The Out of Control Arab Israeli Crime Clans Driving the Murder Rate Sky-High
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No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds. Late December, 2020 in the mixed city of Lod in Israel.

Lodz is a tough town, it's been beaten down a bit, and it's known for its criminal elements. But Omar Abusalik, 15 years old, and his parents are probably pretty happy to see the police on this day. They're on the wrong side of a violent Klan feud that's been ongoing since 2010. And the three police cars in a convoy are escorting them out of town so that they can avoid being the victims of a revenge killing. You see, the night before, Salman Arzbarga had just been gunned down, and his body's just been found in a rough industrial area of town.

And if an Asbarga gets killed, everyone knows that the Abu Salik family is in the crosshairs. The vendetta started in 2010, when a member of the Abu Salik family knifed and killed a member of the Asbarga family after the Abu Saliks kicked him out of a mosque they were renovating. After that, it's been war. In Israel's Arab sector, the police are overwhelmed, crime clans run the streets, and disputes, helped by a massive amount of illegal guns, are settled with bullets. Omar and his parents are fleeing to the town of Kfar Qasim,

But as the convoy drives off, a car comes out of nowhere and speeds toward it before quickly turning and heading off in a different direction. Two of the three police cars give chase, not realizing it's divergent. All of a sudden, another car pulls up out of nowhere and sprays the Abusalek family car with gunfire, killing 15-year-old Omar and wounding another man in the car. Shortly after, riots break out in the city as cars belonging to members of both sides are set on fire.

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Welcome back, guys. This is Danny Golds. I am the host of the Underworld Podcast. It is a podcast about organized crime around the world, and it's a podcast where we teach you that no matter a person's race or religion or ethnicity, if they're going to help you traffic cocaine in the desert, you put your differences aside and you work with them. Usually, I am joined by my friend Sean, but today we are joined by Ben Hartman. Once again, Ben joined us, I think, last time for our...

episode on jewish organized crime in israel today we're going to be talking about the criminal clans of arab dissents in israel proper so ben say hi to everyone hi everyone thanks for having me back on we definitely don't want to overlook the arab arab crime sector in israel especially considering what's what's happening there lately yeah i think you were saying too that this this shooting happened near i think near where you live or near where your parents live somewhere near uh

One of the places they fled off to is kind of near where my in-laws live. And, you know, it's interesting. It's a really interesting shooting. It was one of those few murders in what they call in Israel the Arab sector. That's what they say in Hebrew.

And this is one of the few in the Arab community that really broke through the noise and really made headlines. They usually kind of fall off because it's like they don't break through the noise because, you know, it's that old thing like, you know, it happens in the wrong part of town. It happens in communities that we don't really see or look for or the largest didn't care about the larger Jewish community. But this one, it happened outside community on Highway 6, the big cross-country toll road.

It was in broad daylight. That thing is, you know, up and down, cameras everywhere. And there was a police escort. You know, you got all the different elements. It's in the light of day. It's out in the open. Bystanders could have gotten killed. In other words, when we say that, we mean Jewish bystanders. That's what people wink, wink mean by that. It's also the fact that it shows, once again, how the police, when they're actually tasked to protect somebody in this country, they don't...

often do a very good job. And so that's another one of the reasons that organized crime can kind of run rampant here. You can't really have a good witness protection program in a country the size of New Jersey, and the guys don't really do a good job even when they know exactly what they got to do. Yeah, and if you guys want to catch up on the stuff that we did on the Jewish organized crime groups that operate in Israel, the episode with Ben was fantastic. I think it's one of our earliest, maybe episode 10 or something like that. And we had so much content. We

Again, Patreon bonuses, interviews, all that patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. And once again, just as a PSA, you know, we're not going to get into politics here. We don't care about your opinion on the conflict. You know, this isn't about Israel, Palestine politics. And if you want to argue about that, there's plenty of places you can go on the internet to do that. Just don't, don't bring it to us. But if you want to yell at Ben,

His Twitter account and phone number are as follows. Yeah. It's at Ben Hartman, B-E-N-H-A-R-T-M-A-N. One in, not two. That's not that. Not one of those German names. But yeah, at Ben Hartman, one in on Twitter. Feel free. You can yell at me. You don't need to be a paying Patreon person to do that. Really? Okay. I was kidding. But if you're willing to take it, go right ahead. But if you are a paying Patreon person, then you're allowed to yell at me. You can yell at me all you want. That's enticing. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, this story, it's kind of been bubbling on the surface for a while, even in international media. I was actually pitching it as a print story back in 2019, but didn't get to make the trip. And then the pandemic hit, and I also realized you can't earn a living as a freelance print journalist. And here we are not earning a living as podcasters. If you're crooked, but even then, I don't know. It was getting a lot of attention, I think, in 2019 as the murder rates were reaching higher and higher and protests were starting to pop up and call attention to the violence.

And again, in the last few months, we've sort of seen the same thing as the situation just threatens to really get out of control. So I think most people would argue that it already has been out of control. And like Ben said, when we say the Arab sectors, we're talking about the Arab areas within Israel proper. So not the West Bank, not Gaza. These involve what some people refer to as Israeli Arabs, Arabs with Israeli citizenship who are afforded way more rights within Israel than someone in West Bank or in Gaza, though, of course, they're still marginalized.

