Legislating apartheid: How Israel entrenched unequal rule during Gaza war
Israeli police arrest a Palestinian woman in Karmiel, northern Israel, 3 July 2024
Orly Noy reports in +972 on 2 December 2025:
For over two years, Israeli public life has been shrouded in a heavy, disorienting fog. There has been an unending churn of crises, conflicts, and anxieties at home and abroad: the shock of the Hamas attack of October 7 and Israel’s genocidal campaign of revenge on Gaza, the fight to bring back the hostages and against the state’s vilification of their families, the reckless confrontations with Iran. Together, these have left Israeli society suspended in a collective stupor, obscuring the depth of the abyss into which we are rapidly descending.
But the same cannot be said of our parliamentarians. As a disturbing new report by the Haifa-based legal center Adalah shows, they have used the chaos of the past two years to advance more than 30 new laws entrenching apartheid and Jewish supremacy — joining Adalah’s existing list of now more than 100 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens.
One of the report’s central findings is a sweeping assault on freedom of expression, thought, and protest across a wide array of arenas. It includes laws prohibiting the publication of content that includes “denial of the events of October 7,” as determined by the Knesset, and restricting broadcasts of critical media outlets that “harm state security.”
Another authorizes the Education Ministry to fire teaching staff and withdraw funding from educational institutions based on views it considers expression of support for, or incitement to, a terrorist act or organization. And alongside a state-led campaign to deport international solidarity activists, a third law bars foreign nationals from entering the country if they have made statements critical of Israel, or have appealed to international courts to take action against the state and its officials.
But perhaps the most dangerous bill is one that targets citizens who merely seek to consume information from sources the state doesn’t like. Just a month after October 7, the Knesset passed a two-year temporary order — renewed last week for another two years — that outlaws the “systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization,” carrying a one-year prison sentence. In other words, the legislature now criminalizes conduct that takes place entirely within a person’s private space.