ICAHD condemns with outrage if not surprise the Israeli parliament’s passing of the Death Penalty for Terrorists Bill on March 30. Drafted by Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a convicted terrorist, it was supported by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his entire Likud party and 70% of Israeli Jewish public.
This racist law mandates the death penalty – specifically by hanging – for a “terrorist” defined in terms that could only apply, in our context, to a Palestinian. Since there is no legally accepted definition of a “terrorist,” Ben Gvir & Co. invented one. In the Death Penalty Law, a “terrorist” is defined by intent and national origin. Thus, a terrorist is one who commits a “nationalistic" killing of an Israeli citizen with “the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel.”
Framed in this way, it would apply almost exclusively to Palestinians while making it impossible to indict and convict Jewish nationalist terrorists even if they were caught red-handed in the act. It even defines terrorism differently for Arabs and Jews. For the latter, terrorism means “negating the State of Israel” or harming “Jewish national revival” as a motive for killing someone, hardly an intent that could be laid to Israeli Jewish terrorists. In short, an Israeli Jew cannot be a terrorist; that designation can only be applied to a Palestinian.
As such, the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law represents nothing more than another lethal weapon in Israel’s arsenal of ways to kill Palestinians, to suppress their resistance and to criminalize their liberation struggle.
The law, in fact, is in itself illegal. It extends Israel law into the occupied West Bank and Gaza in violation of the Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibit that as a devious act of annexation.
Besides ensuring that only Palestinians be brought to court on charges of terrorism, the law also skews the legal proceedings towards almost certain conviction. Characteristic of an apartheid regime, the law is adjudicated in two separate legal systems, civilian courts for the Israeli citizens and military courts for residents of the West Bank or Gaza. Most if not all the trials of Palestinians will be held in military courts in the West Bank infamous for their 99% conviction rate. Since the Death Penalty for Terrorism Law mandates that those convicted be executed within 90 days, the chance of acquittal is slim at best.
Nor is leniency a possibility. The IDF commander in the West Bank is not authorized by the Law to pardon, mitigate, or commute a death sentence, even if he were inclined to do so. All this is in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which guarantees anyone sentenced to death the right to seek pardon or commutation. Given the virtual certainly of conviction, any Palestinian charged under the Death Penalty for Terrorism Law will be executed by a kangaroo court. This amounts to torture or cruel, degrading punishment, illegal under international law and morally reprehensible.
ICAHD calls on the international community to suspend Israel from the UN
The Death Penalty for Terrorists Law must be unequivocably condemned as yet another instrument of state-sponsored political killing. We call on the international community to suspend Israel from the United Nations until it ceases to commit blatant and brutal violations of International Humanitarian Law: the crime of apartheid, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of genocide – and be held accountable for them. As in the case of apartheid South Africa, Israel cannot remain a member of good standing in the international community and its institutions as long as violates with impunity that community’s laws, UN resolutions and the most basic of human values, or the national, human and civil rights of the Palestinian people.