When the State Neglects
- Ayala Shalev
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
If, in the face of the wave of protests we have all been witnessing over the past two weeks in the Arab society in Israel, you shrug your shoulders and say, “That’s Arabs for you, they’re violent,” it might be time to check your racism index. These protests come after years of neglect and abandonment, while crime claims the lives of men, women, and children almost every single day.
When the State Neglects
Ayala Shalev
We have all grown accustomed to the framing of crime and violence in Arab society as an internal, sectoral problem, one that belongs to the community itself. How convenient it is to remove responsibility from the state and simply blame the victim. But the truth is that the crime we see today is a direct outcome of long-standing government policy, especially of what the state has chosen not to do: an accumulation of neglect: economic, planning-related, educational, and enforcement-related. In practice, the state has retreated from its responsibility toward the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It did not invest in infrastructure, did not create jobs, blocked the expansion of towns, prevented industrial development, and neglected basic services. Into the vacuum created by this retreat stepped organized crime.
It is not that the State of Israel is incapable of enforcing the law, preventing crime, or overseeing what happens on the ground. We all live here with a relative sense of personal security – one that is steadily eroding, but that is another discussion. It is therefore impossible not to see that the same system that knows how to monitor, track, and punish when political or security interests are at stake chooses to look away when it comes to the lives of Arab citizens. In other words, the abandonment of Arab society is policy.
The body immediately responsible for law enforcement and the protection of civilians is, of course, the police. A common claim among the Jewish public is that the police “fail” to deal with crime in Arab society. But the real question is how much the police are actually trying. Over the past year, the number of people murdered in Arab society exceeded 250. That number is hard to grasp. Only about 40 of those cases were solved, which is also hard to comprehend, until one looks at reality on the ground. There is excessive enforcement when it comes to protests, construction, or expressions opposing government policy. But when it comes to protecting civilians’ lives, there is no enforcement and no serious effort to address criminal organizations. Again, it is impossible not to see that this is not accidental. It is policy.
The various government plans discussed over the years are largely an illusion. They were presented as investments and solutions, but in practice were implemented partially and slowly, if at all. Budgets were not transferred, impossible conditions were imposed – reflecting, at best, deep misunderstanding – and changes in government often led to their cancellation. At the same time, there were no comprehensive, structural programs that addressed root causes. The response was therefore destined to be partial and incapable of producing meaningful change.
Zooming Out: Occupation as an Organizing Principle
Throughout years of right-wing rule in Israel, Arab society has repeatedly served as a political punching bag: at times as a demographic threat, at times as a security problem, at times as a tool to scare voters, and today as a population openly framed as “terrorists.” From the regime’s perspective, this is convenient. Violence in Arab society does not threaten it, does not require policy change, and the Jewish public has internalized the idea that “this is just how it is,” failing to connect the dots to government policy and instead blaming the victim. The familiar image from election nights, where television panels exclude Arab parties from coalition calculations and then play with what remains, has become self-evident. As a result, Jewish society no longer sees Arab citizens as people entitled to security, but rather as a “problem.”
Within this framework, confusion often arises among Jewish Israelis regarding the identity and belonging of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel. To make sense of this confusion, we must start by acknowledging that there is a Palestinian people. Yes, surprising as that may sound to some. From there, we need to examine how the State of Israel has divided this people and structured its relationship with each group.
The policy of “divide and rule” is a core mechanism through which the state governs Palestinians as fragmented, weakened, and hierarchically ranked groups, rather than as a people with collective rights. There are Palestinian citizens of Israel (1948 Palestinians), who formally hold citizenship but face deep institutional discrimination in all areas of life. There are Palestinians in the West Bank (1967 Palestinians), living under direct military rule, without civil rights, fragmented into enclaves through settlements, checkpoints, and permit regimes. There are Palestinians in East Jerusalem, who are “residents” but not citizens, without the right to vote for the government or the Knesset, deprived by definition of political representation and therefore chronically neglected and constantly threatened. And there are Palestinians in Gaza, whose unbearable reality today hardly needs elaboration. Israel is sovereign over all four of these groups. The fragmentation it produces is a deliberate strategy designed to prevent solidarity, obstruct collective struggle, and enable Israel to claim in every arena that these are “different realities,” when in fact they are manifestations of the same logic of control, repression, and dispossession through varied means.
The abandonment of Arab society to violence and crime cannot be separated from the ongoing occupation. Occupation is not merely a regime applied beyond the Green Line. It is a governing mindset that views Palestinians as a threat to be managed rather than people to be protected. The same mechanisms of control through weakening, dismantling community structures, and deliberate avoidance of equal law enforcement operate against Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. The normalization of violence, of “cheap” human life, and of entire areas where the rule of law effectively does not exist, is a direct outcome of decades of military rule, during which the state learned that lack of governance can be just as effective as overt violence in implementing policy. This creates a single continuum: a military that acts against civilians, a police force accustomed to not seeing Palestinians as citizens with equal rights, a government that prefers managed chaos over civil equality, and a public trained not to ask questions. In this sense, police inaction that enables the surge of violence in Arab society is one of the forms occupation takes.
Occupation thus creates the logic that enables crime, both from the regime’s perspective and from that of the Jewish majority. A state that maintains violent, prolonged control over another People, that distinguishes between lives worthy of protection and lives that matter less, imports this logic inward, into the space within the Green Line.
Tarabin as-Sani'
And What Is the Role of the Jewish Public in All This?
First and foremost, the Jewish public must understand the broader picture, see events in context, and call things by their proper names. When we say “crime in Arab society,” we must remember that this framing is misleading, and not by accident. Crime in Arab society is the product of government policy. While the victims are overwhelmingly Arab, the problem belongs to all of us, long before the utilitarian argument that “eventually it will spill over into Jewish society.”
In the face of this abandonment, the struggle currently led by Arab society against violence and crime is not a “sectoral struggle.” It is an Israeli social struggle, a deep civic struggle over the very character of society in Israel. The Jewish public has a decisive role to play: choosing whether to remain a bystander enjoying relative quiet achieved at others’ expense, or to demonstrate genuine solidarity with a just struggle for security, life, and rights. Such solidarity means rejecting the story of “internal crime,” demanding equal responsibility from the state and the police, and understanding that the abandonment of Arab society is part of the same policy that weakens all civic struggles, dismantles collective voices, and deepens control through fear and chaos. When Jewish citizens support this struggle, they are not “helping Arabs.” They are defending the possibility of a functioning civil society, in which security is not the privilege of one group and violence is not a legitimate tool of governance. Basic, isn’t it?
And perhaps, just perhaps, such a shift in perception could lead to a broader one: recognizing the government’s failures toward all of us, its insistence on living by the sword even internally, and its refusal to pursue equality and justice that could ultimately bring, well, peace.
Tomorrow, Saturday, January 31, a demonstration led by the Arab public will take place against this deadly abandonment. A march will leave Museum Square at 6:00 PM and arrive at Habima Square, where the demonstration will begin at 7:30 PM. Come.
Ayala Shalev is the editor of That's About Us.
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