‘Hateful, Bigoted’ Chip Roy Introduces MAMDANI Act in Congress

“Blatant Islamophobia aside, Roy’s staff probably wasted days trying to land this acronym,” said one observer.


Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) speaks at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on March 4, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Apr 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Journalists and rights advocates reacted on Monday with a mix of bemusement and anger over US Rep. Chip Roy’s display of “blatant Islamophobia” as the Texas Republican introduced a bill that appeared as intent on personally targeting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as it was on unconstitutionally expelling immigrants from the US over certain political and religious views.

“Blatant Islamophobia aside, Roy’s staff probably wasted days trying to land this acronym,” said Ravi Mangla, press secretary for the Working Families Party, after Roy unveiled the Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists (MAMDANI) Act.

According to Roy, the legislation would enact “sweeping” changes to US immigration law that would deport, denaturalize, and deny US citizenship or entry to any immigrant “who is a member of a socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”



The bill was introduced nearly four months after Mamdani was sworn in to office. Roy had suggested that the political rise of the democratic socialist, who is a Muslim immigrant from Uganda, risked bringing what he believes to be “Sharia law”—actually a broadly defined set of personal theological and ethical guidelines rather than a national law—to the US.

In reality, Mamdani has taken steps toward enacting a universal childcare program, opening a network of city-owned grocery stores to compete with corporations, and convincing the state to tax the second homes of wealthy New Yorkers.

The legislation introduced Monday comes days after a Washington Post analysis found that Roy has been particularly fixated on promoting the view that allowing Muslims to immigrate to the US and practice their religion—in accordance with the US Constitution—will harm the nation.

Including one recent post that explicitly said, “No more Muslims,” Roy has posted from his campaign and official accounts about Muslims, Islam, and “Sharia law” more than 244 times since January—more than any other member of Congress, including Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has faced called to resign for numerous anti-Muslim comments that have attacked public figures like Rep. Ilham Omar (D-Minn.).

The Council on American Islamic Relations said in a report last month that last year, it received 8,683 complaints from people facing anti-Muslim bias or attacks—the highest number of complaints in a single year since the group began compiling civil rights reports in 1996. Employment discrimination was the most common complaint, with immigration and asylum discrimination and hate incidents rounding out the top three.



Gun control and human rights advocate Cameron Kasky said that “many moderate Democrats and the mainstream media have played a pivotal role in normalizing this dangerous, escalatory Islamophobia.”

A number of influential establishment Democrats suggested Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral race last year could endanger Jewish New Yorkers, and refused to endorse him. Party leaders also continue to support arming Israel—which has spent the last two-and-a-half years attacking Palestinians in Gaza and has now returned to assaulting Lebanon—claiming the Israeli government needs US weapons to defend itself against other countries and groups in majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East.

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) warned that while Roy’s bill targets socialists and Muslims whom the congressman says subscribe to “fundamentalism,” the party will likely “expand their list of targets—little by little, hoping you do not notice—until their is no one left to stand against their agenda.”

“ Fascism,” she said, “ALWAYS requires a public enemy.”

Named for Mamdani, GOP Bill Would Strip Citizenship From People Who Advocate for Socialism

History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.


US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Rep. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) participate in a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on April 01, 2025 in Washington, DC. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet and the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government held a joint hearing to investigate judicial overreach and limits on federal courts.
(Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann
Apr 21, 2026

Common Dreams


Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.

Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”

The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.

“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”

“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.

“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)

“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.

We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.

But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.

In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.

That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.

I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.

Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.

The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.

That goes all the way back to trying to overturning the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.

Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing clearance Thomas’s recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”

That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.

This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.

We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.

The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.

History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.

There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.

It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”

And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.

Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.

Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.

Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.

The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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Nuclear Myths Continue To Fuel Neocon Fantasies

by James Carden | Apr 13, 2026 |

Reprinted from The Realist Review.

In a recent televised rant on the Fox News Channel, the neoconservative publicist Mark Levin made the eye-opening claim that the current US-Israeli War on Iran is “every bit as important as World War Two.” Still more, according to Levin, the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon (for which there is approximately zero evidence), requires us, as good citizens to rally around the President and the military. Not surprisingly, Levin also noted that President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan saved “a million men” by forestalling a US invasion of the Japanese Home Islands (the inference being: Trump should do likewise). Truman’s decision to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs remains a topic (among a number of others) with which we Americans largely deal in the counterfeit currency of myths.

Despite the conclusions of the US Bombing Survey, that “certainly prior to December 1, 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” few myths are as entrenched in the psyche of America’a media and political elites as the claim that Truman’s decision (invariably valorized as “brave”) to incinerate a quarter of a million civilians – mainly women, children, and elderly – in Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war in the Pacific.

The claim that Truman’s decision saved countless American lives has grown to proportions that would have surprised, if not shocked, Truman’s own military high command. President George H.W. Bush, himself a veteran of the Pacific campaign, claimed that the atomic bombs saved the lives of half-a-million US servicemen.

The record, however, rebuts the myth.

Truman’s military advisers disagreed with Truman. Five-star Navy Admiral William Leahy, who served as Roosevelt and Truman’s chief of staff, felt that the bombs were “of no material assistance in our war against Japan.” The Japanese, said Leahy, “were already defeated and ready to surrender.” Leahy believed Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons had “adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Likewise, Admiral William F. Halsey, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, noted that, “the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers throughout Russia long before” Truman decided to drop the bombs. Two weeks after the nuclear attacks, General Curtis LeMay publicly criticized the decision, saying, “The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

The myth that the bombs “saved” a million US servicemen who would have otherwise perished in the invasion of the Home Islands came from the pen and imagination of the man who would become among the most infamous strategists and apologists for the War in Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy.

