The new “Death Penalty for Terrorists” law passed by the Israeli legislature is not ethnicity-based. The new law raises serious moral and legal questions, but describing it as inherently racist mischaracterizes its structure, which is based on citizenship status rather than ethnicity.

Despite international uproar about the “racism” of this law, it actually applies to non-citizens in occupied territories, making capital punishment the default sentence (with discretionary exceptions) for non-citizens convicted through military judicial process of murder as an act of terror.

The optics for Israel are bad, especially in the context of widespread anti-Israel sentiment and narratives. Itamir Ben-Gvir’s gleeful champagne popping celebration in Knesset was inappropriate and too emotional, and gave easy fodder to critics and ideological antizionists. People across the world are focusing on Israel’s new death penalty law, calling it everything from racist, to evidence of apartheid, to genocide. Some have even compared the law to Nazi policy.

However, the new death penalty law is far from any of those things because it is not based on........

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