CNN ran an Easter feature on Tom Holland, the British pop historian who wrote Dominion and now tours the American evangelical circuit as their favorite secular validator. The headline promises a “brush with the supernatural.” The article delivers something more instructive: a case study in what happens when a thesis is tailored to its paying audience.

Holland went to Sinjar in 2016, where ISIS had massacred Yazidis by the hundreds. Men executed. Women sold into slavery. The stench of decomposing bodies so overpowering he doubled over on camera. His takeaway: a cross was still standing above the rubble. It moved him. Financially. The dead Yazidis didn’t get a second thought as he walked through them towards his personal savior plans.

I was convinced I was going to devote my life to the Yazidi cause – and I tried. But I don’t devote my life to it. There are whole weeks when I don’t think of them.

Well, the Yazidi aren’t Christian, which is perhaps what prevented him from thinking of them more.

Booze for the Alcoholics

Holland’s thesis in Dominion is that Western values like compassion, equality, and human rights are Christian inventions. Secular people hold Christian beliefs without knowing it. The argument has a problem and a function, and the function explains why nobody talks about the problem.

The problem is that the thesis is false. Buddhist ethics developed sophisticated frameworks for compassion and non-harm five centuries before Christ. Jewish law codified obligations to the poor, the stranger, and the vulnerable long before Paul wrote his first letter. Confucian reciprocity predates Christianity by the same margin. Islamic jurisprudence built an entire legal architecture around human dignity. The Yazidi faith he walked through in Sinjar teaches its followers to pray for other religions before their own. It traces to pre-Zoroastrian traditions over a thousand years before Christ. Holland ignores ALL of it. A historian who omits most of human civilization from his thesis about most of human civilization is not doing history. He is doing something else.

The function is flattery. The Southern Baptist Seminary president calls Holland’s premise “fairly unassailable.” American evangelicals get a credentialed British intellectual telling them their religion invented morality. Holland gets the audience, the debate invitations, the YouTube clips, the Easter profiles. Booze for the alcoholics. Delivered in a posh accent with a PBS shine.

The same CNN writer who profiled Holland for Easter published a piece three months ago that documents Christianity’s central role in the KKK, slavery, and colonial genocide. The Holland thesis requires amnesia from the people telling it.

The Content Creator in the Foxhole

Holland’s own faith statements reveal how thin the performance is. “There are times where I can feel that I believe it. There are times when I don’t feel it at all.” His mother tells CNN “he never quite acknowledges it.” He says belief makes “the universe more interesting.” This is not faith. It is aesthetic consumption.

He cites R.S. Thomas as his spiritual touchstone. Any reader of Thomas knows what that means. Thomas was the poet of God’s absence, unanswered prayer, the empty church. His life’s work was the theology of divine silence. Holland cited him as a branding reference in a CNN puff piece. If Holland understood what Thomas was actually writing about, he would not have brought him up.

Holland himself invokes the foxhole cliché. Diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2021, he prayed at midnight mass on Christmas Eve. The cancer hadn’t spread. His brother connected him with a specialist. He now calls it a possible “Marian miracle” while conceding he can’t “100 percent say it’s a coincidence.” His brother’s phone call saved him. He credited the Virgin Mary.

Serious people have examined what happens to faith in actual foxholes. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein published After Auschwitz in 1966 and founded an entire field of theology on one premise: after the Holocaust, belief in a God who acts in history is intellectually indefensible. Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, wrote The Trial of God with God as the defendant. The people who endured genocide concluded God was absent or dead. Holland walked through a genocide site and saw a camera angle.

The Honest Version

Christianity did reshape Western moral frameworks. That much is defensible, and Holland deserves credit for stating it plainly. Where the argument collapses is in calling it revelation rather than what the historical record shows it to be: power technology.

After 1945, British occupation forces deployed church networks across Germany to deprogram a generation raised on Nazi ideology. Christianity was the available operating system that could overwrite the previous one. The British didn’t evangelize the Hitler Youth because they believed. They did it because it worked. Christianity spread through colonization for the same reason. Empires used it because it was effective, and its effectiveness is what Holland is actually documenting.

An honest version of Holland’s thesis would say: Christianity became the dominant moral framework of the West because it was backed by cruel militant empires of history trying to obliterate other faiths, for profit. That is a serious historical argument. But it would empty his bleachers, so he wraps the same insight in a conversion narrative and sells it as mystery. The stench from Holland is almost too much to bear.

