Palestinian citizens of Israel: Between criminals and the criminally negligent

Last year was the deadliest on record for Palestinian citizens of Israel, with 252 of them murdered, including 23 women. Already this year, 27 members of this community have been killed — and there does not seem to be any sign of respite.

It is a truism that the state’s role is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens, all of them, without discrimination. This is one of the most basic tenets of the social contract between citizens and those who govern them. But when it comes to Palestinian citizens of Israel, the state has failed them for many years — and in a colossal and tragic way since the current government came to power more than three years ago.

A mixture of revulsion and exhaustion from living in constant fear has led ordinary Palestinian citizens of Israel to seek to conquer the terror. They have taken to the streets to protest what increasingly seem to be acts of deliberate incompetence by the government when faced with the duty to prevent an epidemic of murderous gun violence in their communities.

First, up to 100,000 people in Palestinian towns and villages took part in a general strike that culminated in a massive march through the northern city of Sakhnin. On Saturday, this was followed by a mass rally in Tel Aviv, where Muslims and Jews joined forces to demand that the government do what it is obliged to do and take positive action to stop these killings.

A mixture of revulsion and exhaustion has led ordinary Palestinian citizens of Israel to seek to conquer the terror

Yossi Mekelberg

The victims have been of all ages, male and female, and many of the killings have been carried out by criminal organizations. These groups terrorize locals in their attempts to extort protection money from businesses and recklessly kill innocent people, including bystanders.

Generally speaking, the homicide rate in Israel has substantially increased since the current government came to power in 2023, in both the Jewish and Palestinian communities. But staggeringly, the murder rate among the Palestinian citizens of Israel is 14 times that of the Jewish society and this is the consequence of government neglect, which one starts to suspect is deliberate.

During the short-lived Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government, the number of those killed in a year was down to 109 — still way too high but nevertheless the trajectory was downward instead of upward, as has been the case for the last three years, which suggests that this is not necessarily a coincidence. Handing the ministry in charge of the police to none other than Itamar Ben-Gvir, a person whose political career has been built on espousing racist, anti-Arab ideology, was reckless and to the detriment of the more than 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The authorities are not interested as long as the victims are Palestinian, which reflects an institutional and societal racism

Yossi Mekelberg

There are at least two disturbing layers to this sorry state of affairs. The first is that the law enforcement agencies and their political superiors are not interested in interfering with the rise of violence in Israeli society, including domestic violence, as long as the victims are Palestinian, which reflects an institutional and societal racism. One of the manifestations of this state carelessness is not only the insufficient measures taken to prevent the murders, but also the very low rate of bringing the culprits to justice, in comparison to the figures among Jewish society.

From the 252 homicide cases last year, in only 32 cases were charges brought, with 12 of these involving civilians killed by police. In similar cases among the Jewish society, 65 percent of the culprits were brought to justice. This combination of a much higher murder rate and an extremely low conviction rate is intolerable and only serves as an encouragement to the criminally violent elements in the community.

However, criminality and organized crime do not come out of nowhere. Capturing criminals and punishing them, as much as rehabilitating them, is necessary, but the root causes of the lure of a life of crime must be dealt with too. The Palestinians in Israel, who make up 20 percent of the entire population, are in principle — although not in practice — rightful citizens of Israel, but they are being failed by the state almost from the minute they are born.

According to the Israel Democracy Institute, nearly 40 percent of Palestinian families in Israel live below the poverty line and half of their children live in poverty. Despite improvements in recent years, those rates are more than twice as high as those in Jewish society. One cause of the higher poverty rate, which is also a contributory factor to the high level of crime, is underinvestment in education. This is considered one of the most effective tools to break the cycle of poverty, along with decent infrastructure and public services.

Add to this the lack of integration into the rest of the society for many in the community, the exclusion of their representatives in the Knesset from the centers of power and high unemployment among the youth, and the road to alienation and subsequent criminality for too many is relatively straightforward.

Beyond its alienation from the Jewish society, distrust of the police has become a significant obstacle to resolving crimes in the Palestinian community. Between the fear of criminal gangs and distrust of the police’s intentions, let alone their incompetence, the police always have difficulty finding anyone willing to share information with them. Moreover, the availability of arms and ammunition on both sides of the Green Line makes it unbearably easy to get hold of lethal weapons, which frequently end up in the hands of criminals who have little regard for other people’s lives.

As usual, the response by the Netanyahu government is the exact opposite of what is needed. Last year, it cut about $68.3 million of budget funding that had been allocated to social and educational programs for Palestinian citizens of Israel and transferred it to the internal security agency Shin Bet and the police, “for the purpose of combating crime in Arab society.” This act illustrates the bigotry and mindlessness of this government. Ironically, although not that shockingly considering the government’s anti-Arab rhetoric, this move was initiated by the minister for social equality and the minister of national security.

While policing is essential and urgently needs to be improved and enhanced, the government is treating the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories with the same disdain it shows for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It treats them all as a security issue instead of working to reverse decades of neglect and discrimination. In the meantime, the vast majority of the Palestinian community in Israel, which is not involved in crime, is trapped between criminals and criminally negligent authorities.

• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg