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.[1]
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.”[1] By that construction the law cannot reach West Bank settlers who attack Palestinians in order to drive them out or to take their land.[2]
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.[3] The mechanics as described on the programme are unforgiving — a mandatory sentence, hanging within ninety days, narrow provisions for delay, and no clemency.[4][5]
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.”[6][7]
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.”[7]
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?”[4]
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.”[8][4]
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.”[9] 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.[10]
The reasoning he offers for why the law was passed at all is at the logic of radicalization.