The Israeli Knesset passed a new law this week, championed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, that mandates the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of murder—but not Israelis. The law is specifically crafted to discriminate along ethnic lines. On paper, it punishes “terrorists who have carried out murderous terror attacks,” but the wording is carefully chosen so that it only applies to crimes committed “with the aim of negating the existence of the State of Israel.” This means that Israelis who kill Palestinians, with the intent to promote or defend Israel, are excluded by definition. As the New York Times delicately puts it, the law “almost certainly cannot be applied to Jewish extremists convicted of similar crimes.”

Execution by hanging is the default punishment, and the new law requires it to be carried out within 90 days of sentencing. There is no possibility of clemency, but thanks to a last-minute change by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the sentence can be changed to life imprisonment if there are undefined “special circumstances”—a provision added in the eleventh hour, Reuters reports, “to head off international backlash.” In the lead-up to its passage, Ben-Gvir and his allies promoted the bill by wearing gold pins shaped like nooses on their lapels. When it became law, they popped champagne corks and raised a toast.

Not long ago, it was controversial to describe Israel as an apartheid state. You could be fired from your media job for saying so, as journalist Katie Halper was in 2022, or even censured by the House of Representatives, as Rep. Rashida Tlaib was in 2023. When Ta-Nehisi Coates compared Israel to the Jim Crow South in his book The Message, he was labeled an “extremist” for it. Now that Israel has passed a Jim Crow lynching law, there should be no doubt he was right. We are looking at the deliberate construction of a two-tiered punishment system, in which one ethnic group is marked for death and another is not, for the exact same crimes. Under the new law, the New York Times reports, even a depraved mass murderer like Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered 29 Palestinians with an automatic rifle in the Hebron Massacre of 1994, would not be sentenced to death, because his killing spree was not committed “with the intent of negating the existence of the State of Israel.” But a Palestinian who threw a rock at an IDF soldier, or defended themselves against a raid by West Bank settlers, would be. “Soon we will count them one by one,” said Ben-Gvir, who has even filmed a vertical video showing off an execution chamber.

Not only that, but the trial system itself is a segregated one. Israelis are tried in civilian courts, but Palestinians in the West Bank are tried in military ones, which the New York Times admits have “fewer civil rights protections and less due process.” Again, this is a euphemism: Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports that the conviction rate for Palestinians in military courts is an astonishing 96 percent, and that “In many cases, these convictions are based on ‘confessions’ obtained through pressure and torture during interrogations.” (Indeed, the Israeli supreme court has repeatedly declined to punish soldiers who use so-called “physical interrogation” techniques.) There is little pretense that fair trials and verdicts will occur.

Worse still, the Knesset passed a “Youth Bill” over a decade ago which allows children as young as 12 years old to be tried and convicted for violent crimes, including terrorism. In 2024 the IDF actually imprisoned a 14-year-old boy, Ayham al-Salaymeh, who became the youngest ever Palestinian prisoner after he was accused of “throwing stones at Israeli settlers.” The new death penalty law, too, places no floor on the age of the accused. So there is a real possibility that soon, teenagers like al-Salaymeh will be sentenced to death as well, and the world will see the ghastly spectacle of a child’s corpse hanging from an Israeli gallows.

This is only the latest step in the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians under Israeli law. Already, Israeli prisons are nightmarish sites of abuse and torment for the Palestinian inmates held there. Amnesty International reports “horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment” there, including “severe beatings,” arbitrary strip-searches, and guards who urinate on prisoners. B’Tselem has documented “widespread sexual violence” committed by the same guards, including an infamous case where a Palestinian man was left with severe injuries after being “sodomized with a knife.” In short, Israeli prisons have become torture camps—and if this new law is allowed to stand, they will soon be death camps as well.

The perversity of this whole situation is difficult to overstate. In the first place, Itamar Ben-Gvir is himself a convicted supporter of terrorism, having been sentenced in a Jerusalem court for “inciting racism” against Arabs and spreading propaganda for the ultra-right-wing Kahanist movement. Until 2020, he kept a framed photo of Baruch Goldstein, the mass shooter, in his home. Meanwhile, international law clearly states that armed resistance to occupation is both legal and legitimate, while the International Court of Justice has found that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal. So here we have a convicted terrorist supporter, writing a law to define Palestinians’ lawful right of resistance as “terrorism,” and promising to execute them en masse for it. Right and wrong, perpetrator and victim, have been turned on their heads.

