On a Monday morning in January, Ali Zubidat, a longtime store owner in Saknin, a small Palestinian-majority town in northern Israel, weighed his options and decided enough was enough.
Earlier that day, the widespread and organized crime plaguing Saknin and countless other Palestinian towns and villages across Israel came to light.
Recommended stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
“We know where you are going and where you are walking. If you don’t do what you need to do, we will kill you,” a message was sent to his cell phone. Gunmen have already targeted Zubidat’s family business four times, the most recent being just a week ago when one of his stores was attacked with dozens of automatic weapons rounds.
This message was the final conclusion. Zbydat has closed his business and has no plans to reopen it.
His case attracted the attention of not only the Palestinian public in Israel but also broader Israeli society.
As word of Zubydat’s actions spread, more and more businesses in Saknin began to close in protest of the organized crime that had infested the community in what appeared to be a deliberate policy of government neglect.
What began as a protest in Saknin quickly galvanized public opinion against organized crime to a level that commentators described as “historic.” Tens of thousands of people, including Palestinians and Israeli Jews, took to the streets of Tel Aviv over the weekend to demonstrate against organized crime that drains the lifeblood of Israel’s remaining Palestinian communities.
“252 Palestinians were killed in Israel in 2025, but that doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian lawmaker in Israel’s parliament who represents the left-wing Hadash Taal faction and is one of the few prominent voices who consistently speak out about the violence.
“Nothing is said about the thousands of people who are unable to live a normal life and have to spend almost their entire income on protection.
“Fear and anger are growing, but it took one very brave man in Saknin to ignite the spark. They asked him for protection and he said no. They tried to shoot one of his sons, so he closed his shop and said it would stay closed,” she told Al Jazeera.
fertile land
Palestinian citizens of Israel make up approximately 21 percent of Israel’s total population.
They are descendants of Palestinians who escaped displacement during the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 people fled after the creation of Israel.
The majority of Palestinians who remain in Israel live isolated from the rest of the population in isolated towns and villages, suffer from a lack of government funding, and live as de facto second-class citizens.
Observers, including Hassan Jabareen, founder and executive director of Arab rights group Adalah, said that for many people living in these communities, the state was not actively working towards them, and in fact was completely absent.
“This is Hobbesian,” he said, drawing parallels with the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s description of the human condition without the restraints of the state and life in one of Israel’s Palestinian communities as “nasty, savage and short.”
According to the Israel National Insurance Institute, about 38 percent of Palestinian households are below Israel’s poverty line, and many are far below it. According to the same report, about half of Palestinians say they earn more money than they have to spend in a given month.
Unemployment is endemic and has worsened since 2023, when Israel’s genocidal war broke out in the Gaza Strip, restricting access to the occupied West Bank for Palestinians who are under Israeli control but do not have Israeli nationality.
According to 2024 statistics, only 54% of Palestinian men and 36% of Palestinian women have jobs in Israel, after already low employment levels plummeted in tandem with the massacre in Gaza.
Touma-Suleiman said it has become a breeding ground for organized crime.
From the Nakba to the present, there were no police stations in Palestinian towns and villages in Israel, she told Al Jazeera, explaining how Palestinians who had fled poverty in their villages to work in the criminal fringe of Israeli society returned, safe from police scrutiny and armed with the knowledge they needed to build new criminal networks in their communities.
“Also, many Arab families moved here after the second intifada from the post-1967 occupied territories, who were cooperating with the Israeli government. [in 2005]” Touma-Suleiman said, explaining how this upset the Palestinian community in Israel.
“Many of those families are now running criminal organizations and even the police say they are under Shabak’s protection.” [Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet]so they can’t actually be touched. ”
Al Jazeera has contacted the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Shin Bet for comment, but has not yet received a response.
poison harvest
The result was industrial-scale organized crime.
The gangs, close in size and scope to the Italian Mafia, control much of the meager commercial life that flourishes in Israeli Palestinian towns and villages and are confident that their operations will not be thwarted by the police, led by the far-right and anti-Palestinian Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir. He himself has been charged with supporting an anti-Palestinian “terrorist” group.
“There is a hierarchy at play at the main national level. This killing is just a symptom. They have their own banking system and they make loans,” Touma-Suleiman said, referring to a financial desert in which only about 20% of Palestinians qualify for loans from Israeli banks.
“They also deal in drugs and weapons. Not only pistols, but also missiles and explosives. They are incorporated into the state and control contracting companies, which means other companies bidding for work have to go through them.”
As a result, the area became unrecognizable to Jewish Israelis, who rarely set foot in areas considered dangerous and unsafe.
“They are [Jewish Israelis] This refers to the Palestinian nature, the Arab nature, and certainly not the fact that the state of Israel is at arm’s length from Palestine. [Palestinian] We have enclaves and we allow murders and crimes to happen,” prominent Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Sharabani told Al Jazeera.
poisonous crops
In one of the latest protests against the violence, demonstrators marched through the streets of Tel Aviv holding banners and photos of murdered relatives.
Placards reading “Enough of violence and murder,” “Enough of silence,” and “Arab lives matter” spoke to a tide of anger that even Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who had offered little resistance to the massacre of more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, was having to deal with.
On Tuesday, it was reported that in light of nationwide concern over the violence, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to name Ben Gvir to head a task force to tackle the issue.
When asked about the contrasting childhoods of two boys of a similar age, one from a Jewish town in Israel and one from a Palestinian town, Adara director Jabareen was candid.
“A person will feel safe. When he goes to sleep, he knows he is safe. When he goes to school, he knows he is okay,” Jabareen said.
“The other boy will not be able to sleep because of the sound of guns. He will be worried that he will be shot accidentally on his way to school or that his bus will be targeted,” he continued. “At school, you’re going to be worried that your classmates and teachers are going to get shot. Even if you have to go to the doctor or pharmacist, you’re going to be worried that there’s going to be gang activity there and there’s going to be more shootings.”
