How Crime Groups Drew a ’Ring of Death’ Around Arab Towns That Were Once Ruled by Israeli Military Law - Opinion ▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-02-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/how-crime-groups-took-over-for-the-israeli-military-law-that-once-ruled-over-arab-towns/0000019c-3df1-d86c-a19c-bff304b20000
The generation of our parents and grandparents grew up under a military administration and was confined to Arab communities. Over the years, they encountered the “Hebrew City” only as providers of cheap labor.
The cancellation of the military administration did not eliminate the racially based segregation system that was instated in the country’s first years; it only became more sophisticated. You no longer needed to deal with travel permits or closures imposed on Arab communities – the boundaries imposed on Arabs inside the Jewish state became self-evident.
These boundaries consisted of a “green ring” of national parks, Jewish National Fund forests and military firing zones. The policy of land expropriation, which took away Arab farmers’ livelihood, turned them into laborers working for the Zionist project.
Discrimination in the provision of basic services made Arabs dependent on the “oxygen lines” of adjacent Jewish towns. Thus, the segregation apparatus self-perpetuated, without a need for soldiers or roadblocks.
However the third generation, that of the grandchildren, learned how to leap over these invisible barriers. Its members made their way to the cities, to universities, hospitals and high-tech offices, refusing to remain limited to the area they were allocated.
This breaching of boundaries required a renewed retooling of the state’s means of control. This role was taken – with the silent assent of the state – by crime organizations, which have become the de facto sovereign in Arab towns.
These crime groups are redrawing the boundaries through the creation of a “ring of death” around Palestinian citizens. They are placed on the seam between the “inside” (the Arab communities) and the “outside” (the Jewish state), creating two parallel realities: security and well-being vs. crime and neglect. Thus, the Arab citizen is restored to the role he was destined to fill from the beginning – cheap labor departing every morning for a Jewish city, returning in the evening to a neglected space.
.