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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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UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – The United Kingdom threatened to sanction Israelis involved in West Bank settlement expansion after the Jewish state’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.
Construction in E1 “would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution,” the British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in a special statement he posted on X on Thursday.
Targeted sanctions, Miliband wrote, would be part of a series of measures his government would take. His office also summoned Israel’s charge d’Affaires Thursday to demand a closure of the bidding process, which first opened on Tuesday, and a withdrawal of the construction project altogether.
“Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution,” he wrote. Miliband has held his position for a month and is part of the new leadership Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham appointed when he took office in July.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attacked Miliband on X, stating that Britain’s “decision to damage the relationship between our countries is deeply unfortunate.”
He said that the U.K. government’s “systematic policy of blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism has already contributed to a massive wave of antisemitic hatred and attacks against the British Jewish community.”
The Jewish people have the same right to “live throughout the Land of Israel” just as the British people have a right to live anywhere in the U.K., Sa’ar wrote.
Plans to expand the built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim settlement by constructing some 3,400 housing units on a largely underdeveloped hilltop within the city’s boundaries have been in place since 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister.
Israel mostly froze those plans under pressure from the international community, including the U.S., with many countries warning that building homes in E1 would harm their diplomatic ties with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to advance the project in earnest in 2012 to protest the United Nations General Assembly decision to grant the Palestinians the status of a non-member state and has since pushed the project forward in spurts, particularly during election seasons.
The publication of the bidding process for the homes was first announced on Tuesday and is set to close on Oct. 19, one week shy of the Israeli elections on Oct. 27. Opening the bids is a move that plays well with Netanyahu’s right-wing voter base, which opposes Palestinian statehood and believes that settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and the E1 area should be annexed into sovereign Israel.
But the move reverberated globally, with the U.K. signing onto a joint condemnation by France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, in which they warned that settlement building in E1 distanced peace and undermined the country’s international standing.
They also reminded businesses who might bid for E1 construction that they could face legal or reputational consequences, given that such companies could be in breach of international law.
Palestinian Authority Vice President Hussein Al-Sheikh said he welcomed the condemnation, explaining on X that such a position “reflects the importance of the international role in confronting settlement activity and safeguarding the two-state solution.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes appeared first on The Forward.
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Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first
(JTA) — An Argentine federal judge was removed from office Tuesday for a series of antisemitic posts on his social media accounts that constituted misconduct incompatible with his role, an impeachment panel ruled.
Alfredo Eugenio López, who headed Federal Court No. 4 in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, was removed by Argentina’s Jury of Impeachment, a special panel composed of judges, lawmakers and lawyers.
It is the first time in Argentina’s history that a judge has been removed over antisemitic remarks.
In López’s social media posts, the judge referred to the Jewish people as “a brood of vipers,” Israel as a “fictitious state” and Argentinian Jews as “foreigners.” He has also used such terms as “Zionist” and “gay” as insults.
According to the panel, the judge committed acts of “discrimination and the denial of equal rights against the Argentine Jewish community. For the purposes of these proceedings, it is particularly significant that, by acting in this manner, he shattered public confidence in his continued fitness to administer justice impartially.”The case reached the panel through Argentina’s Council of the Magistracy, based in Buenos Aires, the constitutional body responsible for the selection and discipline of federal judges.
The first complaint against López was filed in February 2025 by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, which is the umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community. One month later, the Argentine Forum Against Antisemitism also filed a complaint. In July 2025, attorney Yamil Santoro from Apolo Foundation added another one.
In his defense, López argued that his messages were “ subjective and decontextualized interpretations of exchanges on social media, which in no way affect the administration of justice or his impartiality” as a judge. He added that his remarks were unrelated to any pending case and that he had never been recused or removed from any judicial case.
Neither Lopez nor his attorney were immediately available for further comment.
“He was removed because he simply would not stop engaging in hate speech,” jury member Alberto Maques said during a live interview Tuesday on the A24 news channel. “It is absolutely disgraceful for a federal judge to engage in this kind of conduct.”
Maques said there were 15 social media posts that he acknowledged, but more than 50 posts in which he said “outrageous things that are not worth repeating because they truly constituted hate speech.”
“This is not merely an issue of hate speech against the Jewish community. This is someone who lacks common sense,” he added, interviewed by A24 news channel.
Prosecutors in the impeachment proceedings argued that the messages were not isolated political comments but reflected a pattern of hostility toward Jews, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
“No position of authority can shield hatred. This is not a matter of punishing an opinion. It is about sanctioning repeated conduct involving antisemitism, hostility and dehumanization, conduct incompatible with the impartiality, dignity and public trust required of the judiciary,” DAIA said Tuesday in a statement.