CNN calls this a story about faith. It’s a story about supply and demand. And if Holland actually believes what he now claims to believe, he should worry. He declared himself a Christian, then used the faith to sell snake oil to the faithful. By his own adopted theology, that’s the kind of thing they send you to hell for.

On this past shabbat I sat in the synagogue and listened to the Rabbi on my left, the Rabbi on my right, and the Rabbi in front of me, relate their views of the Passover coming tomorrow. They asked me to flip the pages, to ask questions, and I paused here:

סַנְהֶדְרִין הַהוֹרֶגֶת אֶחָד בְּשָׁבוּעַ נִקְרֵאת חוֹבְלָנִית. רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן עֲזַרְיָה אוֹמֵר, אֶחָד לְשִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה. רַבִּי טַרְפוֹן וְרַבִּי עֲקִיבָא אוֹמְרִים, אִלּוּ הָיִינוּ בְסַנְהֶדְרִין, לֹא נֶהֱרַג אָדָם מֵעוֹלָם. רַבָּן שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן גַּמְלִיאֵל אוֹמֵר, אַף הֵן מַרְבִּין שׁוֹפְכֵי דָמִים בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל.
— Mishnah Makkot (Plagues) 1:10

How can this wisdom be? On this week of all weeks, do we forget?

On March 30, 2026, the Knesset passed a law imposing the death penalty on any person who “intentionally causes the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voted for it in person.

The law was written to kill a specific ethnic group, Palestinians.

Its architects know this. Human Rights Watch noted that within the civil court system, the ideological intent requirement of “negating the existence of the State of Israel” was designed to structurally exclude Jewish defendants. Amichai Cohen of the Israel Democracy Institute confirmed the law…

…will apply in Israeli courts, but only to terrorist activities that are motivated by the wish to undermine the existence of Israel. That means Jews will not be indicted under this law.

But the statute’s language has fatal flaw, because the ethnic targeting was not legally restricted to its targeted ethnicity. It tries to hide its true intent by defining a crime of intent.

Intent.

By this law’s own terms, no living person has done more by intent to negate the existence of the State of Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu himself. What follows is this plain evidentiary case, which everyone already can see, beyond what is known in classified briefs.

And it’s worth noting, before we begin, exactly when and why Israel ended its death penalty after they killed an innocent man.

His name is Meir Tobianski.

Arrested, convicted, and executed by firing squad all on the same day, June 30, 1948. Posthumously exonerated of all charges a year later, because his widow Lena demanded an investigation. Ben-Gurion issued a public exoneration and had his remains reburied with full military honors. The wrongful execution served as a painful reminder of the flaws of the death penalty, and was a direct catalyst for Israel abolishing the death penalty for murder in 1954.

His gravestone famously reads “killed by mistake.”

Israel learned in its first weeks of existence that the state kills innocent people. It abolished the death penalty for murder, as a foundational tenet, because of that lesson (Mishnah Makkot 1:10). Now Netanyahu is negating the state, with a 90-day execution window and no right of appeal, so he can kill a targeted ethnic group, Palestinians.

I’ll say it again, the death penalty for murder itself is the negation of the state of Israel. The new law puts civilian defendants back under the kind of summary state-killing authority that produced the Tobianski disaster.

Netanyahu is literally corrupting intelligence apparatus to undermine Israel all the way back to pre-1948.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has already petitioned the Supreme Court to strike down the law. The 1954 abolition and the Tobianski precedent are the historical foundation of that challenge.

For 72 years, the rejection of state execution was part of Israel’s legal identity, a democratic commitment arising from the state’s own founding-era failure of justice. Netanyahu has reversed it. This is not incidental to the negation argument. It is the negation argument.

A state that defined itself in part by abolishing the death penalty after killing an innocent man, and whose prime minister reinstates it under conditions designed to deny due process, has been negated in its constitutional character by that act alone.

I. Statutory Framework

The operative provision of the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law (2026) amends Israel’s Penal Law to provide:

Any person who intentionally causes the death of a person with the aim of negating the existence of the State of Israel shall be sentenced to death or life imprisonment.

Two elements must be established:

1. Intentionally causing death
2. Doing so with the aim of negating the existence of the State of Israel

What “intentionally causes the death” means under Israeli law.

