Let’s give credit where credit is due. Anyone who argues that Zionism is racism owes a profound debt to the Israeli right, which works furiously to provide such critics with a constant stream of talking points.
The most recent and glaring piece of evidence came yesterday, when the Knesset’s far-right majority approved a new law that makes Palestinians convicted of killing Israeli Jews subject to execution, while exempting Israeli Jews convicted of killing Palestinians from the hangman’s noose. (That’s not a figure of speech; the law specifies hanging as the means of execution.)
Until now, legal executions haven’t really figured very much in Israeli jurisprudence; the last person legally executed by Israel was Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann in 1962. Under the new law, capital punishment is established, but only for murders carried out “to negate the existence of the state of Israel,” a phrase as perfunctory in its sanitization of targeting as, say, “final solution.” (In that sense, Eichmann serves as a precedent not only for being executed, but also for helping institute extremist race-based law.) An Israeli who murders Palestinian civilians, reasoned the new law’s authors and supporters (Itamar Ben-Gvir, the government’s far-right security minister who wrote the bill, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud party provided the votes to enact it), is not out to negate Israel’s existence and thus not subject to any legal niceties about equal justice under law. Under its terms, for instance, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler who murdered 29 Palestinians at prayer in 1994, would not have been subject to the death penalty. (Ben-Gvir, the new law’s author, once had Goldstein’s photograph displayed on his living-room wall.)
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This story first appeared in our Today On TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
One of the other legal niceties that the new law trashes is the requirement for jury unanimity; it will now take just a simple majority to pass a death sentence on a convicted Palestinian.
The law was enacted on a 62-48 vote, with the centrist and left parties voting against it. It was immediately condemned by a host of European nations that were once among Israel’s staunchest allies, including Germany and Britain. It encountered no pushback, of course, from Donald Trump’s government.
In the lead-up to the vote, Ben-Gvir sported a pin depicting a noose on his lapel. Just in case you’re wondering why Democrats, however belatedly, are shunning funding from AIPAC, you might keep that image in mind.
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