When ‘Terrorism’ Only Means ‘Against Jews’

Israel’s debate over the death penalty for terrorists is usually framed as a practical argument about deterrence. Will execution prevent attacks by people already willing to die? Is it moral, effective, reversible?

But the most consequential move in the current proposal is not about deterrence at all. It is about definition. And in criminal law, definition is never neutral.

On November 5, 2025, Israel’s official legislative gazette published two bills titled “Death Penalty for Terrorists” (Amendments 159 and 160). At their core is a new aggravated form of murder. If a person causes the death of an Israeli citizen—intentionally, or with indifference—motivated by racism or hostility toward a public, and does so with the aim of harming the State of Israel and “the revival of the Jewish people in its land,” the punishment is death—and only death.

That phrase—“the revival of the Jewish people in its land”—is the hinge on which everything turns. It sounds historical, even uplifting. In a criminal statute, however, it functions as an ideological filter. The bill does not define terrorism as politically motivated violence against civilians. It defines terrorism as violence that can be framed as an assault on Jews, and on Israel as the vehicle of Jewish national revival.

That is why the proposal is not merely extreme; it is selective in a way that matters. The death penalty is not triggered by brutality alone, or even by racism alone. It is triggered by a particular combination of victimhood and narrative: the victim must be an Israeli citizen, and the act must be understood as a strike against the Jewish national project.

In other words, the law does not simply ask, “Was this terrorism?” It asks, “Was this terrorism against us, as we understand ourselves?”

That framing carries a predictable consequence: it is difficult to imagine this bill ever being applied to Jewish perpetrators of political violence—even when that violence is lethal, racist, collective, and intended to intimidate. A Jewish extremist does not typically describe his actions as aimed at harming “the revival of the Jewish people.” He describes them as serving it. The statute’s moral universe is therefore asymmetrical by design: “terror” becomes a category that points outward.

This is where the debate should become uncomfortable. Israel does not lack politically motivated violence committed by Jews. What it lacks—too often—is a willingness to treat that violence as structurally meaningful rather than exceptional, fringe, or merely embarrassing.

Over the past year, settler violence in the West Bank has surged on a scale no serious observer can dismiss as isolated. Incidents vary—arson, beatings, intimidation, attacks on homes, fields, and roads—but their function frequently converges: to instill fear, enforce dominance, and signal that certain people live at the mercy of others. If that is not terrorism in the plain sense of the word, then the word has been emptied of content.

Nor is this atmosphere confined to the frontier. In Jaffa—the mixed city adjacent to Tel Aviv, often invoked as a symbol of coexistence—recent incidents have carried the same civic message. One reported case involved the assault of a heavily pregnant Arab woman who required medical treatment afterward. Another report linked suspects to the “hilltop youth” milieu associated with West Bank extremism. Whatever the legal outcome in each file, the pattern is visible to those living it: ethnic violence that humiliates and intimidates is becoming harder to treat as an exception.

So why does the state persist in describing this phenomenon as marginal—while drafting a death-penalty law that effectively defines “terror” as what happens only when Jews are the victims?

This is the point where law stops being only a tool of governance and becomes a mirror.

Even if the bill never passes, it is already doing political work. Criminal law is also a language the state uses to teach society what is most dangerous, most sacred, most intolerable. It signals which harms deserve the strongest moral response—and which harms can be absorbed, rationalized, or deferred.

Here, the parallel with Argentina is clarifying. Argentina’s femicide law did not invent gender-based killings. Those killings existed before the statute and continued after it. But the law named a pattern that had been blurred behind generic labels. By naming it, the legal system made the pattern visible, discussable, measurable. It forced the public to see a structural problem rather than a string of isolated tragedies. The law’s force was not only punitive. It was diagnostic.

Israel’s death-penalty bill is diagnostic too—just not in the way its sponsors intend.

By defining “terrorism” through a narrative that privileges Jewish victimhood and marginalizes Arab victimhood, the bill reveals a state posture: a willingness to let ethnic hierarchy seep into the most solemn part of the legal system—the place where the state decides which crimes are so singular that they justify the irreversible sanction of death.

Its sponsors likely believe they are projecting strength. What they are projecting is something else: that in modern Israel, a certain measure of institutional racism is not merely present—it is becoming draftable, publishable, and defensible, proposed without triggering an emergency of conscience.

Israel does not need a death penalty to fight terrorism. It needs the moral clarity to recognize terror when it is committed by Jews as well as against them, and the legal humility to avoid writing hierarchies of human worth into the criminal code.

That is the paradox this bill has already achieved. It claims to protect Israel from terror, yet it forces Israel to confront a deeper question: is the state prepared to formalize, in black-letter law, a hierarchy of victims?