Israel, Apartheid, and the Death Penalty
When Law Becomes a Weapon of Ethnic Extermination
On 30 March 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a law imposing death by hanging on Palestinians convicted by military courts in cases involving fatal attacks, with execution carried out within ninety days of sentencing. This is not a penal code. This is a codified instrument of ethnic elimination, operating within a documented apartheid system, shielded by unprecedented American political cover. To understand what happened, we cannot begin with the law alone. We must begin with the entire structure that produced it.
The Death Penalty: The Cheapest Solution for the Failed State
From my principled and humanist position, I reject the death penalty completely and categorically. The right to life is an inherent right inseparable from a person’s humanity, and no state, regardless of the legitimacy it claims, may confiscate it.
No one is born a criminal or violent. Everyone at birth is in the fullness of innocence. Specific conditions and circumstances are what transform a person into a criminal: poverty, unemployment, the absence of social protection, authoritarianism, and national, religious, and class discrimination and oppression. Capital punishment provides failing governments with a ready-made excuse to evade their actual responsibility for addressing the root causes of crime and violence.
It is the easiest and cheapest solution, while treating the roots of crime is costly and demands serious, genuine work that corrupt and incapable authorities have no interest in doing.
The death penalty is in its essence a violent, retributive, and inhumane punishment rooted in the logic of revenge, not rehabilitation and reform. It is also a class-based and discriminatory punishment by definition: the overwhelming majority of those executed worldwide come from the working classes, marginalised communities, and national and religious minorities, people who cannot afford lawyers and have no connections to centres of power and influence. We rarely hear of a wealthy person or someone with political clout being executed for a criminal offence.
It is furthermore an irreversible punishment in a world whose courts are riddled with grave judicial errors, where most confessions are extracted through coercion, torture, and psychological and physical pressure. When a death sentence is carried out against an innocent person, there is no reversal and no remedy, and this alone is sufficient grounds to reject the punishment at its root.
Societies that are more humane in addressing crime and more just in distributing wealth are more capable of reducing violence. Killing in the name of the law produces not security but a state that excels at revenge and fails at reform, a state that through its practice of execution becomes the supreme negative model that codifies a culture of killing and spreads it throughout society.
The New Law: Legislating What Was Already Practiced in the Shadows
The current Israeli government is the most right-wing, extreme, and racist in Israel’s entire history. Its cabinet includes ministers who describe Palestinians in language that strips them explicitly of their humanity and who openly advocate forced displacement, annexation, and physical elimination as official state policies, not fringe opinions. This government did not emerge from a vacuum and has not governed in isolation. It reached this level of audacity in codified crime because it knows its back is covered internationally and that the price it will pay will not be painful enough to alter its calculations.
The most important political cover comes today from Washington. The Trump administration, expressing the American nationalist-populist right in its most unrestrained embrace of naked power, provides Israel with unconditional strategic support surpassing anything offered by any previous American administration. This support is not merely a diplomatic position.
It is an ideological alliance between two converging racist right-wing movements: both regard national supremacy as a source of legitimacy, both use the language of security and terrorism to justify crimes against oppressed peoples, and both work to dismantle the international oversight institutions that could hold them accountable. Trump’s Washington and Netanyahu’s Tel Aviv are two faces of a single system that places power above law and domination above right.
This alliance gives the Israeli right everything it needs to escalate its violations: protection in the Security Council through the American veto, media coverage through the American right-wing digital machine, and the false international legitimacy that frames occupation as legitimate defence and apartheid as necessary security.
The novelty here is not the act itself. Israel has practised extrajudicial execution for decades through assassinations, field liquidations, and direct bombardment of civilian populations. Many of these operations killed dozens of civilians surrounding their alleged targets, transforming them into a form of disguised mass execution dressed in the language of security and deterrence.
What is new today is that the state no longer confines its killing to the shadows. It now does it in the open, granting it legislative legitimacy and placing it in its declared legal arsenal. This is not courage in acknowledging what is done in secret. It is brazenness in normalising crime.
The Palestinian in the occupied territories is not tried before a system of legal equality. He has been tried before a military court operating within a colonial structure, lacking the most basic guarantees of a fair trial, recording conviction rates exceeding ninety-nine per cent, with most confessions extracted under coercion and psychological and physical pressure.
Conviction is nearly predetermined before any trial begins. By contrast, the Israeli Jewish citizen who commits a comparable crime faces an entirely different legal system, one that does not subject him to military courts or the same exceptional procedures.
This distinction is not a flaw that can be corrected by amending a text. It is the essence of a legal structure that divides human beings into different grades of life and rights. When a system like this is granted the right to execute a person within ninety days based on a military trial with near-automatic conviction rates, we are not facing a penal code. We are facing a codified instrument of ethnic elimination.
