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Israel’s controversial new death penalty law targeting Palestinians has sparked outrage, with critics warning it deepens apartheid policies and a descent into full-scale fascism.
By YUSUF ISMAIL
The iconic Palpatine quote regarding the path to the dark side is: ‘The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural,’ spoken to Anakin Skywalker in the final Star Wars trilogy, Revenge of the Sith.
Israel has long passed that ‘dark side’ as it now simply completes its inevitable descent into fascism. The ‘Nazi crescendo of fascism’ refers to the rapid ascent of National Socialism in Germany between 1929 and 1934, where Adolf Hitler transformed a fringe extremist movement into a totalitarian dictatorship. This is paralleled now by a transformation in Israeli society which was always an apartheid state but has now embraced a level of evil never before seen since the days of the Khmer Rouge. In fact, the killings and genocide committed by Israel since October 2023 are now similar in scale to the genocidal Pol Pot.
On March 30, 2026, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, passed what can only be described as a ‘genocide law’, the so-called ‘Penal Bill (Amendment — Death Penalty for Terrorists)’, making the tyrannical legislation the law of the land.
National security minister and convicted terrorist Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the far-right Jewish Power (‘Otzma Yehudit’) party, with support from Netanyahu’s Likud party, was foremost in leading the call for torture and the implementation of the death penalty. During Ben-Gvir’s tenure as Minister for National Security, Israeli human rights groups such as Physicians for Human Rights have reported an increase in cases of abuse and torture in Israeli prisons, as well as rape of male and female Palestinian prisoners within its torture dungeons such as the notorious Sde Teiman Prison by IDF soldiers. Ben-Gvir has published videos of himself taunting Palestinian prisoners in prison and boasting that they are being held under ‘minimum conditions’. Last year he oversaw the cancellation of the indictment of five soldiers accused of anally raping a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman prison in southern Israel. ‘In light of developments arising out of the indictment that was filed in the Yemen Field case, the military prosecution has decided today to cancel the indictment,’ the Israeli army said in a statement.
The torture case dates back to July 2025, when Israeli soldiers tortured and anally gang-raped a Palestinian prisoner with an object at the Sde Teiman detention facility, causing near-fatal injuries and a tear in the rectum. This is a norm, according to the NGO B’Tselem, in its report Welcome to Hell, where rape of Palestinian women and men is normative in Israeli dungeons.
Ben-Gvir’s criminal history includes convictions for 13 offences, including supporting a terrorist organisation, incitement to racism, propaganda for a terrorist organisation, participation in an illegal gathering, rioting, and property damage. By 2015, Ben-Gvir claimed to have been indicted 53 times. But if he represents the worst excesses of Jewish-Zionist supremacist fanaticism, he is not far off from Netanyahu or the majority of the Knesset which voted for the same, or Israeli society in general, which has now fully embraced racism as an ideology and hatred of Palestinians as a national doctrine.
The death penalty, having now been passed as law, applies only to Palestinians living in the West Bank (Gazans are simply blown up with 2 000-pound bombs) and Palestinians living in Israel, but not Israeli Jews. This is a direct derivative of Jewish Talmudic racism at play in a state that claims to be a ‘democracy’. The Palestinians in the West Bank are charged under military law and are kept in administrative detention, sometimes not being charged for years on end. If convicted in a military court, they face a mandatory death sentence or, in the wording of the bill, ‘… his sentence shall be death, and this penalty only.’
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Even during the height of South African apartheid, white people were also executed, though the death penalty was applied disproportionately. Jewish-Zionist racism is on another level of evil entirely. Only Palestinians, who are viewed as sub-humans, can now be ‘officially’ murdered by the state, but not Israeli Jews. And to top it all, the death penalty is being applied to people who are under perpetual illegal occupation. While the prospect of legally sanctioned state executions may appear shocking, it represents a logical extension of an already lethal system. According to a November 2025 report by Physicians for Human Rights Israel, at least 98 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli custody since October 7 as a result of torture, medical neglect, and forced starvation — dozens of whom were classified as civilians by Israel’s own intelligence.
In South Africa, such insanity is being supported by the Zionist Board of Deputies, fanatical extremists like Rob Hersov, and educational centres where children are indoctrinated into following the excesses of Zionist fascism, such as in Herzliya School in Cape Town. Why such schools are not shut down is a similar question to why Orania is not disbanded. No surprises there, though, when even Israeli children were taught to sing genocidal songs of mass murder such as the cynically titled ‘Friendship Song’ during the epoch of the Israeli genocide. When the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Warren Goldstein, condemns South Africa but endorses Israeli apartheid, we live in dark times. This is a product of being emboldened by three years of Israeli genocide and the world turning a completely blind eye. I have challenged all of the above local Zionists to a public debate (and challenge them once again), but none of them will turn up because Zionism is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak said prior to the law’s passing that ‘Israel is reaching a new low in the dehumanisation of Palestinians, enshrining their cruel treatment in state law…’ A Knesset legal advisor, Ben-Itzhak, criticised the bill prior to its passing, arguing that it ‘does not provide for the pardon of a person sentenced to death’, which contradicts international conventions.
Further, the new death penalty law specifies its application based on the nature of the crime rather than the age of the offender. There is no explicit clause that excludes minor Palestinians from facing the death penalty, which means children between 12 and under 18 could theoretically be subject to hanging. This would be unprecedented globally. Not even China executes minors.
There is a solution to all of this psychosis: the complete disbandment of Israel as an apartheid state in the same way apartheid South Africa was disbanded, and the granting of votes to all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In such a situation, we would have a one-nation state with Palestinians being given equal rights, and the illegal occupation would become moot. That would thus be the death knell of Zionist supremacism and, hopefully, usher in a new genesis of armistice. Any alternative to this is desolate and can only lead to summons for the resistance to continue and the dark cycle of violence to perpetually engulf the Middle East, with ramifications for us globally.
Yusuf Ismail is a criminal defence lawyer and founder of the South African Debate Initiative.
