There have been many moments over the last few years where I have been envious of our martyrs. Where I imagined myself among them, standing as lions against those invading our land, meeting death with my face forward. That envy is easy from abroad, easy from Ann Arbor, easy from a distance where martyrdom is sacred and abstract and belongs only to others. But Monday night the Knesset voted to make hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted in its military courts, and for the first time martyrdom stopped being a concept. I am a Palestinian man over sixteen who has published, spoken, and written against Israel in every forum available to me. The next time I go home, I could be pulled from a checkpoint, held without charge, tried without a jury, convicted on a confession I did not give in a language I do not read, and hanged before the sun sets twice. For the first time, I am afraid to go to Palestine.

 

I want to say this clearly before I say anything else. Israel did not sentence Palestinians to death on Monday, Israel’s official policy has always been Palestinian death because Palestinians are a continuous reminder of a colonial state and its colonial history.

Shireen Abu Akleh was sentenced to death. She was shot in the head while wearing a press vest. Amer Rabee was sentenced to death. He was thirteen, walking with his cousins, shot by an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in the West Bank. Mohammed al-Durrah was sentenced to death in 2000, crouched behind his father begging for his life on camera. Palestinians are sentenced to death in their homes when settlers arrive with rifles and impunity. They are sentenced to death at checkpoints, in prison cells, in refugee camps, in hospitals that are no longer hospitals. The death sentence has always been active.

The Knesset passed the bill 62 to 48, with Netanyahu personally attending to cast his vote. Ben-Gvir wore a lapel pin in the shape of a noose. The bill makes death by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted in military courts of acts deemed “terror,” to israel. Settlers who kill Palestinians, and they do, with regularity and with near-total impunity, are tried in civilian courts where judges have the option to choose between the death penalty and life imprisonment. Israel has yet to prosecute any of its citizens for killing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade.

Israel is the first state since Nazi Germany to codify death as a punishment reserved for one race and not another. Apartheid South Africa, whose systems of racial domination the world rightly condemned and eventually dismantled, did not go this far. It brutalized Black South Africans, imprisoned them, worked them to death in mines, stripped them of citizenship and land and movement. But it did not write into law that Black lives were unilaterally undeserving of the protections afforded to white ones in a capital case. Israel has done so because apparently a Jewish Israeli who kills a Palestinian in the West Bank will face no punishment at all while a Palestinian who kills an Israeli faces a rope. The last government to construct something equivalent wore a different uniform and spoke a different language, and the world has spent eighty years promising it would never allow it again.

The bill’s proponents call it a deterrent, which requires you to believe these military courts are courts at all. But, they are not courts in any sense the word. Military trials of Palestinians run a 96% conviction rate, built largely on confessions extracted through torture and duress, with no jury, no right to appeal, and no entitlement to pardon, placing this among the most extreme capital punishment frameworks anywhere in the world. Executions are to be carried out by hanging within 90 days of sentencing, and the Defense Minister retains sole authority to decide whether a given Palestinian is tried in military or civilian court, which is to say the executioner decides the courtroom.

What makes this law particularly obscene is not only what it does to Palestinian adults but what it does to Palestinian children, who are already its subjects. Israel is the only country in the world that automatically and systematically prosecutes children in military courts, sending between 500 and 700 Palestinian children through them each year. The most common charge is stone throwing, against a settler. In 2015, the Knesset amended the penal code to impose a 10-year sentence for throwing a stone without intent to injure and 20 years with intent, the word “stone” added to the statute specifically to target Palestinian children. Between 2005 and 2010, at least 835 Palestinian minors were tried in military courts on charges of stone throwing, and only one was acquitted. These children arrive at interrogation bound, blindfolded, and sleep-deprived, and give confessions after verbal abuse, threats, and physical violence that in some cases amounts to torture, with military law providing no right to legal counsel during interrogation and judges seldom excluding confessions obtained by coercion. Those confessions, extracted in the dark from children who cannot read the Hebrew they are signing, will now carry the weight of a death sentence. The same courts that prosecute a fourteen-year-old for throwing a stone at an armored jeep are now empowered to hang him for it.

Beyond the children, Israel holds approximately 9,500 Palestinians, about half without any charge, all of whom are now at risk of the death penalty. Administrative detention orders are renewable indefinitely, issued on the basis of classified evidence that neither the prisoner nor their lawyer is ever permitted to see. A Palestinian can spend years in Israeli custody without knowing what they are accused of, without ever being tried, and then find themselves before a military judge who signs a conviction and starts a ninety-day clock.

France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom called the bill discriminatory. Amnesty International called for its repeal. The UN Human Rights Office said it breaches international law. The United States said it respects Israel’s sovereign right to determine its own laws, and Netanyahu welcomed the decision, and Ben-Gvir opened champagne. The same people that celebrate and applaud sexual violence and pedoliphia were never going to mourn a noose.

What I want to say to the people who will read this law as news, as something new, is that the Palestinians who have been killed at checkpoints and in their homes and in the streets did not die any less finally because there was no trial. The bullet that killed Shireen Abu Akleh was a death sentence without paperwork. What Israel has done is grant itself the administrative dignity of a courtroom. Death has always been the condition of Palestinian life. We have lived beside it, raised children beside it, built our homes beside it, buried our dead beside it, and kept living. What Israel has done is not introduce death into Palestinian experience. They have decided death every day since before 1948.

I am afraid to go home. And I am afraid of what it means that I am afraid, because Palestinians who never left have never had the option of fear. They have only had the option of living, which Israel has always tried to make indistinguishable from dying.