“The Rope is for Arabs Only”
Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook
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 one percent of cases—0.87 percent, 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.
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.
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.
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:
“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.
—Mondoweiss, April 2, 2026