Born in 1919 to an upper-class family from Boston, Bundy was a graduate of Yale who served as an Army intelligence officer during the war. His father, Harvey Hollister Bundy, was a close associate of FDR’s Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. After the war, McGeorge was hired to ghostwrite Stimson’s memoirs. It was just around that time that journalists and a number of former high-ranking military officials began asking uncomfortable questions about whether it was necessary to use the atomic bomb against the Japanese.

Stimson and Harvey Bundy viewed the growing criticism with alarm, and so, McGeorge was given a second assignment, which was to help Stimson write defense of Truman. That spirited and wholly dishonest apologia appeared on the February 1947 cover of Harper’s magazine. The article, which heavily relied on material provided by Harvey Bundy, said that the atomic bombs were “our least abhorrent choice,” despite the fact that the Japanese had been actively suing for peace. The Harper’s article also included the entirely made up claim that an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have come at the cost of a million US casualties.

As Robert Oppenheimer’s biographer, Kai Bird, later noted, Bundy’s essay, “Would stand for at least two decades as the definitive explanation of the decision to use the atomic bomb. Even today, it remains the orthodox view.” Six years after assuming the role of national security adviser, Bundy would depart the White House in disgrace, reviled for his role in perpetuating and defending the war in Vietnam. There is a certain symmetry to his public career, which began as it ended: In the retailing of lies.

Alarmingly, those very lies are now being repurposed by fools like Mark Levin and his Israel First supporters within the Trump administration to justify a nuclear attack on Iran.

James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review.  He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.

UK

HubMP201

The 1926 General Strike

Jeff Slee explores an historic confrontation ahead of next month’s hundredth anniversary.

This May is the centenary of the General Strike, the biggest event in the history of the British working class. It lasted nine days, and up to 3 million workers covering all the main sections of British industry took part. There had been a general strike before, in 1842, but the working class was much smaller then.

The strike was in defence of the miners, against the demands of the mine owners for wage cuts, longer hours, and the ending of national agreements. Many of the workers involved feared that they too would be faced with similar demands from their bosses.

Britain in the 1920s

A hundred years ago, Britain was a manufacturing country. Coal was the main source of energy for homes, industry and generating electricity. Transport of people and goods – including coal – over longer distances was by rail. In towns and cities, people took buses or trams. Only the rich had cars. Millions of workers worked in the mines, transport, the docks, steel making, shipbuilding, and other engineering industries. Coal, the biggest of these industries, employed over a million miners – about one in ten of Britain’s male workforce.  All these industries were in private ownership, except for London’s docks which were run by the public sector Port of London Authority, and buses and trams which were run by local councils.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, trade unions had grown in size, organisation and militancy. Between 1900 and 1926, trade union membership rose from 2 million to 5 ½ million – at its peak in 1920 there were over 8 million trade unionists. Strikes caused the loss of many millions of working days each year. The miners’ union, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) – which later became the NUM – had a membership of over ¾ million and the most industrial power of any British union.

The prelude to the General Strike

In 1925 the UK coal industry was in a downturn. The coal owners demanded that miners take wage cuts and work longer hours, and that agreements should be made at district level instead of national level. The MFGB refused, and appealed to the TUC General Council for support. The Railway and Transport unions agreed to support them, and the General Council – together with the railway and transport unions – ordered a stoppage of all movement and import and export of coal from July 31st. This was to be followed by a sympathetic strike – a generalised strike – if the coal owners imposed a lockout on the miners.

Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his Government, working closely with the coal owners, wanted a general reduction in wages – not just in coal but for all workers. They also wanted to break the power of the TUC General Council – the TUC had created the General Council in 1921 to be their leadership, and the Government and bosses feared that it would lead co-ordinated and generalised strikes.

Faced with the threat of a widespread strike, the government and the coal owners backed down. The Government provided a nine-month subsidy to coal owners to maintain wages, which was to expire on April 30th 1926. And they set up a Royal Commission on the reorganisation of the coal industry.

The Government, knowing that they had only postponed a confrontation between themselves and coal owners – their class – and the miners and trade union movement  – the working class – used those nine months to plan and organise to win that confrontation. They built up coal stocks, including using coal imports. The Government set up an emergency civil administration system to keep transport and food and coal distribution running. This was based on ten regions each to be run by a Civil Commissioner assisted by civil servants. And they set up a strike-breaking organisation, the Organisation for the Maintenance Of Supplies (OMS).

In contrast, the TUC did not plan or organise for when the nine-months pause would end. There was no clear agreement between the General Council and the MFGB on what the aims of a strike would be, or how a decision would be taken on the terms of any proposed settlement.While the MFGB was clear on their demand of “Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day”, the TUC General Council never formally adopted this as their aim. They reserved the right to make a deal that would mean worse pay and conditions for the miners.

The General Strike

In April 1926 the Government’s coal subsidy ended, and the coal owners again demanded wage cuts, longer hours and the ending of national agreements. They threatened to lock out the miners if the MFGB did not agreed to these demands. On Saturday May 1st, a special TUC conference voted overwhelmingly for a general strike. The Government had prepared for a war on the working class, and when TUC representatives met them that weekend to try and reach a deal, the Prime Minister showed little interest.

So the coal owners locked out the miners, and at midnight on Monday May 3rd, the General Strike began. The General Council called out all transport workers, printers, iron and steel workers, metal and chemical workers, building workers, electrical and gas workers. From Tuesday May 4th there were no trains, buses or trams, no power, no newspapers, no building work done. From May 11th the General Council also called out shipyard workers and engineers.

The strike was enthusiastically supported and almost completely solid. For example, 99% of London Underground employees were out; the various rail companies reported that only a few percent of goods trains were running. Mass picketing was effective across the country. The Government were unable to break the strike, despite bringing in the army and navy, strengthening the police, and using young upper-class volunteers to try to keep transport running.

