Ron Dudai
+972 Magazine / November 26, 2025
A bill to legalize the execution of Palestinians represents an effort to institutionalize revenge and erase all remaining limits on state violence.
On Nov. 10, a bill enabling the death penalty for Palestinians cleared its first major legislative hurdle in the Israeli parliament. The single-page proposal, which now moves to committee before potentially returning to the Knesset for its two final votes, would mandate a death sentence for anyone convicted of “intentionally or out of indifference causing the death of an Israeli citizen, when the act is carried out from a racist motive or hate to a certain public … and with the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland.”
The bill is extreme even by current Israeli standards. It creates a new capital offense, makes the death penalty mandatory under vaguely defined conditions, and eliminates judicial discretion altogether. Crucially, its language is explicitly discriminatory, applying to Palestinians who kill Jews but not to Jews who kill Palestinians. As one of the bill’s sponsors, MK Limor Son Har-Melech, put it bluntly, “There is no such thing as a Jewish terrorist.”
A second section addresses Israel’s military courts, which technically already have the authority to impose capital punishment on Palestinians but have never done so due to longstanding government policy. Here, the bill seeks to dismantle the primary safeguards that have limited this power: the requirement that a three-judge panel reach a unanimous verdict, and the army Chief of Staff’s authority to commute death sentences. These protections have historically ensured that valid death sentences remained exceedingly rare and, when issued, swiftly commuted. Removing them in a system widely criticized for failing to ensure fair trials would carry unprecedented risks.
Although the vote on the death penalty bill received coverage in both local and international media, it prompted little sustained outcry, despite its clear violation of international laws protecting the right to life. With at least 70,000 Palestinians and 2,000 Israelis killed over the past two years or so, the issue may seem almost trivial by comparison. Yet much is at stake — for Palestinians, for Israeli society, and for global efforts to abolish capital punishment.
A policy of abstaining
Israel formally abolished the death penalty for murder in 1954 — a relatively early move, at a time when countries such as the UK and France were still carrying out executions. Capital punishment nevertheless remained on the books for a narrow set of exceptional offenses, including crimes related to the Holocaust and genocide, treason, and certain acts covered under emergency regulations inherited from the British Mandate. In practice, however, Israel has carried out only one execution in its history: that of Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the Holocaust, in 1962.
After Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it authorized the military courts established there to impose the death penalty on Palestinian residents. Yet every government since has maintained a policy of abstaining from its use. Military prosecutors were instructed not to seek death sentences, and a series of procedural safeguards — a unanimous three-judge panel, an automatic appeal, and the possibility of commutation — ensured that even when individual judges attempted to deviate from policy, their rulings did not stand.
Several factors underpinned this longstanding restraint. Israel’s security establishment, including the army and Shin Bet, has consistently opposed the death penalty, arguing that it offers no deterrent value and risks fuelling further violence. Successive governments also feared that executions would harm Israel’s international standing; opposition to capital punishment instead offered a rare human rights credential to showcase abroad. The stance also dovetailed with the enduring Israeli self-image of “shooting and crying,” a myth that frames the use of force as reluctant and purely defensive.
Moreover, many perpetrators of the deadliest attacks were either suicide bombers or killed during the incident, meaning they never reached trial, while the widespread use of extrajudicial killings allowed Israel to pursue lethal force without resorting to judicial executions.
At the same time, demands for the death penalty for Palestinians — often expressed through variations of the slogan “Death penalty for terrorists” — have become a prominent fixture of Israeli right-wing discourse. For years, the idea has energized demonstrations, petitions, and online campaigns, and it has emerged as a defining cause of the insurgent radical right, championed in particular by Israel’s current National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
Throughout this period, Knesset members regularly introduced bills to modify existing laws and policies around capital punishment — a ritualistic act of populist defiance against an ethos of responsibility, restraint, and concern for international opinion. None ever passed; in practice, Israel’s policy has not changed since 1967. With little prospect of implementation, the demand took on the quality of a revenge fantasy, while the political center’s pragmatic, elitist, and self-congratulatory rejection of executions continued to define official policy.
Abandoning the pretense of restraint
As the recent vote makes clear, the politics of the Israeli radical right are no longer confined to the realm of ritualistic gestures. It will be tempting to attribute the shift solely to the horrors of the October 7 attacks — and that is certainly part of the story — but the legislation reflects a broader transformation tied to the rise of the radical right and the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul agenda. Indeed, the bill that just advanced is identical to one tabled in early 2023, well before October 7. (A separate proposal to establish special tribunals with death-penalty powers to try October 7 suspects is still awaiting committee discussion.)
Above all, this turn toward capital punishment reveals a fundamental change in Israel’s balance of power: the waning influence of the traditional political, military, and judicial establishment and the ascent of a radical right determined to strip away checks on state violence.
In the past, the heads of the Shin Bet and the Military Advocate General’s office would appear before the Knesset to voice opposition to the death penalty. Today, the old-guard Shin Bet chief has been dismissed and replaced with Maj. Gen. David Zini — an officer aligned with the messianic right who has reportedly expressed explicit support for the new bill — while the Military Advocate General has been arrested for leaking footage documenting the torture of Palestinian detainees at the Sde Teiman detention facility. Meanwhile, the broader judicial establishment is fighting for its institutional survival, and aggressive hasbara efforts have largely replaced the earlier diplomatic concern for Israel’s standing abroad.
At the same time, Ben Gvir’s rise to national security minister has transformed what was once an anti-establishment provocation into the policy of the establishment itself. After the initial vote passed, the long-time advocate of capital punishment handed out sweets to fellow lawmakers, in what seemed like a bizarre mimicry of the widely publicized allegations that some Palestinians celebrated news of the October 7 attacks by distributing sweets and celebrating in the street.
