Is Israel at the end of its moral tether or just replicating its British colonial past?
Israel daily demonstrates its moral degeneracy. Not only has the State followed a vicious policy of abuse based purely on religious and cultural distinction, it has abandoned justice and the rule of law, as it relates to powerful political figures on the one hand and detainees on the other.
Recently State-employed torturers and rapists were aquitted. Torture in state detention centres and prisons is not unusual or exceptional. It is systematic and State-approved and those who implement it, irrespective of guilt on the part of the victim, are protected and indemnified.
We know that individuals can act as monsters, but when the State itself initiates, encourages and protects monstrous acts on some pretext or racial logic, we know it is rotten to the core.
The world has witnessed it for generations but has effectively done nothing about it. Worse the 'moral' West has actively engaged in supporting the policy and actions of this degenerate State of Israel, whilst pretending to support a 'two state sollution' that it knew Israel would never accept. This was blatant fraud and duplicity at the international level.
America supplied the explosives that flattened Gaza and provided sanction protection at the UN. It provided the satellite and interception intelligence to enable an illegal assassination campaign of Iranian and other other officials, up to the Supreme Ruler of Iran itself.
It has not opposed incursions into Lebanon and Syria and threats to Jordan and other states. It, in partnership with Israel, has initiated and pursued an illegal war and bombing campaign on Iran, including non-military targets and personnel.
As in Gaza people and places, such as children in schools, the ill in hospitals, bridges, fuel storage and desalination plants have all come under attack, thereby proving they ignore and despise the international law of relations and war.
Despite Starmer claiming the British Government will not be pulled into the present conflict, throughout the current phase of Israeli/American military aggression, it has not been far behind, providing GCHQ and Military Intelligence, over-flight surveillance, use of airports in UK, Cyprus and Indian Ocean, provision of weapons and spares, and regular high-level military liaison and Whitehall-hosted semi-secret meetings.
Though deeply embroiled in the Middle East mess from at least the 1920's onwards (see: Abdaljawad Omar's article below) it now disengenuinely presents itself as the convenor of a solution-seeker grouping. Ever the 'perfidious Albion'!
It pretends to oppose the illegal and inhuman excesses of the Israeli/American criminal conspiracy, but is hamstrung by its financial, economic, political and military ties, that nonetheless have shown signs of fraying recently, with Trump's threat "he will remember" what he sees as desertion by an old ally in the present conflict. This in the context to disparaging remarks about European countries, NATO and threats to Canada and Greenland. Will diplomacy, most obviously in the up-coming King's visit, be able to repair or at least mask, the damage and repercussions?
Ben Givir's new execution law.
The latest sign of Israel abandoning all pretence to justice and humanity is Ben Givir's new law on execution.
Not satisfied with incarcerating often totally innocent Palestinians - currently over 10,000, a quarter of which are under 18 years of age - and torturing and killing them on an industrial scale, it now intends to progressively execute them one by one.
The fact that it is drafted to be vague as to qualifying guilt, lack of appeal, and application to only Palestinians proves itself to be yet another thinly disguised method of intimidation, subordination and genocide.
A British Government spokesperson says "it is concerned at the law". Such mealy-mouthed, ineffective observation only confirms British complicity in and with a deeply offensive law - from a deeply offensive regime.
Below I reproduce three articles on the subject, providing far greater detail and insight than I am able to give. Hopefully in some small way it will help to galvanise opposition to both this particular unjust, inhumane law and State that proposes to implement it.
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Palestinians protesting the Knesset’s passing of the death penalty law exclusively for Palestinians, Gaza City on April 1, 2026. (Photo: Hashem Zimmo/APA Images)
The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the passing of a death penalty law for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.
It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.
Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.
What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.
Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed firsthand accounts of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only.
The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.
There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open.
Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct.
For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.
A codification of existing practice
In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other.
For decades, Israel maintained a public performance of conscience. The language of democracy, the announcements of investigations, the carefully worded regret after each killing — none of this changed what was happening, but it served a purpose: it kept Western governments comfortable enough to provide diplomatic and military cover, and gave Israeli liberal society a way to say: this is not who we are, this is an exception, this will be looked into. The champagne bottle ends that performance — not because Ben Gvir has changed what Israel does, but because he has decided it no longer needs to be explained or excused.
Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.
What Israel does and what Israel is willing to admit to doing are now the same thing. And when a political project stops apologizing for itself, it rarely goes back. The frankness becomes normal, the normal becomes policy, and the policy becomes law — until what was once unsayable is written into statute, and what was written into statute becomes the last thing a family sees through a car window on the way home, or what two wanted Palestinian men see before being executed while surrendering to Israeli soldiers. That is what happened in Tammoun and Jenin in recent months.
In Jenin, on November 27, 2025, Israeli border police surrounded a building harboring two fugitives and known fighters in the Jenin area, al-Muntaser Billah Abdallah, 26, and Yousef Asaasah, 37. They came out with their hands raised and lifted their shirts to show that they were completely unarmed. They were ordered back into the building and then shot dead at point-blank range. The whole sequence was caught on camera. Ben-Gvir publicly backed the troops: they acted exactly as expected.
That was not political cover. It was a declaration of policy, made by the same man who held the champagne bottle several months later to celebrate the legalization of execution.
More recently, in Tammoun, Ali and Waad Bani Odeh were on the way home from a family shopping trip in Nablus alongside their four children. It was the night before Eid, and they were coming home after midnight when they were met by an undercover Israeli unit in a car with Palestinian license plates. The soldiers opened fire without warning. Ali, 37, Waad, 35, and their two youngest sons — Othman, 7, who was blind and had special needs, and Muhammad, 5 — were shot in the head and killed. The two older children, Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, 8, survived with shrapnel wounds.
