Itamar Ben Gvir might have been acting like the cat who got the execution cream, but no amount of noose lapel pins can save his bill it seems... Right, so he turns up in the Knesset with a gold noose pinned to his chest, grinning like he’s reinvented justice, and for a moment you’d think the only thing standing between Itamar ben Gvir and a functioning execution chamber is the will to hurry up and build one. But scratch it, just slightly, and the whole performance falls apart. Because while he’s waving props and promising a Palestinians-only death penalty delivered by lethal injection, the people he actually needs to make that threat real - Israel’s doctors - have already shut the door on him. They’ve said no. They’ve said it publicly, professionally, unequivocally, because their ethics – yes, there is such a thing as medical ethics in Israel - ban them from taking part in executions and they’re not about to throw away their licences for him. So here he is, selling a punishment the state can’t physically carry out, he’s claiming he’s got 100 doctors who will, but conspicuously hasn’t proven it, so you can see the cracks running through this whole charade before he even opens his whacking great mouth. Right, so it says everything about the state of Israeli politics that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir walked into the Knesset wearing a gold noose on his suit like he was launching a brand. He called it a symbol of justice, a symbol of deterrence, a symbol of what he thinks Palestinians should expect once his new death-penalty bill becomes law. And even before he opened his mouth, even before he started rehearsing the lines about terror and revenge and “no more releases,” his plan was already collapsing in real time. Because it wasn’t long before anyone who actually understands how a death-penalty system works could see the hole running straight through the centre of his plan, and the people who sit at the heart of it - the Israeli Medical Association, represented publicly by its chair Professor Zion Hagay - who wasted no time pointing it out. A state can pass a death-penalty bill. But it cannot kill without doctors. And Israel’s doctors have said no. The law Ben-Gvir is pushing is not a general reinstatement of capital punishment. It is a targeted law aimed specifically at Palestinians convicted of killing Israeli Jews in attacks labelled as terrorism.