Aravim” (Hebrew for “death to Arabs,”) became a common echo in Jerusalem against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
This is also nothing new. In 2014, Israeli settlers rallied with the same slogan. In Jerusalem, the slogan was translated into action after settlers kidnapped 14-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir and burned him alive.
The intensity of incitement against Palestinians was especially potent for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinian residents of Jerusalem.
In launching Operation Break the Wave last year, this campaign of settler incitement and attack morphed into a fully-fledged military campaign, and 2022 quickly became the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem since the UN began documenting Palestinian fatalities there in 2005.
Contextualizing the death penalty bill
It is a fundamental international principle that when occupying states hold political detainees as prisoners during military conflict, those prisoners retain basic human rights while they remain in custody.
“No prisoner shall be subjected to, and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” the Standard Minimum Rules of Treatment of Prisoners emphasize. The article continues that “no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification.”
By sanctioning the judicial execution of those persons, the bill constitutes an infringement on their most basic rights.
But the violation of detainee rights is also nothing new, and the Palestinian prisoners’ movement has mobilized over the decades to combat it, feeding into the general rise of Palestinian resistance.
“Making the terrorists’ conditions worse is necessary both to create deterrence and to fulfill our moral duty to terror victims and their families.”
Gilad Erdan, former Public Security Minister, currently serving as Israel’s representative to the UN
The last time the Israeli Knesset attempted to push for a death penalty was in 2018. At the time, then Israeli Public Security Minister, Gilad Erdan, had called for the conditions of Palestinian political detainees to be reduced to the bare minimum. The bill passed a preliminary reading with a vote of 52 in favor and 49 opposed.
In a 2019 press conference, the Minister proclaimed that “the party is over,” and that Israeli prison standards would be lowered to “deter terrorism.”
In February, the Knesset approved a preliminary reading of a bill which denies Palestinian detainees medical treatment.
Less than three weeks after Erdan’s greenlighting the repression of prisoners by the Israeli Prison Services in January 2019, Israeli forces raided Ofer prison and injured more than 100 detainees, while burning three prison cells.
Now serving as Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Erdan claims that detainees will return to “terrorism” after their release, and so “making the terrorists’ conditions worse is necessary both to create deterrence and to fulfill our moral duty to terror victims and their families.”
In other words, Erdan essentially calls for Palestinian detainees to receive punitive treatment for any actions they may make after release.
In response to the intensified attacks against detainees in the last five years, prisoners have called for a state of emergency and a state of mass disobedience inside prisons, including hunger strikes, the burning of prison rooms, and refusing to stand during count or go to the military court hearings.
Just this February, the Israeli Knesset approved a preliminary reading of a bill that denies Palestinian detainees medical treatment, legalizing the slow killing of Palestinian detainees through medical negligence.
“The occupation authorities continue to ignore everything that has been approved by the international system, without any concern,” the director of the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society, Qaddura Fares, said in response to the bill against medical treatment.
“And in light of the international silence,” Fares continued, “the occupation authorities will continue to invent racist legislations and laws, which appear at first glance to only affect Palestinians, but which in reality affect all of humanity.”
The Israeli Knesset is a classic case of collective insanity. The US Congress is a classic case of collective cowardice.
https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2023/03/06/is-israel-on-the-precipice-of-genocide/
Is Israel on the Precipice of Genocide?…a look at the UN’s report on atrocity crimes, which lists risk factors for genocide and “lesser” forms of organized violence, is illuminating. It lists eight common and six specific risk factors. The eight common factors are situations of armed conflict or other forms of instability; record of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law; weak state structures; motives or incentives; capacity to commit atrocity crimes; absence of mitigating factors; enabling circumstances or preparatory action; and triggering factors. These are, as the document states, general risk factors. Many states might qualify. Israel ticks all the boxes….Arabs and Palestinians have always been treated as a separate people and there is a growing consensus that Israel has many of the qualities of apartheid. There is classification—the creation of categories that serve to institutionalize, not only difference, but superior and inferior, and pure and impure. Israel has created a legal, political, and cultural difference between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians have different rights and responsibilities depending on their membership status: Israeli Palestinians are a step below Israeli Jews, while residents of the territories have few rights whatsoever. Israeli law and policy not only distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, but the state’s responses to terrorism differ depending on whether it is committed by Jews or Palestinians.
The U.N. responds –
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/02/israel-un-experts-alarmed-potential-reinstatement-death-penalty-terrorism
“The reinstatement of the death penalty is a deeply retrogressive step. More so when, on the face of it, the punishment will apply against minorities living within the State or those who live under the 55-year military occupation and rule,” the experts said….The UN experts said that the proposed law further entrenches two classes of criminal law in the State. “One class which privileges and protects Israeli Jewish citizens of the State and one which further targets, marginalises and undervalues the lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory—and their fundamental rights to non-discrimination and self-determination,” they said…According to the experts, the fact that the Bill proposes that if the crime occurs in the occupied Palestinian territory such punishments will apply in military court…“It also raises significant due process and fair trial challenges, as well as the potential arbitrary deprivation of life,” they said, underlining that the trial of civilians in military courts per se raises serious concerns in guaranteeing the right to equality and a fair trial and is permitted only under exceptional circumstances.
America’s best ally in the Middle East is showing the world once again, that they are entitled to occupy, steal, build, and kill civilians, AGAINST INTERNATIONAL LAWS, and that the victims of their brutal crimes dare not, and cannot, resist their endless suffering. In what part of democracy, which the zionists always boasts it has, is that okay or acceptable? Victims of any military occupation has the law on their side, the occupier does not. Only America and the Western world pretends it does.
“Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force is not just recognised under international law but specifically endorsed.
In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (pdf), as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.
Finding evolving vitality in humanitarian law, for decades the General Assembly of the United Nations (UNGA) – once described as the collective conscience of the world – has noted the right of peoples to self-determination, independence and human rights.
Indeed, as early as 1974, resolution 3314 of the UNGA prohibited states from “any military occupation, however temporary”.
In relevant part, the resolution not only went on to affirm the right “to self-determination, freedom and independence […] of peoples forcibly deprived of that right,[…] particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination” but noted the right of the occupied to “struggle … and to seek and receive support” in that effort”. Al Jazeera
I also wanted to add that the hypocrisy is loud and clear – how about the death penalty for the real terrorists? I refer to the illegal settlers who have been called terrorists by the US State Department.
The ones who carry weapons, attack and kill civilians, and steal and destroy Palestinian property.
What makes them exempt from the same punishment? Jewish superiority?