The TUC had not planned how the strike was to be run in cities and towns, but everywhere local trade union organisations rose to the occasion and started running the strike in their localities. In some places, this was done by Trades Councils, which were then much more numerous, strong and well-supported than now, building on a long history of local co-operation and organisation by trade unionists. In other places, this role was taken on by union Councils of Action or Joint Strike Committees which were rapidly set up and got themselves organised.

Running the strike in their localities included taking responsibility for organising mass pickets, producing local strike newspapers, and issuing permits for what transport they decided could still run.  Employers had to go to these committees to ask for permission if they wanted to move goods such as coal or foodstuffs. In a very real way this strike led to alternative working-class organs of state power at local level. The Government’s Civil Commissioners were unable to organise local services: power was with the strikers’ organisations.

For example, “in Newcastle the Government’s Commissioner” [ one of those the Government had created before the strike to run local services during the strike] “was forced to go to the Joint Strike Committee with a suggestion  for dual control of food services in view of the breakdown of the efforts of the OMS.” (Allen Hutt, The Post-War History of the British Working Class, Left Book Club 1937).

End of the Strike

By Wednesday May 12th the strike was stronger than ever, with no signs of any significant return to work and the shipyard workers and engineers having enthusiastically joined the strike the day before. But the backbone of the TUC General Council members was weaker than ever. They were frightened of the power of the strike and just wanted to find any way out. That day, the General Council met with Prime Minster Stanley Baldwin and called off the General Strike, without any concessions from the Government.

Millions of workers – dismayed by the decision of the General Council – stayed on strike on ThursdayMay 13th. The General Council resorted to issuing a statement making the completely false claims that “The General Strike… has made possible the resumption of negotiations in the coal industry, and the continuance, during negotiations, of the financial assistance given by the Government” to get union members back to work.

Some employers took the opportunity to announce wage cuts, longer hours, and victimisations of union militants, but many workers, notably on the railways, refused to return to work until the owners had withdrawn threats to their conditions and contracts.

The miners stayed out, and did not return to work until November 1926 – defeated in the  end, having to accept wage cuts and longer hours.

The General Strike and the miners’ strike following it caused 162 million working days ‘lost’ (the word used in Government statistics) to strike action in 1926. This represented more days than in all the 50 years from 1975 to now added together.

The Tory Government used their victory over the General Strike to press forward with attacks on the working class. They cut unemployment benefit and extended the clause which was used to deny unemployment benefit altogether to those workers who were deemed as “not genuinely seeking work”. The Trades Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927 made much trade union activity illegal, including banning general strikes, all sympathetic strikes and strikes which could be considered as likely to coerce the Government directly or indirectly. Mass picketing was banned, as was the closed shop in public services.

Within the trades unions and the Labour Party, the defeat of the strike, and the demoralisation, wage cuts, unemployment and loss of union membership that followed, reinforced the dominance of those leaders who had sold out the General Strike and their approach of seeking a subservient position in a partnership with employers and the ruling class.

The Labour Party and the General Strike

The Labour Party and the trade unions were more closely linked at all levels than they are now. National Union of Railwaymen General Secretary JH Thomas (more on him later) was a member of the TUC General Council, one of those who led their efforts to avert the General Strike and then to call it off once it was under way. He was at the same time the Labour MP for Derby; he had been a minister in the short-lived 1924 Labour Government and was to become a minister in the 1929 Labour Government – one of those who betrayed the Party by forming the National Government with Liberals and Tories in 1931. Speaking for the Opposition in the House of Commons on May 3rd in the debate on the strike, he showed how far the General Council was prepared to let down the miners to avoid a strike, when he said:

“For ten days, we said to the Government: You force the coal owners to give us some terms, never mind what they are, however bad they are. Let us have something to go upon” and “in a challenge to the Constitution, God help us unless the Government won.” (Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, p 134).

Labour leader Ramsey MacDonald said hours before the strike started: “I don’t like General Strikes”, and spent the strike talking to the Government to try and get anything that could be used to call off the strike.

Some of those in high positions of the Party took a better position. The then Labour Party women’s publication The Labour Woman in its editorial of June 1926 said:“The most important thing is that the people themselves now know and feel their own power. Genuine class-consciousness was born in the ten days of the strike… The General Strike has made a united working class.” 

And in the months that followed the defeat of the General Strike, while much of the Labour and trade union leadership left the still-striking miners to starve to defeat, Dr Marion Phillips – the Chief Woman Officer of the Labour Party – led a committee which raised £313,000 (equivalent to about £17 million now) to relieve  the suffering of mining families.

Many rank and file Labour Party members were also active trade unionists, and played their part in local organisation of the strike. Labour Party members with their local Party banners took part in union demonstrations at the start of the strike. The Independent Labour Party – a large leftish group then affiliated to the Labour Party but opposed to its leadership – “provided couriers, canteens, and entertainment, throwing their entire organisation into solidarity to support the strikers and their families” and ”ILP halls across the country became staging grounds for organising distribution” of strike bulletins (Simon Hannah, A Party with Socialists In It, p30). Aneurin Bevan, then a young miner and already a leading Labour figure in South Wales, ran the Council of Action in his home town of Tredegar.

Why the General Strike Failed

The General Strike did not fail because of any weakening of support from the working class, but because the trade union leadership did not want it. They did not want to challenge the ruling class: they just wanted to be accepted by it as junior partners. This leadership included men like Transport Workers’ leader Ernest Bevin, later to be Foreign Secretary in the Attlee Government, and NUR leader JH Thomas, who said in a speech during the strike that” I have never favoured the principle of a General Strike” and denounced “those who, on whatever side they may be, are talking of a fight to a finish.”

The militant miners’ leader A J Cook wrote later that “the only desire of some leaders was to call off the General Strike at any cost, without any guarantees for the workers, miners or others.”

The TUC General Council included many men (at that time all the union leaders were men) from very poor backgrounds who had started out as workplace militants. Some had led strikes in the past: in 1919, JH Thomas as NUR General Secretary had led a national railway strike that succeeded in defeating bosses’ demands for wage cuts, and Ben Tillett was one of the leaders of the famous 1889 London Dock Strike.

But what those leaders did not have was the understanding that the interests of the working class as a whole are opposed to the interests of the bosses’ class. They accepted the world view of the British ruling class – many boasted about how patriotic they were – and just wanted fairer pay and conditions for workers within the system, provided the system could afford it. They could and did lead strikes and argued for their own sections of workers, but did not want confrontations where the working class as a whole was up against the ruling class.

Jeff Slee is a retired rail worker and former RMT National Executive Committee member.

Image: Tyldesley miners outside the Miners Hall during the 1926 General Strike. https://picryl.com/media/tyldesley-miners-outside-the-miners-hall-during-the-1926-general-strike-0b56de Licence: Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal PDM 1.0 Deed

Israel Moves Toward Executing Palestinian Children

Ramzy Baroud

 April 9, 2026

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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

According to Israel’s new death penalty law, Palestinian children, like adults, could, in practice, find themselves facing the gallows. This might take some by surprise, or even be dismissed as an exaggeration. Sadly, it is neither.

The death penalty law, passed by Israel’s Knesset on March 30, mandates capital punishment for Palestinians convicted of carrying out deadly attacks. The legislation, often referred to as the ‘Death Penalty for Terrorists’ law, requires that executions be carried out swiftly, within 90 days, while sharply limiting avenues for appeal or commutation, according to human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

It resolves a long-standing political demand by Israel’s far-right leadership to formalize execution as a tool of control over Palestinians. As extremist Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has repeatedly argued, those accused of such acts “deserve death,” framing the law not as an exception, but as a necessary policy.

Though the law itself does not explicitly mention children, it does not exclude them either. Knowing Israel’s treatment and legal classification of Palestinian children, this distinction is not minor—it is decisive.

Under Israel’s military court system, Palestinian children as young as 12 are prosecuted. In practice, they are often treated as adults within a system that offers few safeguards and operates with an extremely high conviction rate.

Defense for Children International–Palestine reported in its 2023 briefing Arbitrary by Default that the Israeli military detention system subjects Palestinian minors to “systematic”, institutionalized and “widespread ill-treatment.”

Reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other rights organizations describe consistent patterns of abuse, including night arrests, physical violence, threats, and psychological pressure.

Many children, these groups note, are interrogated without adequate legal safeguards, in conditions that facilitate coercion and the extraction of confessions.

Under international law, children are protected persons, entitled to special safeguards under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child—both of which prohibit cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Not in Israel, however—a state that has consistently treated international law not as binding, but as an obstacle to its political and military objectives.

For Israel, Palestinian children are often framed not as civilians, but as potential threats. This framing represents a profound assault on basic humanity and fundamental rights—one that goes even further than the cynical language of ‘collateral damage’, by preemptively stripping children of their civilian status.

Israeli officials have made such views unmistakably clear.

In 2015, former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked shared and endorsed a text declaring that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy,” including its children, and that Palestinian mothers should not give birth to “little snakes.” Her statement was not an aberration, but a reflection of a political discourse in which dehumanization is normalized.

This, too, has often been dismissed as routine racism in Israeli politics. It is not.

Since October 7, 2023, Gaza’s children have been killed in staggering numbers: at least 21,289 children among more than 71,800 Palestinians killed, and over 44,500 wounded, according to UNICEF’s February 2026 update.

In the occupied West Bank, the pattern persists, with Palestinian children increasingly killed during Israeli military raids and settler violence.

All of this in mind, it should not be surprising that the death penalty law does not exempt children from the horrific fate it envisions for Palestinians who resist Israeli occupation.

To be clear, the death penalty law is neither about punishment nor deterrence. Israel does not require a law to kill Palestinians—whether those engaged in armed resistance, or, as has often been the case, civilians with no involvement in hostilities.

For decades, Israel has carried out assassinations, extrajudicial killings, and large-scale military operations that have resulted in thousands of Palestinian deaths.

The killing of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is no longer incidental, but documented. Since October 2023, at least 98 detainees have died in custody—many under conditions linked to torture, abuse, and medical neglect, according to Physicians for Human Rights–Israel.

The law, therefore, is about something else: the projection of power.

It is not fundamentally different from the performative brutality associated with figures like Ben-Gvir, whose rhetoric and conduct toward Palestinian prisoners have emphasized domination, humiliation, and control.

But within this projection of power lies a deadly consequence: Many people stand to be killed—including children.

Though some voices in the international community have spoken out against the law, these reactions have been limited and short-lived, quickly overshadowed by other developments.

Without sustained pressure, Israel has no reason to refrain from carrying out executions—decisions that will be made by military courts that lack even the most basic standards of fairness or adherence to international law.

Once this, too, is normalized, the threshold will shift again. And children will inevitably be drawn into it.

Israel has already normalized practices once deemed unthinkable. If it now normalizes the execution of children, it will cross a threshold even many colonial regimes did not openly breach.

There must be a limit—because its continuation will not only devastate Palestinians, but reverberate far beyond, eroding the most basic protections of human life itself.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author, and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His new book, Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation and War in Palestine was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include “Our Vision for Liberation,” “My Father was a Freedom Fighter,” and “The Last Earth.”  Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net   

If Kushner Was Smart, He’d Invest in Rope: Israel’s Lynching Law for Palestinians 

Stanley L. Cohen

 April 10, 2026

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Israel’s Death Penalty Law for Palestinians by Seth Tobocman.

In 1947, while describing the crimes of the judicial system of Nazi Germany, Telford Taylor, lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, opined, “[t]he dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.”

With these words, Taylor laid bare the historical context of where and how a state executed, not on the basis of equal application of law for the most serious of crimes, but adopted an institutional cover for mass slaughter of a concocted enemy, all dressed up in a courtroom pretext.