And just to be clear, not every murder in the Arab sector is related to gangs or organized crime. There's also your standard crimes of passion, regular criminals, you know, there's honor killings, but we're going to focus on the criminal gangs aspect because, you know, it's the most dominant. And

And it's the most fun for us. So I think it's important to note, you know, really key, key fact in all this is that they, they are citizens, absolutely. One percent of Israel. And at least according to the law, they have all the same rights that anybody here should any, you know, Jew, Muslim, otherwise, but they don't typically get the same protection from, from law enforcement or from, or from the country. And a lot of those, those prior, you know, in earlier years, there could be a big story at times, there's violence in the Arab communities and,

largely because of the murders of women, which is a very controversial term, honor killing. They don't like to use the police, don't like to use it and all that for obvious reasons. There's no honor in killing your sister or your niece or brutalizing women. But that was kind of the focus. A lot of these protests, let's say 10, 15 years ago and recently, it's been more on guns and the crime and the organized crime and the murders in the Arab communities. And part of why it's

It's gotten so much attention, not just because the numbers are going up. They're also, for the first time, the Arab parties are part of the governing coalition. So they're able to highlight the concerns that face their communities more than they ever have before, at least on paper. Yeah, we'll talk about some of those politicians too later on. I think that does it for our PSAs and our prefaces, but always such a fun region to report on.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I was just going back through some of the archives, some of these old reports from the Israeli government, just looking at different years. In 2015, there were 110 people murdered total. We're already over 100 just in the Arab communities. Between 2000 and 2006, there were about 150 per year, but again, that was across the entire community. And the Arab population, like you said, they only make up 20%, so it's disproportionately high. Also, the clearance rates for these homicides are much lower than...

It's bad in a lot of different ways. And it should be said again, just to give perspective, I think I do this a lot when we talk about violent crime in places that aren't America or Latin America, that none of these numbers come close to the murder rates in dangerous American cities. I think that's important to keep that in mind when we're talking about it. Like you said, I mean, even with these numbers going up, there's a lot less murders.

In Israel in total than even just in, let's say, one American city like St. Louis or Baltimore, New Orleans or Memphis. You know, any one of those cities has more murders than all of Israel. Nonetheless, it's gotten quite bad. And the sense of public security, especially in those communities, is quite low. Also, in Israel, the murders have a different quality to them than in the States. There's not very many stranger murders. In other words, you almost always know who the person is who's going to kill you.

or you're married or related to them. It's especially true for women. Or it's because you're tied up in the criminal life in some way.

Obviously, in the States, the majority of homicides, I'm pretty sure, are still related to the drug trade or still related to criminal activities. But, you know, you're much more likely in Israel if you get murdered, you know, for it to be somebody who is who is close to you. Someone someone who, you know, is not going to be hard to put two and two together where that came from. And, yeah, I definitely want to get into to the Klan wars and the rampant attacks on local politicians. But I think we need to start back in the year 2000. Right.

Arab areas in Israel have always suffered from discrimination. They've gotten less resources. You know, Arabs get fewer opportunities and all that. But things didn't really get violent there until recent years. And most people point to an incident that happened in October of 2000 that kind of set the process in motion as one of the major catalysts for what's happening now.

What happened then was that as the second Intifada was kicking off, Israeli police shot and killed 13 Israeli Arabs during protests and riots. Now, this is actually a typical, right? These sorts of things didn't happen within Israel, the police shooting civilians like this. Again, remember, it's not the army. It's not the Shin Bet. It's the police. There was actually a commission that lasted three years, the Orr Commission, that tried to get to the bottom of it, of why this excessive force was used. And

And the whole thing, it had a profound effect on how Israeli police viewed these areas and how Israeli Arabs viewed the police. And since that incident, Israeli police totally backed off out of these neighborhoods and left everyone to their own devices. While on the flip side, they started being seen much, much more as an unwanted presence to the point where they were attacked when they came in. And here's a quote from an All Monitor article, I think from 2014. Since then,

Israeli police in Arab towns and villages are considered to be an unwanted presence. Every police patrol in these regions is a loaded event, surrounded by considerable tension. For the Arab residents of the state of Israel, the police represent an oppressive force, which discriminates against them as compared with the Jewish residents. The arrest of an Israeli Arab resident in an Arab village or town, even when it is a criminal arrest, can sometimes meet with resistance from the local residents.

To many people, police activity is not perceived as the fulfillment of their responsibility to maintain public order, but as a means of violent retaliation. That's definitely true. I think you mentioned the October 2000 shootings at the protests slash riots. I think of a previous incident that is obviously very different, but in terms of civilians back in 1912,

1956, there was what's known as the Qawwakasin Massacre, and that was about 50 Arab civilians who were killed by police, Border Patrol, for breaking curfew. It was, in all sense of the words, a massacre, and that left a lasting impact, even though a couple years is a lifetime in the Middle East, but even in kind of a timeless conflict like this, 60 years is not enough for people to put that behind, and it has a lasting impact, and that's one of the

towns in Israel, larger Arab cities in Israel, and one that has a lot of problems right now with crime. But to get back to what you were talking about, about the police, I think this gets to...

Kind of the crux of the issue that is similar to what you see in a lot of communities in America, where they're sort of – they suffer at the same time from under-policing and also over-policing. In other words, when somebody gets killed in an Arab community, they're much less likely to respond quickly. And then a lot of times when they do respond for something –

They come in with more force if they come in at all and things get out of hand a lot easier than they do in other, let's say, in Jewish communities. So they suffer from both under and over policing. But this sort of, this phenomenon of pulling back, it's not necessarily a bad thing in the sense that

I can think of many occasions with marches or protests in Arab neighborhoods or towns for things like Land Day or Nakba Day. The ones that I remember going to, they would tend to hang back. Oftentimes, not always, obviously, there was clashes and fighting and all that too, but they'd often hang back outside the entrance to the community because they know that

Their presence can be seen as a provocation for obvious reasons. But then where do you strike that balance between pulling back too much and not being a problem? Between pulling back so you're not inciting things or igniting things or you don't have friction and pulling back too far where you can't actually protect people who are citizens and have the same rights as everybody else. So this creates a sort of vacuum.

