Policy Paper by Ameer Makhoul, Progress Center for Policies
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Introduction
There are growing indicators of a potential expansion in the political weight of Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel. These indicators are closely connected to the exposure of a qualitative shift in their mobilization against the crime system, whose role as an Israeli state instrument for fragmenting this segment of the Palestinian people—numbering roughly two million—is becoming increasingly evident. This population is geographically distributed across the Negev in the south, the coastal cities, the southern and northern Triangle, the Galilee, Nazareth, and the Jezreel Valley.
Conversely, cities established in the 1950s as exclusively Jewish towns—following the confiscation of Palestinian land and the Judaization of space aimed at severing Palestinian demographic geography within Israel—have, through Palestinian in-migration, become mixed cities. In practice, there is hardly an Israeli city without Palestinian Arab residents, reinforcing their spatial presence in the public sphere and provoking a historically and structurally entrenched racist mindset, which has now translated into overtly more violent official policies.
However, this emerging horizon of political empowerment poses a challenge to systems of surveillance and repression that strategically seek to curtail such weight—by stripping political legitimacy, suppressing already deficient democratic freedoms, and dismantling the social bonds that sustain community cohesion. This fragmentation is pursued through the crime system, amid the governing establishment’s promotion of a racist narrative that portrays crime as a product of an “Arab-Islamic mentality.”
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Current Data in a Comparative Temporal Context
Reviewing crime rates among Palestinian Arabs in Israel over time, and comparing them with crime data in the Jewish Israeli street, Knesset Member Ayman Odeh, head of the Hadash–Ta’al list, notes that from 1948 until 2000 the number of Jewish victims of violent crime significantly exceeded the number of Arab victims.
The year 2000 marked a turning point with the Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Uprising inside Israel, during which thirteen Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded and arrested. Coinciding with the outbreak of the Second Intifada, this uprising reshaped the security and political establishment’s perception of this public—constituting roughly 20% of Israel’s citizens—ushering in a more explicit hostility, intensified control and surveillance policies, and the rise of doctrines aimed at internally fragmenting and politically weakening the community, preoccupying it with internal crises, and distancing it from influencing public policy.
Based on the figures cited by Odeh, the comparative picture is as follows:
• 1980: 58 Jewish victims vs. 11 Arab victims
• 1985: 75 vs. 14
• 1988: 50 vs. 8
• 2000: 91 vs. 63
• 2002: 126 vs. 82 (the year the government formally adopted a policy of combating crime in Israeli cities)
• 2005: 93 vs. 76
• 2010: 64 Jewish vs. 86 Arab victims
• 2014: 54 vs. 75
• 2019: 48 vs. 94
• 2025: 252 Arab victims
These figures do not include the injured, psychological and livelihood damage, or the human stories behind the statistics. During the current government’s term alone, the number of Arab victims has reached nearly 800. Former police commissioner Roni Alsheikh was quoted—via Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—as saying, in effect: “Let Arabs kill each other.”
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Long-Term Policies: The Most Dangerous Factor
These data demonstrate that long-term Israeli policies are what have led Palestinian Arab society to the dominance of organized crime networks, refuting the official racist claim that crime stems from Palestinian culture or Islam.
Comparisons with Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, the diaspora, or with Arab societies regionally show that crime rates there are fundamentally lower than what can be described as a “crime war” waged against Palestinian Arabs in Israel.
The data also reveal shifts in official policy regarding weapons possession. Until the late 1980s, any Palestinian citizen caught with a weapon was treated as a security case involving the Shin Bet and prosecuted accordingly. Today, such cases are handled as ordinary criminal files—despite the fact that most weapons, ammunition, and explosives are smuggled from Israeli army bases, estimated in the hundreds of thousands. This points to Israeli involvement in the arms market, so long as the weapons are used against Palestinian Arabs themselves.
By contrast, almost any shooting incident against a Jewish Israeli—even if criminal in nature—is swiftly solved and the Arab perpetrators arrested within hours.