Long before the Nazi party filled its chambers of death with the ashes of many millions of those of different faith, politics, ethnicity and identity, in 1919, Hitler wrote, “the ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.”

To accomplish this end, on August 20, 1942, Hitler appointed Otto Thierack, a fervent Nazi, as Reich Minister of Justice. With this appointment, Hitler ensured the death of any independent fact and law-based judiciary in Germany. Substituting in its stead one that fled from an objective rules-based order to become a rubber stamp, finding verdicts of guilt and imposing sentences according to Nazi principles and ideology.  In defining the rule of law and the role of jurists within it, Thierack announced an aim not all that different from the very one which echoes throughout the halls of the Israeli Knesset today:

Those in the administration of justice must recognize that it is their job to destroy traitors and saboteurs on the home front… The home front is responsible for maintaining peace, quiet, and order as support for the war front. This heavy responsibility falls especially to German judges. Every punishment is fundamentally more important in war than in peace.

In his treatise The War Path: Hitler’s Germany 1933-1939 David Irving describes with chilling contemporary familiarity, the construct of the Nazi justice system, one in which findings of guilt and imposition of sentence were determined beforehand not by established evidence or controlling law, but based upon what were considered to be “serious political offenses” seen as an affront to fundamental Nazi faith.  Known as the “People’s Courts,” “its judges were more likely to hand down death penalties to members of the most organised opposition groups, those involved in violent resistance against the state and defendants with characteristics repellent to core Nazi beliefs.”

Finding Oswald Rothaug, a Nazi jurist, guilty of crimes against humanity among his many international law violations, the Tribunal cited a case where he imposed the death penalty on a member of a “deviant race” who was accused of “racial defilement”.  In another similar case of persecution, Rothaug sentenced a slave laborer to death because “the inferiority of the defendant is clear as he is a part of Polish sub-humanity.”

Writing on the “Jewish Question” long before he became grand executioner of many tens of millions of “deviant” races, Hitler preached:

For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to–one to be solved by small concessions.  For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated.  Don’t be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus.  Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis.  This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.

Tragically, reality dictates a finding that when it comes to attacks on civilians of a different race, religion, culture or identity, Hitler’s deadly vitriol was by no means sui generis. Not even a century later when debating the “Palestinian question,” the words and goals of most Israeli lawmakers are very much a mirror image of those of their counterparts back in the day when they said heil Hitler to the grandparents of the very people who sit in the Knesset today or who carry out their hateful message while attired in black robes or military dress.  Against the desperate crafted shout of antisemite, evidence shows that more than a decade ago, Israeli leaders … both political and religious … provided contemporary meaning to Mein Kampf’s deadly vision and voice. As noted by the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Israeli politicians and rabbis alike have spilt venomous verse thought by many, but spoken by few in public:

+ “[A] Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he’s gay.”[1]

+ “Gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring.”[2]

+ “[Most of the] Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man.”[3]

+ “Goyim [non- Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel… Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat… With gentiles, it will be like any person: They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant. That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.”[4]

+ “You can’t teach a monkey to speak and you can’t teach an Arab to be democratic. You’re dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers. Muhammad, their prophet, was a robber and a killer and a liar. The Arab destroys everything he touches.”[5]

+ “[Non-Jews are] murderers, thieves and senseless… Today they say there are eight billion people in the world. And what are they all? Murderers, thieves and senseless. Did God create the world for these murderers? The world was created for the righteous people who study Torah. That is the purpose of creation … The nations of the world have no redeeming qualities.”[6]

+ “Arab culture is very cruel… Arabs use different codes and violent norms that amount to an ideology.”[7]

+ “Racism originated in the Torah… The land of Israel is designated for the people of Israel.”[8]

+ “Hurting small [non-Jewish] children makes sense if it’s clear that they’ll grow up to harm us, and in such a situation – the injury will be directed at them of all people.”[9]

+ “If we go on like we have until now, we will lose the Galilee. Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don’t think that it is appropriate for [Jews and Arabs] to live together.”[10]

The echo of national socialism surely smiles with perverse pride in seeing what it has passed on to the children and grandchildren of its own victims.  Today, an honest look at the “nation state” of Israel, with its poisonous preaching and incessant deadly deeds, proves the venom of Hitler has so seeped its way into the very fabric of Israeli society, as to defy any hint of collective decency or the reality of justice. Given the voice of its leadership and the damning shared silence of its masses, Israel will only grow more toxic in the years ahead, absent a structural crash and a complete rewrite of its existence:

+ “[B]eat them up not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until its unbearable.”[11]

+ “[W]e must defend ourselves against the wild beasts”[12]

+ “Palestinians are beasts they are not human.”[13]

+ “Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done- we need to pick up an axe and cut off his head.”[14]

+ “I am happy to be a fascist”[15]

+ “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise more little snakes will be raised there.”[16]

+ “[T]he Palestinian like threat harbors cancer like attributes that have to be severed. There are all kinds of solutions to cancer. Some say it is necessary to amputate organs but at the moments I am applying chemotherapy.”[17]

+ “[S]end Gaza back to the Middle Ages”[18]

+ “We have crushed them. There are tens of thousands of dead … ‘The dogs and the cats ate them because no one collected them.”[19]

Like its convicted ancestor of the Third Reich, the Israeli justice system of today is by intent and process designed to protect, indeed further, the supremacy of the Jewish state and its Jewish citizenry. That Israel exalts a debauched home-grown screed of Judaism to the exclusion of all other faiths is no myth. To be sure, the messianic cloth of Israeli Judaism provides an additional demonic cover to the usual meaning of theocracy.