The statute must be read within the Israeli Penal Law (5737-1977). Section 18(b) provides that “act” includes an omission. Section 18(c) defines “omission” as refraining from doing what is a duty under any law or contract. The source of the prime minister’s duty is constitutional. Basic Law: The Government provides that “the Government is the executive authority of the State” and that “the Army is subject to the authority of the Government.” The prime minister, as head of the executive, bears a legal duty to protect the security of the state and its citizens. A deliberate failure to act on that duty, where death results, constitutes “causing death” under the statute.

Section 20(b) further provides: “foreseeing the consequences as almost certain to occur shall be deemed to be an intention to bring them about.” This is the near-certainty doctrine. It means that where a defendant foresees death as a near-certain consequence of his policy decisions, intent is established as a matter of law. He need not desire the deaths. He need only foresee them as almost certain and proceed anyway.

Section 300(a), as amended in 2019, defines murder as causing the death of a person “intentionally or indifferently.” The indifference standard is directly relevant to a leader who receives repeated warnings of catastrophic risk and dismisses them for political reasons.

What “the existence of the State of Israel” means under Israeli law.

The statute does not define “the State of Israel.” It does not limit “negation” to territorial dissolution. It does not specify that negation must be pursued through a single act of violence. It provides no limiting construction whatsoever.

But Israeli constitutional law does define what the state is. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (1992), Section 1A provides: “The purpose of this Basic Law is to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to establish in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” This is not aspirational language. It is constitutional law with super-legal status, giving the Supreme Court authority to disqualify any legislation contradicting it. The 1994 amendment to this Basic Law further directs that fundamental human rights “shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles set forth in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.”

The State of Israel, as constitutionally defined, is a Jewish and democratic state governed by the rule of law. We argue that “existence” must encompass this constitutional character, because Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty defines the state’s identity, and a reading limited to territorial boundaries would leave that identity unprotected by the statute’s own terms. Israeli legal discourse has historically construed “negation of the existence of the State” (שלילת קיום מדינת ישראל) as referring to physical destruction or denial of the right to exist. This brief argues that construction is incomplete: a state whose democratic institutions, independent judiciary, security architecture, and international standing have been systematically destroyed has been negated in its existence as constitutionally defined, even if its territorial boundaries remain intact.

Netanyahu easily meets both elements.

II. Element One: Intentionally Causing Death

A. The Iran War: Ongoing Casualties Under a War of Choice

This section carries particular legal weight. Because Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty §10 prohibits retroactive criminal punishment, the October 7 failures, the judicial overhaul, the hostage obstruction, and the Gaza campaign cannot independently ground a charge under a March 2026 statute. They are evidence of intent and pattern. The Iran war is the ongoing conduct that satisfies the temporal requirement: Israeli civilians are dying under this law’s operation, from a war Netanyahu initiated and continues.

The war began on February 28, 2026 with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. Haaretz characterized it as:

Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war. A joint venture, [following] Netanyahu’s incessant urging of American presidents to confront Iran militarily.

The retaliatory consequences were foreseeable and foreseen. Iran responded with waves of missile and drone strikes on Israeli territory. As of late March 2026, at least 20 Israeli civilians have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded. The largest single strike killed nine civilians in a residential neighborhood of Beit Shemesh on March 1. Iranian cluster munitions have struck Tel Aviv, Beersheba, and Dimona. On March 29, an Iranian missile struck a chemical plant in the Ne’ot Hovav industrial zone, causing a hazardous materials leak and civilian evacuation. Strikes continued on and after March 30, the date of the law’s enactment.

By the tenth day of the war, Iran had fired 300 missiles at Israel, nearly half carrying cluster submunitions banned under international treaty, targeted at residential areas. ACLED recorded more than 90 attempted strikes on Israel in the first five days alone, with around 20 directly hitting civilian areas.

RAND analyst Shira Efron, based in Tel Aviv, stated:

There is a sense in Israel that the desire to keep Israelis in this perpetual state of war also serves the prime minister’s political objectives. It is very difficult to go to elections when you are in the middle of a war.

The war was initiated by Netanyahu after decades of personal advocacy for a military confrontation with Iran. The retaliatory strikes killing Israeli civilians were foreseeable as near-certain. They are ongoing as of the date of the law’s enactment. Under §20(b), a leader who initiates a war knowing retaliatory strikes on his civilian population are almost certain, and who continues to prosecute that war for political reasons documented by Israeli analysts, has intentionally caused the resulting deaths as a matter of law. These are post-enactment deaths, caused by post-enactment decisions, under a law Netanyahu voted for on the same day Israelis were sheltering from incoming Iranian missiles.

