{"id":45670,"date":"2026-03-31T22:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T22:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/45670\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T22:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T22:15:08","slug":"new-israeli-law-hangings-for-palestinians-but-no-noose-for-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/45670\/","title":{"rendered":"New Israeli Law: Hangings for Palestinians, but No Noose for Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The most recent and glaring piece of evidence came yesterday, when the Knesset\u2019s far-right majority approved a new law<\/a> that makes Palestinians convicted of killing Israeli Jews subject to execution, while exempting Israeli Jews convicted of killing Palestinians from the hangman\u2019s noose. (That\u2019s not a figure of speech; the law specifies hanging as the means of execution.)<\/p>\n

More from Harold Meyerson<\/a><\/p>\n

Until now, legal executions haven\u2019t 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 \u201cto negate the existence of the state of Israel,\u201d a phrase as perfunctory in its sanitization of targeting as, say, \u201cfinal solution.\u201d (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\u2019s authors and supporters (Itamar Ben-Gvir, the government\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s author, once had Goldstein\u2019s photograph displayed on his living-room wall.)<\/p>\n

Today On TAP<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The law was enacted on a 62-48 vote<\/a>, with the centrist and left parties voting against it. It was immediately condemned by a host of European nations that were once among Israel\u2019s staunchest allies, including Germany and Britain. It encountered no pushback, of course, from Donald Trump\u2019s government.<\/p>\n

In the lead-up to the vote, Ben-Gvir sported a pin depicting a noose on his lapel. Just in case you\u2019re wondering why Democrats, however belatedly, are shunning funding from AIPAC, you might keep that image in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s give credit where credit is due. Anyone who argues that Zionism is racism owes a profound debt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[1681,4278,37,1685,18951,2925,18952],"class_list":{"0":"post-45670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-america-and-the-world","9":"tag-criminal-justice","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-israel-palestine","12":"tag-law-justice","13":"tag-on-tap","14":"tag-race-ethnicity"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116326100262771334","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}