Israeli Law and the Architecture of Apartheid

Co-Authored By:
Robert McDonald, Senior Legislative Researcher
Tamara Sharifov, Legislative Analyst

A Public Celebration of Unequal Justice

On March 30th, The Israeli Knesset passed a law legalizing “death by hanging” as the default penalty for Palestinians convicted of committing deadly attacks on Israelis under a new Israeli law. Notoriously, the penalty applies only to Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis, but not to Israelis convicted of killing Palestinians. As the vote passed, images emerged of national security minister (a convicted terrorist by Israeli courts) Itamar Ben-Gvir and his colleagues cheering, laughing, and popping champagne bottles - in a public celebration of future hangings.

The law is horrifying on its face. But its deeper significance is not merely the punishment it imposes. Its true meaning lies in what it reveals: this is not an isolated legal development, but the clearest symbol yet of a long-standing asymmetrical legal system in which Palestinians are subjected to one set of laws and punishments while Israeli settlers living in the same territory remain governed by an entirely different legal order.

The Two-Tier Legal System Palestinians Have Lived Under Since 1967

For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel’s approach to capital punishment can be understood as a predictable evolution of its existing policies and attitudes. Palestinians have lived under a two-tiered legal system within the West Bank since Israel's occupation in 1967. Palestinians are prosecuted through Israeli military courts, while Israeli settlers within the West Bank, are tried in civilian courts under Israeli civil law. 

The disparity in outcomes is staggering. Palestinians in military courts face conviction rates exceeding 96 percent, often in proceedings where access to legal counsel is severely restricted. By contrast, Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians face extraordinarily low rates of accountability, with B’Selem reporting conviction rates often hovering near 3 percent when both full and partial convictions are counted.

This system reaches far beyond adults accused of violence. Every year, hundreds of Palestinian minors are prosecuted in military courts. Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights organizations have documented a consistent pattern of nighttime arrests, denial of access to legal counsel, coercive interrogations, administrative detention without charge, solitary confinement, and psychological abuse.

Detention Without Trial as a Tool of Permanent Control

The use of detention without trial has become one of the clearest expressions of this legal order. As of December 2025, Israel holds over 3,300 Palestinians, including 351 children, under administrative detention, meaning they are being held indefinitely, without trial. 

This means thousands of Palestinians remain incarcerated not because they were convicted in a fair judicial trial process, but because the occupying authority claims the power to hold them without one.

The hanging law must be understood against this broader legal architecture. It is not the beginning of inequality; it is the escalation of a system already designed to separate legal status based on racial and religious affiliation.

Separate Roads to Separate Political Futures

The legal separation extends beyond movement into citizenship and political identity itself. The 2018 Nation-State Law codified Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people alone, downgraded Arabic from an official language, and elevated Jewish settlement as a national value.

The 2022 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law further restricted Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza from obtaining residency or citizenship through marriage to Israeli citizens, even where families share children, while exempting settlers living in the same occupied territory from equivalent burdens.

The Death by Hanging law stipulates that Palestinians convicted in Israeli military courts of carrying out deadly attacks deemed to be "acts of terrorism" would be executed by hanging within 90 days, with a possible postponement of up to 180 days. This law reverses Israel’s prior abolition of the death penalty for murder and its long-standing de facto moratorium on executions since its hanging of Adolf Eichmann in 1962. The reintroduction of capital punishment through a law that solely targets Palestinians' preserves and intensifies a dual legal system under which Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are subjected to military law, military courts, and diminished due process guarantees.

Taken together, these laws do not describe isolated security policies. They describe a governing logic: one legal system designed to preserve rights, mobility, and political self-determination for Jewish Israelis, and another designed to fragment, contain, and subordinate Palestinians on their own land.

Why International Law Calls this Apartheid

The outcome of this legal system, symbolized by the death-by-hanging law, coupled with the discriminatory practices against Palestinians based on Israel's current political structures, meets the legal definition of Apartheid.

The definition of apartheid emerged in the 1973 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Specifically, it defined apartheid as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” These systems legalize discrimination, institutionalizing segregation through all parts of life - economic, healthcare, education, housing, etc.

For Palestinians in the West Bank, this is evident through legalized movement restrictions, including Israeli military checkpoints and restricted roads, as well as limits on travel between Palestinian villages and East Jerusalem - requiring permits and military permission to enter East Jerusalem, as well as travel between Palestinian villages. Furthermore, movement restrictions and permit requirements significantly constrict Palestinian access to medical care, resulting in preventable death during a medical emergency because care was unable to be reached and blocked by Israeli military personnel.

For Israelis, these realities are non-existent. Israelis travel different roads from Palestinians which are void of any military blockade. Israelis are not required to hold or obtain permits for travel through the West Bank and Israeli territory. What can take an Israeli citizen twenty minutes of travel, can take a Palestinian hours due to check-points. Or passage of movement for a palestinian can be blocked completely.

This is a legal order built to dominate one people, denying their self-determination, and transforming inequality and discrimination into law. Suffering under an apartheid system has long been a way of life for Palestinians in the West Bank - now, it is a way of death, too.