“This case sets a precedent: for the first time in more than a century, DAIA initiated proceedings of this nature against a judge. No office is above democracy.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first appeared first on The Forward.
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California progressive Wahab defeats AIPAC-backed Hernandez in close race
(JTA) — California progressive Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed moderate Melissa Hernandez in a congressional runoff this week, capping off a contest that had become unexpectedly tight after the pro-Israel lobby entered the fray.
The Associated Press called the race between the Democrats — who were vying to replace a disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell — a full two days after polls closed, when Wahab secured 53.1% of votes to Hernandez’s 46.9%, with 95% of ballots tallied. The gap between them grew by four percentage points from Tuesday evening, when Wahab had held a narrow 51% lead to Hernandez’s 49%.
“We stayed focused on the people, and I will fight for this district that raised me,” Wahab said in a Thursday statement, noting her journey “from foster care to Congress” in her East Bay community.
Although Wahab ended up victorious, the narrow initial margin on Tuesday shocked California’s 14th District, given that she had secured a double-digit lead in preliminary races two months ago.
But in the past few weeks, an unforeseen variable appeared to influence the trajectories of the two campaigns: a massive spending push from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee aimed at turning the tides for Hernandez.
Since the beginning of August alone, AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, and other affiliated groups spent more than $2.5 million on both boosting Hernandez and denigrating Wahab with negative ads and mailers, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“This was not a landslide for Wahab by any means,” local Democratic strategist Noah Finneburgh, who is not affiliated with either candidate, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They narrowed the gap for sure,” Finneburgh added, referring to AIPAC. “They spent millions of dollars attacking Wahab very aggressively.”
These attacks, he explained, did not involve Israel and instead focused on divisive issues for the Bay Area, such as public safety and protecting kids.
“Negative advertising with a persuasive message can be very effective,” Finneburgh said.
In her Thursday night statement, Wahab declared that her “district cannot be bought,” describing the race as “one of the ugliest, most expensive elections we’ve ever seen.”
Prior to this influx of cash and related ads, neither AIPAC nor Israel had played a significant role in this short-lived race — which began in April following Swalwell’s resignation over allegations of sexual assault.
When the district held a special primary to seek Swalwell’s replacement on June 16, Wahab and Hernandez finished as the top-two candidates and moved on to this week’s special general runoff election.
California primaries are “nonpartisan” or “top-two” races, in which the two highest ranking candidates move on to the general election, irrespective of their parties. The top-two in this case were both Democrats, like Swalwell, in a district that the Cook Political Report deems solidly blue.
Even though Wahab will now finish the remainder of Swalwell’s term, she will have to compete with Hernandez again in the November general election for a full term that begins on January 3, 2027.
In a June 16 special primary that preceded this week’s runoff, there was still a massive gap between the two candidates, with Wahab accruing 42.8% of the votes, compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%. A separate primary for the November race, which occurred two weeks earlier, placed Wahab at 38.3% and Hernandez at 17.2%.
Wahab, who will be the first Afghan American in Congress, has focused on affordability, civil rights, education and climate change. Her campaign calls for an end to wars and “prolonged occupations” but only specifically calls out U.S. military activity in “Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.”
Though Wahab has been critical of Israel and its operations in Gaza, she has not been as vocal about the issue as many other progressive colleagues nationwide. She responded “yes” when asked if Israel was committing genocide in a primary debate, but she didn’t include Israel or Gaza in her campaign priorities.
During a recent appearance on far-right influencer Hasan Piker’s livestream, Wahab acknowledged that “it’s not a zero-sum game in the Middle East,” adding that “we can care for all people.” She also referenced a resolution she introduced last year in the California legislature, pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza but also condemning Hamas and demanding the release of the hostages.
“We talk about both Palestinians and the Israeli victims there,” Wahab told Piker. “We talk about holding the perpetrators accountable from both sides.”
Asked if she was in favor of “ending all U.S. aid to Israel,” she responded “yes,” while stressing that “humanitarian aid is important to me, too.”
Wahab has earned the backing of multiple labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. The liberal pro-Israel group J Street also recently invested $108,000 in her campaign, according to the FEC. American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC, also spent at least $200,000 on supporting her.
Hernandez has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
Come November, Hernandez will gain one additional asset. Due to statewide redistricting, the 14th District will gain about 26,000 new voters from Dublin, where Hernandez previously served as mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
But Finneburgh said he believes that Hernandez has only a minimal chance of winning that race, especially because Wahab will be heading into that election as an incumbent.
He also suggested that if “she plays her card right,” Wahab could even take some endorsements away from Hernandez.
“There’s going to be people who are going to probably move over from the Hernandez camp and back her,” Finneburgh added. “It’s going to be hard to unseat her.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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