Fighting crime in Arab communities is no job for the Shin Bet

There is no question that organized crime in Israel’s Arab society has become one of the gravest domestic crises the country has ever faced.

Hundreds of people have been murdered in recent years—nearly a thousand since the current government took office. Criminal organizations have entrenched themselves in entire communities. Families live under constant fear. For years, the State of Israel has failed in its most fundamental obligation: protecting the lives and personal security of its own citizens.

Precisely because this crisis is so severe, the government’s reported intention to place the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) at the center of the fight against organized crime is one of the most dangerous public policy initiatives it has advanced in recent years.

This is because this proposal is not fundamentally about policing, but about citizenship. For the first time in decades, Israel would be assigning responsibility for addressing the principal civilian crisis affecting one national minority not to the police, but to the country’s domestic security service. That is far more than an administrative decision and amounts to a de facto reclassification of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

A community that should be protected through ordinary civilian institutions would instead be placed under the authority of an agency whose statutory mission is to defend the state against terrorism, espionage, subversion, and threats to the democratic order. In constitutional terms, this represents a strategic downgrading of the civic status of Israel’s Palestinian minority.

Organized crime, however brutal and deadly, is not terrorism. Crime syndicates seek money, power, and control. They are no different in that respect from the Italian mafia, the Mexican cartels, or organized crime groups in the United States. They are not attempting to redraw borders or advance an ideological cause.

That distinction is fundamental because democracies deliberately separate criminal law enforcement from national security. The police exist to protect citizens from criminals. Security agencies exist to protect the state from enemies. Confusing those two missions inevitably changes how the state defines the people it governs.

Redefining organized crime in Arab communities as a national security threat does more than expand the Shin Bet’s responsibilities. It transforms Palestinian citizens of Israel from citizens whom the state is obligated to protect into a population from which the state increasingly seeks protection.

For a quarter of a century, since the events of October 2000, successive Israeli governments—despite many shortcomings and inconsistencies—have gradually attempted to replace the old security paradigm with a civic one. Multi-year development plans, investments in education and infrastructure, efforts to reduce socio-economic disparities, and programs to combat violent crime all rested on a simple premise: Palestinian citizens of Israel are citizens, and their problems are civilian problems requiring civilian solutions.

This proposal reverses that trajectory. Instead of asking how the state can better protect its Arab citizens, it asks how the state can better protect itself from them.

Supporters of the proposal argue that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary tools. They point, correctly, to the police’s repeated failures and to intelligence capabilities available to the Shin Bet but not to ordinary law enforcement. Those arguments deserve to be taken seriously.

The police have indeed failed. Years of neglect, misplaced priorities, and ineffective enforcement have allowed organized crime to flourish. Many Palestinian citizens themselves have become so desperate that they are willing to consider measures they would once have rejected. But none of this justifies abandoning one of the basic organizing principles of a democratic state.

If the police require additional investigative powers, the Knesset should grant them those powers. If intelligence cooperation is necessary, mechanisms for such cooperation can be established.

What should not happen is transforming the Shin Bet into parallel police force whose primary operational arena is one national minority. Israeli law itself recognizes this distinction. The General Security Service Law assigns the Shin Bet responsibility for preventing terrorism, espionage, subversion, and threats to state security and the democratic order. Organized crime, however serious, is not part of its statutory mission.

If the government believes that mission should change, it should do so honestly. It should amend the law, explain why such an extraordinary expansion of power is necessary, and clarify whether the Shin Bet’s new mandate would apply only to organized crime in Arab communities or equally to Jewish organized crime.

The proposal also raises practical questions for which no convincing answers have been offered. Who would lead investigations—the Police Commissioner or the Director of the Shin Bet? Who would determine which cases remain with the police? How would mixed Jewish-Arab criminal organizations be handled? Would Jewish suspects remain under police authority while their Arab associates were investigated by the Shin Bet?

Beyond the constitutional questions lies an equally important practical concern. Effective policing depends on public trust. Victims must report crimes. Witnesses must testify. Community leaders must cooperate. Informants must believe that the authorities ultimately serve their interests.

The Shin Bet operates according to precisely the opposite institutional logic. It is built on secrecy, intelligence gathering, and suspicion rather than transparency and partnership. Introducing that model into the daily relationship between the state and Arab citizens risks destroying what little trust in law enforcement still exists in communities where cooperation is already fragile.

The irony is striking: After years of failing to protect the personal security of Palestinian citizens, the government now seeks to use that very failure as justification for fundamentally redefining their relationship with the state.

The proposed expansion of the Shin Bet’s role is also best understood in a broader constitutional context. Eight years ago, the Nation-State Law marked a constitutional turning point by redefining the symbolic place of Arab citizens within the State of Israel. Many Palestinian citizens understood it as declaring that they were citizens, but not equal partners.

The current proposal goes much further. The Nation-State Law primarily affected constitutional symbolism. Entrusting the Shin Bet with responsibility for the principal civilian crisis facing Arab society would reshape the everyday relationship between the state and its Palestinian citizens.

Together, these measures point in the same strategic direction: away from an inclusive concept of citizenship and toward an increasingly security-based conception of Israel’s Palestinian minority.

For nearly two decades, Israeli governments have attempted—however imperfectly—to integrate Palestinian citizens more fully into Israel’s civic sphere. This proposal would reverse that historic trajectory.

Institutionally and psychologically, it would blur the distinction between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living under military occupation beyond the Green Line. It would signal that even when Palestinian citizens are the primary victims of a civilian crisis, the state continues to view them through the prism of national security rather than equal citizenship.

If Israel entrusts its domestic security service with policing the principal civilian crisis affecting one national minority, it will have done far more than adopt a new enforcement policy. It will have redrawn the constitutional boundaries of citizenship itself. That would not be remembered merely as a tactical response to organized crime , but as a strategic turning point in the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel.