The ‘Israel is Arming’ Campaign: A recipe for rising crime and violence against and among Palestinians

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the number of Palestinian Arabs in Israel killed due to structural developments in organized crime and the wave of internal violence engulfing Palestinian society. The process is taking place in a context of an intentional lack of state regulation and complicity by the law enforcement agencies responsible for controlling the proliferation of murders. The stockpile of legal and licensed firearms within Jewish Israeli society, in the hands of individuals and located in military camps, constitutes a primary source of the supply of weapons and ammunition to Palestinian society.

Since October 7th, 2023, Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has implemented measures to loosen policies and procedures governing gun licensing and firearm ownership, accelerating the armament of Israel’s Jewish society, while exploiting the prevailing state of panic and fear.  

This approach is consistent with the wider goals of imposing heightened Jewish control over Arab Palestinians within the Green Line, in addition to those in the West Bank and Gaza, and further regulating their behavior, as part of the practice of Jewish supremacy. Inside the Green Line, this program strives to further entrench Jewish supremacy by mobilizing Jewish society through a heightened sense of emergency, while arming a significant proportion of Jewish civilians, predominantly men, equipping and preparing them to suppress their Arab counterparts. In addition, experience has shown that mass civilian armament through loosened licensing procedures is highly likely to lead to an increase in the number of weapons transferred unlawfully to criminals or criminal organizations operating within Arab society, and thus to an upsurge in murder and crime rates, and in the number of casualties.

The Israeli security establishment as a major supplier of weapons used for criminal activity

Over the course of the past decade (2014-2023), the proliferation of firearms among Palestinians inside the Green Line has left more than a thousand victims in its wake, including women and children. The vast majority of these victims, however, are men between 20 and 35 years of age.

Many unlawful firearms end up in the hands of Palestinian citizens in Israel. Most of them are in the possession of criminal groups, who acquire them by stealing them from military or civilian sources, including thefts from individuals and private security companies. Around 200 firearms are acquired in this way from civilian sources yearly, as well as large quantities of ammunition. The rest are purchased from soldiers who trade them for their own personal profit on the black market. Weapons are also obtained through theft and trafficking, particularly from reserves stored at Israeli military bases located throughout the country, and which are not stringently supervised. Thus, for example, in 2020, over 102,000 pieces of ammunition were stolen from the Israeli military, including bullets, grenades, missiles and bombs, in addition to 103 guns[1].

Laxly-guarded military training zones are an easily accessible source of weapons, especially in the Naqab (Negev) region and the Golan Heights, where ammunition is often left behind after the end of training sessions. Ammunition may also be stolen directly from soldiers who fail to follow security protocols and leave their weapons unattended, or from military stockpiles, as well as from Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

 The Israeli army is a main source of weapons and ammunition supplying Arab organized crime.  Another source is robberies from houses and vehicles, especially lightweight pistols, which can be privately held by civilians without any state oversight once they are granted this kind of license, as stated in an official response sent to the Gun Free Kitchen Tables Coalition by the National Security Minister in July 2023.  This was also among the findings of the annual report of the Israeli State Comptroller for 2021, entitled “Illegal Weapons Possession and Shooting Incidents in the Arab Community and in the Mixed Cities”. 

Loosened eligibility criteria and zero oversight increase armed chaos

A full picture of today’s small arms proliferation in Israel can only be formed through an understanding of the situation as it stood before October 7th, clarifying how political and security events such as ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ were exploited to push for policies facilitating the distribution and proliferation of firearms among male Jewish citizens. The call to arms has also been expanded to include Jewish women. The distribution of ‘legal’ weapons implemented by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, following ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’, carried out by Hamas, and the genocidal war on Gaza, waged by Israel, has negatively impacted Palestinians in Israel, and those under occupation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Control of their lives, displacement and dispossession are being further entrenched through intimidation at gunpoint, and often their actual murder by settlers and other Israeli citizens, as well as soldiers. These impacts are visible in the sharp increase in the number of Palestinian deaths in the West Bank, and in the violence perpetuated by armed settlers.

