Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 23.02.2026
It is hard not to understand that the murderous criminal gangs operating among the Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel are the result of a deliberate policy of the Zionist state in order to intimidate Palestinian citizens and prevent demands for equality. I myself had experience with this question as a lawyer. I appeared in the Jerusalem District Court in a case in which a Palestinian civilian shot at his neighbor but did not hit him. After the trial, the judge invited me to his office and asked me: “Why are you defending a Palestinian when one Arab should be allowed to kill another Arab?”
In another case in the Supreme court case, I represented a Palestinian from Beth Lehem who was beaten by the Security forces. I asked the three judges to look at his face and the three turned their heads to the opposite side to pretend he was not beaten.
Kobi Niv in an article in Haaretz says exactly the right thing and he writes today
23 Feb 2026:
“In a discussion of the Finance Committee,” Ynet reported last week, as well as other media outlets, “a riot broke out after Knesset member Iman Khatib-Yassin (Ra’am) asked to talk about the violence in Arab society. She shouted at Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and hurled accusations at him. He replied: ‘I didn’t understand, are we now also guilty of murdering each other?'” No, I will answer the pseudo-rhetorical question of this naïve and/or stupid and/or evil person, and I will answer as is the custom of our days – no, you are not guilty, you are not the murderers. But you are responsible for ensuring that there will be no murders, in the Arab sector and everywhere in the State of Israel, or that there will be as little as possible. In every country in the world, regardless of the regime in which it operates, except for the Zionist state, the responsibility for the security of citizens against crime lies with the government.
Let’s imagine that in Germany, a criminal organization would take over a province where most of the residents are immigrants from Poland or Turkey, and all the businesses in the area would be protected and the criminal organizations would kill civilians every day, and so on for years. And the Bundestag member from that district would complain to a minister in her government about why the state and the police are not working to stop and eliminate crime in its area. Is it possible that the minister would have answered her in this way, like our Minister Smotrich, by saying, “And what are we to blame for you murdering each other?”
Is it possible that such a thing would have happened or been said in a normal country? That minister, and another senior figure, would have answered like this in such a case, and basically said to the member of parliament, “Mupped, the murders in your country are not a problem of the government, it is a problem of you, of the citizens who are not really real Germans”?
Nope. This could not have happened in any normal country. This could only happen in a colonial country. Because in all colonial regimes, that’s exactly how it was. The regime and the police would protect only the first-class civilian settlers, while the second-class citizens, the natives, the inferior, when they complained about crimes and murders committed on their lands and against them, the state and the police would always answer them exactly like Smotrich. It’s not our problem. That’s your problem. Get along with each other.
But that’s nothing else, because it’s much worse than that. Because not only does the Israeli government, with its ministries and police, do nothing and shirk any responsibility to protect Arab citizens from crime and murder, but the Israeli government, through its ministries and police, allows the criminal organizations that murder Arab citizens en masse to operate and even grow. And this is not new in colonial regimes, either. All the colonial regimes in the world encouraged religious and criminal organizations and indigenous collaborators, so that they would be a counterweight and a threat to secular indigenous organizations that demanded human rights and national rights from the regime. And so, for many years, in our country as well.
And it was the same with Hamas, when it began operating in the Gaza Strip in the late 1970s as a religious relief organization, something like Shas in our country. The Israeli government and its army encouraged their actions in order to serve as a counterweight to the secular Fatah organization, which was considered the main Palestinian enemy at the time. When the tables turned and Hamas became an extremist militant organization against Israel, the Israeli government continued to encourage and fund it, because precisely from that ancient colonial fixation of thought, Hamas is perceived by us as a “strategic asset” whose terrorist actions thwart the danger of peace with the Palestinian Authority.
For almost the first twenty years of the State of Israel, its Arab citizens were under military rule, which, through the missile of Ben-Gurion’s “democratic” Israeli government and the Zionist left, imposed siege, deprivation, terror and terror on the indigenous subjects, so to speak, civilians.
However, with the abolition of the Military Government and its transfer to the territories occupied in 1967, a kind of governmental vacuum remained that would wreak havoc on Arab society, and this vacuum was entered, with the active or passive encouragement of Israeli governments, by the criminal organizations that carry out acts of terror against Arab citizens on behalf of the government, so that the bastards would not dare to demand their rights.
Crime in the Arab sector is therefore a continuation of, or if you like, the privatization of the military government.”[1]
The role of the Palestinian existing leadership is to understand that the force that can defend the Palestinians citizens of Israel is self- defense. However, this leadership is calling on the government and the police to act against the criminal gangs.
Anyone who expects Ben Gvir’s police to protect the Palestinians, whether under the occupation of 1948 or 1967, is simply dangerous, because it creates illusions in the police. The only way to protect the Palestinians is self-defense, which begins with sports organizations that teach Japanese self defense and legal means to disarm the gangs.
Endnotes:
[1] https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/2026-02-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/0000019c-86a6-d930-ad9f-f6f72f8e0000