Just days before Pesach – Passover – when Jews around the world recite avadim hayinu, that we were once slaves in Egypt, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and 60 other Israeli parliamentarians saw fit to enact a morally repugnant death penalty law that effectively only applies to West Bank Palestinians convicted of lethal terrorist attacks. In doing so, they knowingly treat Palestinians as inferior to themselves and risk alienating large numbers of diaspora Jews who have defended Israel against charges of racism and apartheid.

This law could easily be called the Luftglass law, after Markus Luftglass, a Polish Jew who was sentenced to 30 months imprisonment in 1941 for hoarding 65,000 eggs. Hitler read about the case in a Berlin newspaper and had the chief of his chancellery, Hans Lammers, inform acting justice minister Franz Schlegelberger that the Führer was furious at what he considered an overly lenient sentence. Schlegelberger proceeded to have Luftglass transferred to the Gestapo for execution.

Had a non-Jewish German been convicted of the same offense, he would most certainly have been treated differently. Luftglass was put to death– murdered, if you will — because he was a Jew and Nazi German law differentiated between Jews and Aryan Germans.

Or perhaps the new Israeli death penalty law should be called the Katzenberger law, after Lehmann, or Leo, Katzenberger. In 1942, Katzenberger, a 68-year-old prominent member of the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)