B. Gaza: Over 51,200 Dead Under Direct Command Authority

The factual record for deaths in Gaza is established by multiple Israeli-admissible sources: IDF internal investigations, Shin Bet operational reports, testimony before the civilian commission of inquiry, and contemporaneous military orders issued under Netanyahu’s command authority. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 based on the same underlying evidence, but Israeli courts do not recognize ICC jurisdiction, and this brief relies on domestic sources alone.

The death toll as of March 2026 exceeds 51,200, the majority women and children. These deaths occurred under Netanyahu’s direct command authority as head of the war cabinet. The deliberate restriction of food, water, and medical supplies to a civilian population, as documented by the IDF’s own operational records, satisfies the near-certainty standard of §20(b): death was foreseeable as almost certain, and the policy was maintained. Intent.

C. October 7, 2023: 1,200 Dead Through Deliberate Policy Failure

An independent civilian commission of inquiry (November 2024), chaired by retired judge Varda Alsheikh, found after hearing 120 witnesses that Netanyahu was “responsible for undermining all decision-making centers, including the cabinet and the National Security Council, in a way that prevented any serious discussion that includes a plurality of opinions on significant security issues.”

The commission found the October 7 massacre was enabled by “arrogant” groupthink led by Netanyahu, which stifled critical voices and entrenched a false belief that Hamas could be managed with money. Intent.

Specific findings of fact:

• Netanyahu’s government facilitated the transfer of suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash into Gaza to maintain a fragile ceasefire with Hamas. This money strengthened Hamas’s military capabilities ahead of the attack.
• The Shin Bet’s own investigation (March 2025) found the agency possessed Hamas’s actual battle plans and did not consider them a realistic threat. The Shin Bet also blamed Israeli policies of propping up Hamas rule in Gaza to buy calm on the border, a policy directed by the Prime Minister’s Office.
• An academic analysis published in the RUSI Journal found that “intelligence agencies fell in line with political priorities dictated by the Prime Minister’s Office, who believed that Hamas was contained and refused to accept any evidence to the contrary. This is because that containment strategy served a wider political purpose of freezing and prolonging the status quo.”
• The border with Gaza was manned by just 767 soldiers when an estimated 5,600 attackers stormed the fence. 1,200 people died. 251 were kidnapped.

Netanyahu has never accepted personal responsibility for his personal failures.

The causal chain satisfies Israeli domestic law, though no Israeli court has previously applied criminal omission liability to a head of state’s policy decisions. This is a novel application. The unprecedented nature of the conduct justifies it.

The prime minister has a legal duty to protect the security of the state and its citizens. His deliberate suppression of intelligence processes and security infrastructure constitutes an omission within the meaning of Penal Law §18(b) and (c). The Shin Bet possessed the battle plans. The intelligence agencies warned. Netanyahu’s political directives overrode their assessments.

Under §20(b), foreseeing the consequences of a policy as almost certain to result in death, and proceeding anyway, is deemed intention as a matter of law. Under §300(a), causing death “indifferently” constitutes murder. A prime minister who receives warnings that his containment policy is based on a false assessment of Hamas, who dismisses those warnings to serve political objectives, and who leaves the border manned at a fraction of necessary strength, has caused death through omission with at minimum indifference to the outcome.

Hamas’s independent decision to attack is an intervening cause, and this admittedly is the weakest causation link presented here. It is included because the civilian commission’s finding of directed failure, not parallel failure, establishes causal primacy at the policy level and because the pattern of deliberate indifference to Israeli lives is central to the aim element.

Intent.

D. Hostage Deaths: Evidence of Aim, Not Independent Causation

The following evidence does not establish an independent count of murder. Hamas killed the hostages, and the intervening cause problem is acknowledged. This section establishes the pattern of prioritizing political survival over Israeli lives that satisfies the “aim” element of the statute.

Of the 251 people kidnapped on October 7, hostages died in captivity while Netanyahu obstructed deals for their release. CNN reported, based on Israeli documents, that Netanyahu derailed a potential hostage deal in July 2024 by introducing last-minute demands, and that at least three of six hostages found dead in Gaza were due for release under a May 2024 draft agreement.

