ISRAEL’S adoption of a racist death penalty law, in which capital punishment only applies to Palestinians, is a watershed moment.

The details are extraordinary. The law specifies that convictions only require a majority vote (not unanimity), that hanging will be the default sentence and that it must take place within 90 days of the final verdict — provisions designed to maximise the number of executions.

In the occupied West Bank — currently suffering a wave of settler attacks on Palestinians — it will be applied by military courts with a 96 per cent conviction rate.

Denying the apartheid character of the Israeli state is simply not credible any more. Nor can it plausibly be said to align with what our Establishment terms “liberal democratic” values.

That should have consequences for British politicians who still present support for Israel as the test of political respectability, and insinuate that opposing it is racist.

Israeli state racism is not new. Nor is the accusation of apartheid.

Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians, both within and without its recognised borders, since its violent establishment in 1948 and has never accorded them equal rights with its Jewish citizens.

Often this has been cloaked by military occupation, and the illusion that Israeli rule over territories such as the West Bank is a temporary measure dictated by Israeli security, rather than an expansionist policy with replacement of the current population by Jewish settlers the long-term goal.

Plenty of Israeli politicians boasted openly of the ethnic cleansing project, but the absence of formal annexation gave their Western allies wriggle room to pretend the occupation was transient, the so-called peace process real.

Israel was a close ally of the state which coined the term apartheid in South Africa, and the leader of the latter’s liberation struggle Nelson Mandela famously compared the plights of Palestinians and black South Africans when he said “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Broad recognition that its systematic differential treatment of Jews and Palestinians amounted to apartheid is more recent in the West, but this was recognised by the world’s best-known liberal charities — Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — in 2021. “Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights,” Amnesty then announced.

Liberal disillusionment with Israel has marched in step with the state’s increasingly extremist character — the accelerated colonisation of Palestinian land, the inhuman siege of Gaza from 2006 (that even Tory prime minister David Cameron said had turned the Strip into an “open-air prison” years before the October 7 2023 attacks), the casual way it bombs neighbours and murders foreign citizens, increased repression of dissenting voices inside Israel and acts like the Nation State Law, which formalised the second-class status of its Palestinian citizens.

Given Israel’s routine killing of Palestinians outwith any legal process through bombardment and massacre, and its refusal to punish racist settlers who kill Palestinians on their own initiative, some might say the return of capital punishment changes little.

But it does — it is another weapon to terrorise the Palestinian population, another open statement that it regards them as subhuman.

And it must change things here. Keir Starmer boasted at the 2022 Labour conference of his work as a lawyer opposing “the barbaric practice of death by hanging.”

Britain has condemned the new law. But it must be a wake-up call that the liberal values the British Establishment accords lip service are no longer remotely applicable to the two allies whose wars we help facilitate and which risk igniting catastrophic world war — the United States and Israel.

They are violent, authoritarian, racist states whose conduct increasingly resembles fascism. Our alliances with both need severing and their apologists in this country must be isolated and defeated.