Op-Ed: Violence in the Arab Society

It seemed certain that violence had become a phenomenon in the Arab community in the country, rather it had become one of the distinctive and dangerous phenomena in it.

It is noted that it has increased dramatically since the beginning of 2000 and immediately after the suppression of the uprising of the Palestinian people at home and in the West Bank, when despair seeped into the hearts of Arab youth, and they began to live in a vicious circle without finding any looming solutions to their life problems. Young people did not set their sights on any political, economic or social goals.

It seems that the lack of Arab political leadership or the weakness of this leadership is one of the factors that brought society into this vicious circle, which began to permeate and develop rapidly in a capitalist society that sanctifies money and economic freedom, which began to seem difficult and out of reach for these young people.

At the same time, Israeli society developed widely towards capitalism and absolute economic freedom and took a course towards globalization and integration into the global economy.

Large segments of Israeli society enjoyed this economic recovery, and an economic middle class in Jewish society began to take shape, while in this same period of time large segments of Arab society retreated and were no longer part of the general economic community, to be on the poverty line. While the percentage of the Arab population in the country reached 22%, their percentage lying on the poverty line reached about 50%. We can add the fierce economic policy of persecution pursued by successive Israeli governments towards Arab citizens, including with regard to restricting housing, building and licensing spaces in Arab villages and cities, as an important factor in tightening the neck of poverty on the necks of Arab society.

At the same time that the governments of Israel began the process of distributing the population of the Jews from the center to the suburbs and the outskirts of the Galilee, the Triangle and the Negev, they began to thrust the Arab population into ghettos in these villages and cities, and used an iron fist related to preventing the expansion of these areas and used a strict demolition policy such as the Kamenetz Law, where it is considered This is the only law of its kind in the world in which Arab homes are demolished under the pretext of not obtaining a permit.

This policy of restriction had the greatest impact, which led to the spread and spread of poverty and the escape of tens of thousands of Arab youth towards an unknown economic and life future that lacked any professional or scientific frameworks for these youth, in addition to the demographic increase in the Arab population to reach 2.2 million out of 9 Millions of people, which is the population of Israel. And at a time when many young people did not find the correct economic professional life path, the slide towards violence and violent internal strife accelerated, which has killed annually since 2010 about 1,500 people, or more than 120 deaths per year.

And after the signs of a new globalization appeared in the Arab society, represented by a rapid decline in the authority of the father and the head of the family, new phenomena of violence increased, such as family and tribal conflicts, which appeared evident in every village and city and left new victims incurred by this society, which was once a conservative society par excellence.
The shape of the Arab village and city and the lack of a strong local authority or municipality controlling local cultural, educational and economic matters were also among the factors hindering keeping pace with development and drawing up plans related to building the new Arab man. The Arab masses made a mistake when they continued to elect incompetent people over decades, so that they had a decisive role in delaying the Arab society, because they do not have the foundations and means to walk with the pace of modern societies. Despite this, our society continues to put them on the front lines.

In the face of these structural and fundamental changes in a country that looks down on the Arab citizen, especially in the field of media, state institutions, and the police, the National Law that was enacted several years ago clearly recognized that Arab citizens are second-class citizens and could be third-class or more, and in this article I will not I focus on the policy of discrimination, but rather on its consequences, with regard to the escalation of violence in Arab society. In early April 2023, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir leaked a secret conversation with Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai, in which they talked about violence in the Arab sector. Among what the commissioner said is that the nature of Arabs is violence and killing, and we cannot do much to prevent that; As for Bin Ghfir, his goal is clear, which is to gain governmental and public support in order to establish an armed national guard that roams the country north and south and mainly targets Arabs. As for the commissioner-general, his goals are different. He does not do anything to curb crime in the Arab sector, but rather can help fuel it. In an interview in mid-April 23, Shabtai said that the police are primarily interested in policing the Jewish community in the first place, and then preserving the widespread protests throughout the country; That is, violence in the Arab sector is not one of its priorities. If, for example, a double murder occurred in the Triangle or the Negev, the police would come after some time to record its report on this incident, but they do not care and do not make an effort to investigate and solve the mystery of the crime because it affects the spending of budgets in other places in the center. The Jew, so that the Arab community remains languishing and suffering from the escalation of this scourge.

Another aspect that researchers deal with in the issue of increasing violence in the Arab sector is a comparative analysis. America, for example, pursued in the early sixties a harsh policy towards the black American community when it flooded them with weapons, which increased the killings there, and this continued until the early eighties when the black community raised its hands completely in front of the white American regime. Towards the Arab minority, with everything related to the increase in violence and its victims, and the impasse to stop it. .

But the certain inevitable result is that Israel, through the increase of this violence in the Arab milieu, has achieved complete inferiority towards the Arabs in Israeli society, so that the Hebrew news bulletins start with killings in the Negev, the Galilee and the Triangle, and there are Israeli journalists appointed for this purpose and follow up the numbers of dead and the places of violence, but they do not They do anything to stop this scourge, as the Arab public wakes up daily to injuries and killings between criminal gangs and victims who are killed by mistake as well.

In the face of the exacerbation of this phenomenon, we do not see any local Arab movement to confront it rigorously by the heads of local councils, municipalities and Arab representatives regardless of their party affiliations, and civil society associations who must work on finding clear-cut strategies and seek the help of researchers and experts in crime and society, and work in a comparative research manner. With phenomena that occurred in other places in the world, they also have to meet and come up with quick results to confront this phenomenon at the local, governmental and global levels.