The ink was barely dry on the Knesset’s vote when the communiqués began to flood through the letterbox. Eight Islamic nations – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Qatar and Pakistan – issued a joint condemnation of Israel’s new death penalty law for Arab terrorist offences, decrying it as racist and a threat to regional stability. Australia, Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom followed with their own joint statement. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights weighed in; the EU threatened trade sanctions; Human Rights Watch, along with Amnesty International, called it apartheid.
All are extraordinary, except for one small detail that we must not forget.
Saudi Arabia, which co-signed that joint Muslim statement, executed at least 330 people in 2024 alone – for offences including drug possession, adultery and, most horrifically, alleged sorcery. Iran, which needs no joint statement to express its contempt for Israel (simply download the Home Front Command app to check on your friends and family in Israel for your witness), executed over 1,500 people in 2025, nearly half of them for drug-related crimes, many following confessions extracted under torture, some for offences committed when they were children. Then, in January, Iranian security forces operating for the regime opened fire on their own people in the streets of Tehran, Karaj, and Kermanshah, killing 36,000 people in two nights.
The fog of a government-imposed internet blackout makes precision impossible here, but this may be the largest massacre of civilians in the 21st century. The order came directly from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who instructed his security services to crush the protests against his regime ‘by any means necessary’.
What do you think the UN Security Council’s response to the massacre was? They called an emergency session. Surely, you think, it was called because tens of thousands of civilians had been shot in the streets? No, it was because the United States and Israel later struck Iranian military targets. There were statements. There are always statements.
Compare that to the eruption over Israel’s death penalty law – and even Israel’s own legal establishment considers this constitutionally doomed. Within minutes of the Knesset vote, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel had already filed a petition with the Supreme Court challenging it as discriminatory and legally void. Opinion pieces in Haaretz, Israel’s foremost liberal newspaper, described the law as a populist tool, and predicted it would be invalidated by the High Court of Justice; those in the Times of Israel called it fragrantly unconstitutional and said the High Court has a moral imperative to strike it down.
What we are learning here is that it is perfectly fine to issue the death penalty, and for offences much worse than the deadly terror attacks it punishes, except when the enforcer and the victim are Jews.
What we are learning here is that the European nations are perfectly content to criticise Israel for dealing with terrorists on its own soil but will continue to equivocate when it comes to their front doorstep. If Australia, Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom were to face the terrorist threat Israel does, one imagines their response would be quite different to their current one, no longer sat on the sidelines booing the pragmatic player. Just yesterday, there was an explosion at a Christian pro-Israel centre in the Netherlands. What will the response be?
Now, Itamar Ben-Gvir is hardly a fool: the National Security Minister, who wore a noose-shaped lapel pin in the Knesset chamber and popped champagne when the vote passed, understands Israeli jurisprudence perfectly well. He understands that the High Court – which he has made a career of attacking as an obstacle to the national will – is almost certain to block this law. That is, at least partly, the point. Every time a court strikes down legislation he championed, Ben-Gvir has new material; new proof, for his base, that unelected judges stand between the Jewish people and justice.
With elections due before October 2026, the death penalty law is as much a political manoeuvre as a legislative act: he threw a grenade and the international community caught it, held it in their hands, and obligingly detonated it. All of their own free will.
But let us set aside Ben-Gvir’s calculations and address the law on its own terms, because the argument being made against Israel is not merely that this specific legislation is flawed; the argument is that Israel has placed itself beyond the pale of civilised nations. This is implicit in EU sanctions threats, in the calls for ICC referrals, and in the machinery of international human rights law bearing down on the one democracy of the Middle East. Let us conveniently cast aside the fact that the United States has executed over 1,600 people since 1976, 25 of which in 2024; let us cast aside, too, that the countries that are signatories to the ICC certainly have no business dictating to Israel what it morally ought and ought not to do.
The State of Israel has carried out exactly two executions in its entire history: the first, a soldier wrongly convicted of treason in 1948; the second, Adolf Eichmann in 1962. Japan, a fellow liberal democracy rarely subjected to international censure, hangs condemned prisoners, sometimes with only hours’ notice to the prisoner and no notice at all to the family; Singapore executes drug traffickers; China executes thousands annually, and keeps its figures a state secret; Russia, which currently holds a Security Council seat and has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, not to mention the tens of thousands more Ukrainian soldiers it has killed on the battlefield in its illegal war. Can you guess how many of those nations have been threatened with the suspension of a trade agreement?
The law Israel has passed – whatever its flaws, and they are real – applies to people convicted in a court of law of deliberately killing civilians to destroy a state. The first duty of a state, above all, is to ensure the protection of its citizens. Every country in the world reserves the right to apply the harshest of penalties to those who commit acts of mass political violence. Most of those countries do not face anything even approaching the pressure Israel faces this week.
The question is not whether the law is good, but why this law, in this country, triggers the full apparatus of international condemnation, while an Iranian theocracy executes 30,000 people in a single week and keeps thousands more held in prisons in which they are likely to die, and all the world can produce, if anything, are statements.
The answer, which honest observers across the political spectrum must eventually confront, is that the international human rights architecture does not operate on moral principle. It operates on political convenience. Israel is a democracy with a free press and a defiant Supreme Court. It is, in short, an easy target that talks back.
The regimes that murder in silence only receive the very silence they were counting on. Iran killed 36,000 people in January, and the UN sent a letter. Nothing more, nothing less. Only now has the UN found its voice – it is a pity, though, that it was about Israel.