Ben Gvir Just Put A Noose Around Israel’s Neck

While Ben Gvir poses with a noose shaped lapel pin, record numbers of prison fatalities on his watch is hitting Israel hard. Right, so Itamar Ben Gvir turning up to the Knesset in a bright yellow noose pin is one of those moments where the performance finally catches up with the policy isn’t it? Because you do not need to be a legal scholar to see what a man is telling you when he walks into a parliamentary committee dressed like the executioner while more than a hundred Palestinian detainees have died on his watch in detention. You do not need insider briefings to understand what it means when he praises soldiers who shoot surrendered men in Jenin and then tries to promote the officer responsible. And you certainly do not need a UN mandate to work out why states are starting to bar him from entering their borders. You just have to look at the noose and look at the bodies and ask why anyone is still pretending the two things are not connected. He might want to put a noose around the neck of Palestinians, but his antics, going consistently without meaningful censure are placing it around the neck of Israel itself instead. Right, so Ben Gvir walking into the Knesset wearing a bright yellow noose pin is not a one-off stunt, it is the straightest expression yet of what he is doing with the carceral system he controls, and of what the Israeli state is now prepared to put in plain sight. He and his Otzma Yehudit colleagues sit on the National Security Committee with little nooses on their lapels while they debate a bill that would formalise the death penalty – but only for Palestinians - on so-called “nationalistic” grounds, and he sits there cheerfully explaining that hanging is one of several options, along with the electric chair and lethal injection.