Another deadly weekend in what has practically become routine for Arab society in Israel. On Friday night, three people were shot, wounded and only luckily weren't murdered, including an eight-year-old boy in Kfar Qasem; and on Saturday, a mother, father and their daughter were murdered while on vacation.
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These were not the first appalling murders or crimes, and we can say with certainty that they won't be the last. I wrote the same thing just a few months ago and I'll repeat it again here, the worst is still to come. To the best of my understanding, all this is happening for two main reasons.
The first is the intolerable ease with which one can acquire and conceal illegal firearms. Not just any firearms, but extraordinarily lethal automatic rifles. The second reason is the ability to plan a murder under the nose of the police, which appears to lack what the Shin Bet security agency has – quality and precise intelligence information. It is both warranted and very reasonable to harshly criticize the state, which has long neglected Arab society; and the Israel Police, which in recent years has become part of the problem as it has failed in its explicit duty to prevent these types of heinous crimes.
With that, we can hardly ignore the fact that in most cases the police can only act after a crime has been committed, which means an overriding part of the problem occurs way before the crime itself has been committed – stemming from the steady rise of criminal organizations over the past two decades, and the bloody rivalries between them over money and lands, and even influence and control of local municipalities.
The greatest injustice to occur in the State of Israel since its inception is the distinction and compartmentalization between criminal and nationalistically motivated crimes. It eventually dawned on criminal elements in Arab society that their crimes were deemed less important to the Israel Police, justice system and Shin Bet. Indeed, the penalties for their criminal behavior were never as severe as the penalties for nationalistically motivated crimes. Arab society in Israel can no longer cope with the unrelenting violence. The state must take responsibility and employ an iron fist, from legislation and harsher punishments, to confiscating all the assets of anyone convicted of murder.
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