Israel brings in death penalty for “terror attacks”

THE ISRAELI Parliament has agreed that anyone who is found guilty of conducting a terror attack will be sentenced to death. It’s the latest move in Israel’s campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people.

It is only Palestinians who are likely to be convicted of terror attacks – usually after superficial trials. The death sentence will see the Israeli state killing them rather than imprisoning them – a small but significant step in Israel’s campaign to eliminate its critics.

•Israel has killed many people since the attack on Israel on 7th October 2023. It has killed around 70,000 people in Gaza and another 1,000 in the West Bank and around 4,000 in Lebanon.
The people of Gaza are, for the most part, still living in a giant concentration camp, low on basics such as food, water and healthcare – or the norms of civil society such as education, leisure and freedom of assembly and expression. No one knows what will happen to them, but the privations mean that thousands more are likely to die.

•Palestinians living in the West Bank are not the central focus at the moment, but they are being attacked sporadically by Israeli forces and also by illegal Israeli settlers.

•The US/Israeli attack on Iran has probably killed over 3,000 Iranians. Under the cover of the war on Iran, Israel has scared thousands of Lebanese away from the south of that country so it can kill those sympathetic to Iran. Israeli attacks on south Lebanon since October 2023 have probably killed 4,000 people, and their attacks since the start of the war on Iran have probably killed 1,000 more.

No campaign of genocide, no terror attack, no killing can be defended. And of course there have been deaths in Israel and in other states in the Gulf.  But what is different in the case of Israel is that it has decided to protect itself by killing its opponents rather than trying to make peace with them – from a position of military, economic and political strength.

In past rounds of conflict, Israel has imprisoned those it has labelled as being guilty of attacking its citizens. It often has to release some of them in prisoner exchanges, and it has long feared that once they have been exchanged, these prisoners go back into the system, attacking Israel again.

Hence the need for capital punishment. That will stop any repeat offending. Yes, it does mean that Israel won’t have prisoners to exchange in the near future – but its strong position in the region means it is not very likely to have its own military personnel detained in the near future. This means that Israel doesn’t need a stock of prisoners ready to exchange just now, and it’s better off using convictions to eliminate a number of Palestinians permanently.

And the silence coming from western “democracies” in response to the new law is deafening.

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