The former spokesman of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum stated: “There is no doubt that Netanyahu is preventing a deal. Netanyahu knows that if he goes to elections at this time he won’t be able to form a new government, and he is motivated by cold political considerations.” He identified the mechanism: “The moment the hostages are released, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir will leave the government because they’ll think the price was too high.”

The Hostage Family Forum stated: “The Israeli government made a conscious and deliberate decision to sacrifice the hostages.”

These statements constitute available witness testimony on the intent element. The hostage families are not outside observers. They are direct victims of Netanyahu’s policy who received contemporaneous information about the reasons deals were blocked.

Their testimony establishes that Netanyahu chose coalition survival over the lives of Israeli citizens. Under the “aim” analysis, this is direct evidence that the negation of the state’s duty to protect its people was not incidental but instrumental to Netanyahu’s political objectives.

Intent.

III. Element Two: With the Aim of Negating the Existence of the State of Israel

A. Destruction of Democratic Governance

Haaretz documented that former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak stated Israel was “already under one-man rule and no longer a liberal democracy.” Barak was not speaking metaphorically. He was describing the structural consequence of the judicial overhaul.

In July 2023, IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi publicly warned about judicial reforms:

a national security threat that imperiled Israel’s existence.

Netanyahu dismissed the warning.

The judicial overhaul aimed to: strip the Supreme Court of the power to review legislation, let the Knesset override court rulings by simple majority, and give the governing coalition control over judicial appointments. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty defines Israel as “a Jewish and democratic state” and grants the Supreme Court super-legal authority to enforce that definition. The judicial overhaul was a direct assault on the constitutional provision that defines what the state is. If the state’s legal identity is democratic, then destroying the institution that enforces that identity is negation of the state as constitutionally defined.

B. Corruption of Security and Intelligence Institutions

Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar stated in a court filing that Netanyahu demanded “personal loyalty from the head of the Shin Bet instead of loyalty to the state,” that he sought to use the intelligence service “against political opponents, against protests, against citizens who came out to defend democracy,” and that he pressured Bar to write professional opinions formed by Netanyahu to avoid appearing in court for corruption charges.

PBS reported that Netanyahu fired his defense minister for pushing back on Gaza policy, then pressured the military chief to resign, and the new chief then sacked the military spokesman. The Shin Bet dismissal came while the agency was investigating ties between Netanyahu advisers and Qatar, and while it was probing the leak of classified documents that provided Netanyahu political cover.

Former deputy chief of staff Yair Golan described this pattern as making Netanyahu “a direct threat to Israel’s security and rule of law.”

When the leader of a state demands personal loyalty over institutional loyalty from the intelligence services, replaces security chiefs with political loyalists during wartime, and fires investigators probing his own inner circle, the state’s security architecture ceases to function as a sovereign institution and becomes a personal instrument.

This is negation.

C. Empowerment of Actors Whose Stated Goals Negate the Democratic State

Netanyahu’s coalition partner Itamar Ben-Gvir was convicted by an Israeli court of racist incitement and supporting the Kahanist terror organization, and was exempted from military service due to extremist activities. He was famous for his threats against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before Rabin’s assassination. Netanyahu created an enhanced cabinet position for him overseeing all of Israel’s police.

Coalition agreements pledged immunity for settlers and security forces for anti-Palestinian violence. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich advocates annexation and ethnic transfer. The ICC prosecutor was reportedly preparing arrest warrants for both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

Netanyahu did not merely tolerate these figures. He gave them the instruments of state power. Their program, if implemented, makes Israel ungovernable as a democracy and indefensible under international law. This is not a policy disagreement. It is the systematic installation of actors whose explicit program is to replace the democratic state with an ethno-nationalist one.

D. Destruction of International Standing and Sovereign Capacity

The ICC arrest warrant against Netanyahu was the first ever issued against the leader of a Western-backed democratic country. All 125 ICC member states are legally obligated to arrest him. The sitting prime minister of Israel cannot travel to most of the democratic world.

The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Netanyahu’s “viability as a leader” was “in jeopardy”:

distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war.

The foreign ministers of Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy jointly condemned the death penalty bill as undermining democratic principles. The Secretary General of the Council of Europe called it “a major civilizational setback.”