And the people who are going to fill that vacuum are not the type of people you want. Yeah, I think we talk about that a lot as we move forward. It's sort of like this catch-22 that's not an easy thing to solve. And I think there's a February 2021 Haaretz article I'm going to quote now that had a pretty great rundown too. According to Dr. Yael Litmanovitz, a researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University, what followed October 2000 was a bilateral breakdown of trust and cooperation.

On the one hand, the Arab citizens of Israel said, no, we don't want the police. We don't trust the police. Look at what they did. At the same time, the police said, look at how you behaved. If you don't want us, we don't want to be here either. In 2017, the Manavitz participated in a study looking at how members of the force view their work.

She says that commanders who had assignments in Arab towns in the years following 2000 often referred to the period as a lost decade. And interestingly, in recent months, the tagline Arab Lives Matter has picked up steam. But as opposed to here in the U.S., it includes a lot of calls for more police presence and more aggressive policing. But again, all of that has complexities, which we're going to get into a little bit further down the line.

Yeah, the calls here at these protests, including by Arab politicians in Israel and community leaders and just everyday community members, is definitely not for defunding the police. It's not for abolishing the police or anything like that. It's for better policing. And a lot of people will just call, you know, straight out, just come in and get the guns, come in and sweep the guns, go door to door. And that's, you know, easier said than done for a lot of reasons. And also, you know, the police...

From their point of view, what they often say is, you know, they don't, what they blame is they don't get cooperation from the, from the communities. It's very hard to get them to, to cooperate, obviously to, to inform on people in their own neighborhoods, often in their own families. So how do you develop sources and develop intelligence to fight crime? When you withdrawn from these communities, there's almost zero Arab citizens of Israel serving in the police. There's very few. And you have this kind of mutual animosity and you just don't have people on the ground, you know,

kind of permanently, you know, work in the ground and, you know, just like beat cops like you would have somewhere else who were just, you know, gathering intelligence and making ties in the community. And instead, they're kind of they've kind of pulled back. So it's it's a very loaded thing. The Arab communities often you have these kind of two warring sort of takes on what's going on. It's that, you know, we don't get cooperation from the community and the community will often say the police don't care enough or aren't trying hard enough or aren't looking at the right places or they just come in and they knock heads. So, you know, there's a lot of truth in what both sides are saying.

So we have some ingredients here that are starting to build, right? We have marginalization and a lack of opportunities, decades of systemic discrimination in housing, employment and education, which also leads to high unemployment for young men, which makes easier recruiting for gangs and criminals, and police leaving a void to be filled. And usually that's a recipe for disaster because someone's going to fill that void, and it's usually not a paragon of truth and justice.

And on that similar theme, something else noted was the breakdown of traditional clan structure to sort of respect the elders' weakening of traditional authority who usually oversaw disputes and things like that. This is from a February 2021 Howard's article, quote, this hierarchical society was becoming less traditional, less patriarchal. In the past, when the men were in charge, the elders of the clan were at the top of the pyramid and resolved disputes as they saw fit.

That sense of order has broken down to a large extent. And though that has positive consequences for women, for example, who are more likely to appeal for help outside of the family when subjected to violence by spouses, the absence of a clear source of control has also left Arab society prey to criminal elements.

These structures, the elders, whatever you want to call them, they basically functioned like state institutions in a way because those institutions in Israel didn't function great or weren't trusted in Israeli Arab areas. And these respected elders could act as mediators. I think some of this talk you hear a lot about kind of a younger generation or a new generation, this sort of conventional wisdom, it's similar also on the Jewish crime scene in Israel. The stereotype, the cliche is that this younger generation is just different

uh than their parents or their grandparents i guess you know every every generation says that about the new one but but there's something to it the the take is that they're you know they're more hot-headed they're less street smart less careful they didn't maybe come up as hard as we did and have to use their wits the same way uh they're always on social media and a lot of them are sharing their crimes on there which you always warn your listeners against and a lot of them are on tiktok just doing you're just clowning and so um you got this real this real dangerous mix and

And then, you know, on top of all that, which you hit on somewhat before, is just being an Arab citizen of Israel has got to be one of the most complicated and loaded national identities on earth in so many different ways. You know, they're so identified in so many ways with the Palestinians, so many of them.

identify as Palestinians. They're part of Israel. They're citizens. They pay the taxes just like everybody else. But where do they fit in and how do they fit in with the state? Is the state for them or going after them? So there's so many things and it's so loaded. I mean, you could write books and books about that, how complex that identity is. And one of the places where it gets really messy and really tragic is when it comes to crime and public safety. So with all of this going on, with the vacuum of power, with the police stepping back,

The state stepping back, the elders falling to the wayside, in steps organized crime, these criminal clans. Yeah, and these criminal clans, you know, many of them are quite large, and they can kind of fill a sort of, you know, where there is sort of a vacuum of power or the state, these guys can kind of take over. And, you know, it should be mentioned, not every Arab citizen in Israel is part of some large clan or part of some large criminal clan. And for them...

What recourse do you have in a community like that where you're just from some small family? Who can you turn to? You feel like you can't turn to the state and you're not from a big enough family to be able to protect yourself. Who are you going to go up against and who are you going to get protection? A lot of people are kind of left with no recourse and left on their own. There are efforts, obviously, the state has tried to take that the police have as well.

Back in, it was either 2011 or 2012, I wrote an article about a police officer at the Ramleh police station who had this special appointment to be sort of a liaison for the Arab community in the town, which is a mixed Arab Jewish city, about half and half. He was an Arabic-speaking Mizrahi Jew. This is a Jew whose family's origin is in the Middle East. And he was a Jewish man.

