Israel’s Death Penalty Law Has Little to Do with Criminal Justice and Everything to Do with Ethno‑Nationalism

Potential efficacy aside, the death penalty law did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the product of a political trajectory that has unfolded over decades and has seen the once-fringe settler movement evolve into a dominant force shaping Israeli governance.

When Likud, the right-wing party of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, first came to power in 1977, settlements in the occupied West Bank gained legal status in Israeli law. Since then, settlements have expanded rapidly, despite remaining illegal under international law.

Settlers now represent roughly 6% of Israelis, but their political influence is far greater than their demographic weight. Settlers and settler-aligned public figures have reshaped the institutional landscape by making strategic inroads into military leadership, government ministries and party primaries.

The ruling coalition includes ministers with explicit pro-settler and ethno-nationalist ideologies – most notably Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Their ideology promotes Jewish supremacy over the entirety of historic Palestine, including the West Bank, and regards territorial compromise with Palestinians as both a political and theological impossibility.

The inclusion of people so closely aligned with the settler movement in Netanyahu’s coalition signaled that anti-Palestinian violence would, in effect, be treated as legitimate expressions of state policy. Indeed, in the past two years, settler violence in the West Bank rose to unprecedented levels.

Smotrich moved to transfer control of the Civil Administration – the military bureaucracy that has governed Palestinian civilian affairs in the West Bank since 1967 – from military to finance ministry oversight, reducing institutional checks on settlement expansion. Meanwhile Ben-Gvir issued over 100,000 new gun licenses, granted settlers preferential access to firearms and began transforming the police force toward aggressive, Palestinian-focused enforcement.

Through such moves, the line between state security apparatus and settler militancy has become virtually indistinguishable.

The Politics of Retribution
This is the context within which the death penalty legislation operates. Capital punishment has always been part of the penal code, but with the exception of Eichmann in 1962, it has never been used. This was by choice: Israel for much of its existence wanted to project an image of a democratic modern nation based on the rule of law.

This pivot from deterrence to retribution reflects the religious-nationalist worldview that I believe now dominates Israeli governance. It is rooted in a particular strain of religious Zionism, embraced by roughly 20% of Israeli Jews, that interprets the establishment of the state of Israel and its subsequent military victories as a process of divine redemption.

Under this ideology, the West Bank is not occupied territory but the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria – land to which Jews hold an irrevocable, God-given claim.

Adherents believe that accelerating this redemptive process requires total military dominance and the systematic negation of Palestinian national aspirations.

This theology leaves little room for the restraint that characterized earlier security doctrines. Rather, Palestinians are existential obstacles to be vanquished.

In this light, the death penalty becomes not merely a tool of criminal justice but a declaration of supremacy – an instrument through which the state enacts its divine mandate.

Democratic Backsliding
Perhaps the most consequential dimension of the legislation is what it makes explicit.

The existence of parallel legal systems for Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories is not new. It has been a structural feature of the Israeli control of the West Bank since 1967.

But the death penalty law formalizes this duality with unprecedented starkness.

This formalization matters because it strips away the ambiguity that has long allowed Israeli officials to claim that all persons under their jurisdiction enjoy equal protection of the law.

Scholars of comparative authoritarianism have long identified the selective application of harsh criminal penalties as a hallmark of illiberal governance. The Israeli case offers a particularly instructive example because it unfolds within a nation that continues to maintain democratic institutions for its own citizens while operating an increasingly coercive regime over a subject population.

The death penalty law deepens this contradiction, pushing Israel further along a trajectory that some analysts have described as democratic backsliding. What is clear is that the legislation represents more than a policy choice about capital punishment.

Arie Perliger is Director of Security Studies and Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass Lowell. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.