Two years, thirty laws: Engineering discrimination through Israeli legislation

Over the past more than two years, public life in the occupied territories has fallen under a heavy haze; the residents of the occupied territories have been immersed in an endless flood of crises, conflicts, and internal and external anxieties; at the same time, Zionist lawmakers are rapidly increasing the number of laws that guarantee and facilitate apartheid.

A new and alarming report by the legal center Adalah, based in Haifa in the occupied territories, shows that members of the Knesset of the Zionist regime have taken advantage of the chaos of the past two years to push forward more than 30 new laws that entrench Zionist apartheid; these 30 new laws have been added to a list of more than 100 Zionist laws that create discrimination against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

One of the main findings of the report is the widespread assault on freedom of expression, thought, and protest across a wide range of arenas; this includes laws that ban the publication of content about the Al-Aqsa Flood operation and restrict the broadcasting of critical media.

Another law allows the Ministry of Education to dismiss educational staff under the pretext of having approaches supportive of the Palestinian resistance and to cut the budgets of educational institutions under the same pretext; a third law, alongside an official campaign to expel international solidarity activists, bans the entry of foreign nationals if they have made statements critical of the Zionist regime or have referred to international courts to take action against this regime and its officials.

The Adalah report provides a correct and good interpretation of the path toward which the Zionist regime is moving.

The Knesset on the path to strengthening apartheid

These hateful laws did not provoke any protest in the occupied territories; in fact, some of these laws were passed with the support of opposition Zionist parties in the Knesset.

From the very first days of the war, the Zionist regime severely violated the basic rights of freedom of opinion and protest; Yaakov Shabtai, the then police commissioner of the Zionist regime, on October 17 2023, announced a zero-tolerance policy toward what he called incitement and protest, as a result of which, for months, every attempt to demonstrate against the Gaza war was met with an iron fist by the army of the Zionist regime.

However, the wave of new strict laws goes even further; in addition to creating legal infrastructures for the systematic harassment of Palestinians and beyond Zionist opponents, this wave includes measures that explicitly target Palestinian citizens, such as the so-called law on the “expulsion of terrorists’ families.”

According to this law, the definition of “terrorist”—a label that is used almost exclusively for Palestinians living in the occupied territories—has been expanded to include not only people who have been convicted of terrorism in a criminal proceeding, but also those who have been detained on suspicion of committing such crimes, including those under administrative detention; in other words, these are individuals who have not been charged at all, let alone convicted.

At the same time, the Knesset tightened the strict ban on “family unification” in order to prevent the marriage of Palestinian citizens from the West Bank and Gaza, and expanded the punishments against Palestinians residing in the occupied territories.

In reality, Zionist lawmakers exploited the genocide in Gaza to intensify their long-standing demographic war against Palestinians, including those living within the 1948 borders.

A separate chapter of the Adalah report documents the severe violation of the rights of Palestinian prisoners and detainees since October 2023, who, according to testimonies and other reports, have been held in torture camps.

This same wave of legislation has also severely violated children’s rights and has eliminated “long-standing legal rights,” including the distinction between children and adults.

In addition, the report of the Adalah Center details laws that deliberately harm Palestinian citizens and Palestinian refugees in the occupied lands through banning relief organizations such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

In the open rush of the leaders of the Zionist regime toward fascism, the heaviest cost will be paid by the most vulnerable people.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of residents of the occupied territories took to the streets to protest what the cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of the Zionist regime, called judicial changes; nevertheless, this protest movement was mostly focused on procedural mechanisms and paid little attention to violations of freedom of expression and protest, equality before the law, and protection against institutionalized discrimination.

These trends did not begin over the past two years, but it is no coincidence that alongside the genocide of the Zionist regime in Gaza, they have accelerated at a terrifying pace; the destruction in the Gaza Strip and the fascist legislation advancing through the Knesset act as two coordinated forces seeking to eliminate the last remaining limits on the power of the cabinet of the Zionist regime.

Just as the protest movement against the Zionist regime cannot ignore the genocide in Gaza and the issue of apartheid against Palestinians, the global anti-genocide movement also cannot turn a blind eye to the legislation being promoted by the most extreme Knesset in the fabricated history of the Zionist regime.

This is no longer merely an internal matter of the occupied territories, but part of a broader assault on the very existence of the Palestinian people