Emma Graham-Harrison

In some ways, these trials feel to many people long overdue.

It's been so long since these things happen now, over two and a half years.

It's not been a question that they've been trying to find the suspects.

They've been in captivity all this time.

But at the same time,

There is definitely a feeling among many Israelis that this is a government that's putting its own interests before those of victims, survivors and long-term national security, actually, because if you don't understand properly what went wrong, how can you be sure you stop it happening again?

Well, you know, I mean, in one sense, you could say that very different.

One is looking back at setting up these tribunals under the framework of existing Israeli law.

The other is looking forward and setting up a new legal regime, a new set of statutes under which the death penalty can be handed down.

But in another way, they're very, very intimately linked as really part of a legal move to essentially reestablish the death penalty inside Israel, but only for Palestinians.

Both parts of that are important to sort of think about and understand.

The first is, you know, in Israel's entire history, there have only been two executions.

The first was a soldier who was executed very shortly before he was exonerated.

So that was a wrongful execution, I think, in 1949, the very beginning of Israel's existence as a state.

And then in 1962, you had the execution of one of the most prominent Nazis, Eichmann.

You know, Hannah Arendt wrote a famous book about the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

And since then, Israel has essentially had a de facto moratorium on the death penalty.

And that's not just been...

a decision not to implement it.

For 60 years, Israel has been in the camp of countries that really don't use capital punishment.