Afrasianet - The eminent Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote in his "Prison Notebooks" in 1930 that when the old dies and the new is not born, the new is born, frightening political and social symptoms appear in society.
On its 78th Independence Day, Israel is plunged into the phase described by Gramsci. It is no longer a democracy in a temporary crisis or an extremist society in the shadow of a protracted war, but a state that abandons the last moral, legal, and political barriers to a democratic state of law, on its way to becoming a violent fascist state. Hegemony and apartheid take hold.The
2026 Death Penalty Law for Terrorists, which was approved by the Knesset on March 30, is not an amendment to a criminal law that stems from security motives, and it is not an overly emotional and political reaction to the tragedy of October 7.
This is the moment when the truth will be revealed. It shows that Israel is not only seeking to imprison, expel and displace Palestinians, starve them and harm their ability to live, but also to authorize itself, under a discriminatory legal system, to execute the people under its rule.
To combat terrorism, a law that gives the state additional authority to kill Palestinians, in a system that is already based on a wide disparity between Jews and Arabs.
The law would allow for selective punishment of Palestinians – only Palestinians – and would represent a serious escalation in their repression.
The United Nations has warned that the application of this law in occupied territories where its inhabitants enjoy protection is a violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.
Israel does not enshrine the death penalty at the core of its legislation in general, but rather directs it toward the people it controls by military force.
This is not just a moral imbalance, but a structural element of the reality of ethnic domination.
This law must be understood in the context of the war in the Gaza Strip, the ethnic cleansing taking place in the West Bank and the war with Iran.
The events of recent years, since the beginning of the coup in January 2023 until now, are all but manifestations of a state that has lost all its political and moral boundaries, and has replaced the cult of violence with legal restraint.
The genocide in Gaza is not only an emotional or security backdrop to the enactment of this law, but it is the key to understanding the changing face of Israel. In September 2025, an international UN investigation found that Israel had committed genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Although the debate over terminology continues, the documents and facts paint a clear picture: famine, systematic destruction of living conditions, mass displacement, killing of civilians on an unprecedented scale, violence aimed at preventing the continued existence of Palestinian society in Gaza.
In this sense, the death penalty law is an integral part of what happened in Gaza.
It is another stage in the process by which Israel has become accustomed to seeing the killing of Palestinians as a legitimate goal that can be achieved by various means: the government war machine, the terror of settlers in the West Bank, and legislation.
Hannah Arendt understood that the system that is taking shape in Israel is based not only on ideology, but also on the systematic dismantling of the space in which people are considered equal before the law.
The American philosopher Hugo Beda, one of the most prominent thinkers who opposed the death penalty in the United States, argued that it was not a question of whether the punishment was a deterrent, but also of determining what kind of state claimed the power to kill in a system that was prone to arbitrariness, bias and error.
Robert Biedenter, a French Jewish jurist who grew up in the wake of the disaster and lost his father in the Sobibor camp, later led a struggle for the abolition of the death penalty in France. Biedenter realized that a state that chooses to execute is not a show of force, but a moral and political failure. Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Vannon designed, in their own way, that colonial rule not only dispossesses the ruled, but also corrupts the ruling society, accustoming it to seeing violence as natural language, and seeing the lives of the governed as a substance that can be shaped, reduced, or erased. In Israel 2026, these elements intersect at the Gaza intersection, settler terrorism in the occupied territories, the war in Iran, and the death penalty law.
The term "apartheid" is no longer just a controversial slogan, but an accurate description of the reality in Israel. Even in apartheid South Africa, the death penalty was not enshrined in law as a punishment only for blacks.
However, it was implemented within a clearly racist legal system. In 1981-1990, some 1,100 people were executed in South Africa, almost 97 percent of whom were black. All the judges who issued the verdicts were white.
The gap was structural. The death penalty was applied within a legal system that over-protected white lives, while black lives were consistently neglected.
Indeed, there have been rare cases in which whites have been sentenced to death for killing or raping black people, most famously in the case of Jenny Gotswena, a black woman who was raped and murdered in February 1985, and two whites were sentenced to death for it, Shalka Borcher and George Spree.