A state whose leader is an international fugitive, whose legislation draws condemnation from its principal allies, and whose conduct has generated genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice has been negated in its capacity to function as a sovereign member of the international community. Netanyahu is the direct cause.

E. Obstruction of Accountability as Ongoing Negation

Netanyahu structured the October 7 inquiry so that he controls the composition of the investigating body. The opposition called it a “cover-up commission.” The Movement for Quality Government said:

This is not an investigative commission, this is a cover-up commission.

He has refused to allow a state commission of inquiry, the established Israeli legal mechanism for investigating catastrophic government failures, used after the Yom Kippur War, Sabra and Shatila, the Rabin assassination, and the Second Lebanon War.

A state that cannot investigate its own worst security failure because the responsible leader has captured the investigative process has been negated in its capacity for self-governance and institutional correction.

IV. The Intent Standard Under Israeli Law

The statute requires that the defendant act “with the aim of” negating the state’s existence. Critics will argue that Netanyahu does not subjectively intend to destroy Israel. Israeli law forecloses this defense on multiple grounds.

First, and dispositive: the law’s own application standard defeats the defense. Under Justice Aharon Barak’s purposive interpretation framework, which dominates Israeli jurisprudence, a statute is read through both its subjective purpose (legislative intent) and its objective purpose (the values it serves within the legal system). The subjective purpose of this law is discriminatory: it was designed to execute Palestinians. But the objective purpose of any criminal statute must conform to Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty §1A, which requires all laws to befit the values of Israel as “a Jewish and democratic state.”

Section 8 of the same Basic Law provides that rights may not be violated except by a law befitting those values. A criminal statute that applies by its own terms to “any person” cannot be purposively construed to exclude a class of persons without violating the equal application principle derived from §1A. The law either fails constitutional review under §8, or it applies to any person, including a prime minister. There is no construction that saves the statute and exempts Netanyahu.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel is making exactly this argument in its Supreme Court petition. If the court reads “aim” as inferable from conduct when the defendant is Palestinian, it must read “aim” as inferable from conduct when the defendant is a prime minister. The law cannot have one meaning for one class of defendant and a different meaning for another.

Second, Penal Law §20(b) provides that “foreseeing the consequences as almost certain to occur shall be deemed to be an intention to bring them about.” This is a statutory equivalence, not a discretionary inference. It must be acknowledged that §20(b) addresses כוונה (intention), not מטרה (aim), and that Israeli criminal law treats aim as a higher mens rea standard requiring subjective purpose. But the drafters of this statute collapsed that distinction by design. The law applies מטרה to Palestinian defendants through inference from conduct, not through proof of subjective purpose. No Palestinian defendant is asked to confess a philosophical commitment to Israel’s non-existence. The “aim” is read from the act of killing. Having collapsed the distinction between aim and intention in application, the drafters cannot resurrect it as a defense. Netanyahu was warned by the IDF Chief of Staff that his judicial reforms imperiled Israel’s existence. He was warned by intelligence agencies that Hamas was not contained. He was warned by allies that his military conduct would result in international isolation. He dismissed every warning and pursued the course that produced exactly the predicted results. Under §20(b), foreseeing the negation of the state as a near-certain consequence of his actions, and proceeding, is deemed to be intention to bring that negation about. And under the law’s own application standard, that intention is functionally indistinguishable from aim.

Third, the negation of the state is not a side effect of Netanyahu’s pursuit of personal power. It is the mechanism. The civilian commission of inquiry documented that Netanyahu consolidated authority by “undermining all decision-making centers.” He could not achieve personal dominance without destroying institutional independence. The destruction of democratic governance was not collateral damage. It was the method. Under the statute’s own “aim” standard, where the negation of the state is inseparable from the means by which the defendant pursued his objectives, the aim element is satisfied.

Fourth, Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial corroborates the motive structure. He is currently being prosecuted for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The corruption charges establish a documented pattern of governance oriented toward personal benefit at the expense of public duty. The systematic dismantlement of institutions documented in this brief was not ideological. It was instrumental. He attacked the judiciary because it was trying him. He fired the Shin Bet director because the agency was investigating his advisers. He obstructed the October 7 inquiry because it would assign him personal responsibility. He prolonged wars because ceasefires would trigger elections he would lose. Each act of state negation served a personal objective. The corruption trial is evidence of the pattern. The pattern is evidence of the aim.

