The Knesset death penalty law
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The Knesset death penalty law is Israeli legislation providing for execution by hanging of Palestinians convicted of taking a life during the commission of a terrorist act. John Kiriakou discussed it on the DeProgram show with Ted Rall shortly after its passage, calling the whole business sickening.

His first objection is to who holds the definition. "Of course, it's the extreme right-wing government in Israel that decides what meets the criteria of a terrorist attack and what doesn't." By that construction the law cannot reach West Bank settlers who attack Palestinians in order to drive them out or to take their land.

The asymmetry was put to him in concrete terms and he did not soften it: a settler who opens fire on a Palestinian family is untouched by the law, while a Palestinian who shoots that settler to stop his home being seized is hanged. The mechanics as described on the programme are unforgiving, a mandatory sentence, hanging within ninety days, narrow provisions for delay, and no clemency.

The apartheid comparison

Kiriakou's verdict is that the law puts the question of apartheid beyond argument, and he endorsed the comparison drawn on the show, that even apartheid South Africa did not maintain a separate legal code for whites and blacks. "That's exactly right," he said; in Israel's case "they're codifying racial discrimination within the areas in their control."

He anticipates and rejects the standard rebuttal, that the law governs the West Bank rather than Israel proper. "But that's sophistry. They've controlled this territory since as long as you and I are alive."

The question he treats as unanswerable is the democratic one: "How can you claim that you're a democracy, if the only democracy in the Middle East, if you don't have equal justice under the law?"

How it will be defended

Asked how Israel's American defenders would handle it, Kiriakou predicted they would try, and that the attempt would be dishonest: "it's going to be one of those disingenuous things. How can you possibly defend something like this?" His own answer was that there is no way, "there's no upside to this. There's no way to defend it."

He nonetheless sketched the two forms the defence would take. Right-wingers on Capitol Hill "view the death penalty as legit punishment," holding that "it's less bad to kill an innocent person than to allow a guilty person to live." Among Democrats, "the most ardent Zionists" would reach for terrorism, "we don't want another 9/11. We don't want another October 7th", or, as his co-host suggested and he accepted, simply decline to comment at all.

The reasoning he offers for why the law was passed at all is at the logic of radicalization.

See also

- Itamar Ben-Gvir
- Israel's rightward shift
- The Logic Of Radicalization
- Ted Rall
