Kazim AlamThe passage of Israel’s new death penalty law on March 31 has thrust the country’s legal system into the international spotlight.
Unanimously criticised by human rights advocates from around the world, the law imposes the death penalty as a default sentence on Palestinians convicted of “terrorism” by the Israeli military courts.
The law creates a separate and harsher legal track because Palestinians in the occupied territory are automatically tried in military, instead of civilian, courts.
Israel pushed through the law amid the haze of the Iran war and its continued killing of Palestinians in Gaza despite a tenuous ceasefire following two years of constant genocidal bombings. At the same time, Israeli forces and illegal settlers have repeatedly killed Palestinians in the occupied West Bank with impunity.
Experts say the new legislation is not an outlier, but the extension of a broader body of laws designed to ensure unequal rights and protections in Israel along racial and ethnic lines, especially targeting Palestinians.
Yair Dvir, a spokesperson for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, calls the new death penalty law a “horrific example of the depths of apartheid” that constitutes a “direct violation” of the right to life.
“(Israel has) a variety of laws that institutionalise preference for its Jewish citizens both within the 1948 borders and, of course, under the military regime in the (occupied) West Bank,” he tells TRT World.
But the new death penalty law marks “another stage in the deep dehumanisation of Palestinians” that has enabled years of oppression, dispossession, and discrimination through the Israeli judicial system, he says.
Nasir Qadri, an international law practitioner and critical legal scholar at Koc University in Istanbul, tells TRT World that Israel runs two different legal frameworks for Palestinians.
One operates through military courts in the occupied West Bank, where conviction rates exceed 99 per cent for Palestinian defendants.
The other exists within Israel’s civilian courts that targets acts committed with the “intent to negate the existence of the state of Israel”.
Qadri notes that the second legal framework is not neutral because it targets “ideological intent rather than conduct”, making its application structurally asymmetrical.
“An Israeli Jewish citizen cannot, by definition, be framed as negating the existence of the state. A Palestinian defendant can always be so characterised,” he says.
A pattern of discriminatory laws
Mehmet Rakipoglu, a Middle East expert and associate professor at Mardin Artuklu University in Ankara, calls the new law a “part of a broader punitive turn” unfolding in Israel.
“It seems to me that the elasticity of such legal categories allows the (Israeli) state to deploy law in ways that prioritise its security narrative, while disproportionately penalising Palestinians,” he tells TRT World.
Rather than neutral instruments, these measures “reclassify and penalise political dissent and resistance,” reinforcing a dominant national narrative, he says.
The experts agree that the collective body of Israeli laws is structured to extend unequal rights.
Dvir describes an “entire apparatus of written laws” designed to establish the “demographic dominance of Jews”.
Rakipoglu points to “differentiated rights tiers” between Jewish citizens and Palestinians evident in the vast disparities in land allocation and resource access.
A series of Israeli laws illustrates the pattern of bias against Palestinians.
For example, the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Family Unification Ban), enacted in 2003 and repeatedly renewed, is cited by all three experts as a cornerstone of demographic engineering.
The law explicitly denies family rights on the basis of ethnicity or national origins by barring family reunification for Israelis married to Palestinians from the occupied territories.
Dvir explains that Israeli law allows any Jew, even if they have never lived in this part of the world, to immigrate to Israel and receive citizenship. Meanwhile, a Palestinian who was expelled from the land is prevented from returning.
Rakipoglu terms the law a tool to maintain a “Jewish demographic majority” by granting Jews global immigration rights, while restricting Palestinian family unification – a practice that has long fragmented Palestinian family life and limited social integration.
Qadri adds that the law imposes a “categorical restriction” based on territorial origin and without any individual evaluation.
The law renders Palestinian residents’ status precarious, while Jewish citizenship remains secure, he says.
Therefore, the law is structurally discriminatory, prioritising Jewish ethnic composition over individual rights, he says.
As for the Admissions Committees Law, experts say it empowers numerically small communities to reject applicants for housing units on grounds of “social and cultural suitability”.
Effectively, the law excludes Palestinian citizens from the housing market, institutionalising ethnic segregation in land use, while reinforcing the legal preference for Jewish citizens.
Narrative control via law
Every expert singles out the Nakba Law – which is used as a financial whiplash to ensure no one commemorates the mass displacement of Palestinians at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948 – as an instrument of narrative control.
Dvir calls it a mechanism that guarantees that Israelis learn nothing about Israel’s crimes as far back as 1948, and directly links it to “the genocide that Israel is currently committing in Gaza”.
Rakipoglu views the Nakba Law as a tool that legalises the financial crippling of institutions and NGOs that commemorate the Palestinian experience.
“I see it as a clear attempt to suppress a critical part of Palestinian memory,” he says.
Along with the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People -- which legalises the right to national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people” and “Jewish settlement as a national value” – the Nakba Law erases the 1948 displacement of Palestinians to create a singular Jewish national story, according to Qadri.
In other words, the dispossession of the Palestinian population of 750,000 is constitutionally erased and rendered legally irrelevant, he adds.
The Kaminitz Law is another example of discriminatory legislation that gives the Israeli state expanded powers to demolish homes and seek prison sentences for Palestinians for so-called breaches of the state’s ostensibly biased planning and building laws.
The law disproportionately targets Palestinian communities where planning permissions are routinely denied, accelerating dispossession in line with the “apparatus of written laws”, as described by Dvir.
Similarly, the 2023 Citizenship/Residency Revocation and Deportation Law further reinforces the difference in status between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.
The 2023 law gives the Israeli state the power to revoke residency or citizenship, something that fits the broader framework that Rakipoglu and Dvir say limits and erases Palestinian presence.
“Palestinian residents hold a precarious legal status subject to administrative termination, while Jewish residents hold secure citizenship not subject to comparable conditions,” Qadri says.
Beyond relatively new laws, the experts note the systemic nature of discrimination against Palestinians embedded in the legal system for over seven decades.
Dvir points to the Absentees’ Property Law, which Israel has used to take over most of the land in the country since 1950.
“(It is) used to this day to dispossess Palestinians of their homes, including the expulsion of hundreds of Palestinian families from (occupied) East Jerusalem happening at this very moment,” he says.
Then there is the Law of Return, which allows every Jewish person to immigrate to Israel and automatically become a citizen. The law also applies to the children and grandchildren of Jews, as well as their spouses and the spouses of their children and grandchildren.
Meanwhile, the same state denies Palestinians the right to immigrate or receive citizenship, even if they were born in the present-day State of Israel.
The result, in Dvir’s words, is a physical struggle involving violence, expulsion, and killing.
“But it is also a narrative struggle based on a belief in supremacy and the horrible idea that the only path to security is by erasing Palestinian existence,” he says.
