Every Citizen of Israel Deserves to Live in Safety |
Suppose you were in a neighborhood shopping area with your young children at 1100 in the morning and a young man on a motorcycle stops, pulls out a gun and fires into the air. Fida Nara Tabony, co-director of programs at the New Israel Fund and a resident of Nazareth, writes that this is commonplace in her community. But it should not be, not anywhere in Israel.
She writes: “Guns are everywhere. Crime and violence are all-pervasive. I am not being dramatic: People from Palestinian communities inside Israel go to the hospital for gunshot wounds at a rate that is six times higher than their Jewish neighbors. In just the first six weeks of 2026, 42 people have been murdered; that’s nearly one a day.”
Most of us living in Israel have interacted with enough members of the Israeli Arab community to know that, for the most part, our local Arab neighbors are not any more violent by nature than we are nor are they, for the most part, on the bottom of the economic ladder. Remember that approximately 21% of Israel’s population is Arab, totaling over 2 million people. This demographic includes Muslims, Christians, and Druze who are citizens, along with permanent residents in East Jerusalem. They constitute a significant minority, with the majority living in Arab-majority towns and cities, such as Rahat and Nazareth, to cite just two examples. So why so much violence?
Driving in those cities, it is........