When a state enshrines the killing of a population into law and the world looks away, it is not only that population whose future has been decided.
There’s a word for what happens when the exceptional becomes the ordinary. We call it normalisation. And normalisation doesn’t respect borders — what becomes acceptable in one place does not stay there. We have seen it before: in colonial penal codes that travelled intact from one territory to the next, in the counterterrorism architectures drafted after 2001 that gave governments across the world new instruments for the detention, surveillance, and elimination of those they designated as threats. The mechanisms change. The logic propagates.
This week, Israel passed legislation enabling its courts to impose death sentences on Palestinians convicted of “fatal attacks” — a formulation specific enough to sound legal, vague enough to extend wherever a prosecutor points.
For years, the killing of Palestinians has proceeded through military orders, administrative detention, lethal raids, and the systematic deprivation of conditions necessary for life. What changes now is that the logic of elimination is being written into the legal framework itself. The architecture of annihilation is being formalised.
That distinction matters. Practices that exist in the gap between law and policy are always contestable, reversible in principle, and embarrassing to defend in international forums. Once legislated, they become precedent — available to cite, to emulate, and to adapt. They enter the grammar of what states may do.
THE EROSION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
International humanitarian law was never a ceiling. It was, at its most ambitious, a floor – a minimum set of obligations states agreed not to fall below, hard-won across a century of catastrophic evidence about what happens when they do. That floor is not cracking. It’s being deliberately dismantled, piece by piece, in full view of the institutions built to defend it.
What makes the current moment distinct is not simply the scale of violations but the quality of the justifications offered for them. The argument being advanced — implicitly by Israel’s government and explicitly by the US, its most powerful patron — is not that the laws are being followed but that the laws no longer apply, or never applied in circumstances like these, or must yield to considerations of security and sovereignty. This isn’t a departure from the rules-based order. It’s a competing theory of what that order permits. And that theory, once legitimised, becomes available to every state that has a population it wishes to designate as an existential threat.
The implications are not hypothetical. They are already being drawn. Security councils in multiple regions are watching what’s possible when a state faces no meaningful accountability from its principal allies. Governments that have been pressured over detention conditions, over targeted killings, and over the treatment of minorities within their borders are now calibrating what they can justify by pointing to what has been permitted elsewhere without consequence. Impunity is not merely an absence of punishment. It’s a signal. It tells the world what the powerful will tolerate — and therefore what states may attempt.
THE DEHUMANISATION INFRASTRUCTURE
What sustains this process is not violence alone. Violence requires a prior operation — the removal of the target population from the category of those whose suffering registers as morally significant. This is what B’Tselem — Israel’s leading human rights organisation — documents in its 2025 report. Our Genocide: a long-term infrastructure of language, law, and media designed to make the killing of Palestinians legible to Israeli society not as an atrocity but as security. You cannot pass a death-penalty law targeting one population without having first persuaded a sufficient part of your own society that this population’s lives are worth less than others. That persuasion does not happen spontaneously. It is manufactured.
We should be clear about what this infrastructure is and what it does, because it’s not unique to Israel. The playbook – identify a population, frame them as an existential threat, and gradually withdraw their legal personhood while expanding the legal authorities of the state – has been run before in other forms. It is running now in other contexts, with different populations and different vocabularies. Migrant communities. Religious minorities. Indigenous peoples who insist on sovereignty over land that resource economies want. The methods may differ, but the logic is the same: that the security of the group requires the subordination, confinement, and, when necessary, the elimination of another.
What is being destroyed in Gaza and the West Bank is not only a people. It is the principle that some things may not be done to human beings regardless of what they are accused of, regardless of what they represent, regardless of what a state decides to call them. When that principle erodes in one place, the erosion does not stop at a border.
THE DEMOCRATIC QUESTION
Israel continues to present itself as a democracy. The claim is important to take seriously, not because it is persuasive, but because its acceptance by Western governments has been the mechanism through which accountability has been deferred. The argument runs: democracies make hard choices; democracies have security needs; and democracies should not be held to standards that would compromise their existence. This argument has served, for decades, as a kind of diplomatic immunisation — a way of categorising what Israel does as regrettable, perhaps, but compatible with democratic norms.
It is no longer defensible. A state that subjects one population under its control to systematic killing, mass incarceration without trial, deliberate starvation, and now the institutionalised threat of execution, while exempting the perpetrators of violence against that population from legal accountability, is not a democracy with difficult choices. It is a system of ethnocratic control that uses democratic procedures selectively, for some, against others. The question this raises for the states that have sustained it with arms, vetoes, and silence is not whether they agree with Israeli policy. The question is what their continued support signifies about the terms of their own democratic commitments.
That question is arriving in domestic politics. It is arriving in the United States most visibly, but it is arriving elsewhere too — in the moral grammar of what liberal states may do to those within their borders whom they designate as threats; in the increasing comfort with executive power unrestrained by judicial oversight; and in the rehabilitation of ethnonationalism as a respectable political position. These are not separate phenomena. They share a logic. What is tolerated in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. It enters the repertoire of the possible.
WHAT RECOGNITION REQUIRES
The hardest thing to say clearly is sometimes the most obvious thing. This is not a conflict with two sides making difficult choices in a complex situation. This is a state systematically destroying a people – through direct killing, through the destruction of conditions for life, and now through the legal architecture of execution – while a significant portion of the international community either provides material support or performs the language of concern while doing nothing that might alter the trajectory.
The debate is not about facts. The organisations documenting what is happening — Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the UN Special Procedures, the International Court of Justice — are not working from incomplete information. The evidence is overwhelming, and it points in one direction. The debate is about recognition: about whether the political and institutional structures of the international order have the capacity to see what they are witnessing and call it by its correct name.
They have not, so far. And the cost of that failure is not only borne by Palestinians, though they bear it most immediately and most terribly. The cost is borne by every population, everywhere, for whom international law represented some limit on what could be done to them. Those limits are being removed. Not in theory. In practice. In full view. With precedent being set, week by week, for what is permitted when power is absolute and accountability is absent.
History has a way of marking the moments when the architecture of protection was dismantled and the people who had the capacity to act chose not to. We are living in one of those moments. What we choose to recognise — and what we choose to name — is not only a matter of moral honesty. It’s a decision about what kind of world the next generation inherits.