And his job was to kind of, you know, to try to build connections and relationships in the community and be a liaison between the police and the community so that to try to head off violence before it happens. In other words, let's say he's got his, he's got his head, he's got his ear to the street. So if he knows something's going to pop off in theory, at least he could go and speak to the, to the, to the relevant people on both sides to try to squash it before somebody gets killed. Because once,

Once the guns come out, somebody gets killed, there's a body in the street, and all the doors are closed. And nobody's talking to police, and nobody's going to help, and then what do you do? So that all makes a lot of sense, and that all sounds great on paper, but another kind of problematic side to all this comes back to this role of the state again. So in places like Ramle, Lod, other areas,

The police can at times play this sort of role in trying to head off conflicts between different families, different gangs or different clans by way of these sulhot, like sit-downs, for lack of a better term. I don't even know how you translate it. But like the different sides, you know, sit down and it's like arbitration, you know, who wronged who.

what do you think the compensation would be and then they agree to uh to squash it at least at least temporarily i remember being shown by this cop he was showing me pictures of all these people he went to like with these you know big you know like look like wedding halls full of dudes sitting down and eating together and it sounds like wow that's that's you know that's a real good initiative right there the question though is that this is you know this is a state with actual you know laws and the legal system and judges and courts and all that but you have this kind of

extra state sort of, you know, outside of the authority of the state coming in and getting involved. And, you know, even if it works, it's a little bit complicated or a little bit loaded there. And also the fact that

Like I mentioned before, not everybody's from one of those big, big families. If somebody, if you're from a small family in Ramle or Jaffa or somewhere, or a small Christian Arab family, and somebody kills, let's say, your cousin or shoots your, shoots your dad, you know, your family's, you know, kind of, your family's nobody to fear. You're not from some big, from some big clans. They're not going to fear, fear the comeback much. The police, let's say, aren't going to get involved and they're not going to broker some, some arbitration. So what, what sort of recourse do you have? Your, your,

You're weak and they're strong and you can't count on the state or the police and you don't have a big enough family to try to throw your weight around. So a lot of people get left, left with no answers. As we covered way back in the, in the car bomb wars episode about the Israeli mafias, Israel has an active underworld and no stranger organized crime families. Most, if not all of the dominant groups originally, we're talking like eighties, nineties, early two thousands who are extremely powerful and expanded internationally. We're Jewish Israelis, especially the Moroccan Jews, the,

And as Ben pointed out so incisively in our last episode, organized crime in Israel was actually a beacon of tolerance and hope in a region without a lot of it. The Israeli and Arab crime families sometimes worked together, whether they were trafficking drugs or murdering their enemies. The guys on both sides in both religions who work in this sort of world, they have a lot of things in common, similar vibes, similar or shared business interests. And so, you know, it's business, there's money to be made.

And there's a lot of places in Israel where Jews and Arabs can cooperate quite well when there's money to be made and when you're people who are part of an underworld, a subculture and all that, even more so.

Is it a beacon of hope? It's definitely, you know, maybe, maybe it is a model of coexistence, you know, not necessarily guys who would, uh, you or I could, could, uh, coexist with, but we, I guess we can make an effort. I'm not looking to a branch out though. Yeah. I mean, they both, they both share a love of, you know, Armani tracksuits, giant sunglasses. Deodora. Yeah. Yeah. Other things like that. Hugo boss. I thought the cost, sorry, the cost is still big.

Yeah, the little gator. So what happened is, as the Israeli mafia has really started making headlines, getting more brazen, the state turned its attention to them and started to crack down. It wasn't easy, and some of these families definitely still have power, but they brought down a decent number of them and at least forced them to take steps back. And with that happening, the Arab families were able to step in and take some power, fill some vacuums. It's kind of similar to what happened to the Italian mob in New York in the 80s and 90s, who

which paved the way for other organized crime groups, other ethnicities to kind of move in. If we look at that, a lot of those big police efforts to fight those Jewish organized crime families around the turn of the millennium or early 2000s, this is because, partly because a lot of those, they're more brazen murders and bombings and all that. They were happening at the height of the second Intifada and in the middle of Israeli cities where there had already been

terror attacks and bombings and then you come in and you start blowing each other up. Don't you already see what we're dealing with? So the Israeli public was already fatigued and traumatized by the terrorism of those years and there was no tolerance. There was pretty sweeping public support for an all-out war by police against these guys.

And to some extent, it had a lot of success against a lot of those big names. A lot of them ended up in jail. A lot of them killed each other. A lot of those guys were just replaced by new guys. But there were some wins. And some of those new guys were with these Arab groups who...

had come up as contractors, essentially, under the Jewish groups. They started to get more organized and implement some lessons they had learned from the more powerful, more advanced mafia families. A 2021 Times of Israel special report quotes criminologist Walid Haddad, who says, no longer in the shadow of Jewish organizations, the Arab groups developed into complex institutions. He also says criminal organizations in the Arab community even franchise out their names to toss looking to put prestige behind their muscle for monthly payments.