That there exist dozens of laws designed to protect and to benefit Israeli Jews to the exclusion of all other non-Jewish citizens is beyond debate; indeed it’s very much settled by the literal verse of its numerous supremacist statutes and regulations. To find tens of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners disappeared through a military “justice” system that detains them indefinitely … with children, the elderly and those in between sitting uncharged, unprosecuted, unconvicted, unsentenced, and battered and bruised, has long been the norm blinked by the Israeli civil society and its courts. Yet, with the Knesset’s most recent execution order, it cannot be denied that Israeli justice, when viewed against that of the Nazis, is not just a difference without distinction, but dispositive evidence that in Israel, once again, the dagger of the assassin is concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.

As almost another national holiday in the making, on the day the Israeli murder bill became law, many members showed up to vote wearing gold nooses to the Knesset session.  Following its passage, as he popped open a bottle of champagne, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir summed up the sentiment of the state’s fascistic political and religious leadership … “[s]oon we will count them one by one … from today, every terrorist will know, and the whole world will know, that whoever takes a life, the state of Israel will take their life.” That is, of course, unless they are Israeli Jews. On its face the plain wording of the statute and its intended reach necessarily excludes all Israeli Jews from the exposure to its penalty.

In the relevant part, the purpose of the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law, 5786–2026, “is to establish a death sentence for terrorists who have carried out murderous terrorist attacks, for the sake of the struggle against terrorism — inter alia, for the protection of the State of Israel, its citizens, and its residents.” Applicable almost exclusively to the Occupied West Bank (referred to in the law as “Judea and Samaria”) and its Palestinian population, the Act continues the double standard that sends Palestinians charged or even suspected of violation of Israeli laws in the West Bank to military tribunals while Israeli Jews accused of the identical conduct in the same venue find their way to civilian courts, with civilian judges and civilian justice.

By its requisite intent clause, Law 5786–2026 is limited to those who kill with the specific aim of negating the existence of the state of Israel. Thus, those Israeli settlers guilty of the recent murder of 19-year-old Palestinian American Nasrallah Abu Siyam in the occupied West Bank, if ever charged, are beyond the reach of the law. The same amnesty applies to the armed Jewish settlers who, earlier this year, murdered several other Palestinians during a raid on their village of Abu Falah in the occupied territory.  Core to their ethnic cleansing agenda, settler murders of Palestinians in their local West Bank communities date back many decades.

For example, more than 40 years ago, a mob of settlers murdered an 11-year-old Palestinian girl from Nablus. As justification, the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community at the time apparently cited a Talmudic text justifying the murder of a child who “will grow up to become your enemy.” Under 5786–2026, those rampaging assassins could not be held accountable.

The same immunity from the reach of the law would have applied to the massacre carried out by Israeli-American physician Baruch Goldstein in 1994. Attired in an Israeli military uniform, Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians during the Jewish festival of Purim in the Cave of the Patriarchs in occupied Hebron. Anything but a challenge to the existence of Israel, before his rampage, Goldstein, quoting from Ecclesiastes, reportedly said “There is a time to kill and a time to heal”. Following the massacre, his supporters described Goldstein as a “saint” and his blood bath as an act of “martyrdom” or a “sanctification of God’s name.”

So, too, the new death penalty could not have been applied to those settlers who burned to death a toddler in his family home in the Nablus village of Duma in 2015. Nor would it today have application to Israeli medic Elor Azaria, who, some six years ago, executed twenty-one-year-old Abdul Fatah al-Sharif while he lay injured and motionless on the ground after stabbing, but not seriously injuring, an Israeli soldier in occupied Hebron. Approaching his semi-conscious victim, Azaria cocked his rifle and executed him with a single shot to his head. For his murder, Azaria served some nine months in prison.

These are but a few of the endless examples of Palestinians executed by settlers/soldiers in the occupied West Bank over the last 15 years alone for little more than their mere presence, or words.  Numbering more than 1000 killed in the last several years alone, under the legislative intent of the law, NONE of these assassins (if ever charged) could face execution for their butchery.

Although lacking a dispositive definition under international law, there is a legal consensus that terrorism is criminal violence intended to intimidate a population (or a government) with the specific intention to advance a political, religious, or ideological cause. Although tailor-made to describe generations of West Bank settler terrorists, their statutory exemption from Israel’s latest assault on equal accountability is as palpable as are the massive number of Israeli Jews who find sheer pleasure in the execution of Palestinians in furtherance of their own political, religious, or ideological invective.

In the relevant part, Israel’s definition under its original Counterterrorism Law of 2016 defines a terrorist act as an act that constitutes an offense, or a threat to carry out such an act, which meets the following standards:

It was carried out with a political, religious, nationalistic or ideological motive… It was carried out with the intention of provoking fear or panic among the public or with the intention of compelling a government or other governmental authority, including a government or other governmental authority of a foreign country, or a public international organization, to do or to abstain from doing any act … and the act carried out or threatened to be carried out, involved one of the following, or posed an actual risk of … Serious harm to a person’s body or freedom; Serious harm to public health or safety; [or] Serious harm to property, when in the circumstances in which it was caused, there was an actual possibility that it would cause the serious harm … and that was carried out with the intention of causing such harm.

Tailor-made for charging the Israeli state as a whole with acts of terrorism in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, a plain read of this decade-old law with no statutory limit, shows that while thousands of Jewish settlers have been a veritable primer on terrorism, it’s been applied almost exclusively against Palestinians. Against this de facto selective distortion, stands the de jure reality that the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law, 5786–2026 is, on its face, stripped of all pretense. By design, it is intended to find application solely against Palestinians.

That there is a double standard in the application of Israeli law is neither new nor isolated to so-called acts of terrorism. At its core, there is a deliberate double standard of justice, in all things at all times, with Israelis obtaining privileged status in civilian courts decorated with black robes and a gavel and Palestinians guilty, or liable as charged, in all things at all times, in military courts decorated with nothing but battle dress and guns.