V. Procedural Path: Immunity and Prosecution

Under Article 17 of Basic Law: The Government, the attorney general must approve the initiation of a criminal investigation against a sitting prime minister. If the investigation produces grounds for an indictment, the attorney general may indict the prime minister. This is settled law. Netanyahu is currently being prosecuted under this framework for corruption charges. The mechanism for indicting a sitting prime minister exists and is operational.

A prime minister may request the Knesset to grant immunity under Article 4 of the Immunities, Rights and Obligations of Knesset Members Law (1951). The law provides four grounds for granting immunity, none of which are automatic. No member of Knesset has been granted immunity since 2005. Netanyahu previously requested and then withdrew an immunity request in his corruption case. A request for immunity from charges of causing death with the aim of negating the state’s existence would require a Knesset majority to approve, and would be subject to review by the Supreme Court, which retains the authority to strike down immunity decisions that lack evidentiary basis.

If immunity is denied, the prime minister faces trial in the Jerusalem District Court. Under Article 18 of the Basic Law, should the prime minister be convicted of an offense involving moral turpitude, the Knesset may remove him by majority vote. If the Knesset declines to remove him, the government is considered to have resigned upon a final conviction, with the prime minister continuing to serve only until all appeals are exhausted.

The procedural framework exists. There is no constitutional barrier to prosecution. The only barrier is political will.

It should be noted that Netanyahu has systematically attacked the very office that would need to authorize his prosecution under Article 17. He has sought to strip the attorney general of independence, fired the Shin Bet director during active investigations of his advisers, and attempted to replace oversight officials with loyalists. The obstruction of the prosecutorial mechanism is not merely a procedural obstacle. It is itself evidence of the crime charged: an act of state negation that doubles as consciousness of guilt. A defendant who dismantles the institution responsible for holding him accountable has demonstrated, through conduct, the “aim” the statute requires.

VI. Conclusion

The Death Penalty for Terrorists Law (2026) defines a crime: intentionally causing death with the aim of negating the existence of the State of Israel.

The charged conduct is Netanyahu’s ongoing prosecution of the Iran war, in which Israeli civilians continue to die from retaliatory strikes that were foreseeable as near-certain, initiated and sustained for documented political reasons. On March 30, 2026, Netanyahu voted for this law while Israelis sheltered from incoming Iranian missiles. That is the post-enactment act that satisfies the temporal requirement.

The pattern of prior conduct establishes the aim. The evidence shows that Benjamin Netanyahu:

• Caused the deaths of 1,200 Israelis on October 7 through deliberate suppression of intelligence and security infrastructure, satisfying the omission and near-certainty standards of Penal Law §§18 and 20(b), establishing a pattern of causing death through policy failure motivated by political self-interest.
• Caused the deaths of more than 51,200 Palestinians in Gaza through policies documented by Israeli military and intelligence investigations, establishing a pattern of indifference to foreseeable mass civilian death under his command authority.
• Obstructed hostage release deals to preserve his coalition, directly contributing to hostage deaths in captivity and establishing, through the testimony of the hostage families themselves, that he prioritized political survival over the lives of Israeli citizens.
• Systematically dismantled the democratic institutions, independent judiciary, and security architecture that constitute the State of Israel as defined by Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, establishing the aim of negating the state as constitutionally defined.
• Continues to prosecute a war with Iran that is killing Israeli civilians, under foreseeable retaliatory conditions, driven substantially by personal political calculation, constituting the ongoing post-enactment conduct that satisfies both elements of the statute.

Each of these acts, individually, degrades the existence of the State of Israel.

Together, they constitute the most comprehensive program of state negation in Israel’s history, executed not by an external enemy but by the head of government, using the instruments of sovereign power.

This brief is not, ultimately, a call for prosecution. It is a demonstration that the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law destroys itself on contact with its own terms. A law whose most obvious defendant is the prime minister who voted for it is not a law that can stand. A statute that defines state negation as a capital crime, authored by a government whose conduct meets that definition, is an act of self-indictment by the state itself.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has petitioned the Supreme Court to strike this law down. This brief provides the evidentiary record for that petition. The law was designed to kill Palestinians under conditions that deny due process, enacted by a government that has systematically negated every democratic principle Israel has defined itself by since Meir Tobianski’s gravestone was inscribed “killed by mistake.”

The law should be struck down before it kills anyone else by design.

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