Haddad has dubbed this phenomenon McMafia, which is also the name of a really great book by Misha Glennie that we recommend pretty much every episode. Yeah, I had that one way back when I was in college or maybe I had it somewhere out here. Yeah, definitely. You know, a lot of these, the more well-known ones have a name that even the Jews know here and even the wider media knows. People who never go in those communities or never, never, never do anything with that whole...

whole other part of Israel know some of these names and they carry a lot of weight. But I think if we're looking at what makes a lot of these Arab organizations in Israel arguably more dangerous than the Jewish ones, is that they're much more likely to be clan-based. Clan-based organizations based on a family structure, typically in a specific village or neighborhood,

where the family lives, multi-generational households, tons of people who are members of that same family or work for that family. And people in a clan, just like clan organizations in a lot of other countries, criminal organizations that are family-based,

You know, they're less likely to, you know, to switch sides in a gang war. They're less likely to cooperate with police because you're going to have to be informing on the guy who lives in the same house as you or across the street or a member of your family. And so how does how do the police who already have trouble, you know, with organized crime and getting informants and getting informants in Arab communities? How are you supposed to make inroads in a family or a clan structure?

So that's a very difficult thing. Also, that's a sort of environment where if you have some sort of feud with these guys, if you're coming from the outside, let's say you're, you're a Jewish gang and you have some sort of beef with some, some, some Arab crime family, that's, that's based on a clan, uh, Hamula, like you're going to, you're going to roll into their town and, and just go to war with them there. Like what, I mean, that's, that's, that's pretty intimidating. You know, it's not the same as rolling into some neighborhood in Holon or, or Bat Yam or Rishon Natsion, you know, all these Jewish towns in Israel, like,

you know, that's, that's real dangerous too. You can definitely get killed, but you know, let's say, you know, a Bedouin clan and you've got some sort of feud with them. You're some Jewish gangster in Be'er Sheva. And so you're going to just drive into Tel Sheva and, and, you know, get, get the guns out. It's not, it's not smart and you might have trouble leaving. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of kind of structure in these, in these kinds of family based organizations can be a lot tougher. Yeah. And we should talk about the, uh, is it Jarushis? Jarushis? How do you say it? Jarushis. Jarushis.

That's how I would say, you know, I mean, their pronunciation is a lot better than mine. That's one of the ones that has pretty universal name recognition, including among, you know, civilians and Jewish civilians. They know that name. I was going to say, they're probably the most notorious of the criminal clans. And I should also point out that the Jerushites are, you know, they're a huge clan, and only a small percentage of them are involved in organized crime. I think that's worth noting, and I think a lot of people in the wider Israeli public don't understand, is that, you know, when they talk about a crime family in Israel, the Jawushi, it's not like talking about...

the Gambinos or the Genovese or, you know, Bonanos or whoever. Like it's not, it's not just a criminal organization that has a name and it's a bunch of guys who just take that name as the organization. And, you know, they are actually large families and some of them have, you know, hundreds or even, even thousands of people. And, and most of them aren't,

And the ones who were involved in the criminal elements

They made pretty big headlines in 2017. They were at the center of a bribery scandal involving a member of the parliament, Likunlik, actually, who, I mean, he's one of the right-wingers aligned under Netanyahu.

Yeah, that was a guy. That was the big homie, David Bitton. He was one of BB's main lackeys, let's say. Lackeyworks. Lackeyworks, okay. Henchman, yeah, whatever you want to call it. One of the guys who they tried out on TV to yell, he had a very close call this past year with COVID. He almost lost his life. He's kind of like our Chris Christie in some ways. He's a

ran a big furniture store and there was a big corruption case too so very colorful character indication of how you know to be a criminal doesn't mean you're in organized crime also if you're a politician doesn't mean you're not in organized crime it's a it's a there's a world opportunities here

Yeah, he was alleged to have taken loans from them, been unable to pay them back, and then agreed to do favors for them, including giving them large contracts. And the contract thing and the loan sharking, they're huge among the criminal clans, and we'll get into that in a bit. You got to know what you're able to pay back before you take a loan. This is the real basic stuff here. Another important lesson, especially if it's got an insanely high interest rate, which I'm sure these do. Yeah.

So these guys also made headlines a year later when they helped out the government by negotiating the release of a seven-year-old kid who had been kidnapped in a Klan dispute. Their origin story, I've seen it reported a couple different ways, but the main one says they're descended from Bedouins from Libya who moved to present-day Israel about 140 years ago. And they had good enough relations with their Jewish neighbors in the Ramle Lod area that they were paid to protect them from hostile Arab villagers.

Another report I saw had them as Bedouins that settled in the area post-48, but either way, they soon became incredibly powerful. Now, their main basis of operation is in Ramallah, and the boss man is or was Ramadan Malad Jerushib, though there's a war of succession currently going on.

And they rule over their territories. They settle disputes. They extort protection money from businesses in the area and definitely a lot of construction contracts. They run illegal gambling parlors. They counterfeit money, sell drugs, traffic weapons, and do hits. So it's your basic organized crime family list of services provided. And they also got famous for drug ATMs, which sounds kind of fancy, but it's basically just a typical hole in the wall situation where money goes in and drugs come out.

Yeah, and that's in neighborhoods where we're often, you know, the legal, you know, banks didn't want to really operate a lot. Those are often the easiest to find ATMs. That whole era is a little bit, fell off a little bit in those communities, the whole like cospomatum as they're called. But it's definitely what places in Lourdes and Ramblay were associated with to a large extent.

If you see, if anybody's out there, it's depicted in a movie from about 12 years ago in Israel called Ajime. Ajime is a neighborhood in Jaffa. And it was nominated for an Oscar, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, there's a whole scene with the ATMs. And there's a whole scene also with the Sulcha, with some Bedouins. Actually, in Tel Sheva. And it's because one of the characters... It's not a spoiler. It's like the first 20 minutes. One of the characters, his uncle or somebody... Uncle shoots a guy.