As B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, recently wrote of the military court system:

Israeli military courts have been trying Palestinians in the Territories since the occupation began. While the courts offer an illusion of proper judicial conduct, they mask one of the most injurious apparatuses of the occupation. In these courts, the judges and prosecutors are always Israeli soldiers in uniform. The Palestinians are always either suspects or defendants, and are almost always convicted for violating orders issued by the occupation regime. As such, these courts simply cannot be an impartial, neutral arbitrator. They are firmly entrenched on the Israeli side of the power imbalance, and serve as one of the central systems maintaining its control over the Palestinian people.

Several years earlier, the Office of the High Commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights Office indicted the West Bank military justice system noting that “[s]ince the beginning of the occupation, the Israeli military has either taken part in or failed to protect Palestinians from violent settler attacks in the occupied West Bank, including, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement, property damage, destruction and unlawful appropriation, discrimination, harassment, and threats.” Continuing on, it stated “[i]n the occupied West Bank, the functions of police, investigator, prosecutor, and judge are vested in the same hierarchical institution – the Israeli military” that ultimately sits as judge and jury over Palestinians suspects. This translates into a situation where military judges in military courts consistently provide legal and judicial cover for acts of torture, cruel and degrading treatment against Palestinian detainees carried out by their colleagues in the armed forces and intelligence agencies. It also makes legal defence impossible.”

Putting aside the uniform, bias and cover, from a practical standpoint, the military court system that has controlled “justice” in the occupied territories since 1967 and which will be tasked with likely all death penalty prosecutions, presents a procedural gamut far less protective of the rights of the accused than in civil courts… those set aside solely for cases involving Israeli citizens. Thus, because in civil courts there are higher due process standards arising from “basic laws” and criminal procedures, an accused is provided a stronger guarantee of rights compared to the rules handed down, at times, on a case-by-case basis by military orders. In civil court proceedings, those accused of crimes must be quickly charged and have largely unimpeded access to lawyers and family members. In contrast, those Palestinians swept up by the Military process can be held without charge for longer periods (up to 90 days) and typically face long periods of restricted access to legal counsel.

Civil proceedings are held in Hebrew and, at times Arabic, but, in any event, have available translation protocols. Military court proceedings are held entirely in Hebrew, often without translation support, with prosecutions driven by coerced confessions lacking legal counsel, with signed documents written exclusively in Hebrew, which most defendants do not understand.  Under Israeli civil law, the age of majority is 18, while in the military system, 16-year-old Palestinians are treated as adults. In addition, civil law requires specially trained police for juvenile interrogations; no such requirement exists in military prosecutions.

Perhaps most telling of all is that, unlike the civil court system, almost all Palestinians accused of even the most minor breach of law, although “presumed innocent,” are routinely remanded by military judges to custody until the proceedings are concluded. These individuals are not serving a prison sentence, have not even been sentenced, and should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yet, other than in cases involving traffic violations, this practice is the rule rather than the exception in the military court system. By its very nature, this coercive linchpin of the military court system induces guilty pleas from even the innocent for no reason other than to gain their freedom.

Summing up the worth and rights of Palestinian children, Defense of Children International Palestine notes: “Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that automatically and systematically prosecutes children in military courts that lack fundamental fair trial rights and protections. Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year.”

In what is very much the mirror image of The Terrorism Act (No. 83 of 1967), a South African statute that allowed for indefinite, no-trial detention based on a very broad definition of terrorism, it is estimated that as many of 800,000 Palestinians have been detained under military orders, including some 13,000 children, without formal charges or trial. Under Israeli “security” provisions, a person, including a child, can be held without formal accusation on the grounds that they plan to break the law in the future. Like the apartheid system of South Africa, because this shackle is crafted as preventive, it has no time limits.

Do not misconstrue any preference for the due process “protections” of the Israeli civil court system over the physical and emotional torture process of the state’s military courts. After all, history is littered with the institutional failures of Israeli civil courts. These courts serve not by virtue of any constitutional edict or independence, for in Israel, there is no such document. Rather, they sit and perform by the whims of the Knesset, which can and does, with regularity, pass laws that convert these jurists into mere messengers of political winds.

Thus, the “necessity defense,” more aptly known as the “ticking time bomb exception,” announced in the case of Abu Ghosh v. Attorney-General, speaks volumes about the blind eye of the Israeli judiciary. In Abu Ghosh, the Israeli High Court approved the use of “exceptional interrogation methods” by state security upon suspicious Palestinians, which not only imposed a high evidentiary burden on those who sought judicial relief for torture, but required a light burden of proof on the state when claiming necessity. As defined by international law, this judicial test violated its prohibition against torture. So, too, once again in violation of settled international law, the Israeli civil courts have endorsed the use of collective punishment … long defined as a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention. In case after case, the High Court has upheld or walked away from matters where the military seeks vengeance from families uninvolved in the acts of the few. As noted by the United Nations Special Rapporteur:

Since 1967, Israel has destroyed more than 2,000 Palestinian homes, designed to punish Palestinian families for acts some of their members may have committed, but they themselves did not,” he said. “This practice is in clear violation of Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The list is endless. Whether it’s forcing Palestinians to pay the cost of the destruction of their own homes and businesses; ignoring the 2004 ICJ finding that the walls/barriers in the Occupied Palestinian Territory violate international law; laughing at Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits occupying powers from transferring its population into occupied territory; and a clear finding that the most recent onslaught in Gaza constitutes genocide, Israel and its civilian court system have been wittingly complicit in a steady stream of violations of international law not seen since the days of the Third Reich.  And now, with another deadly sweeping mock at international law, Israel says we will execute Palestinians and Palestinians alone.

