New death penalty law shows how Israel targets Palestinians with highly discriminatory legal system

The 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.