What’s the difference between Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and the Israeli Zionist gallows? Auschwitz-Birkenau did not come with a special “viewing chamber.”
That is not a metaphor. It is what Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announced on camera on 19th August. He waved his hand and heralded to his Instagram followers the gallows Israel plans to use to execute Palestinian prisoners. Like a serial killer, a diabolical smirk on his face, he gloated as he described his 21st-century damnatio ad bestias.
Israeli culture didn’t need a climate-controlled stage to derive pleasure from watching Palestinian pain. For years, they did it at “Sderot Cinema.” Residents of Jewish-only colonies along the Gaza boundary have hauled lawn chairs and snacks and huddled on the hilltops to watch the bombing of Gaza the way Americans watch Fourth of July fireworks.
They watched the bombs with awe and excitement, cheering the massive explosions that lit up Gaza’s night sky and applauding each plume of smoke rising from smoldering neighborhoods with unadulterated cruelty.
This was not only since 7th October 2023, but back to 2014 where murder and destruction was videoed and normalised as a form of public entertainment. The open-air cinema that once required a folding chair on a hill now gets an enclosed theatre, offering the Israeli audience more comfortable seating to maximize its pleasure. Designed by a minister who celebrated his 50th birthday with a noose decorated cake and a message, “Congratulations minister Ben Gvir, sometimes dreams come true.”
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This is Zionist Schadenfreude: a culture that needs a viewing chamber for an execution because it has been indoctrinated, for years, to see Palestinian death as entertainment. From hilltop watch parties to sea cruises and the gallows room, it is the same impulse, some enacted in the open air, the other behind closed doors.
The execution law passed by the Knesset last March, making death the mandatory sentence for freedom fighters resisting illegal colonisers. The same law does not apply to the Jewish mobs who have murdered twelve Palestinian civilians since the beginning of this year alone, and nine American citizens since 2022. Rarely, if ever, do Jewish killers get indicted for their crimes against Palestinians or Palestinian Americans.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitioned the Supreme Court arguing the Knesset had no authority to legislate for people who are not its citizens. The foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy and the UK warned of the bill’s “de facto discriminatory character.” Eight Muslim-majority governments called it part of a system that “entrench[es] apartheid.”
The gallows are not being built in isolation. Israel holds roughly 9,200 Palestinians in custody, almost 40%, including 191 minors, are administrative detainees, held without charge, and without trial. Doctors kidnapped from the hospital’s operation rooms, students and educators from their universities or elected legislatures from their homes. A six-month extendable military detention, a Palestinian can vanish into the Israeli prison system indefinitely. Civilian hostages held by Israel as bargaining chips for exchanges. A law that applies exclusively to non-Jews in the West Bank and Gaza. While Jewish mobs terrorising West Bank villages are immured from the same military law.
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Since October 2023 at least 98 Palestinian hostages, a little over one percent of all held in the Israeli dungeons have died or killed, most showing signs of torture; freed detainees describe electric shocks, dog attacks, and sexual assault during interrogation. UN expert called Israeli torture as state doctrine.
In fact, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was a carbon copy of Israeli torture chambers. A system that imprisons without charging them or uses extrajudicial executions to murder activists does not need much retooling to start hanging them.
Four UN special rapporteurs, including the expert on extrajudicial executions, declared in April that the execution law “constitutes a discriminatory regime” and manifestly violates Israel’s obligations under international law. The International Court of Justice’s 2024 finding that Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian land breach the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. Writing in Opinio Juris, a professor of criminal law laid out the case that the new Israeli law may meet the Rome Statute’s definition of the crime against humanity of apartheid, by establishing an institutionalized regime of domination by one racial group over another. He noted the precedent is clear in apartheid South Africa where it instituted a compulsory death penalty against the Black majority.
Put the pieces together and the picture is not ambiguous. A state culture with a documented host parties of civilians gathering to cheer bombing of civilians and now with a stage designed for spectators.
A prison system that holds thousands without charge, and is already responsible for dozens of documented deaths in custody, now seeks to codify that impunity into law. A court system that tries one person (non-Jew) under military law and the other under civilian law (Jew) has produced a judicial apartheid.
Eighty years ago, the gas chambers were hidden because even their Nazi designers understood, at some level, that the world would not tolerate watching. Israel’s national security minister is building a killing chamber “with a view,” boasted about on Instagram, next door to a hillside culture that has spent decades in watch parties celebrating war crimes, rehearsing all along for the next damnatio ad bestias, a 21st-century Zionist Schadenfreude.
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