As in Israel, where Amiram Ben-Uliel, the Dawabsha family killer, was sentenced to three life sentences, but an exceptional verdict revealed the norm in which Jewish terrorism against Palestinians enjoys political and legal immunity, which does not apply to Palestinians.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the most prominent moral voices in the struggle against apartheid, said the death penalty was a disgrace, as it was used disproportionately against the poor and ethnic minorities (who were predominantly black).
In South Africa, too, this was not just a distortion of justice, but one of the means by which the law itself became an executive arm of white supremacy.
In Israel, the death penalty law is an element of apartheid, which forms the infrastructure of the occupation. Jews living in the same area as Palestinians are tried in fair civilian courts, while Palestinians are tried in military courts affiliated with the occupier.
Jews are guaranteed all political rights, freedom of movement, access to resources, and a civilian judicial system, while Palestinians live under the control of checkpoints, military orders, licensing mechanisms, collective punishment and constant violence.
Under this system, when the state empowers itself to execute only those under occupation, it makes no sense to talk about democracy with "exceptions." It is a system that not only distributes land, water, roads, and rights according to ethnic affiliation, but also the attitude of life and death.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory reported that 1,697 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 33 communities in the first three months of 2026, due to settler violence and access restrictions.
More than 68 percent of these expulsions were in the Jordan Valley, specifically between herders' and Bedouin communities. Another report issued by OCHA in February 2026 documented 883 cases of displacement of Palestinian families, including 4,765 people, in 97 communities, due to settler violence since January 2023.
The UN Human Rights Office concluded that this violence was strategically coordinated and stressed that the Israeli authorities play a key role in guiding and participating in this pattern to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish between state violence and settler violence. This is no longer just negligence in the application of the law, but has become a style of governance.
These are no exceptions. Herders and Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley and in the southern Hebron Hills are leaving their homes not only in compliance with official eviction orders, but also in particular, after repeated disturbances that include breaking into homes, shooting, denying access to water and pastures, stealing sheep, arson, assaults, destruction of property, and sometimes killing, often in the presence of or with the support of security forces.
Human rights organizations describe a pattern in which it becomes impossible to live, until leaving becomes the only option; it may appear to be voluntary, but in reality it is forced displacement through ongoing terrorism.
This is the image of Israel's sovereignty in the West Bank. Groups of armed Jews, sometimes operating within Qatari security systems, along with IDF units, determine who is allowed to move, graze, plow, build and sleep safely.
The line between the soldier, the settler and the armed rioter is gradually blurring. This is the stage at which the system ceases to be a system of law, and becomes a system of racial immunity: one group can act violently without paying any price, while the other group remains under constant suspicion and liable to death.
The death penalty law is part of this reality, it simply translates it into legal language. But it is also linked to the reality of Gaza. The same state that allows settlers to commit massacres in Palestinian villages in the West Bank has implemented a policy of extermination, starvation, destruction of hospitals, and destruction of civilian infrastructure, and has turned the very existence of the Palestinian people into a problem that must be solved by force.
The Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the death penalty law are only a reflection of a single reality. In Israel now, fascism and apartheid are no longer just slogans or metaphors, but terms that accurately reflect reality: apartheid; between the sea and the river, there is one system in terms of sovereignty, and two systems in terms of rights, justice and punishment.
Because Jewish sovereignty is no longer constrained by a deep commitment to human equality and the law, and because violence is no longer just a means of control, but has become a higher example and a test of loyalty to Jewish hegemony.Daily displacement and terror in the West Bank, massacres of innocents, famine and mass destruction in the Gaza Strip, the ongoing war with dubious goals in Iran, and the legalization of the state's right to kill those under its authority under the apartheid regime are all intertwined to form a new structure of the Jewish state.
To a segregated state that is not only fascist, but also mired in the process. This is not just the current extremist government, as large segments of Israeli society have become accustomed to living peacefully under ethnic superiority, and to regard the slow and open extermination of another people as an acceptable price for the supposedly normal life of Jews.
Therefore, the death penalty law is not just a law, but proof that a state born from the promise of historical and moral liberation of a people who have known genocide, where millions of its children have been exterminated, is reconstituting itself after some eighty years as a brazen racist state resorting to unbridled violence.
This is not a democratic state in crisis, but a state that loses its identity and questions the moral and historical justifications for its existence.
Haaretz 17/4/2026
