When Will the Lives, and Deaths, of Palestinian Citizens of Israel Actually Matter? - Opinion - Haaretz.com
It was five in the morning on a Friday when gunshots ripped through the silence of our neighborhood. Like many Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, I've developed a reflex to freeze whenever I hear that sound, but fear for my younger brother jolted me out of bed. At the exact same moment, he ran out of his room, both of us rushing to check on each other.
Instead of following the instinct of self-protection, we did what too many of us end up doing: We looked out the window to see where the shots were coming from. The sound was so loud that we thought it was directed at us. It wasn't. It was directed at our next-door neighbors, whose only "crime" was refusing to pay extortion money to local criminals.
Outside, two armed men were shooting at the house. One sprayed bullets at the family home; the other pointed his gun toward anyone who dared to step outside. A neighbor tried to shout at them to stop – they immediately fired in his direction to silence him. We all watched in terror. Nobody could intervene.
Much later, the police showed up. They collected the bullets, took testimonies and left.
You might think that's where it ends. That this is a democratic country governed by the rule of law, where even criminals might fear consequences. But less than 24 hours later, the attackers came back with reinforcements. This time, the gunfire was louder, harder, longer – like artillery. The father next door screamed for them to stop, desperate to protect his children, as the criminals targeted their bedroom and their cars. Any movement outside could have turned this into a massacre.
Twenty minutes after the gunmen disappeared, the police finally arrived. Two officers. No urgency. No sense that an attempted murder had just taken place. Unlike the dozens of police cars armed to the teeth that show up to demolish a Palestinian home or arrest someone over a Facebook post, this time they strolled in as if responding to a neighborhood catfight.
When neighbors stepped outside to support the victims, the officers' priority was not catching the shooters, but dispersing "irrelevant" bystanders, as if our presence was the problem. As if their entire lack of effort and empathy wasn't the most relevant and insulting thing at that moment.
A man watching protesters march against government neglect and organized crime, in the northern city of Umm al Fahm in February.Credit: Fadi Amun
We live in fear, and the state treats it like background noise.
This is not an isolated story. It's a pattern. Since 2018, crime in Arab towns inside Israel has continued to grow more brazen and more deadly, yet the police response remains dangerously apathetic. Arab citizens make up just over one-fifth of the population but the majority of murder victims. In 2023 alone, 244 Arab citizens were killed – the deadliest year on record. This year so far, the killings have already surpassed 200 deaths.
In Jewish communities, police solve around 70-80 percent of murders. Meanwhile, in Arab communities, the clearance rate often hovers around 20 percent. In 2023, it dropped to an astonishingly poor 10.5 percent. These numbers speak volumes. The state has the capacity to act decisively when it wants to – but it chooses not to when the victims are Arab.
Officials like to blame the community for "not cooperating," ignoring the reality they helped create. People are afraid to testify because they know the police won't protect them. They've watched for decades as organized crime flourished unchecked, illegal weapons proliferated and extortion became routine. Police didn't step in when the first warning signs appeared. Instead, they treated this violence as an "internal Arab problem," not a national crisis.
When it comes to raiding homes, suppressing protests or demolishing buildings in Arab communities, the police are swift and aggressive. But when families are targeted by gunmen in the middle of the night, their response is late, minimal and indifferent.
Protest in Jerusalem against the soaring levels of violent crime within Arab communities in Israel, and the lack of police or government interventionCredit: Olivier Fitoussi
This failure is political, not logistical. For years, Palestinian citizens have been framed as a security threat rather than as equal citizens with rights. Police forces are structured to monitor us, not protect us. Intelligence agencies track our social media posts more carefully than they track the illegal firearms used in the vast majority of murders.
New police stations have been built in some Arab towns in recent years, but without genuine community trust or adequate staffing, they are little more than a façade. When people see officers standing idly by after an attempted murder, the message is clear: You are on your own.
And so, communities are left to navigate a deadly landscape where organized crime holds power and the state looks away. Every gunshot at 5 A.M. is not just an attack on one home – it's an attack on the notion of equality, on the idea that our lives matter as much as anyone else's.
While Israel may have failed to ethnically cleanse Palestinians in Gaza during its genocidal war, it is succeeding in a different kind of destruction inside Israel and the West Bank – a slow suffocation through neglect, violence and bureaucracy. Bureaucracy becomes the excuse for inaction: Files pile up while murder cases remain unsolved, and official statements replace accountability.
Social Equality Minister May Golan, left, conversing with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir at the Knesset in Jerusalem in July.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
Instead of addressing that failure, Israel's Social Equality Minister May Golan – who is herself under criminal investigation for bribery, fraud and breach of trust – is pushing to expand her authority over a new program to fight crime in Arab society. As Haaretz reported last week, Golan has been working to transfer funding from other ministries to the police and National Security Ministry to establish new police units, while diverting budgets originally allocated to the Arab community's five-year development plan.
"This is an attempt to transfer funds from the Arab community to the police," a senior official at a government ministry told Haaretz. The irony is hard to miss: While families mourn victims of unsolved murders, the government's proposed "solution" comes from a minister under criminal investigation whose plan may strip Arab communities of the resources meant to uplift them in the first place.
But this is not inevitable. The same state that boasts world-class intelligence and security capabilities could dismantle the criminal networks terrorizing Arab communities – if it wanted to. It could solve murders, protect witnesses and target illegal weapons with the same intensity it directs toward political surveillance.
Until it does, Palestinian citizens will continue to live in fear, counting the seconds between the sound of gunfire and the arrival of a police car that may or may not show up.
We are supposedly equal citizens of Israel. We are equally entitled to safety, justice and dignity. But every indifferent police response, every unsolved murder, every bullet collected and bagged without consequences tells us otherwise.
Two hours later, an ambulance finally came.