And then they, who was trying to extort money, and then they do this, they broker this sit-down. So pretty good depiction in that film of all that world. Yeah, and as we learned from the MP, they also do what's known as extra bank loaning, sort of gray area loan sharking, which is apparently a huge business in Israel, where they loan money out to poor families with high interest rates or just anyone who can't really get a loan from a bank. And here's, again, the 2021 Haaretz write-up, quote,

Israel's financial institutions are not built to serve traditional Arab communities, and a lack of availability of legal credit ensures the existence of an extensive range of black market lenders. Protection rackets extort money from owners of legitimate businesses. In both cases, unpaid debts are collected at the end of a gun.

High unemployment rates, particularly among young men, mean there are plenty of soldiers available as enforcers for the gangs. It's definitely the case. I think when people talk about what's called in Israel the gray market, this underground world of banking, it's often people almost get a little bit mistaken that it's similar to just kind of loan sharking. Like, you know, some poor schmuck owes a little bit of money from gambling, so he borrows some money and then he can't pay that off. You know, there's that too, but it's a lot bigger than that. There was a report in 2015 by the Justice Ministry saying

That estimated the worth of that whole underground banking scene, the whole gray market scene is about 130 billion shekels, which is about $40 billion, which seems extremely high, but also doesn't seem not plausible because these are actually a lot of the people who are taking these loans are actual, like you said, actual businesses, people who have money and they're not taking out...

500 bucks or 1,000 bucks or something. They're taking out 100,000 cycles, 500,000, a million, a couple hundred thousand dollars basically. And those interest rates are high, like payday loans. I mean, you can't, before you know it. And so these are actual...

real large loans and it's actual it's it's it's big enough this world is big enough to the extent to where it's actually legit competition for the overall banking system but again it's not one of these places where the underworld is kind of filling in the vacuum by the legal world the legal banking world or the or the you know the criminal justice system and the police yeah that's pretty crazy i didn't know that they were actually competing with the bigger banks i mean that's

I mean, I don't think they would see this competition. The banks are like, well, we're competing. We don't think about those guys. But that's a ton of money. That is a ton of money. And a lot of people are taking out those loans, can't get them from the actual banks, and they're going to get the money somehow. And if they can't pay, you light a match. Or here's a quote from the Times of Israel.

Sometimes these disputes are resolved in court, but very often, the borrower suffers a series of escalating threats from crime groups until they manage to pay, either by asking for money from family members or by agreeing to do favors for the crime family, like working in prostitution or being a fall guy in court for the family's crimes. An expert on organized crime in Israel, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Times of Israel.

The Jerushis, they previously had a vicious war with another powerful organized crime group, the Karajas, that took place mostly in the 90s. There were dozens of hits, allegedly 30 people killed, and the feud only ended when the government stepped in, initiated a ceasefire that kind of forced the Karajas to have to leave Ramla and live somewhere else.

And if I remember correctly, they also required them to, like, you know, bulldoze some of their properties and their houses and just move out en masse. One of the low points of that whole war, the Kharajas and the Jawushis, was in 1997, someone actually fired a shoulder-fired missile. They launched a shoulder-fired missile at a house in a Jawash neighborhood in Ramle. Apparently, no one was hurt. The missile was a dud. But that's the type of thing that gets noticed outside of Ramle, you know, when people are firing missiles.

you know, RPGs and similar sorts of things at one another. So that kind of, you know...

then you got to do something the agreement was that they would move to a place the carachas moved to a place called harish pretty far-flung town that at the time at least was still being built and you know these real estate developers were trying to attract um young couples to move there weren't really having much luck because it was it was seen as kind of you know out in the out in the boonies and not a lot of infrastructure so you were only able to get like ultra orthodox jewish families and some members of this crime gang and other people so it was kind of a strange mix and then

In recent years, it's actually a somewhat more desirable place because, you know, real estate prices are so high. It's a totally different place than what it was, or at least a rather different place. But that whole war and the way it was, you know, quote unquote resolved is one of the stranger kind of microcosms of this world in Israel. Yeah, but their violence has continued since that war. You know, they've been putting up numbers that have contributed to the ever rising murder rate. They've been fighting another war with the al-Shami crime family, which included a triple murder and load in June of 2020.

One of the men killed was the fourth member of the family to be killed in a few months. And it kicked off originally because the Jerushimani man, Hamouda Mugrabi, was killed in August the previous year. And it took only a day for the first revenge killing to go down.

Said a relative of one of the three murdered men who had also lost a nephew to Haaretz, quote, what's going on here began in the 80s. This place stank the most in the region. In came the crime, drugs, and weapons. The police make a living from the Jerushi family and the crime families. They're criminals and they don't do anything, he added. So yeah, that's another interesting thing that I didn't really get to the bottom of, Ben, but you see a lot of talk about

and the police protecting collaborators? What's the story with that? That's a very opaque world in Israel because it involves the security services and people who are in Arab communities who are trying to lay low, at least from people on the outside world. It's an allegation that gets tossed around a lot in Arab communities. The word in Hebrew is a mashtapim, which means like cooperators or collaborators.

And they're often scapegoated in these communities for the violence of the crime. The allegation often being, you know, they sold out their own people. These are Palestinians who sold out their people to the Zionists, the Jews. So what else are they capable of? You know, they'll do anything, you know, for money or for a little bit of, you know, for whatever. So, you know, certainly there are going to be many that are involved in that life, just like the rest of the Arab community. They live in...

