00:02And we're pleased to welcome Gershon Baskin, Middle East Director of the International Communities Organization.
00:08Thank you for speaking with us here on France 24.
00:13Your reaction to the institution of the death penalty in Israel, a first since, what, 1954 for murders, other than,
00:24of course, that of there was the execution of the Nazi Adolf Heichmann in 1962.
00:32But other than that, there has been no capital punishment in Israel and this death penalty only for Palestinians who
00:42commit terror attacks.
00:44Right. This is a deep stain on the law books of the state of Israel.
00:48And we are expecting that the High Court of Israel, the Supreme Court of Israel, will rule that the law
00:55is unconstitutional,
00:57primarily because the way that it was written in past discriminates on the basis of nationality.
01:02Between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
01:05And this is not going to be held as legal by the High Court.
01:09Many people who are critics of the law are not actually attacking the immorality of the law,
01:14but are talking about the fact that this is a tick-tock law proposed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, our so
01:20-called Minister of National Security.
01:23Ben-Gvir, this was a campaign pledge of his that he would pass the death penalty law.
01:27And he will be using this in his campaign propaganda when he goes to the public to be reelected to
01:33the Knesset and to be a minister in the next government of Israel.
01:37Most people believe that the law will never be enacted and it should never be enacted in the state of
01:42Israel.
01:42It passed by quite a wide margin.
01:44What is it, 62 to 48?
01:46There were even, I believe, two Israeli Arab lawmakers who voted for the measure.
01:53Yeah, there are a number of people from the opposition who voted for the measure.
01:57They're not part of a leftist opposition to the right-wing Israeli government.
02:01They are part of the opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu personally.
02:04They're the anti-Netanyahu camp, but they are definitely on the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum.
02:10And they voted with the law.
02:11There is a guaranteed guarantee for this government to pass whatever laws it wants to in the Knesset.
02:18They have a majority in the parliament and they can pass whatever they did.
02:21This law has been up for many, many, many years and never passed because no one ever considered that the
02:28state of Israel should enact a law with a death penalty.
02:31And as I said, we believe that the law will be overturned.
02:34And if it's not, it will be another stain on the books of Israel, which is marching steadily into its
02:41definition of being an apartheid state.
02:44This was a judgment to the International Court of Justice.
02:47And it's going to be very difficult to argue that Israel has not become an apartheid type state.
02:53What does it mean for Arab Israelis?
02:56One in five Israeli citizens are not Jews.
03:01Right. Well, it would only, if the law sticks, it would only be relevant to those people who commit acts
03:08of terrorism and kill Israelis.
03:11The Israeli-Palestinian citizens of Israel, very, very few of them are engaged in acts of terrorism.
03:18It's an overwhelmingly law-abiding part of the Israeli public.
03:23And it would be mostly enacted against Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the
03:29Gaza Strip.
03:30Very few Israeli-Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel would be falling under this law because they simply don't commit acts
03:38of murder as acts of terrorism against the state of Israel.
03:43What does it say also about the mood, Gershon Baskin?
03:46There's an element, we heard those clips of people on the street before we spoke with you.
03:52There's still people who feel, after October 7th, there's, is it, how much of, is there still a sense of,
04:00well, the need for vengeance?
04:03Well, the two-year war in Gaza was a war of revenge.
04:06It was not a strategic battle against Hamas.
04:08Hamas is still in power in the part of Gaza that it controls.
04:12And we're now four or five months after the war officially ended, and yet very little been done to actually
04:18impose the solution that Hamas itself agreed to,
04:22which is disarming and turning over government to the National Administrative Council for Gaza,
04:28which has been formulated through President Trump's Board of Peace.
04:31So the mood in Israel is still very much in a revenge mode.
04:35We're fighting this war now in Iran and with Lebanon, with Hezbollah, and much of the Israeli public is enraged
04:41by the missile attacks that we're facing.
04:44Very few Israelis actually see the damage that Israel is bringing down both on Iran and on Lebanon to citizens
04:50there who might not be in support of either Hezbollah or the Iranian government.
04:54But the mood in Israel is very, very belligerent, and perhaps that's very common in a wartime atmosphere.
05:03I hope that this won't last, and we're seeing a decline in support amongst the Israeli public for the war
05:10in Iran and for the war in Hezbollah,
05:11certainly following the killing of four Israeli soldiers today, and we'll see more of these soldiers, God forbid, coming home
05:19also wounded and killed in Lebanon.