 In recent years, the Ministry of National Security has submitted several bills to amend the eligibility criteria for a civilian gun license under Israel’s Firearms Law and through secondary legislation of regulations, towards the gradual acceleration of a process that has been underway since the era of former Minister of Public Security in 2015, Gilad Erdan. The most recent was a bill originally proposed by Ben-Gvir in June 2023. Days after Hamas attacked, he sought to exploit the widespread sense of trauma and the state of emergency, and his proposed measures were approved by the relevant parliamentary committees on October 15th, 2023, thereby enacting the mass civilian armament of Jewish society into Israeli law. Under the pretext of “security considerations”, the criteria for obtaining a civilian gun license were dramatically altered and eased without any professional discussion, in service of Ben-Gvir’s declared political agenda of strengthened Jewish supremacy. This administrative, undemocratic move drew sharp criticism, including from the press. The Legal Advisor to the Committee for Interior Affairs (a representative of the Ministry of Justice), argued that the new criteria, put in place for an indeterminate period, had not been subject to serious debate, and consequently constituted an abuse of power by the Parliamentary Committee for National Security during wartime.[2] 

Some of the key measures introduced by the amended regulations include a lowered level of military training required for a civilian gun license; a reduced period of military service required from applicants for a gun license; expanded eligibility categories, extended, for instance, to individuals from farmers’ families rather than farmers only; And automatic extension of private gun licenses.   

In addition to expediting the process of obtaining a private gun license, the Ministry of National Security has formed large numbers of “community security squads”. Municipalities and various local communities have organized armed squads, in coordination with, and encouraged by, the ministry and the police and/or the army, and in some cases independently. Firearms are distributed to volunteer recruits or to military reservists who carry out reserve duty in these squads.

Community security squads are welcoming almost everyone, in the absence of clear guidelines or governing legislation, and their ranks have also been swelled by people who hold racist views. These squads pose a serious challenge in particular in the mixed cities, where both Palestinian Arabs and Jews reside.

Since October 7th, Israel’s Palestinian citizenry has been subject to collective condemnations by the police, and experienced unprecedented levels of persecution by Jewish civilian groups and institutions, including employers, universities, hospitals and public service providers. In addition, Palestinian activists from Israel, both men and women, have been personally persecuted by Jewish colleagues at work, by neighbors in mixed cities, by municipal officials and mayors, and in university classrooms, as have artists, academics and lawyers, among others.[3] 

Death Penalty as Widespread Practice

In March 2024, the 25th Knesset approved a preliminary reading of a proposal known as the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law. The bill has not yet come up for further readings. At the same time, in the military court system, the death penalty can already be imposed on those who have been defined as terrorists, if the decision in the military court is unanimously accepted. To this day, the military system refrains from imposing a death sentence.

At the same time, in practice - in Israel and in the West Bank - a growing number of men and women are being executed without trial, even without legislation or express sentences, with tacit consent.

The paucity of indictments and the conspicuous absence of significant punishments for those who shoot to death a suspect, a thief or an assailant, have already established a widespread practice of shooting to death as a substitute for delay, investigation and arrest.

Some of those who are executed are indeed attackers who are shot during an attack. The protection of the law applies, or should apply, to these as well. An assailant who is shot, injured and does not pose a threat - or poses a reduced threat, is allegedly protected by law against what is called in the military "verification of killing", an action performed during or after a battle, whose purpose is to verify that an enemy soldier who appears to be injured is undoubtedly killed and therefore no longer poses a threat to the fighting forces. When the action is done during a battle, it is customary to justify it by the fact that the fighting force, which cannot engage in capturing wounded enemy soldiers, is not ready to suffer losses from an enemy left unattended. But it seems that a killing verification has become the pattern of action taken also in non-military situations such as the case of Abd Elohab Halaila who on July 4, 2023, a few minutes after running over and stabbing eight passersby, was hit and then killed by a citizen carrying a weapon, who continued to shoot him even after the latter laid "neutralized" on the road in northern Tel Aviv.

