On Monday, Israel’s Knesset passed a law mandating death by hanging for Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis in the occupied territories—a sentence requiring no unanimity among judges, allowing no appeal, and carrying a 90-day execution clock. The law applies exclusively to Palestinians tried in military courts. Israeli settlers who murder Palestinians face no equivalent penalty.
When the measure passed, the chamber erupted into cheers. Itamar Ben-Gvir, sporting a gold noose-shaped lapel pin he had worn throughout the campaign for the legislation, handed out champagne as members of the coalition celebrated.
Members of his Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party recited the Shehecheyanu, the traditional Jewish prayer of gratitude offered at moments of historic joy: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this season.” They thanked God for living to see the day Palestinians could be hanged.
There is a narrative in Zionist political culture that once presented itself, with some success, as reluctant about violence. Golda Meir, perhaps the most famous articulator of this idea, gave the world a phrase that has echoed for decades: She could forgive the Arabs for killing Israeli sons, she said, but she could never forgive them for making Israel’s sons into killers.
Whatever its hypocrisies—and there were many— this represented a recognizable moral grammar. Violence was a tragic necessity. The cost of it weighed on the conscience. The killing was acknowledged as killing, and the acknowledgement came wrapped in visible anguish.
This was always, in large part, mythology. The doctrine of tohar haneshek (purity of arms) was a marketing strategy more than a moral code, designed to present the Zionist military project in a way that would be digestible to liberal Western audiences and to the Jewish diaspora, many of whom had real reservations about what was being done in their name. The Nakba was not the work of men wracked with guilt, and Palestinian villages were not emptied by soldiers who wept. But the ideology at least insisted on performing grief, on maintaining that the violence of colonization was something necessary but not to be celebrated.
With the passing of the new death penalty law, that performance is over. It has been replaced with joy in the face of death and suffering.
Ben-Gvir is not an anomaly in Israeli politics, but rather the product of a decades-long ideological evolution within Zionism and Israel’s ruling class itself. He is the heir of Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi whose movement was so nakedly racist that Israel banned it from the Knesset in 1988 and the United States designated it a terrorist organization.
Kahane did not pretend that the Palestinian people were a demographic inconvenience to be managed. He said clearly that they needed to be expelled, and that Jewish law demanded it. For years, Kahanism was treated as the embarrassing fringe so that mainstream Zionism could point to it when it wanted to demonstrate that it had limits.
Ben-Gvir himself has been convicted of supporting Israeli terrorist organizations and once kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the settler who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, hanging in his home. He is now the minister responsible for Israel’s national security, controlling the country’s police force and prisons. He had threatened to bring down the government if this death penalty bill was not brought to a vote. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had previously opposed the bill, reversed his position and supported it in the final vote.
The fringe has thus became the mainstream.
This is what the fascist maturation of a colonial project looks like. It does not arrive in a single dramatic lurch. It happens through slow normalization, through the absorption of each previously unthinkable position into the bounds of respectable debate, through the steady rightward migration of the political center until yesterday’s extremist is today’s cabinet minister. The ideology that was banned from the Knesset for inciting racism in 1988 is now writing the laws.
A coalition of human rights and civil society organizations in Israel condemned the bill as an “official stamp of approval on a policy of vengeance and racist violence against Palestinians.”
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid warned from the Knesset floor: “This law says: If they come to murder us, the only solution is to be like the murderers. To act like them, think like them, become them.”
Even this framing, from a liberal Zionist, concedes that the situation has changed. Something has been lost that cannot simply be recovered by replacing the government. The logic that produced Ben-Gvir—permanent occupation, two populations governed by apartheid, land theft—was always there, underneath the performances of sorrow. What Kahanism did was remove the performance.
On Monday, the Knesset thus codified what has been true in practice for decades: Palestinian life is worth less. Palestinian death is acceptable. Palestinian death, under the right circumstances, is cause for celebration.
Golda Meir’s famous quote was always self-serving. She lamented that her soldiers were made into killers while those soldiers were actively engaged in dispossession and massacre. But there was at least a residual acknowledgement buried in it that killing is a moral cost, that it does something to the person who does it, and that it demands accounting.
What Ben-Gvir and his colleagues expressed in the Knesset chamber this week with the champagne toast, the noose pin, and the Shehecheyanu was the complete abandonment of that acknowledgment. There is no cost being counted, and there is no grief being performed. There is only joy over death.
A movement that once needed to pretend that it mourned its victims now thanks God for the tools to make more of them. That is not a government losing its way. It’s Zionism reaching its inevitable destination.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed above are those of the author.
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