You know, often very impoverished communities. They have large families, not a lot of great job options often. And they kind of have their backs against the wall. You know, they're a bit ostracized in their own. And, you know, you push them into a quarter. But, you know, within time, their numbers increase and they have more strength in numbers, especially after the second Intifada.

when so many were relocated to Israel, and so they become more of a force, or they can have more of a place. But another big allegation that often comes up is that they're kind of a protected class. In other words, they're informants for the police, or they were informants for the Shabbat, the Shin Bet, the Internal Security Service of Israel. So the allegation being, well, they thrive in crime because the police turn a blind eye because they need them as informants. So if we look at all of these, the scapegoating and the stereotypes and allegations,

You know, there's a kernel of truth in a lot of that. But I would say, you know, that the overall violence in the Arab communities is very, very homegrown, very, very local, very real. And we can't just blame it on guys from the West Bank or Gaza. And the Jerushis too. The main issue they're having right now is an internal dispute.

which came to a head in June of this year when a couple and their teenage daughter were killed in a drive-by with, I think, the other eight-year-old daughter. She was just wounded, but she survived. And this is the latest hit, or was the latest hit, in a war of succession that kicked off between Zayed Jaroushi, who's the current head of the family, and his cousins, Haram and Amir. The man killed in that shooting, you

Yusef was said to be a small time player who had previously been a drug dealer and was now mostly out of the way and sort of on the way out. But he also happened to be Zayed's brother and Zayed was kind of in hiding. He dodged an assassination attempt in 2019 and was heavily protected or just not, not able to be found. So they went after the brother that was.

And one of the cousins, Hatam, was murdered a month earlier, stabbed to death while going to the Al-Asqa Mosque in Jerusalem to pray during that recent flare-up in Israel that saw riots and protests. And it's interesting how they used the cover of that to commit this murder.

Fearing even more violence, many families in Ramla have apparently picked up and moved to other villages and cities. And this is probably the most textbook example of these cycle of revenge attacks that keep happening, of families going to war with other families, settling disputes like this without elders mediating or police getting involved. In fact, the revenge attack against Yusuf or someone close to him was so expected that he had been dismissed from his job as a night watchman at a market because they didn't want the violence to come there.

Although the job kind of seems more like a low-level extortion thing. Said a shopkeeper to Haaretz, quote, every store paid him 130 shekels, $40 a month. And he came to garden maybe once a week.

It was an organization tax. Once I said to him, tell me, what am I paying you for? And he answered, just give me the money. It wasn't terrible that he left. Yeah, that would be a model of how the extortion method works, especially at job sites, construction sites across Israel. They'll have a security company that does security for the job site, which is just a guy from the security company comes and he demands money for security and you pay the security company to protect you from the security company. If you don't pay the security company, the security company is going to burn down one of your cranes or something. And

there's equivalents in New York, New Jersey, you know, all over. Like, I wonder how much they learn from watching The Sopranos. Hard to say. I mean, you know, I think by and large, you know, they try to kind of look at a business and say, you know, okay, what can they afford to pay? Like, 130 shekels a month, you know,

So that's nothing to sneeze at, but at the same time, that's doable to where, like, you put the person in this sort of, like, this sort of corner where it's like you're not asking them more than they can possibly pay, but it's worth it to them to pay it. At the same time, you know, let's say you do that to 50, 60 different shops, you got a good bit of income. But again, these are, you know, working class people, small business owners and things like that.

It's just yet again, you know, one more way in which this place is can be hard. I mean, that seems to be the bread and butter of a lot of these these crime families. And another one, as documented by Asaf Gur at Tablet, is the OODA organization led by Coco OODA. Coco got a start as a soldier under Yahia Hariri, who ran one of the biggest crime families in the Arab-Israeli world.

He, Coco, gathered a bunch of the other young Shabab from the neighborhood. He formed his own group. This included building a fortified compound in, how do you say, Jauljulia? Jauljulia, yeah. What's the deal with the compounds? Because I feel like you've mentioned that to me before.

Yeah, so it's not, you know, true across, you know, the board universally, but, you know, varies from one village or neighborhood or one family to another. But, you know, multi-generational family units are very, very common in Arab communities in Israel. And when it's, when the family of question is, you know, involved in the criminal life, that can lead to these issues.

These organizations have these sort of family compounds where they hold court, which can kind of sort of increase their power in a way. Obviously, you know, Jewish organizations have their sort of compounds and their, you know, places where they meet up and have sit-downs and all that too, you know. You name it, you know, big junkyards, big parking lots, big bars and cafes, social clubs and all that. But this multi-generational family clan compound is a, you know, is a feature of the Arab community. And, you know, it's the sort of thing to where you can go to different Arab communities all over Israel or different towns or villages and

And there will usually be a number of very large families. They can have hundreds of members even, which I found when I was a reporter often made it relatively easy to cover stories if something happened and you wanted to go speak to the family or interview them or whatnot. Like there was a story about a kid who left Israel to try to join ISIS in Syria, and he was arrested. And there had been a few guys like that by then. And most people were writing this up without necessarily speaking to their families. They're like, oh, I'll go speak to the family.

I don't know any of them. I don't know their phone number. I don't know where they live. I just know they're from this town. And I just remember driving into the town, stop at the first convenience store, ask the guy at the counter and he's related to them and just gives me directions right there. And that's the type of thing that by and large that almost always works in those communities. You know, you'd ask somebody,

Do you know this family and how I can, you know, give them a call or find them and say, oh yeah, that's my, that's my brother-in-law. That's my cousin. And so, you know, in Jewish Israel, it's very common to not have, you know, six degrees of separation. You know, it seems sometimes like, like everybody in Israel almost knows each other, but, but in the Arab communities, it's, from what I've seen, it's much more the case.

Him and 20 of his men got indicted in 2018. You know, they did the usual drug dealing and extortion, but also worked as contractors and hitmen for other organizations. And even Coco himself is said to have traveled to South Africa to practice with a sniper rifle. After being refused a pass to attend his brother's funeral while he was incarcerated, he had some of his men shoot up a number of prisons.

