(RNS) — The death penalty law targeting Palestinians that passed the Israeli parliament on Monday (March 30) has been roundly denounced among liberal Jewish movements in Israel and abroad.

In the U.S., the largest Jewish denomination, the Reform movement, strongly condemned passage of the “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law,” which makes hanging the default punishment for murderers who kill “with the intent to deny the existence of the State of Israel.”

“This legislation represents a sharp and dangerous departure from Israel’s long-standing reluctance to employ capital punishment,” the Union for Reform Judaism said in a statement. “It also contradicts the Jewish tradition’s teachings about capital punishment that emphasize the rarity with which it should be applied.”

The death penalty has only been applied twice in the modern state of Israel’s history — once in 1948 against a soldier who was wrongly accused of treason and later posthumously rehabilitated, and the second, in 1961 against Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.

Until Monday, capital punishment for murder had been outlawed since 1954, and only remained on the books for crimes against humanity, such as Eichmann’s.

Monday’s bill was the project of far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who in recent months sported a lapel pin in the shape of a noose to show his support for the measure.

RELATED: On the eve of Passover, most US Jews oppose the war in Iran

Ben-Gvir and his allies argued that the finality of the death penalty would protect Israelis by removing the possibility for prisoner exchange as an incentive for hostage taking.  Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel, was famously freed from Israeli prison in such an exchange in 2011 in return for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

“For years, we endured a cruel cycle of terror, imprisonment, release in reckless deals, and the return of these human monsters to murder Jews again,” said Limor Son-Har-Melech, a Knesset member from the Otzma Yehudit party, during a parliament debate on the bill. She herself had survived a terror attack in which she lost her husband.

Jewish leaders also said it violated international law and the principles of due process and equal protection.

Despite a massive increase in settler violence and acts of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, experts said the new law cannot be applied to Jewish extremists convicted of similar crimes.

It also has different tracks for those tried in Israel’s criminal court system versus its military courts, which deal exclusively with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who are not considered Israeli citizens.

In the U.S., T’ruah, a rabbinic-led human rights organization, called the law “racist and discriminatory, undermining the basic principles of due process and equal protection under the law and in defiant opposition to Jewish values.”

“With the passage of this law, Israel has violated the most basic Jewish principle of the sanctity of human life,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, T’ruah’s CEO. 

The Rabbinical Assembly, representing more than 1,600 Conservative/Masorti rabbis, issued a statement Wednesday saying, “As a democratic state, Israel must continue to uphold equal treatment under the law for all who are accused or convicted of terrorism, of any kind.”

One Orthodox rabbi in Israel went further. Rabbi Seth Farber, director of ITIM, a nonprofit that advocates for equality in Israel’s religious institutions, said the law was a warning sign.

“This bill serves the narrow political interests of the far right and will not be a deterrent for those who already demonstrate callousness for human life,” Farber said.

Rabbi Avi Dabush, executive director of Israel’s Rabbis for Human Rights, alongside Rabbi Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi in the Knesset, are preparing an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court to overturn the law.

The bill is yet another blow to the already strained relationship between Israeli and American Jewish communities.

“The majority of American Jews oppose the death penalty, which contravenes Jewish teachings and has been repeatedly shown to be a flawed practice that does not make communities safer,” Jacobs wrote in an email. “Its adoption by this extremist Israeli government is deeply wrong.”

RELATED: Israel apologizes after barring cardinal from Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday