The death penalty law for Palestinians convicted of deadly acts of terror, which was fully enacted into law by the Knesset plenum earlier this week, is a stain not only on Israel’s statute books, but on the very fabric of Israeli society and the state itself.

It is a flagrantly unconstitutional law. Not only must the High Court of Justice strike it down, but any justice who fails to join such a ruling will be complicit in a moral crime, even if they remain in the minority.

The law also represents the rare, extreme case that justifies an interim injunction to freeze its validity. Although the High Court strives to avoid taking such a step out of respect for the principle of comity among the branches of government, this death penalty law warrants the issuance of an interim order.

Indeed, this was the first, immediate request made by the human rights organizations that rushed to file petitions against the law’s constitutionality.

The petitioners decried that not only does the law stipulate the immediate implementation of the death penalty, but that its enforcement could also undermine the presumption of innocence. They raised the concern that it “will lead defendants to confess to certain acts they did not commit in order to reach a quick plea arrangement that will not include the death penalty,” and that, consequently, the harm to the right to a fair trial may prove irreversible.

High Court Duty Justice Yechiel Kasher left the issue of an interim injunction on the table, even though he refused to issue an immediate order freezing the law. He ruled on Tuesday that the Knesset and the government must submit their responses to the petitions within approximately two months, after which a decision is expected on whether an interim order will be issued to freeze the law’s validity pending a final ruling.

The time the High Court typically takes to deliberate on constitutional petitions of this kind is generally measured in years, not months.

Another step toward de facto annexation

The central problem with the law is that it is intentionally racist — carefully designed to apply solely to Palestinian terrorists, not Jewish ones.

Accordingly, it does not settle for the standard definition of murder, nor even murder “under exceptionally grave circumstances,” as Israeli law stipulates regarding the release of prisoners in diplomatic deals — a clause written as a direct reaction to historical prisoner exchanges, most notably the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal.

Instead, the new legislation specifically defines the crime as “intentionally causing the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel.”

The objective is to distinguish between Palestinian terrorists — who, according to the law’s drafters, carry out terror attacks to deny the state’s existence — and Jewish terrorists. It is highly unlikely that a court would determine that murders committed by the latter, even if classified as terror attacks, were carried out for the purpose of........

© The Times of Israel