This law also has to be placed in context with the wider pattern of Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Again, it used to be controversial to say that such cleansing existed, or was planned. But now prominent Israeli leaders just declare it openly. The most vocal of them is Bezazel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister—not a fringe figure in the slightest—who has announced plans to “apply Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria” by annexing roughly 82 percent of the West Bank, saying that his goal is “maximum territory and minimum Arab population.” In the Jerusalem Post, former Israeli intelligence agent Jonathan Pollard writes that even that number isn’t enough, demanding “100% of the territory G-d exclusively bequeathed to us, the Jewish people.” Under the second Trump administration, violence by Israeli settlers has already escalated dramatically, and is rarely punished, with an estimated 37,000 Palestinians displaced from their homes in 2025. And in late 2024, a quickly-deleted article in the Times of Israel gave the whole agenda away, asserting that Israel needs “Lebensraum,” the Nazi term for “living space,” in the West Bank.

Several governments around the world, including those of the U.K., Australia, Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand, have issued a joint statement opposing the new law, accurately calling it “discriminatory… inhumane and degrading.” (Though, notably, they don’t mention Palestinians by name as the targets of the discrimination.) Likewise, several of Israel’s regional neighbors, including Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have condemned the policy. International humanitarian groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem are also firmly against it, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, calls the planned executions a “war crime.” As usual, the United States government is an outlier here, with the State Department saying that it “respects Israel’s sovereign right to determine its own laws” and “trust[s] that any such measures will be carried out with a fair trial,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

But the U.S. government lies. We can’t look away from these horrors, or refrain from drawing the obvious conclusion. These are the first moments in a new phase of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people—this time, not conducted from a distance by bombs, but up close by the noose. The steps follow in simple, logical order. Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and Netanyahu want “sovereignty” over the West Bank, which they already label “Judea and Samaria” to assert their ownership. They say openly that they want “minimum Arab population.” They are doing everything they can to enable violent settler movements to spread into the West Bank and seize land. Now, they have passed a law that punishes armed resistance to those settlers by death. Already, the Israeli state holds an estimated 9,900 Palestinian prisoners, roughly 3,500 of them in “administrative custody”—that is, without charges or a trial. To carry out Smotrich’s plan for Israeli “sovereignty” in the West Bank, they would need to arrest and imprison far more. But keeping prisoners takes resources. So for Israel, it would be far more convenient to simply kill anyone who resists, and the death-penalty law provides them with the tools to do exactly that.

Nor can this murderous agenda be blamed exclusively on Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, or any single politician. True, Ben-Gvir is most directly the architect of the hanging law. But he couldn’t pass it alone: in fact, the policy reportedly “passed its third and final reading in the Knesset by 62 votes to 48 on Monday,” a significant majority of Israel’s elected representatives. The results of public opinion polls conducted in Israel are even more disturbing. In 2025, more Israelis supported the continued building of settlements in the West Bank (44 percent) than opposed it (35 percent). In a Haaretz poll from the same year, researchers found that “82 percent of Israeli Jews support ‘the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries’,” while a “majority of 56 percent of Jews supported the ‘transfer’ (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.” And as the Jerusalem Post reports, 64.9 percent supported the death penalty for “terrorists” in 2024.

Among U.S. politicians, it has become commonplace to blame “Netanyahu” rather than “Israel” for the war crimes and atrocities we’ve seen unfold since October 7. Bernie Sanders is the most striking example of this pattern, always talking about “Netanyahu’s war” or “Netanyahu’s cruelty;” listening to him, you’d think “Netanyahu” was the name of the country in question. And certainly, Benjamin Netanyahu is a remorseless war criminal who richly deserves his arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. But clearly, the problem goes beyond Netanyahu or Ben-Gvir or Smotrich, to Israeli society itself.

Within that society, what the Haaretz researchers call “eliminatory attitudes” toward Palestinians have clearly become completely mainstream, and the deadly process of dehumanization is far progressed. “Israelis live under an umbrella of denial and brainwashing, systematic and very deep,” said dissident journalist Gideon Levy when he spoke to Current Affairs in 2024. “[W]e are brought up here from childhood with the feeling that all the Palestinians want to kick us into the ocean. That they were born to kill, that we are the chosen people, that we are the only victims in history, that we have the right after the Holocaust to do whatever we want.” This is historically the kind of attitude that precedes the most extreme acts of violence, and it will not stop with the removal of any one leader.