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An abominable new Israeli law is a death warrant for democracy
A bill mandating the death penalty for terrorists, which the Knesset passed into law on Monday, is the latest dismal illustration of Israel’s democratic decline.
Promoted by the ultranationalist firebrand National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — whose resume includes convictions for supporting terrorism of the Jewish kind — the bill is plainly aimed at Palestinians only. It specifically targets West Bank residents. who are tried in military courts, which Jews are not. It will drag Israel another few steps further away from the democratic world, almost all of which — with the notable exception of the United States — has abandoned the death penalty as inhumane and flawed in its irreversibility.
This abomination passed by 62 to 48 votes, rejected by the key parties of the moderate opposition.
It’s part of a last-ditch effort by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to hang onto power in upcoming elections, and illustrates just how dangerous that coalition’s continuing grip on Israeli politics is to the country’s soul.
The bill mandates that Israeli courts treat the death penalty as the default in the cases of those who have committed a “nationalistically motivated” murder of a citizen of Israel. Government critics like the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel called it an “imminent threat to the human rights of Palestinians.”
You do not need to be a leftist activist or an apologist for terrorism to share that concern. So it’s all but certain that the Supreme Court will strike the act down on the basis of equality under the law — or at the very least demand changes. The bill’s design — which features expedited executions and weakened legal safeguards — virtually guarantees it, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel has already filed a petition demanding the act’s annulment.
And that is actually the point.
Netanyahu has spent years trying to weaken Israel’s judiciary and force it into compliance with his will, because he is on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. His coalition has attempted to pass laws that would enable the government to appoint judges and also to overrule them by a simple majority in the Knesset. As he attempts to intimidate the legal system into letting him off the hook, Netanyahu has made an art of inciting his followers against prosecutors and judges, portraying them as part of a leftist deep-state conspiracy against him.
The public, which cannot be fooled all of the time, is generally aware of the trickery, and broadly opposes the judicial overhaul. With this act, Netanyahu and his allies are betting that while voters may hate his plans for creating an elected autocracy, they hate terrorists even more. He’s setting up a showdown with the Supreme Court to, effectively, make them choose.
After the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas, and after calamitous years of war, there are decent odds that the public — despite Netanyahu’s unpopularity — will take his side. And if he foments enough outrage at the courts, then perhaps he might erase his considerable deficit in the polls, ahead of an election that must be held by October.
If he wins that election, he could claim to truly have a mandate for pushing through his effort to incapacitate Israel’s independent judiciary, turning Israel into a Jewish version of authoritarian Turkey.
In general, Netanyahu is betting that he stands to benefit by focusing the campaign on conflict with the Arabs — as opposed to domestic issues, like his hugely unpopular coddling of the Haredim, including vast funding and military draft evasions. That too may be a decent bet: Netanyahu is expert at framing opposition to his war policies as unpatriotic.
What of the fact that a death penalty for Arab terrorists is all but certain to further mar Israel’s international standing? In an extraordinary development, the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy and Britain — some of Israel’s most significant trading partners — all urged Israel to abandon the bill, saying: “We are particularly worried about the de facto discriminatory character of the bill.”
“The adoption of this bill would risk undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles,” they added.
Alas: That appears to be intentional. Ignoring the experts — most Israel juridical and security experts also oppose the bill — is a feature in the playbook of right-wing populists, in Israel as in the U.S. And while further reputational damage should hardly be a welcome prospect, given the cratering of Israel’s standing in the world, especially in Europe, that is clearly not a concern for the coalition, which seems almost to fetishize an “us-against-the-world” pathology.
What makes this all the more sickening: Few expect the prospect of a death sentence to significantly deter the kind of terrorism Israel faces. There is a culture of martyrdom and fanaticism that embraces death in the context of jihad. That culture is visible in the inability of Israel — and now the Americans in Iran — to subdue rivals that are vastly overmatched in classic military terms.
In fact, it is likely to invite reprisal attacks and “executions” of captured Israeli soldiers as a matter of principle, as a tit-for-tat formal death penalty dynamic will start to somehow look legitimate.
But there is no easy way out of the new miseries this law will create. Should it somehow survive legal challenges, it would calamitously tie the hands of any future government that manages to oust Netanyahu. Any efforts to repeal this act would hand valuable talking points to a right-wing opposition, helping portray the new leaders as soft on terror — a major political liability.
In this tense situation, Netanyahu’s rivals are bracing for a series of further desperate measures in the spring parliamentary session, which will begin in about a month.
The coalition is expected to try to ram through several authoritarian reform bills, including one that would weaken the authority of the attorney general. And many people fear that Netanyahu will try to invoke emergency measures to put off the elections altogether if the polls remain low — a well-earned cynicism that is, obviously, devastating to morale at a time of war. It is not only crackpots and extremists who suspect he may try to prolong the wars in Iran and Lebanon, at least partly for this reason.
If the election does proceed, Netanyahu is widely expected to contest any close outcome, claiming fraud. If the Electoral Commission backs him but the Supreme Court does not, the result would be a constitutional crisis that Netanyahu will try to exploit to his advantage.
Here, too, Netanyahu’s close relationship with President Donald Trump can be seen as more than a matter of policy. It is about a wholesale upending of the political culture, as Trump has somehow made false charges of electoral fraud, and naked attempts to game the system, seem like a legitimate strategy.
The direction of travel is clear, as is the danger that all this will lead to violence in the streets. Israel is in grave, immediate peril — a problem this new bill will exacerbate.
The post An abominable new Israeli law is a death warrant for democracy appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