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Priority: Undermining Community Cohesion, Not Dismantling Crime
Popular committees in several Arab towns have confronted crime by publishing lists of armed gang members—names well known to the police and Israeli security services, yet left at large without accountability. The Palestinian Arab public’s core demand remains clear: confiscate weapons from the crime networks ravaging the community.
This popular stance constitutes an indictment of the Israeli state and its security and police apparatuses, which are seen as invested in the functional role of the crime system and complicit in it—serving policies designed to weaken Palestinians inside Israel and deter them from forming an effective political lever for the Palestinian cause.
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Organized Crime and Its Institutional Function
Research by Israeli scholar Eilat Maoz indicates the existence of mafia-style criminal organizations backed by the state, whose structures and leaders are well known to it. She identifies six major organizations responsible for around 30% of killings, alongside roughly thirty affiliated or emerging armed gangs.
These organizations exert territorial and demographic control, engage in partnerships with police elements, recruit soldiers to obtain weapons from army depots, and penetrate the economy by dominating municipalities, tenders, education, services, contracting, and money laundering.
Drawing on comparative studies, Maoz concludes:
“When a capitalist market and private ownership exist, and the state and legal-administrative enforcement— including contract enforcement—are absent, the mafia emerges.”
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Intertwinement with State Agencies and Weapons
There are notable partnerships between crime bosses and members of the Israeli police, extending to officers implicated in transnational money laundering. During the war on Gaza, arms trafficking expanded significantly in both scale and sophistication. These organizations also operate in the West Bank, laundering money and recruiting individuals used to carry out assassinations inside the Green Line, facilitated by eased crossings despite restrictions imposed since October 2023.
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Crime Networks and the Smuggling of Goods into Gaza
The scandal surrounding the smuggling of goods into Gaza is a pivotal exposure of the functional role of crime within broader Israeli policies. Around seventeen prominent figures are implicated, including Bezalel Zini, brother of the current head of the Shin Bet. The indictment against Zini on charges of “aiding the enemy in wartime”—one of the gravest offenses under Israeli criminal law—reveals the depth of these affairs. Defense lawyers and some political figures argue these are not scandals in the conventional sense but deliberate policy.
This policy relies on Palestinian traders tied to Gaza war profiteers or armed militias—such as the “Abu Shabab” militia—in exchange for massive profits for all parties. Goods smuggled range from advanced mobile phones to cigarettes. Most damning is the smuggling of tens of thousands of Captagon pills into Gaza, which, according to right-wing political sources, serves a devastating psychological function—pressuring Gaza’s population toward displacement or compliance, thereby undermining any prospects of Palestinian collective existence in the Strip.
Overall, coercive policies follow a centralized pattern akin to Judaization or ethnic cleansing strategies—whether in the Negev and Area C of the West Bank, in settler “Hilltop Youth” violence and similar militias inside the Green Line (such as attacks in Jaffa and Beit She’an), or assaults on Arab bus drivers in Jerusalem. These official, semi-official, and unofficial practices collectively generate a condition of pervasive insecurity for Palestinians, driven by a governing mentality seeking to convert fear into political and social disengagement.
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Sustained Struggle and the Current Surge
Popular resistance to organized crime has never ceased. Committees across towns affected by killings and intimidation—particularly to protect schoolchildren targeted by gunfire—have held the Israeli authorities responsible, raising the alarm that lives are in danger.
The High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel has led this struggle, uniting all political currents and Arab local authorities, while parliamentary blocs raised the issue in the Knesset. Political voices have demanded full state responsibility for dismantling organized crime, protecting residents, and collecting an estimated half-million weapons.
This mirrors state action in the early 2000s, when police dismantled most Jewish crime organizations in Jewish cities, pushing remaining elements into Arab towns.
Despite mass protests, road blockades, conferences, and solidarity actions with victims’ families, eliminating organized crime requires state capacity and genuine political will—tasks beyond the reach of popular or political frameworks alone.
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Parliamentary and Governmental Shifts
During the 2021–2022 “Change Government” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, which relied on support from an Arab party (Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas), resources were allocated to combat organized crime, producing tangible improvements and reduced crime rates.
