On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset voted 62 to 47 to mandate death by hanging for West Bank Palestinians convicted of carrying out deadly attacks. The champagne was already flowing before the final tally. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, golden noose pinned to his lapel, celebrated what he called “a day of justice.” His colleague Limor Son Har-Melech called it “true Jewish morality.”

It is not. It is the opposite of Jewish morality. It violates the foundational ethical commitments of Jewish law. And the fact that so many people have been browbeaten into silence about what this law actually represents is itself part of the catastrophe.

The structure of the law is straightforward. It applies to individuals tried in military courts. Palestinians in the West Bank are tried in military courts. Israeli settlers living on the same land are tried in civilian courts. The law explicitly excludes Israeli citizens and residents from its reach.

A Palestinian who commits an act of violence faces mandatory death by hanging, execution within 90 days, conviction by a simple majority of judges, and no right of appeal. An Israeli who commits the same act faces none of this. He enters a civilian court with full due process, appellate rights, and no mandatory death sentence.

The law contains a secondary clause that technically permits capital punishment for Israeli citizens who “intentionally cause the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel.” This language was designed with surgical precision to exclude Jewish nationalist violence. When an Israeli settler burns a Palestinian family alive in their home, as happened in the village of Duma in 2015, killing 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and both his parents, he does not, under this definition, aim to deny the existence of Israel. His ethnicity and court assignment shield him from the noose that awaits a Palestinian for the same act.

This is a legal system in which punishment for killing is determined not by what you did but by who you are.

The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines it as inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group over another and systematically oppressing them. The Rome Statute describes apartheid as an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, committed through inhumane acts.

A law that mandates execution for one ethnic group while shielding another from the same penalty, applied across a territory where both populations live under the same sovereign power, is not a borderline case. It is a textbook one.

And yet much of the political and media establishment will refuse to call it what it is. Not because the term does not fit, but because an extraordinarily effective campaign, driven by far-right Israeli politicians and radical settlement activists, has spent decades placing the word “apartheid” behind a wall of social and professional consequences for left-leaning Jews and critics of Israel. To use it in connection with Israel is to be labeled an antisemite, a radical, a person unfit for serious conversation. Academics have lost positions over it. Journalists have learned to route around it. Politicians treat it as career poison.

It is this Orwellian semantic restriction that paves the way for such outright discriminatory laws as those passed by the Knesset. When you deprive people of the precise vocabulary needed to describe a political condition, you make it exponentially harder to organize opposition to that condition. If critics cannot say “apartheid” without being accused of blood libel, they are left fumbling for euphemisms: “unequal application of law,” “differential legal treatment,” “problematic judicial frameworks.” These phrases describe nothing. They convict no one. They generate no urgency. That is the point.

George Orwell understood this with perfect clarity. “If thought corrupts language,” he wrote in Politics and the English Language, “language can also corrupt thought.” The campaign to place words like “apartheid” beyond the boundaries of acceptable discourse is not a campaign for linguistic precision. It is a campaign to make certain political realities unthinkable by making them unsayable. Every time a critic swallows the accurate word and reaches for the sanitized one, the extremists win another inch of ground. Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich did not rise to power in a vacuum. They rose in a discursive environment where the vocabulary needed to sound the alarm had already been confiscated.

Son Har-Melech called the death penalty law an example of “true Jewish morality.” Otzma Yehudit MK Tzvika Fogel said, “This is a day on which the State of Israel chose life.” These statements do not merely misrepresent Jewish ethics. They invert them.

The Torah is explicit and repetitive on this point. Leviticus 24:22 states: “You shall have one standard of law for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God.” Numbers 15:16 commands: “There shall be one law and one ordinance for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you.” Exodus 12:49 repeats the principle: “One law shall apply to the native-born and to the stranger who dwells among you.”

The Knesset has now passed a law that does the precise opposite: it lowers the evidentiary bar to a simple majority, eliminates appeal, and mandates execution within 90 days. It does so selectively, for one population, while exempting another. To call this “Jewish morality” is not merely wrong. It is a desecration of the tradition it claims to honor.