Another significant part of those executed are not attackers but only suspects. But in most cases no procedure of comprehensive inquiry and investigation is held, or is not accessible to the public, following the shooting to death, to determine if there was indeed an actual attack. Recently, two members of the Tel Aviv City Council, Shula Keshet and Moriah Shlomoth, insisted on this, when they demanded from the municipality an in-depth investigation into the circumstances of an incident in which a municipal employee was shot to death. It seems that the public will never know whether Yusuf Abu-Jaber, who was shot to death on Charles Clair Promenade on April 7 this year, was an assailant who intentionally ran over 8 pedestrians (one of whom died from his injuries), or an unlucky driver who got into a serious accident.

The operating pattern of shooting instead of arrest - or in more direct terms: execution without trial, along with blanket immunity for the Jewish shooter or a shooter from the security forces - has established itself for years in the West Bank and also within the country, first of all when the shooting victims are Palestinians – among other things, the shooting to death of 13 unarmed Palestinians, most of them Israeli citizens, during demonstrations in October 2000. The executions are first and foremost of Palestinians - both in the territories and within the territory of the state, both women and men. They are anchored in the racist and distinct devaluation of Palestinian lives in the Jewish state of supremacy.

Along with this, the sweeping permission to shoot with immunity on the grounds of the assertion that the shooters had already memorized well - "I sensed danger to my life" - also applies to Jewish victims. in 2019-2023 nine cases of extrajudicial executions of the disabled, mentally challenged and people on the autism spectrum were documented. All were shot to death by security forces trained to make arrests even in complex situations and aware of the law. Three of the nine dead were Palestinians. The other six were Jews, all from dispossessed population groups or "marginal groups" according to the labeling common in the commercial media. At the junction between belonging to a relatively dispossessed group, even if it belongs to the Jewish community, which has privileges in the country - including the right to be arrested and not killed - and belonging to a group that faces a physical, emotional or mental disability, the risk of death by gunshot is increased and real.

Conclusion

Within mere months, Ben-Gvir’s policy of facilitating and increasing civilian armament has, so far, placed more than tens of thousands of newly-acquired firearms in the hands of members of Israel’s Jewish population. In some cases, in keeping with Ben-Gvir’s declarations and aims, these weapons have been aimed at Palestinians inside the Green Line.

According to testimonies reported on social media and recorded by Gun-Free Kitchen Tables, some community security squads conduct field patrols to hunt down Arab citizens. Add to that the direct and indirect damage inflicted on vulnerable sections of Israeli society, as per statements made by the Union of Social Workers that the presence of weapons eradicates personal safety and security within families and homes, amidst the scourge of domestic violence.

Furthermore, weapons have been used to intimidate activists, male and female, in Jewish peace movements opposed to the genocidal war. Predictably, these weapons will also lead to a rise in suicide rates, as medical authorities have cautioned.

The chief concern, based on past experience, is that growing numbers of weapons may reach the hands of Arab criminal organizations through various means, and exacerbate violence and crime within Arab society. It will be some time before state authorities update their databases, calculate official victim counts, and tally the number of stolen civilian and military firearms conveyed to criminal, largely Arab, organizations after October 7th, 2023.

While the future may look bleak, it remains as imperative to challenge both the spread of firearms and the wider context of militarization. Readily and widely-accessible firearms are destroying social systems, and eroding the foundations of democracy and healthy relationships. Their proliferation is pushing a national minority, caught between the hammer of the fascist Israeli regime and the anvil of criminal gangs, into a bewildering state of personal insecurity and stunted social development, with the full complicity of Israel’s security establishment.

This Artikel is based on the position paper of Mada al-Carmel The ‚Israel is Arming‘ Campaign: A Recipe for steigende Kriminalität und Gewalt unter Palästinensern, which was published in April 2024 (in Englisch); And on the article Shoot to kill – „I had the feeling that my life was in danger“ (in Hebrew), which was published on August 2024 at the HaOkets Digital Platform.

Anmerkungen

[1] Response of the army to a Freedom of Information Act request filed as part of a petition to the Tel Aviv District Court, Administrative Petition no. 42805-12-21, Gun Free Kitchen Tables v. The Israel Defense Forces.

[2] Shpigel, Noa, Shimoni, Ran. (October 16, 2023). “National Security Committee approves regulations that make it easier to obtain weapon licenses”. (Hebrew).

[3] Position paper. (November 2023). “The War on Gaza: The policy of silencing, intimidation and persecution towards Palestinians in Israel”. Mada al-Carmel