Champagne in the Knesset

Image source: שי קנדלר, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

By Valentine Matta

On March 30^th, there is champagne in the Knesset.

Still under the shadow of a war. Still burying the dead. Sirens still split the night, and soldiers still move between shattered fronts. Yet there is champagne in the Knesset.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli Minister of National Security, celebrated as lawmakers passed  one of the most radical pieces of legislation in the state’s history: the expansion of the death penalty.

Directly before voting began, Ben-Gvir made a bellowing speech from the podium, describing the law as long overdue and a sign of strength and national pride. 

The Death Penalty for Terrorists Act (chuk onish mavet l’mchablim)  passed its second and third readings in the Knesset by a vote of 62 to 48. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined those voting in favor.

The law stipulates that anyone who causes the death of a person “with the intention of harming a citizen or resident of Israel, and with the intent to undermine the existence of the State of Israel” shall be sentenced to death. Necessarily subject to this ruling are those found guilty of terrorism.

Let us, too,  celebrate.

Celebrate a law that makes execution not an exception, but an instrument of control.

Celebrate this sign of strength. Celebrate irreversibility. Celebrate death.

A state locked in perpetual war has chosen this moment to enlarge its power over life and death. While the region burns and Israeli society questions its future, its leaders raise a glass: not to peace, not to restraint, but to execution.

But when the bottles are empty and the applause fades, what will remain of the country they claim to defend?

The discriminatory core of the law is unmistakable: it is to be applied only to Palestinians. It does not establish a universal standard against terrorism as such; rather, it establishes the enactment of  capital punishment for violence directed at Israel or its citizens. A Palestinian who attacks an Israeli, whether inside Israel or in the occupied West Bank, may face the death penalty, while violence committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the same territory does not fall under the same legal framework. The asymmetry is not incidental, It is embedded. 

Unequal in its premise, the law is not even to be applied within a neutral judicial architecture. Unlike the evidentiary standards of civil courts in which Israeli civilians are typically tried, most of those prosecuted under the new law’s provisions will be Palestinians in the West Bank. They will be tried in military courts, where procedural protections are significantly weaker and conviction rates of almost 100 percent. Even Palestinian citizens of Israel, who already face socioeconomic and institutional discrimination, will encounter this legislation within a system that operates on biased footing.

The passage of this legislation is not merely another hardline security measure; it signals a state prepared to formally codify unequal justice and to impose irreversible punishment within a system already marked by deep disparity. It does not represent an isolated rupture but rather a moral turning point within a longer process of erosion. 

Since 2023, a series of increasingly hardline measures has reshaped the landscape, including intensified military operations and raids across the West Bank, rising levels of settler violence against Palestinians, and repeated restrictions on access to religious sites such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Each of these developments has been justified in the language of security. Taken together, however, they reveal something deeper: not just a tactical escalation in counterterrorism policy, but a country drifting gradually away from the principles it once claimed as foundational and, in the process, becoming increasingly unrecognizable to itself. 

Israel has long prided itself on being the only democracy in the Middle East – a state built from the ashes of persecution and committed to the rule of law and the sanctity of life. Capital punishment, with rare exceptions, has never been part of its modern legal identity.

Supporters of the measure insist it is about deterrence. Yet Israel has long possessed overwhelming military superiority, advanced intelligence capabilities, and sweeping administrative detention powers. It already maintains a system in which Palestinians in the occupied territories are subject to military law, while Israeli settlers living in the same geographic space fall under civilian law, even as their illegal settlements expand week by week.

Absent here is a security vacuum which these other tools do not already work to fill. The death penalty does not address a gap, it intensifies an existing imbalance.

This matters not only for Palestinian but for Israelis.

A state that expands its capacity to execute under a politicized definition of “terror” alters the character of its own legal culture. When punishment becomes symbolic, designed as spectacle and vengeance rather than sober justice, the political center of gravity shifts. 

The language of law becomes inseparable from the language of war. Instead of asking, “What crime was committed and what is a proportionate punishment?” the framing becomes, “How do we defeat or eliminate this enemy?” 

It distances Israel further from the community of liberal democracies that have rejected capital punishment as incompatible with modern human rights norms, it deepens the legal dualism between populations living under Israeli control, and it reinforces the idea that vengeance can substitute justice.

Vengeance does not restore hostages. It does not rebuild trust. It does not offer a future.

This is Israel’s existential inflection point. The choice is clear: Is Israel to be a state governed by liberal principles or one gripped by populist strongmen?

The tragedy lies not only in what this law may do but also in what it reveals. Israeli society is so consumed by fear and fury that it risks abandoning the very principles that gave it purpose.

The future of Israeli democracy is inseparable from the rights and lives of the millions who live under its control but outside its protections. 

That is how nations lose themselves: not in a single moment of collapse, but in a series of decisions that feel justified at the time.

History rarely remembers those decisions as acts of strength.