Between Jenin and Tammoun lies what this law was written to protect and expand — to protect the soldiers executing the two men with their hands raised, or the family on its way home from buying Eid clothes.
The British did the same in 1937, building courts fast enough to hang Shaykh al-Sa’di, not because the law required it, but because the field had already laid the groundwork for it. Law follows violence in colonial systems. What changes when the law arrives is not what soldiers do, but what they no longer need to fear — and once that fear is gone, the violence goes further until it outpaces the law again, and the law must catch up once more.
Refusing Israel’s timetable for death
Execution is scheduled death — the state’s claim that it alone decides when a life ends, that the moment of dying belongs to power and not to the one who dies. The British knew this when they hanged al-Sa’di on a Saturday, moving fast enough that no appeal, no intercession, and no calendar could intervene. Israel knows it now, writing the hour of execution into law so the decision becomes permanent.
And the logic of this law is the same logic driving Israel’s war, both depending on controlling the sequence and deciding not only who is targeted, but when, in what order, and on whose terms. Israel’s war has moved through its fronts one at a time: Gaza decimated, Lebanon engaged and paused, Iran struck twice, and later the West Bank. Each front is kept separate from the others, each managed in its own contained interval so that no single front becomes the moment that breaks the timetable. The war machine, like the military court, works best when it holds to the schedule.
But Ibrahim Tuqan, Palestine’s foremost poet of the Mandate era and the man who turned the gallows into the defining image of Palestinian resistance, wrote the oldest answer to this belief in his poem, “The Red Tuesday.” It has aged well.
The poem recounted the death of three Palestinian revolutionaries who had participated in a precursor event to the 1936 uprising, hanged by the British on Tuesday, June 17, 1930. Fouad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum, and Atta al-Zir were set to be executed in three consecutive hours in Acre prison, each execution timed so that each death arrived alone, and that each grief was absorbed before the next. And this is exactly what Israel’s war planners are doing today: sequencing death, containing resistance, and managing the intervals.
What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart
Tuqan’s poem is structured around this very fact. Rather than narrating the executions from the outside, he gives each of the three hours its own voice — the first hour speaks, then the second, then the third, each one personifying the martyr whose death it contains. The hour is not a passive unit of time in the poem; it is a claimant. By doing this, Tuqan takes the executioner’s instrument — the scheduled interval, the managed sequence — and hands it back to the men who died inside it. Each hour becomes the martyr’s own declaration rather than the state’s mechanism of elimination.
But what the empire had not written into its schedule was what the condemned men did next. They began to fight each other for the right to die before their comrades, collapsing three managed hours into a single racing will to be the first martyr. Tuqan captures this by giving the second hour its own voice, letting it speak its impatience directly:
زاحمتُ مَنْ قَبْلي لأَسبِقَها إلى شَرَفِ الخلودِ
I jostled the one standing in front of me to reach the honor of immortality first
What resistance across this region is attempting to do, unevenly and at enormous cost, is exactly this: to refuse the sequencing, to sync its fronts, and to make the hours run together faster than the war machine can pull them apart. It is a fight for time as much as for land — a struggle to take the clock from the hand that has held it for a century and insists, with champagne and statute and strikes from the air, that the hour of every reckoning belongs to it alone.
It is, in Tuqan’s image, the attempt to jostle — to refuse the order the scaffold imposes, to race toward the hour rather than wait for it to arrive, in the hope that when enough hands reach for it at once, the schedule itself breaks down.
Abdaljawad Omar is a writer and Assistant Professor at Birzeit University, Palestine. Follow him on X @HHamayel2.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
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Hi Timothy Theodore,
Israel has passed a new law: it will execute Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks – whether living in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territory – but not Jewish Israelis convicted of the same crime.
This is Israel’s apartheid in action: the same crime, but a different punishment based on your race.
Israel’s annexation of the West Bank – illegally incorporating more of the Palestinian territory it occupies into the state of Israel – is also an extension of its apartheid. Israeli settlers are illegally forcing Palestinians out of their homes – but do not face arrest or further legal action from Israel for this crime.
Timothy Theodore, take action to end Israel’s annexation of the West Bank now:
While Israel and the US bombard Iran – killing at least 1,900 Iranians so far – Israel’s brutal violence across the wider region has slipped out of the headlines. Here’s what you’ve missed:
Israel has attacked Palestinians in Gaza on 147 of the 169 days since the ‘ceasefire’ began, killing over 691 Palestinians.
Stocks of tents, bedding and other essential supplies are dwindling in Gaza as Israel has increased restrictions on humanitarian aid entering since it escalated regional attacks.
In the West Bank, settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Tayasir on Tuesday, injuring at least four people. Settler attacks are happening daily.
Israel is occupying huge parts of South Lebanon and planning to destroy homes along the border to prevent the return of about 600,000 Lebanese people – mirroring its “model in Gaza” according to Defence Minister Israel Katz.
I have just read your article Jonathan. It discusses an important issue that is pervasive and seldom out of the news. The international consequences are significant and there for all to see. ‘Anti-semitism’ has become a corrupted and misapplied political football, to prevent honest deliberation of current events. It is a tool of manipulation as I think the Golders Green incident exemplifies, a rather obvious fraudulent event. It is also worth comparing and contrasting the British Government’s response to it and that of ambulances attacked by Israel in Gaza, where civilians and aid workers, some of whom were British were actually murdered, to illustrate how tilted it is.