BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

Israeli police last week raided the Galilee home of a 60-year-old Israeli Arab woman activist who works in a hostel for abused women and organizes weekly protests against the tide of Arab-on-Arab murders that has afflicted Israeli Arab society these past two years.

The policemen claimed they were looking for illegal firearms, though after a thorough search came away only with two Palestinian flags and a magnetic sticker bearing Palestinian colors. According to the woman, the policemen frightened the children (grandchildren?) in the house, overturned cupboards, trampled on bedding and broke utensils, and one of the detectives accused her of “encouraging” terrorists.

When asked what police unit they belonged to, one replied: “We are Ben-Gvir’s police,” referring to the ultra-right-wing minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. The woman was taken to the Afula police station, questioned on suspicion of anti-Israeli “incitement” and “disturbing the peace,” and was then released on bail after her telephones were impounded.

The incident typified the state’s clampdown on the two-million-strong Israeli Arab minority since the October 7, 2023 surprise attack on southern Israel by the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group that ignited the following two years of war that ended in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire last October. In launching their attack, the Hamas leaders had hoped to trigger rebellion or at least a slew of attacks on Israel’s Jews by their Israeli Arab neighbors. Israel’s Arab citizens constitute some 21% of the Israeli population (not to be confused with the three million Arabs who are not citizens and live under Israeli military rule in the West Bank and the two million Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule).

Israel’s Arabs, descendants of the Arabs who stayed in Israeli territory at the end of the 1948 War, are trapped between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand they enjoy life in a democracy, with good health, education and social services, and continuously increasing prosperity. On the other, they feel the strong pull of family (all have family in the West Bank and Gaza), religion (Islam), and ethnic identity; forty and even thirty years ago, none identified as “Palestinians” – today, all, or most, do.

But no rebellion occurred and though there were a handful of terrorist attacks by Israeli Arabs which claimed half a dozen lives, the country’s Arab citizens remained almost completely quiescent during the two years of warfare. After a year or so into the war, several dozen Israeli Arabs mounted street protests, mainly in the mixed northern city of Haifa, calling for an end to Israel’s counter-offensive in the Gaza Strip. Police quickly dispersed the demonstrations and a few protesters were briefly detained.

The general post-October 7 quiescence of the Israeli Arab population was in large measure due to the immediate police and General Security Service (Shin Bet) clampdown on dissent and fears of arrest, according to Israeli government officials. But many Arabs may also have been disaffected by the atrocities the Hamas committed that day in the Israeli border settlements and the nearby Nova music festival, and some may have opposed the Hamas assault in principle.

But without doubt Israel’s Arab minority was cowed into silence by the thought that Israel’s Jews, among whom they lived and worked, would suspect them of disloyalty.

In the weeks after that October 7, Israeli police and Border Police rounded up and briefly jailed dozens of Arab political activists, artists, students and journalists on suspicion of “incitement” or “disturbing the peace,” and a few were sentenced by the courts to prison terms.

Immediately after October 7, Ben-Gvir warned of possible Israeli Arab “rebellion.” According to Amal Urabi, an Israeli Arab lawyer and publicist (Haaretz, 6 January 2026), Ben-Gvir was motivated precisely by a desire to foment such “rebellion” in order to have cause to treat Israel’s Arabs – whom he has long sought to expel from the country – like the Arabs of the occupied West Bank. In the West Bank these past two years Israeli settlers, largely backed by the IDF and police, have been beating and occasionally killing Arabs, stealing their herds and destroying their property, and uprooting small beduin and rural communities.

Urabi maintained that the Israeli government, led by Ben-Gvir, was now stepping up its efforts to humiliate and debase Israel’s Arab citizens - by withholding funds earmarked for their welfare and physically intimidating them – in order to deepen the Jewish-Arab divide. Urabi predicted that a major blow-up was likely.

Urabi was hinting at the two-week-long police “siege” of the beduin Negev settlement of Tarabin and the harassment of its 4,000 inhabitants, which ended last weekend. The police clampdown on Tarabin was triggered by raids on neighboring Jewish settlements, Gva’ot Bar, Mishmar Hanegev and Lehavim, where a number of cars were torched. The residents and police believe the raiders came from Tarabin. In general, Negev Beduin, including from Tarabin, have been harassing traffic along the roads with live fire and deliberately driving threateningly, rendering the roads unsafe.

While helicopters and surveillance drones flew overhead, some five hundred policemen “besieged” Tarabin, blocked the roads in and out, and briefly detained dozens of villagers for interrogation, seeking the arsonists and illegal weapons. The police found no weapons and apparently were unable to locate and arrest the arsonists, who apparently had gone into hiding. During the two weeks, with police vehicles driving in and out of the village sometimes playing loud music, young Arabs threw stones and the police responded with tear gas and stun grenades. One interrogator asked a 14-year-old whether he was “for or against” the state.

