Under cover of a war of choice and obscured from public view, the Israeli Knesset is advancing an agenda of death. Around the world, countries are increasingly abandoning the death penalty, but this week, the Knesset is resuming hearings to reintroduce and expand a particularly retributive and racist version of it. Lawmakers have scheduled marathon hearings this week and next to pass legislation that is cruel even by the standards of countries that still use the death penalty, and they’re barring the public from entering the Knesset to attend the hearings.
Under the draft law, Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis would be sentenced to death as the default punishment, while the same would not apply to Israelis who kill Palestinians. In the West Bank, the sentence would be carried out through the military justice system — a system that tries Palestinians exclusively and routinely denies them basic due process rights. Confessions extracted from Palestinian suspects — often under torture — would, under this law, send who survived torture in detention to death by judicial sentence.
The death penalty violates the right to life and human dignity, and nearly every democracy in the world has stopped using it. Research consistently shows that executions do not deter crime. A representative of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) even acknowledged before the Knesset that the deterrence assumption at the heart of this proposal is “ambivalent” — unsupported by any serious evidence or reasoning. What actually underlies this legislation is a policy of revenge and repression of the Palestinian people — “retribution,” as the proposal itself puts it.
The Public Committee Against Torture is leading a broad public campaign to stop this legislation in its tracks. Alongside a wide coalition of civil society organizations, we have met with Knesset members, attended Knesset National Security Committee sessions on the bill, published position papers and op-eds, enlisted allies in Israel and internationally, and brought wavering opposition parties on board. Together with committee members who oppose the bill, we have managed to slow and delay the legislative process and forced the bill’s sponsors to drop some provisions — though not the bill as a whole.
The fight against this bill is at a critical moment, and every action counts. Please join the fight against the death penalty: share the call to abolish the death penalty on social media; circulate materials and articles on the issue; raise it at demonstrations and in professional and community forums.
Write and call today — as soon as possible — the MKs from center and left-wing parties to ensure their attendance and opposition in the committee hearings. The coming days are critical for any chance of blocking the bill!
