Israel’s Death Penalty Law and Zionism’s “Invisible Discrimination”

You’ve probably heard by now about Israel’s racist death penalty law — whose supporters took to wearing noose pins. The ultra-nationalist National Security Minister, Ben Gvir, has made no bones about his giddy bloodlust against Palestinians. Gvir is a religious fanatic of the first order, whose extremism at 18 was already so apparent that even the IDF refused to conscript him. Quite the feat for a Jewish Israeli.

Two weeks before the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Ben Gvir held up a decal from Rabin’s motorcade and boasted that Rabin could be accosted just like his car. And Ben Gvir is an admirer of Baruch Goldstein, keeping a photograph of the mass murderer — who slaughtered 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1995 —nailed in the interior of his home. Only taking it down in 2020 for political purposes. “He is my hero,” Ben Gvir once stated about Goldstein, whom he dressed up as for Purim (a Jewish holiday).

Another cheerleader for the law is MK Limor Son Har-Melech, who has said there’s no such thing as a “Jewish terrorist.”  Of course not, since Har-Melech considers a Jewish terrorist to be a “Holy Righteous Man,” her description of an Israeli settler convicted of murdering a Palestinian family, including a baby.

In Israel, there is no pretense: Racism is unvarnished, the most cruel violence is celebrated, and Jewish supremacy is paraded. But Zionists in America work overtime to try to whitewash Israel’s conduct — often engaging in the risible practice of contradicting the very crafters of Israel’s apartheid laws. While Israelis openly state their motivations, Zionists want us to instead believe their words as somehow representative of Israel’s true yet unspoken intentions.

Zionists have seized on the death penalty’s race-neutral language to argue that it is not solely targeted against Palestinians.

Israel has a long history of crafting racist legislation without reference to Jews or Arabs, but the laws are always structured to impact only Palestinians. No one in Israel is mistaken about their intent and purpose. Knesset debates before a law’s passage make it clear what the law is designed to do. Israel, however, seeks to maintain a pretense to the outside world that it is a liberal democracy. And even the Israeli High Court might frown upon explicitly racist laws. And so everything is built around maintaining what the Israeli High Court calls “invisible discrimination.”

The term comes from a High Court ruling ordering Israeli airport authorities to suspend their practice of placing different colored labels on passports held by Jewish and Arab citizens. The Court ruled that visible discrimination is contrary to Israel’s ostensible democracy, but “invisible discrimination” is permitted. So the authorities switched to single-colored barcodes. The practice of discrimination continued, but less baldly salient.

Similarly, Israel has a marriage restriction law that bears no mention of Arabs or Jews, but is explicitly designed to limit the number of Palestinians eligible for Israeli citizenship and thus voting rights. The law prohibits, in race-neutral language, the marriage of Israeli citizens to non-citizen residents of the occupied West Bank.

It would appear to apply to both Jewish and Arab citizens. Except Jews who live, as illegal settlers, in the West Bank already have citizenship, so being from Tel Aviv and wishing to marry a settler living in Hebron is a simple matter. Moreover, Jews who live in Israel are unlikely, to say the least, to marry a non-citizen Palestinian living under occupation in the West Bank.

The law is designed to prevent Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying and conferring citizenship on Palestinians in the West Bank. As Adalah has noted, “Although the law was originally enacted as a temporary order, its validity has been repeatedly extended by the Knesset making it in effect a permanent law. Thousands of Palestinian families have been affected by the law, forced to split apart, move abroad or live in Israel in fear of constant deportation.”

When the marriage law was challenged, the Israeli High Court upheld it on the condition that “human rights are not a prescription for national suicide”. Israel is the only self-styled democracy that conditions its survival on the negation of the basic rights of other people.

Another example: Israel’s “center of life” policy in Jerusalem permits the authorities to revoke residency rights — the blue pass — to individuals whom the authorities judge are no longer adequately rooted in Jerusalem. This is one of Israel’s tools to expel the Palestinian population from Jerusalem. Its criterion is entirely arbitrary. A Palestinian Jerusalemite who studies and works abroad may suddenly find their residency rights revoked. The law makes no mention of race or identity. But it only applies to non-citizens in Jerusalem. And all Jews in Jerusalem are citizens. Any Israeli can leave Jerusalem for decades and never have their rights revoked. Any American Jew, for that matter, who has never set foot in Jerusalem can move their tomorrow. But Palestinians are constantly at risk of losing their home.

Or consider Israel’s housing discrimination laws. Several years back, the Knesset passed a law that would permit towns of no more than 10,000 residents to exclude individuals — a law promoted by the Jewish right in response to upwardly mobile Arab citizens moving into majority Jewish towns. (Arab towns in Israel suffer enormous budgetary discrimination and neglect.)

The High Court sent the law back for revision, and only approved it when the law adopted a more nebulous-sounding frame. Towns can exclude people based on social cohesion, code for not fitting in as an Arab. Israel has since expanded its housing law to towns of up to 20,000 residents, which is a majority of Israeli towns.

Israel’s seemingly objectively crafted racial laws have precedent, of course. With the rise of Jim Crow, for instance, Southern states moved to disenfranchise Black voters (male until the 19th Amendment) but had to do so in a way to avoid running afoul of the 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the vote.

So they crafted literacy tests. But such tests would invariably exclude many working-class white voters from voting, too. So they added a grandfather clause (this is where the term comes from) — if your grandfather had been registered to vote, you would still be eligible even if you cannot read or write. Grandfather, because by the time these laws were passed, almost no Black man in the South would have had a grandfather who would have been eligible to vote in their time, which would have been before the Civil War, when legal slavery was allowed. To an ignoramus, the law may have looked like it applied to whites and Blacks equally, but was structured to exclude Blacks. It succeeded.

Same with Israel’s death penalty law. It does not apply to Israeli citizens. It only applies to residents of the occupied West Bank, subject to military courts. Israeli settlers are prosecuted in civil courts. Palestinians are only prosecuted in military courts, which have no due process, no trial by a jury of one’s peers, where torture is often used to coerce false confessions, access to an attorney is deeply circumscribed, no appeal process, and a Stalinist conviction rate of 99.72%. And Israel is the only country on Earth that automatically sends children to military courts. The law is purposely designed, as its backers have made clear, to execute only Palestinians.

So don’t let Zionists fool you. It was racist then, and it is racist now. The law was championed by racists. Only apologists pretend otherwise.