Cabinet unleashes Shin Bet on Arab citizens
Israel's cabinet has handed its secret police the policing of Arab towns, funded by stripping the very budget built to develop them.
Ahmad Nassar, the mayor of the Arab town of Arraba, was shot seven times in March after refusing to bend to a mafia extortion racket running the town’s garbage tenders. He survived. The men who tried to kill him remain free, one entry in the roughly 85 to 88% of Arab-community homicides in Israel that police do not solve. On 15 July, the Israeli cabinet decided what Nassar’s community needs is not detectives who close cases. It is the Shin Bet.
The cabinet voted to send Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the agency built to spy on Palestinians and long confined by its own former chiefs to “exceptional cases involving threats to state security,” into Arab towns to fight organised crime. It is being sold as Shin Bet Arab Israeli policing, a modernising upgrade to law enforcement. It is better understood as a state deciding that a fifth of its citizens are a security problem rather than a public it is obliged to protect.
A crisis the state chose not to solve
The numbers explain why Arab communities have been begging for help. Israel recorded 252 Arab citizens killed in 2025, the deadliest year on record, the overwhelming majority by gunfire. The first six months of 2026 brought 144 more homicides, up 15% on the same period the year before. Arab citizens make up roughly a fifth of Israel’s population and more than four-fifths of its murder victims.
What happens after the killing is the second crime. An Abraham Initiatives watchdog analysis found police solved only around 12% of Arab-community homicides in the first half of 2026, 16 indictments out of roughly 130 cases. Knesset figures put the wider clearance gap at close to 15% for Arab victims against about 65% for Jewish victims. Trust in the police reflects it: 19% among Arab citizens, 35% among Jewish Israelis. This is not a community reluctant to engage with the state. It is a community the state has declined to police properly for years.
What Shin Bet Arab Israeli policing actually means
Instead of fixing that gap, the cabinet is diverting roughly NIS 497m ($166m) away from the “550 Plan”, the five-year, NIS 30bn programme the Bennett-Lapid government created in 2021 to bring Arab towns level with Jewish ones on housing, jobs and infrastructure. Around NIS 345m to 365m of the diverted money goes to a new Shin Bet unit targeting weapons and drug smuggling; NIS 132m goes to a police organised-crime unit. Jewish organised crime stays with ordinary policing. Arab organised crime becomes intelligence work. That is two systems of law inside one country, built on ethnic lines, and it is being funded by cutting the youth programmes, job training and transport money that might have kept young men out of the gangs in the first place.
Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights, calls it “a racist decision that produces two systems of law”, one for Palestinian Arab towns and one for everywhere else, in which Palestinian citizens are treated as enemy aliens. Adalah’s underlying point is structural, not rhetorical: the Shin Bet “operates in secrecy, without oversight or transparency, and therefore cannot be assigned to civil matters.” The Mossawa Center notes the money now going to a spy agency was earmarked for at-risk youth and industrial development, and is weighing legal action. The Abraham Initiatives put it plainly: “This is not a campaign against crime, it is turning citizens into a security threat.” The Association for Civil Rights in Israel warns the plan risks “serious harm to the basic rights of the entire Arab public.”
That history is not abstract. The Shin Bet’s Arab Affairs Department has run informant networks inside Palestinian citizen communities since the state’s founding, recruiting through financial pressure, blackmail and control over permits, and for decades held sway over Arab schools. This is the apparatus now being asked to “fight crime”. A near-identical plan was proposed in 2021 and abandoned after Adalah warned it amounted to military governance over citizens. It has been revived by the Shin Bet’s new chief, David Zini, who has pushed the agency past the line his predecessors held.
The politicians selling it
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called it “tremendous news for Israeli citizens, bitter news for crime organizations,” and promised the Shin Bet would strike with “an iron fist.” Benjamin Netanyahu called it “a significant step”. Social Equality Minister May Golan said the money would strengthen enforcement “instead of… strengthening crime organizations.” None of them explained why the answer to a 12% clearance rate is surveillance rather than detectives, or why the fund built to develop Arab towns is the one being raided to pay for it.
MK Ayman Odeh, who has taken the crisis to the United Nations after years of meetings, protests and hunger strikes that produced nothing, said the government “will close all doors to us in the fight against crime.” Arab mayors warned the budget cuts are “bad faith and abuse of power” that “will push youth into crime,” arguing crime cannot be eradicated through security measures alone.
The case the government won’t make honestly
The strongest argument for the government is real: Arab residents have pleaded for years for the state to take the killing seriously, and a frame that reads as “leave it alone” would insult the dead. But the demand from Odeh, Adalah and the mayors themselves has never been for a secret agency. It has been for police who investigate murders with the same seriousness they apply in Jewish towns, and for the development money that reduces the conditions crime grows in. Handing the file to an oversight-free intelligence service, while cutting the youth and jobs funding in the same breath, answers a different question to the one the community is asking.
Britain has its own version of this instinct. Prevent was built to counter extremism and ended up treating an entire community as a population to be watched rather than served; the Shin Bet’s new mandate is the same logic with sharper teeth. A state that cannot solve 85% of the murders committed against one group of its citizens has just decided the answer is to watch them more closely, not to investigate their deaths properly. Nassar is still waiting for his shooters to be charged.
