Sickening images of genocidal politicians drinking champagne to celebrate the legalisation of Palestinian prisoner executions again exposed the barbarity of the Zionist entity. The meek condemnation from Britain’s Labour politicians was predictable, but revealing. By bringing back the gallows, the Zionist occupation again takes inspiration from the violent methods of British imperialism.
After years of campaigning by security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and other fascistic politicians, 30 March saw the parliamentary passage of the Penal Bill (Amendment No. 159) (Death Penalty for Terrorists) by the Israeli Knesset (parliament). The law means that Palestinians convicted of ‘acts of terrorism’ in the military courts of the occupation will automatically face hanging within 90 days. Prisoners sentenced to death in the occupied West Bank are to be given no appeal or clemency, and will be held in separate facilities, with no face-to-face lawyer visits. Symbolised by the noose-shaped badge proudly worn by Ben-Gvir, the preferred option of the regime is death by hanging, with lethal injection and electrocution also proffered as alternatives.
Prison brutality and imperialist treachery
Over a hundred prisoners have been killed inside Israeli dungeons since October 2023. The 30 March Knesset vote now provided legal cover for further murder.
Ben-Gvir had spent months visiting the torture camps of the regime and was videoed humiliating shackled and hog-tied Palestinian prisoners, hailing the prison system and claiming that executions would deter resistance. On the eve of Ben-Gvir’s champagne party in the Knesset lobby, the imperialist powers backing the Zionist genocide on Palestine and Lebanon were either silent (US) or weakly expressed their ‘deep concern’, as in the joint statement of Britain, France, Germany and Italy. ‘The adoption of this bill’, they claimed, ‘would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles.’ No sanctions have been threatened by any of these imperialist states.
The ‘democratic principles’ of Zionism and its backers are plain to see in the rape, torture, starvation, medical neglect and killing of Palestinian political prisoners. Prior to the Penal Bill’s passing, charges against the five Israeli army reservists who brutalised and raped detainees at the Sde Teiman concentration camp were dropped, with the only remaining charges being those against the former military official who leaked the videos. Routine methods of torture include rape by dogs, and with bottles, metal rods and knives, severe beatings to deliberately break bones and teeth, extreme stress positions, sleep deprivation, extremities of noise and temperature, and ritual humiliation.
In a 26 March report, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned that torture had become ‘state doctrine’. The prison system had become a ‘laboratory of calculated cruelty’ and ‘What once operated in the shadows is now practised openly: a regime of organised humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels.’ More than 18,500 Palestinians have been detained since October 2023, including over 1,500 children.
Introducing the death penalty for future prisoners extends further this horrific reality that has already seen hundreds of Palestinians killed on the inside, and provides a formal mechanism for their state-sanctioned murder.
Although, as The Guardian and other pro-imperialist media outlets are at pains to point out, hanging was last used by Israeli judiciaries with the execution of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1962, their claim that ‘Israel has rarely used the death penalty, applying it only in exceptional cases’, rings hollow in the light of the repeated extra-judicial killings of prisoners and execution of political opponents. What were the killings of prisoners Walid Daqqa and Omar Daraghmeh by medical neglect and torture if not executions? From Ghassan Kanafani and Abu Ali Mustafa to Sheikh Ahmad Yasin and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Zionism has executed resistance figures with no recourse to ‘legality.’
Torture and execution – the British way
The 30 March vote led to protests across occupied Palestine, the camps of Lebanon and beyond. Demonstrating in al-Bireh, near Ramallah, former political prisoner Rabah Jaber said:
‘Its goal is revenge against the Palestinian people, to intimidate our resistance fighters and discourage them from continuing to resist the occupation. This law will not deter our people from resistance but will rather bring to mind the execution law enacted by the British Mandate and practiced during the Great Palestinian Revolt in the 1930s.’
During the 1936-39 Revolt, the British occupation killed over 5,000 Palestinians. Military courts were set up to deal swiftly with the uprising and those accused of possessing arms were sentenced to death by hanging – 54 were executed at the gallows in 1938 alone. Many of the colonial military figures of this era had come directly from counterinsurgency roles in occupied Ireland, including high commissioner Arthur Wauchope. Among the repressive tactics Wauchope employed were what British officials openly called ‘concentration camps’; by 1939, Britain had built 13, setting in train the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948.
When current foreign secretary Yvette Cooper claims that Britain’s position is now that, ‘The death penalty is wrong and we oppose it around the world’, she is lying. Her fellow Labour cabinet member David Lammy celebrated the 2024 killing of Nasrallah. Another, Ed Miliband, backed the extrajudicial assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Cooper has maintained the position of British backing for a Zionist genocide on Gaza which has killed over 100,000 Palestinians. It would be impossible for the Zionist state to implement its murderous prison regime without the unconditional support of Britain and other imperialist backers.
Responding to the Knesset decision, Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida pointed to the past successes the resistance had achieved in freeing Palestinian political prisoners from the Zionist torture camps. He called out to those confronting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, ‘the heroes of Hezbollah’, to ‘intensify their efforts to capture Zionist soldiers in order to liberate Palestinian and Arab prisoners from the occupation prisons’. A joint statement by the Palestinian resistance factions called on 31 March for ‘revolutionary youth in the West Bank, al-Quds, our occupied land of ’48 and the diaspora to ignite a popular revolution by all possible means and tools’ to oppose this drive to kill even more prisoners.
Carrying the urgency of the moment, Samidoun prisoner solidarity network called for all those who stand in solidarity with Palestine to take immediate action:
‘This is the time to globalise the intifada, to take the streets in mass mobilisation and direct action, to rise up for the prisoners, who sacrifice their freedom and their lives for the liberation of Palestine and the defence of humanity. It is our responsibility to organise and act to save the lives of the prisoners and free them from the horrors of captivity with an uprising for the prisoners, not only in Palestine but everywhere around the world.’