During the “siege” the police found a horse, whose theft from a neighboring Jewish settlement had triggered the operation against Tarabin, in a nearby beduin encampment.

The inhabitants accused the police of what amounted to collectively punishing them and said they felt “imprisoned.” During the “siege,” one (unarmed) Tarabin resident was shot dead by police who claimed he had moved threateningly as he opened the door to his home. He apparently had a criminal record and police said they suspected he was one of the arsonists. During the operation, police impounded cars and buggies and handed out fines or forced residents to pay unpaid utilities’ bills.

Haaretz Jewish columnist Zvi Barel suggested (7 January 2026) that the police “conquest” of Tarabin, accompanied by “terrorization” of the inhabitants, was designed as a “pilot” for future police raids on other Israeli Arab villages, with Ben-Gvir hoping that these would ultimately generate a Jewish-Arab “civil war.”

The irony is that in 2021 the right-wing leader Netanyahu had visited the village and drank coffee with the sheikhs, and 60% of the inhabitants in the subsequent general election voted Likud, Netanyahu’s party that heads the current coalition government.

During the police siege of Tarabin, Ben-Gvir, accompanied by journalists, did a well-photographed walkabout in the streets, claiming that here was proof of his successful imposition since taking office of “law and order” (meshilut, meaning literally governance) around the country.

But Ben-Gvir’s failure to achieve meshilut these past three years is glaringly obvious, especially when it comes to the Israeli Arab minority. The police say there are “tens of thousands” of illegal arms in the Arab sector and they generally stay out of Arab-populated areas, especially in the northern Negev, and the power and audacity of the Arab gangs – who thrive on protection rackets, weapons’ smuggling and drug-trafficking – has crested. So too, dramatically, has the country’s murder rate, especially in the Arab sector. In 2021, when the Likud and Ben-Gvir weren’t in power, there were 126 murders of Israeli Arabs by Israeli Arabs; in 2025 the number was 252 murdered Arabs out of a total of 302 Israelis murdered that year, with 12 more Arabs murdered since 1 January 2026; 23 of the Arabs murdered in 2025 were women. In 2023 there were 242 Arabs murdered by Arabs and in 2024, 233. Very few suspects have been apprehended or tried; only 40 of the 2025 cases have been “solved,” according to the police. (By comparison, 36 Israeli Jews were murdered in 2022 and in 2024, 38 - and police “solution” of murders in 2025 in the Jewish population stood at 60%).

The police blame the murder rate among Arabs on an “Arab culture of violence” and Arab non-cooperation with the authorities; the police’s critics say that, reflecting Ben-Gvir’s views and wishes, his men simply don’t care and expend little energy or time on crime in the Arab sector (“let Arabs kill Arabs”). There is probably truth to both views. Most of the Arab killings are gang-related though some are related to family and clan feuds. Often, clan feuds and gang killings overlap, many gangs being clan-based.

But not all the absence of meshilut is connected to the Arab population. Projecting from the West Bank, where (nationalist) crime by Jews against Arabs is rife and goes almost completely unpunished, there has been a steady growth of Jewish crime against Arabs inside Israel proper.

During the past months there have been repeated attacks by Jewish youths on Arab bus-drivers, especially in Jerusalem. There have also been brutal beatings of Arab municipal workers by young Jews in city streets. On 13 December 2025 an Arab woman resident in Jaffa – a mixed Jewish-Arab area - was attacked by a group of Jews, sprayed with pepper spray. Three of the alleged perpetrators were subsequently located and arrested – but so were 14 Arabs who demonstrated in protest against the attack. Police said the Arabs were “disturbing the peace.” Some Arab shop-owners closed their businesses as part of the protest.

The attack on the woman was a part of a series of incidents between Jaffa Arab residents and hundreds of newly resident religious Jews who belong in some way to yeshivot (Jewish religious schools), synagogues and a pre-army-service course (mechina kedam-tzva’it) operating in the town. Jaffa is the southern neighborhood of Tel Aviv that before 1948 was a separate Arab city, most of whose population fled the country during that year’s Arab-Israeli war. Arab residents claim that these religious Jews routinely walk about town armed, frightening Arab inhabitants.

Police subsequently identified the three alleged attackers of the Jaffa woman as Jewish “hill youths” (ne’arei gva’ot) who have been harassing and harming Arab communities in the West Bank and had been removed from the occupied territory by the Israeli authorities. One of them reportedly spent several months in Israeli “administrative detention” (imprisonment without trial) after attacking Arabs in the West Bank. The three will apparently be charged with aggravated assault.

In his op-ed, Urabi linked what was happening in and to Israel’s Arab communities to the concurrent harassment of the Arabs in the West Bank which Ben-Gvir’s police have done nothing to contain. Many Israelis fear that the violence in and against Arab communities will eventually spill over into violence against Israel’s Jews.