Apartheid: A Legal Classification, Not a Political Insult
Describing Israel as an apartheid system is no longer merely political rhetoric. It has become a documented legal classification endorsed by major international human rights organisations. Amnesty International concluded in its 2022 report that Israel practices a system of racial segregation against Palestinians based on systematic oppression and institutional discrimination extending across the occupied territories and within Palestinian communities inside Israel itself. Human Rights Watch confirmed in its 2021 report that Israeli authorities commit the crimes of apartheid and persecution through policies aimed at entrenching the domination of one national group over another.
These conclusions come from rigorous international organisations working with legal methodologies and field documentation. Rejecting them is only possible by invoking the same defensive logic that the architects of South African apartheid once deployed.
When the new execution law is placed within this context, it emerges clearly as a logical link within an integrated system of domination that controls land, movement, and identity and adds to these today direct control over the right to life itself. An apartheid system does not merely oppress the other.
It degrades the other’s human worth until they become eligible for subjugation and elimination without triggering a proportionate moral response from the great powers that sponsor, fund, and arm this system.
Total International Isolation: A Duty for Every Country in the World
South Africa’s apartheid system did not fall through the spontaneous conscience of its ruling elites. It fell under accumulated pressure from multiple directions: comprehensive international isolation, political, economic, academic, and cultural; a long and costly internal struggle; and the gradual erosion of the system’s legitimacy as the costs of isolation began to affect ever broader segments of white society. This is the historical lesson that cannot be dismissed.
Today, every country in the world is called upon to impose comprehensive international isolation on the Israeli apartheid state. This is not an appeal for symbolic solidarity or rhetorical declarations that are issued and forgotten. It is a description of a binding political and moral obligation resting on every state that claims to respect international law and human rights.
Severing diplomatic relations, imposing economic sanctions, freezing arms deals, withdrawing investments, academic and cultural boycotts, and holding officials accountable before international courts are all available and necessary tools. The only obstacles to applying them are political will and submission to American blackmail.
The current international posture reveals a shameful equation. States that speak about international law and human rights in their official forums simultaneously continue normalising their relations with Israel and silence their criticisms out of fear of the American right-wing pressure.
This surrender to coercion is active participation in enabling the system and prolonging its life. States that remain silent about Israel’s crimes bear a share of the moral and political responsibility for every victim who falls under this system. Popular pressure within these countries, through social movements, left and progressive parties, and human rights organisations, is the necessary tool for breaking this complicit silence and forcing governments to align with their declared principles rather than their narrow interests.
At the same time, external pressure alone is not enough. Radical change requires the struggle of all who inhabit this land, Jews, Arabs, and other nationalities, against the system itself. The Israelis who reject this path exist, and their voice deserves support, not isolation.
Building a genuinely equal state of citizenship grounded in the full rights of all residents without any national or religious discrimination, a civil democratic state that transcends the logic of national supremacy and places the human being at its centre, is the only possible horizon for anyone who genuinely wants to move beyond this historical impasse.
Against a Logic, Not Only Against a Punishment
Justice is not achieved through killing or revenge. Crime and violence are social phenomena rooted in occupation, poverty, displacement, and accumulated oppression across generations. When an occupying state turns to capital punishment against an occupied people, backed by the most partisan American administration in modern history, it does not treat violence.
It feeds it, reproduces it, and adds to it a new layer of grievance and indignation. The real question is not how to end the life of someone who committed violence. The honest question is why human beings turn to armed struggle and violence in the first place, and who bears the true responsibility for the colonial system that produces, sustains, and funds it.
The real struggle is not against a single legal punishment, however grave. It is against an entire logic that transforms the state into an instrument of killing, the law into a cover for discrimination, and national belonging into a criterion for the value of life. Those who feed this logic and protect it internationally bear their historical and moral responsibility, whether they sit in Tel Aviv or in Washington.
The struggle to abolish the death penalty, to dismantle the Israeli apartheid system, and to isolate the racist right-wing alliance that protects it are not separate battles. There are multiple expressions of a single liberation struggle that places every human being, without exception, at the centre of value, rights, and dignity. Let us execute the death penalty itself, and let it be its own final victim.
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Related Links
Amnesty International. (30 March 2026): Israel/OPT: The newly adopted death penalty law must be repealed.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/israel-opt-newly-adopted-death-penalty-law-must-be-repealed/
Amnesty International (February 2022)—“Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity” Full rapport:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/
Human Rights Watch (April 2021)—“A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/27/abusive-israeli-policies-constitute-crimes-apartheid-persecution
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