The global debate on security has been clashing for decades with a fundamental paradox: the absence of a universally accepted definition of international terrorism. Despite numerous efforts at the UN, the international community has never managed to ratify a comprehensive treaty on the subject. This legal stalemate arises from the inability to universally distinguish between acts of terrorism and national liberation struggles, leaving individual states with a dangerous margin of discretion in labeling political violence.
However, another even more thorny issue arises in this void: the definition of state terrorism. While international law has tools to prosecute war crimes or crimes against humanity, it struggles to frame cases where a state directly commits a violent act with the intention of creating a state of terror, or facilitates, arms, or guarantees impunity to private actors who carry it out for ideological purposes. This is exactly the central issue that is raising unprecedented outrage among many academics and liberal activists in Israel.
ACCORDING TO THE ALLEGATIONSof over six hundred Israeli academics from the country's leading institutions, extremist settlers in the West Bank are said to have used the conflict in Gaza over the past two and a half years to carry out outright acts of terrorism against the Palestinian people. The goal would be to conduct a systematic campaign of attacks against Palestinian rural communities to induce their displacement and allow for the expansion of settlements.
Disturbing reports describe brutal assaults, such as the one that occurred in Khirbet Humsa, where beatings of minors and sexual violence were recorded. However, as reported by the newspaperHaaretza few days ago, what would turn these criminal acts into a matter of international relevance is the suspicion that they are not isolated incidents, but a deliberate strategy protected by state authorities. At this point, the term apartheid is no longer used as a rhetorical hyperbole, but as a legal category to describe the reality of the West Bank and Gaza.
The heart of the matter lies in the failure of international law to ratify a clear definition of terrorism. This "void" has allowed the Netanyahu government to manipulate the very concept of security, turning it into a system of legal segregation. If there is no international treaty that defines terrorism in a neutral way, states are free to define it on an ethnic basis.
The introduction of the death penalty with a fast-tracked process for Palestinians only represents the last piece of an asymmetric regime. In a democratic system, the law defines the crime; in this scenario, the law defines the guilty based on their affiliation.
For Palestinians, the death penalty applies, without any fundamental guarantees of the rule of law. For Israeli settlers, there exists a gray area of total impunity. Violence, house burnings, and physical assaults are downgraded to civil incidents or, more often, completely ignored by the authorities.
THIS IS NO LONGERsimple "conflict": it is the consolidation of two separate and unequal legal systems operating in the same territory. When one legal system guarantees civil rights and protection to one group while reserving military courts and gallows for another, the definition of apartheid becomes a technical description of reality.
In this context, Israeli terrorism ceases to be a marginal phenomenon and becomes a function of the government. If the state grants immunity to settlers while simultaneously accelerating executions for Palestinians, it is effectively delegating political violence to private militias to achieve the ideological goal of displacement.
The denunciation by academics is therefore a cry of alarm about a genetic mutation that encodes discrimination by law. As long as the international community hides behind the absence of shared definitions of terrorism, this system of legal apartheid can continue to thrive under the guise of the "war on terror," while in reality it protects one form to annihilate the other.
Indignation is no longer limited to a few niche activists. The petition from university professors marks a turning point: the explicit demand for international intervention. Former political leaders, such as Ehud Olmert, have suggested the need for involvement from the International Criminal Court, while the United States and the European Union have already begun to impose targeted sanctions against individual settlers and entities involved in the violence.
THE APPEALThe intellectuals' call extends to the Jewish diaspora, urged to reflect on how the current management of security and the endorsement of settler terrorism are further undermining Israel's moral legitimacy in the world. According to the signatories, "Jewish terrorism" is not an anomaly of the Netanyahu government, but a tool of its political agenda, which includes the de facto annexation of the West Bank through the uprooting of the Palestinian population.
As the world continues to debate what defines a terrorist in the twenty-first century, the reality on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza demands more urgent reflection. If the rule of law can no longer be equal for all, turning punishment or impunity into a matter of internationally accepted ethnic identity, it would not only be Palestinian lives at risk, but the very structure of democracy and its image in the eyes of history.