Analysis | Israel Gave Up Sovereignty in Arab Cities. Everyone Paid the Price

A police officer amid the violent clashes in Lod two weeks ago.Credit: Moti Milrod

The biggest surprise in recent events occurred inside the Green Line even more than in Gaza. Neither the National Security Council, the Israel Police nor the Shin Bet predicted the intensity of the violent outburst among Arabs in Israel. Concern has been expressed in recent years over the plethora of weapons in Arab communities, the rise in organized-crime families and the surge in the number of murders using firearms. But the worst-case scenario spoke about the use of weapons by lone terrorists to launch attacks during a flare-up in the territories. No one foresaw pitched battles in the streets of the mixed cities, mutual mob attacks and the torching of homes and synagogues.

 
For years, the state engaged in a process of forgoing governance and sovereignty in the country’s Arab locales. The infrastructure was neglected and the police reduced their presence for fear of clashing with criminals. Some of the vast amounts of money that the Netanyahu government injected into the Arab communities seem to have found their way to the crime families, which took over projects designated for local governments. As long as Arab criminals killed one another, the government and the police showed zero interest – and not much more interest even when innocent civilians found themselves in the line of fire or were shot for not acceding to the demands of underworld figures.

 
According to an estimate presented to the security cabinet, some 85 percent of the participants in the present wave of violence were young offenders, small fry. The rest were activists in the Islamic Movement, along with a small minority of individuals associated with Arab left-wing parties. Following a few days of anarchy, large regular police and Border Police forces were brought in, including Border Police companies from the territories. The violence abated but the assessment is that it’s liable to flare up again.

 
At the same time, there’s a palpable reluctance among Jews to enter Arab locales for commercial purposes. The last time, following the disturbances of October 2000, it took years for the economic relations to be restored to their previous level (and at that time the second intifada raged in the background).
 
In a joint effort by the police and the Shin Bet, about 1,400 persons suspected of involvement in the violence were arrested – a small minority of them Jews, many of whom are known to be active in the extreme right. The Shin Bet is taking part in the interrogations this time and is using surveillance and other technological means that are standard in terrorism investigations. But this effort is focused on addressing events that occurred in a specific week. Coping with the crime families will demand an effort across a year or two and will need to focus on arrests, interrogations and the confiscation of weapons, together with earmarking governmental resources for improving the living conditions in the Arab cities, towns and villages.

 
In the meantime, there is no systematic plan on the horizon. Netanyahu wants to utilize the IDF inside the Green Line to help restore order. The police commissioner, Kobi Shabtai, and the army chief of staff, Aviv Kochavi, are vehemently opposed. But this far-reaching idea is still on the table, and soldiers are liable to appear in the streets of Taibeh and Kafr Kasem should another wave of violence erupt that leaves the government befuddled.
 
It needs to be said clearly: The police are the weakest of the security organizations, most of which functioned well during the operation this month. The highly publicized arrest of a young Arab man who gave the police the finger will not restore the status of the police or its deterrent capability. Mistaken decisions by the commissioner and the Jerusalem police district, including on the Temple Mount and at Damascus Gate, contributed to this latest eruption.

Later, when Shabtai dared to speak the truth and explained that there are also Jewish terrorists, he was tongue-lashed by Public Security Minister Amir Ohana. The previous commissioner, Roni Alsheikh (part of the problem is that there was an acting commissioner for two years between their two tenures) summed things up: The project to weaken the police, he wrote in an article in Yedioth Ahronoth, succeeded beyond all expectations.

What Nasrallah learned

 
On Tuesday evening, Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech in a live television broadcast from Beirut. He hadn’t been seen in public for a few weeks, and rumors about his health were rife in Lebanon. If the speech was intended to dispel them, it seems to have failed. Nasrallah looked gaunt and pale, and coughed repeatedly.

 The Israeli media dubbed the two-hour event as the “coughing speech” and conjectured that Nasrallah was ill with COVID-19 or some other respiratory disease. It’s possible, it was said, that this had to do with the fact that for the past 15 years, since the second Lebanon war, the Hezbollah leader has spent most of his time in underground hiding places for fear of an Israeli assassination attempt.

Perhaps. But in fact the excitement over Nasrallah’s conjectured COVID is a bit exaggerated. COVID is not cancer. Many leaders contracted it and recovered, among them Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Yahya Sinwar and even MK Yaakov Litzman (United Torah Judaism). All of them are Nasrallah’s age or older. A dying person doesn’t deliver two-hour speeches. The noise around Nasrallah’s health missed a more important issue: an explicit threat to Israel voiced by the Hezbollah secretary general, according to which any harm done to the holy places in Jerusalem will lead to a regional war.

 
It’s true that Nasrallah has been deterred since the 2006 war and is also immersed in Lebanon’s domestic crisis. Still, similar remarks were made by Sinwar until three weeks ago. The question that arises, then, is what Nasrallah learned from the Israel-Hamas confrontation and whether he is necessarily impressed by Israel’s declarations of victory.