To be clear, the old Israeli establishment with its “shooting and crying” mindset has been responsible for countless atrocities and abuses against Palestinians. Yet, as its opposition to judicial execution shows, it still operated under the assumption that there are limits to state power and that international norms had to at least be acknowledged.
This posture was undoubtedly hypocritical: Israel routinely carried out extrajudicial killings while touting its refusal to execute. But as George Orwell observed, hypocrisy can serve as an important safeguard: It depends on the possibility of shame, and the gap between professed values and actual practice can be exposed and leveraged by those pushing for accountability and change.
The rhetoric of today’s pro-death penalty camp is not hypocritical, and that is precisely what makes it so dangerous. It lets go of the pretense of restraint, seeks to mainstream the spirit of revenge that has shaped the war in Gaza, and elevates notions of Jewish supremacy, national honour, and raw power. It signals a willingness to cast aside red lines, expert assessments, and legal norms.
As National Security Committee Chair Zvika Fogel declared during deliberations: “I am fed up with all the assessments and the information … The debate is meant to add to the Jewish backbone what is required.” After the vote, Ben Gvir proclaimed triumphantly: “Jewish Power is making history.”
Machinery of execution
Taken together, these developments point to a transformation that reaches far beyond the death penalty itself — one that is likely to reshape Israeli policy, governance, and political culture. Once the state authorizes executions, a whole machinery must be built: methods of execution debated, regulations drafted, personnel recruited. Public figures and lawmakers will compete to appear “tougher,” imagining ever harsher punishments, now freed from the restraints that hypocrisy once imposed. MK Yitzhak Wasserlauf has already stated this openly: “I’m not afraid of the word revenge. It has very important value.”
A state that executes must also appoint executioners. There will be calls for tenders, employment contracts, chains of command. The question of who carries out executions will become a public spectacle (physicians are already declaring their refusal). It is not difficult to imagine Ben Gvir inserting himself into the process — perhaps directly overseeing recruitment, or even, as his colleague Bezalel Smotrich once suggested, volunteering to serve as executioner himself.
The hangmen, one can expect, will be profiled by the media and greeted by supporters outside the execution site (perhaps at Sde Teiman?). Commentators will fixate on the rituals surrounding executions: the procedures, the last meals, the final words. And even if cameras are officially banned, videos will inevitably leak and cultivate a culture of morbid fascination. A society that normalizes the gallows will begin to gloat over them.
The effects will ripple throughout the political and legal system. If the death penalty becomes mandatory, it will be far harder to defend against harsher sentences for lesser crimes. Once execution is normalized, resistance to other extreme measures, such as stripping Palestinian citizens of Israeli citizenship, will weaken further. With death at the top of a hierarchy of punishment, the entire system will re-orient; life imprisonment will no longer define the outer limit of state coercion. In a country where executioners exist — and, in practice, they will be Jewish executioners tasked with killing exclusively Palestinian prisoners — claims to equality, rule of law, or compassion will ring utterly hollow.
It is essential to understand that the death penalty bill is part of the broader judicial overhaul agenda, not an improvised response to the shock of the October 7 attack. Its goal is not only retribution, but also the consolidation of authority in the hands of Ben Gvir and his allies at the expense of the judiciary and the military. The clauses concerning military courts strip the “military commander” of the power to commute sentences on security grounds; the clauses amending the penal code make the death penalty mandatory, eliminating judicial discretion altogether. Wasserlauf captured the logic succinctly: “It should be clear that the punishment is not a choice of a judge.” This is the judicial overhaul distilled to its essence.
For its proponents, the bill also meant to signal a break with the international community and its norms. It is a direct inheritance of Kahanism, which has long embraced international isolation as a badge of honour. With the lone exception of Belarus, no European country carries out executions — not Turkey, and not even Putin’s Russia. Europe now defines itself explicitly as a “death penalty-free zone.” Israelis enjoy Europe’s cultural embrace when it comes to Eurovision or UEFA, and are horrified by talk of suspension; reinstating executions could make those threats real.
Supporters sometimes point out that the United States still uses the death penalty. But they ignore that a majority of U.S. states have abandoned it, and that executions, which have been on a steady decline for decades, occur only in a few outliers such as Texas and Oklahoma. The global epicenter of executions today is China, North Korea, and Iran. This is the club Ben Gvir seeks to join — and one that authoritarian regimes, fighting desperate battles against the global abolitionist tide, would welcome Israel into.
Some Israelis oppose the death penalty in principle but believe the perpetrators of October 7 constitute an exception. Yet beyond the imperative of opposing capital punishment universally, it must be recognized that reinstating it cannot be contained. The contaminant would spread through the judicial and law-enforcement systems and into the broader political culture. Once the door is opened, the practice will expand.
The opposition, both in the Knesset and in civil society, can still resist: by obstructing parliamentary proceedings, protesting it, and, if necessary, pledging to repeal it once in power. The centrist bloc, which has broadly supported the government’s wartime policies, may be tempted to stay quiet so as not to alienate voters. This would be a grave political and moral mistake. The death penalty is identified with Ben Gvir; no centrist lawmaker from a party like Yesh Atid will win support by refraining from opposing it, and the consequences of allowing it to pass will be profound.
If executions and the culture surrounding them take hold, Israel will become a worse society still, one with virtually no red lines. But if the death penalty can still be stopped, it would suggest the existence of moral boundaries that have not yet been erased: a recognition that there are some acts a society refuses to imagine itself performing, and that certain forms of blood-soaked revenge are simply too much. Rejecting the death penalty could become a catalyst for a broader return to political and moral sanity.
Ron Dudai is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev [Naqab]