Rabbis for Human Rights, one of the organizations petitioning the High Court against the law, stated plainly that a death penalty policy runs contrary to the spirit of Jewish law and to the principle of the sanctity of life at its core. They are correct. The people celebrating this law with champagne and golden nooses are not practicing Judaism. They are using Judaism as a costume for ethnonationalist violence.

Supporters claim the law will deter terrorism. There is no credible evidence for this. As the Death Penalty Information Center documents, decades of research on capital punishment have failed to demonstrate that it deters politically motivated violence. A 2012 review by the National Research Council concluded that studies claiming a deterrent effect on murder rates are fundamentally flawed. UN human rights experts have warned specifically that the death penalty is an ineffective deterrent for terrorism and that executing terrorists may increase their prestige along with their cause. Israel’s own senior security officials, the people whose professional lives are devoted to preventing attacks, explicitly warned the Knesset that this law would escalate violence rather than reduce it. The Israel Democracy Institute noted that Israel’s own security agencies have long opposed such proposals, both because they believe the death penalty will not serve as a deterrent and because it would encourage hostage-taking and revenge attacks.

This is consistent with the historical record. As Jessica Stern argued at the Death Penalty Information Center, the British House of Commons in 1973 decided by a margin of nearly three to one that executing terrorists in Northern Ireland only increased violence and put soldiers and police at greater risk. National liberation movements from Algeria to South Africa were not pacified by harsher collective punishment. They were radicalized by it. A law that tells an entire people they live under a separate and more lethal legal regime does not persuade them to accept that regime. It confirms what they already believe: that the system exists not to deliver justice but to dominate.

The law also actively endangers Israeli lives. As MK Gilad Kariv has argued, mandatory death sentences restrict the government’s ability to negotiate prisoner exchanges, the mechanism that has historically brought Israeli hostages home.

But deterrence was never the real purpose. The law exists because it satisfies the emotional and political needs of a far-right coalition that has built its power on the promise of vengeance. Ben Gvir did not hand out champagne because he had received a security briefing showing projected declines in terrorism. He handed out champagne because his base wanted blood, and he delivered it.

Israel’s own legal establishment opposed this law. The Attorney General’s office, the Shin Bet, the Foreign Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the Knesset’s own legal advisors: all testified against it. They warned it violates the Geneva Conventions by denying those convicted in the West Bank the right to seek clemency. They warned it constitutes de facto annexation. They warned it could expose Israeli soldiers and officials to criminal prosecution abroad. The military’s own legal advisors told the committee that the law amounts to annexation by another name.

They were all overruled by a coalition for which legal constraints are obstacles and international norms are punchlines.

The foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, and Britain urged Israel to abandon the measure, warning of its discriminatory character. The United States, under the current administration, issued a statement so empty it could have been written by an algorithm: “The United States respects Israel’s sovereign right to determine its own laws.” History will record that silence as complicity.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel warned that the Knesset does not have the authority to legislate for a population over which Israel does not formally hold sovereignty. This is the legal paradox at the heart of the occupation and now, with this law, of the apartheid it has become. Israel governs the Palestinian population of the West Bank. It controls their movement, their water, their building permits, their arrests, and now, their executions. But it does not grant them citizenship, representation, or the protections of its civilian legal system. It rules them while claiming they are not its responsibility.

This is the reality that Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic have all independently documented and concluded constitutes the crime of apartheid. They were denounced for it. Their findings were called antisemitic. And the legal regime they described has only deepened.

There is no honest framework within which this arrangement is anything other than apartheid. The only question is whether we are willing to say so.

Ben Gvir hands out champagne. Smotrich continues to set policy for the West Bank. A law that explicitly creates an ethnic hierarchy of punishment is on the books. And the people best positioned to oppose it are still arguing about whether they are allowed to use the right word.

We cannot afford this cowardice any longer. The death penalty law is an apartheid law.

It creates one legal regime for Jews and another for Palestinians in the same territory under the same sovereign authority. It satisfies every element of the international legal definition.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)