On its face, with appalling pride, the Knesset has now set the stage for the execution by noose of thousands of Palestinians who have never had a day in court, let alone one overseen by independent jurists who ruled not by a military faith and race-based presumption of guilt, but by due process. Like its predecessor, the ticking time bomb exemption, the murder Palestinian law provides absolute discretion to soldiers dressed up with a gavel not only to say guilty as charged, but to impose a sentence of death to be carried out within 90 days of conviction.  This military procedure is akin to the administrative process employed by the Nazis in their People’s Court, which typically had jurisdiction over political offenses, including black marketeering, work slowdowns and “defeatism.” On one such occasion Judge Roland Freisler, who had sentenced more than 5000 people to death, went so far as to send the family of Joseph Muller, a Catholic priest, a bill for his execution by guillotine.

The recently enacted murder of Palestinians is illegal under international law.  To be sure that this law oozes with targeted execution of Palestinians, cannot be debated. With its specific intent, it applies solely to those who cause the death of another “with the aim of negating the existence of the State of Israel.” As noted by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,

The selective application of capital punishment on ethnic or national grounds, or because of one’s political views, constitutes a particularly stark form of discriminatory harm … Any system that permits differential treatment in their justice system or by the imposition of the death penalty undermines the most basic guarantees of equality before the law.

In other respects, the legislation offends settled international law through its palpable attack on essential procedural and substantive safeguards such as notice and specificity as to key elements of an offense, or what can constitute witting complicity in it. Thus, while the law places within its deadly reach co-conspirators who “assist” in lethal attacks, it fails to define with requisite specificity just what to assist means. Is mere proscribed speech, or writing in support of resistance in general a sufficient overt act under the law? Does providing a car, or a weapon or loaning some money to one involved in a lethal act constitute a sufficient overt act in furtherance of the crime to expose a donor to the stretch of the hangman’s noose?  Not at all an abstract debate, Israel is, after all, a land where collective punishment of those uninvolved in a crime is very much the norm and not the exception.

Going further, upon conviction, a resident of the West Bank “who is not an Israeli citizen or Israeli resident … his [default] sentence shall be death, and this penalty only.” By design, the law not only removes any and all settler assassins from its substantive reach, but illegally strips the presiding military panel of sentencing discretion other than in undefined “exceptional circumstances” and where limits are placed on evidence of mitigation to meet that vague burden.

And what of the military court itself? Where unanimity of finding was once required of three jurist panels often passing verdict and sentence in far less serious cases involving but a “nominal” penalty, here, where the noose is the mandated punishment, a mere majority consensus of the judges is required. Continuing on, even in the absence of a request from prosecutors (themselves dressed in military uniform), historically, this is a court system with a conviction rate of almost 100%, built largely of coerced admissions/confessions that were presented for signature to long-detained Palestinians entirely in Hebrew. Isolated, intimidated, sleepless, hungry and subjected to physical and mental abuse with regularity, these often child prisoners are told to sign here, and do so without the presence and advice of counsel.

In what is very much a race to the finality of the hangman’s noose, 5786–2026 impermissibly limits rights of appeal, denies the possibility of pardon and no matter how uncertain the evidence, or arbitrary the penalty, sets an execution mandate of no more than 90 days in violation of the 6-month requirement of Article 75 of the Fourth Geneva Convention with its intent to ensure a reasonable opportunity to pursue appeals.

Most alarming, while it appears, albeit in ambiguous wording, that the law prohibits a revisit to cases of those already convicted and sentenced for a lethal offense, given the supremacist drive of the Knesset, and the obedient silence of the Israeli High Court, the prospect for an amendment permitting post hoc execution looms large.  Moreover, in the absence of any controlling wording to the contrary, there stands the real possibility of a retroactive application of the law to thousands of detained Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds of children awaiting prosecution for allegations that occurred well before its passage. Known as a nunc pro tunc application of a new rule or law, and rejected by legal systems across the globe, historically, Israel has exhibited no hesitancy whatsoever in ignoring settled international norms or law. A more glaring example of a real-world, real-time, real-application by the Knesset of the talisman of blood libel would be hard to find.

Make no mistake about it. The Death Penalty for Terrorists Law is but another accelerated step in the Israeli drive to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine, through any available means.  Unwilling to settle for its most recent criminal mass slaughter in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians were murdered in plain view in Gaza and the West Bank, it now seeks to recast its Reich-like assassin’s face through the pretext of a legislatively-approved military lynching.

In reality, an honest look says all that’s missing from Israeli law 5786–2026 are the prefatory words of an Alabama newspaper editor who, in harkening back to the days of the Ku Klux Klan, when referring to his goal of cleaning out Washington D.C. wrote… “We’ll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them”.

Notes

[1] Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan, Deputy Minister for Religious Affairs in the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, member of the Jewish Home party (December 2013).

[2] Rabbi Dov Lior, Chief rabbi of settlements in Hebron and Kiryat Arba, head of the Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank], and leading figure in the religious Zionist movement (January 2011).

[3] Eli Yishai, Then-Minister of the Interior in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition government (June 2012).

[4] Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the late influential spiritual leader of the Shas party, which was a part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government from 2009-2012 (September 2010).

[5] Moshe Feiglin, former Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party (2004).

[6] Rabbi Aharon Yehuda Leib Shteinman, Spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party, which was then part of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition government (May 2012).

[7] Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Chief rabbi of the city of Safed (2011).

[8] Rabbi Yosef Scheinen, Head of the Ashdod Yeshiva (religious school) (2010).

[9] The King’s Torah, written by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, from the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the settlement of Yitzhar (2010).

[10] Ariel Atlas, Then- Minister of Housing in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition government (July 2009).

[11] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

[12] Id.

[13] Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister.

[14] Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

[15] Miri Regev, Israeli Minister of Culture.

[16] Ayelet Shaked, Israeli Minister of Justice.

[17] Moshe Yaalon, Former Israeli defense Minister.

[18] Eli Yishai, Former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister.

[19] Avraham Zarbiv, Rabbinical Judge who served as a bulldozer driver in Gaza.

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.