After the government’s collapse in December 2022 and the rise of the Netanyahu–Smotrich–Ben-Gvir coalition, crime was effectively removed from the central agenda, leading to an unprecedented surge in violence and deep public frustration—rooted in state complicity, particularly by the police.
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How the Public Overcame Despair
In response to despair, grassroots, women’s, and youth initiatives emerged after each killing, coordinating across neighboring towns to pressure police to fulfill their legal duties.
The major turning point came on 19 January 2026 in Sakhnin, when Ali Zubeidat, owner of three shops, closed them for three days in defiance of extortion. This sparked a mass uprising, spreading to hundreds of businesses and culminating in a demonstration of around 100,000 Palestinian Arabs in Sakhnin, followed by a 70,000-strong rally in Tel Aviv, with significant Jewish participation.
These events marked a popular reversal of despair—posing a stark choice: “Either crime fragments us as a society, or we dismantle it.”
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Political Horizon and Conclusions
The current mobilization represents a pivotal moment with the potential to amplify the political role of Palestinian citizens of Israel, partially freeing it from intensified repression imposed since October 2023 amid the Gaza genocide.
It reveals innovative forms of collective struggle—community protection mechanisms, economic pressure, civil disobedience, and international advocacy—while underscoring that organized crime is not merely criminal but a functional instrument of state policy aimed at fragmenting Palestinian society and neutralizing its political weight.
The ruling coalition bears direct responsibility for this escalation, which cannot be reduced to one minister alone. The entanglement between crime networks and state structures intersects with demographic engineering, Judaization projects, and broader geopolitical schemes.
Palestinians inside Israel face an existential equation: either organized crime dismantles them, or they dismantle it and its governing system.
Any attempt to separate the fight against crime from the Palestinian national cause is politically and morally detrimental. This struggle is inseparable from Israeli policies toward Palestinians everywhere.
Ultimately, combating organized crime is a struggle to change Israeli policies. Sustained local, Israeli, and international engagement—including recourse to international bodies concerned with organized crime—has become an urgent necessity.
References (English Version – Complete List)
Hebrew / Israeli Sources
1. Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
Arab Violence and Crime in Israel: Trends and Implications.
Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University.
2. Gross, Jacob (2024).
Ombudsman: 95% of Police Probes of Violent Crime in Arab Areas Yield No Charges.
The Times of Israel.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ombudsman-95-of-police-probes-of-violent-crime-in-arab-areas-yield-no-charges/
3. Pfeffer, Anshel (2025).
Crime in Israel: Arab Sector Unrest and Police Response.
The Jerusalem Post.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/crime-in-israel/article-793830
4. Ynet News (2025).
Rising Crime in Arab Communities and Its Social Implications.
Ynet News.
https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/hyq571ihje
5. Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) (2025).
It’s Time Israel Recognizes Arab Sector Homicides as a National Crisis.
JPPI.
It’s time Israel recognizes Arab sector homicides as a national crisis
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Arabic / Regional Sources
6. Al Jazeera Mubasher (2025).
The Escalation of Crime in Arab Society in Israel: A Contextual Political Analysis.
Al Jazeera Mubasher.
https://www.aljazeeramubasher.net/news/2025/9/7/when-crime-becomes-an-official-policy-escalation
7. Arab Citizens of Israel Task Force (ACI Task Force) (2025).
Arab Citizens Protest State Neglect of Crime: Community Data and Findings.
ACI Task Force.
https://www.acitaskforce.org/resource/arab-citizens-protest-crime-neglect/
8. Noon Post (2025).
Organized Crime and Social Policy in Palestinian Society inside Israel.
Noon Post.
https://www.noonpost.com/315049/
9. Quds Press (2025).
Security Conditions in Palestinian Arab Communities inside the Green Line.
Quds Press.
الجريمة المنظمة في الوسط العربي.. الوجه غير المُعلن لسياسة التهجير في الداخل الفلسطيني