05:23So I think that public opinion will change.
05:26You're confident that this is just a pendulum swing and that it will revert back.
05:31Why are you so confident?
05:33I'm hopeful that there will be a pendulum swing.
05:38I'm not convinced that it is that the mood in Israel is still very right-wing and very religious and
05:43very conservative and very anti-Arab, anti-Muslim.
05:47And this is part of the environment that we're living in in Israel already for years,
05:51and this has been a political atmosphere fostered by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing religious,
05:58ultra-conservative government here in Israel.
06:00It's not easy to make a change of that, but I hope that when we do go to elections,
06:05which will probably be in six or seven months from now, that the Israeli public remembers October 7th
06:10and who was the leader of the country at the time when Israel failed to defend its own borders
06:15and allowed this horrendous attack by Hamas take place.
06:19And the two-year war in Gaza that did not produce the strategic results that we want,
06:24the strategic results have to be a change of discourse and an engagement
06:28in a peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
06:31That's what we need to see happen in this country.
06:34Was it October 7th where something changed, or was it something earlier?
06:41When did something change so that there is that swing?
06:44After all, that government that you talk about was elected before October 7th,
06:49but when was the moment where Israel changed?
06:52Right. It's important to remember that the government that we have in Israel today
06:55was elected almost by default because the left wing was so divided and split
07:00and two parties didn't cross the threshold, which enabled Netanyahu to form this horrible government
07:04that we have.
07:05October 7th was a changing point in Israeli history.
07:09It was the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust,
07:12and it was something that's indelibly printed on the mindset of the Israeli public today.
07:19Even Israelis who were advocates of peace changed their opinions after October 7th
07:23and believed that we can never make peace with our Palestinian neighbors.
07:26But there will be an awakening because there is no military solution to the conflicts
07:32that we're involved in.
07:33There are only political diplomatic solutions.
07:35We have a president of the United States who, for the first time,
07:39actually engaged with the Israeli public in ending the war in Gaza that the Israeli public demanded.
07:46So maybe there can be a change that will come from Washington as well
07:49with regard to the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
07:53When you hear the Israeli defense minister earlier in the day talking about a Gaza-style occupation
07:59of southern Lebanon, is that just bluster?
08:03Or is Israel's mindset now that the answers to everything are military?
08:12Well, that's this government is certainly the answers.
08:14I'm not convinced that the Israeli public fully supports that.
08:17We're a very divided public.
08:19But I don't understand a world where someone believes that erasing entire villages in southern
08:25Lebanon is going to solve anything or that it's just immoral.
08:28It cannot be accepted, not by the Israeli public and not by anyone in our neighborhood here in the Middle
08:33East
08:34or in the Western world.
08:35I think that the passing of the death penalty law and the policies that Israel is engaged in
08:40in the occupied territories with the violence of the settlers going unpunished by the government of Israel
08:45have to lead countries in Europe to also consider whether or not the association agreement
08:49between the state of Israel and the European Union have legality, have a basis of being continued.
08:55This special relationship between Israel and Europe needs to be weighed on the European side
08:59of whether or not Israel has not crossed a line which makes Israel no longer a state
09:04which should have any special favor within the European Union.
09:08One final question.
09:09I'm France 24, so I have to ask it.
09:12What do you make of the French refusing that overfly of U.S. planes carrying military equipment to Israel?
09:21I think it's a hard case to make for France because the United States is calling on France
09:27and the United Kingdom and other countries of Europe to join in a fight to ensure that the Strait of
09:34Hormuz remains open.
09:35And as President Trump said, the United States doesn't get its oil from there, but all of Europe does.
09:41And there might be a reason for Europe to second think about whether or not it's going to join in
09:47some kind of international effort
09:49to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz is open.
09:51Of course, I believe that the best way of doing that is by sitting down and talking and negotiating
09:56and make sure that this war comes to an end, that Iran never has the chance of being a nuclear
10:01state,
10:02and that its missile threat and its support of its radical proxies in the region are not continued.
10:06But this needs to come out of a negotiated agreement that hopefully the Pakistani government is leading today
10:12with the help of others in the region.
10:14Maybe this will be taken seriously, and then we can see a diplomatic end to this war
10:19that will not leave Iran in a position where it's endangering the economy of the world or the security of
10:25the world.
10:26Gershon Baskin, so many thanks for joining us from Jerusalem.
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