On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset enacted a law imposing the death penalty exclusively upon Palestinians while exempting Israeli citizens. One cannot corrupt justice where justice, in any meaningful and equal sense, has long since ceased to exist. The world has condemned the measure—but condemnation now carries the weary cadence of ritual, not resolve.
The law was championed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who reportedly celebrated its passage with champagne in the parliamentary chamber after it cleared by 62 votes to 48. “We made history,” he declared on social media, brushing aside mounting international calls for its withdrawal.
The responses have been swift, if not consequential. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has filed an appeal before Israel’s Court. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights condemned the measure as a legislative veil for extrajudicial killing. The UN Human Rights Office has urged its immediate repeal, citing clear violations of international law. Amnesty International described it as a “public display of cruelty, discrimination and utter contempt for human rights,” while the European Union expressed deep concern over its discriminatory character.
Alain Berset called it a “serious regression,” and Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand warned that, in practice, it systematically targets Palestinians, reinforcing a pattern that enables settler violence while further dehumanizing an already besieged people.
By reserving the ultimate punishment—death—for one people alone, the state crosses a threshold from discrimination into something colder and more deliberate: the codification of human worth along ethnic lines. It is a law that declares, without equivocation, that Palestinian lives are more expendable, their rights more conditional, their existence more easily extinguished.
Call it what it is: an apartheid law.
Yet even this legal brutality unfolds against a far darker horizon—the devastation of the Gaza Strip. There, amid shattered hospitals, flattened homes, and uncounted graves, a people endures what many across the world now describe as genocide. Entire families have been erased, a society reduced to rubble, a population trapped between siege and bombardment.
Shame on a statute that elevates inequality into doctrine. Shame on those who celebrate it. And shame, too, on a world that has watched the steady erosion of justice—and responded with little more than calibrated disapproval.
For Palestinians—dispossessed, displaced, and denied dignity since the creation of the Israeli state—this is no aberration. It is the latest chapter in a relentless continuum of injustice. That such a measure can be enacted with brazen confidence, even as proceedings unfold before the International Court of Justice, speaks to a stark and unsettling reality: power, unchecked, now presumes itself above the law.
This is not merely legislation; it is a repudiation of the very principles that sustain any claim to civilization. A law that assigns death along ethnic lines is not governance—it is moral collapse, formalized and enforced. No nation that enshrines such a doctrine can credibly invoke the language of justice, democracy, or human rights. It stands outside the bounds of civilized conduct, defiant not only of international law but of the most basic tenets of human conscience. Such a measure is not only indefensible—it is wholly unacceptable to any society that dares to call itself civilized.
Javed Akbar is a freelance writer whose opinion columns have appeared in Toronto Star and numerous digital platforms. He can be reached at: mjavedakbar@gmail.com
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