And, you know, that's kind of showing you, too, like how fearless these guys are going after law enforcement and things like that. Well, you got to be fearless if you if you make it to, you know, if you make it to adulthood named Coco in one piece. Yeah. As a gangster, actually. That's I'm not I'm not going to mess with you. But, you know, he also had good relations with Jewish mafiosos and also dated a Jewish woman. So that's a nice coexistence bumper sticker moment right there. And Mazaltov, that's a reality show.

waiting to be filmed you know well we talked about in the israel episode right didn't they do a reality show about one of the crime families there and they just put a model to live with them in their house it's like uh you know yeah a couple sort of situation yeah the outposts they had a sort of kind of a you know father knows best sort of thing that aired and then uh he was killed about a year later yeah that was bizarre yeah the model was like afterwards was like no like this isn't funny like i spent time with them and they're it's like terrifying

It wasn't like she was like, oh, it was cute. She was like, no, it was terrifying people and it wasn't good, essentially seemed to be. I mean, I think I'm paraphrasing a bit, but it was along those lines. You spend time around people who are in that sort of life. You also put your own life in danger, you know what I mean? Because, you know, if you're hanging out with them when they get shot up or whatever, you know. Yeah.

Why were you there? So it can happen to anybody. To make a reality TV show. Which is probably worth the risk. Let's be honest. I mean, Sean and I are more than willing to participate in a show like that. I'm sure you'd be down too. I would. It depends on where the bullet's going. Where is the gunshot? Is it below the waist? Oh, not getting shot. I meant just living with one of these families. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like an Airbnb somewhere that they don't know and we're paying cash, you know? Yeah. Yeah. The Hariri is the family we were just talking about. They previously had a feud going with the Abdel Kader family in Taib.

who were infamous for getting into a shootout with the police as well. And in the 2012 Ben Harmon special for the Jerusalem Post, there was a write-up of them facing a slew of charges related to tax evasion, gun running, money laundering, and they also did the usual, like drug dealing and extortion. And the man who ran the family, Mabrouk Abdelkader, actually served as the vice principal of a school and, quote, has passed himself off as a community leader, a legitimate businessman, and the public face of the crime family. While behind the scenes,

He pulls the strings on the gang's criminal enterprise. And as you know, we support here on the podcast, we support our school teachers, public school teachers, definitely. Ynet, an Israeli journalist news site, said that according to the Israeli police, there's seven organized crime families made up of Israeli Arabs.

And in the article it mentioned, it kind of broke them down into sort of a depth chart. As I am about to mispronounce some of these, if any members of these families are listening, I do apologize. Up top they had the Hariri clan, who you mentioned, followed by the Abulatif clan from up north. A lot of family from...

and the wider Sharon region, Sharon. Then you, you know, following, uh, moving down, moving down the death chart, you had the, uh, the Karajas up in Harish and Bakar Garbia in that area, the Jawushi clan in Ramle, Abu al-Kian clan from the South and the Al-Aryash family from the Um al-Fahm area, uh, Um al-Fahm, which is in the Wadi Ara. That was the site of a lot of the, um, that October 2000, uh, rioting and shootings were, were around there. Uh,

And again, if we mispronounce your name, please hit us up on Twitter.

So yeah, these are the Warren crews. There's a whole bunch of others, I think, too, and they're armed to the teeth, and they don't hesitate to shoot each other. And there was a video we actually tweeted out from the Otherworld account the other week that had, I think I sent it to you too, Ben, that had some of these guys showing off their wares, and they look at it out, it would look like a cartel video, right? Just guys in the desert, guns on guns. And it's interesting because Israel actually has really strict gun laws when it comes down to it. But there's a ton of weapons in the Israeli Arab sector just overflowing with them.

And El-Manoula wrote it up in 2014. And again, this is even before the really crazy waves of violence happened. And they quote an Arab member of parliament, Isawi Frej. Is that how you say it? Yeah, Isawi Frej. He's from the Meretz party, which is a Jewish left-wing Zionist party. He's an Arab member of parliament. And he's from Kfar Qasim.

And he said, quote, if you don't have a gun, you don't exist. And I'm going to keep going with this because there are some pretty nutty quotes from it that kind of help convey the seriousness. Quote, in an interview with El Monitor, he said that the situation has become so serious that over the past few months, educated young couples in Arab localities are considering raising one of their sons to be a, quote, thug so that he can protect his brothers and sisters.

If you don't have a thug, he said, you could be humiliated. Almoner asked Frej if he wasn't perhaps exaggerating. He replied, I'll give you a personal example. I have one son and my wife is pressuring me to have another male child. I'm talking about myself because my brother has three sons and he really plans for one of his sons to become a thug. No giving up, protect his siblings. That's the situation. It comes back to what we were talking about before. If you're not from one of these big families, if you don't have a lot of guys...

With guns who are part of your family, part of your clan and all that, like, what do you, how do you, how do you get protection? How do you, how do you exert any sort of status? And a lot of these guys are, they're desperate, you know, like you said. I do kind of like too how the monitor journalist was like, you know, maybe he might be getting a little carried away here, but let's hear him out, you know? Yeah.

He's like, what about midnight basketball? Or maybe get him into youth, you know, a sports league, you know? But yeah, yeah. I think, you know, he was speaking from the heart and that, you know, if that's people are desperate, you know? People are, yeah. Well, I mean, we'll see. I think I have a quote for, from Oda later on. That's pretty, that shocked me when I read it.

But, you know, the main question with this is like, where do the guns come from? And some are makeshift weapons that are manufactured in workshops and our villages are in the West Bank. Others are smuggled in from Jordan, Egypt, and a lot are stolen from the Israeli defense forces and trafficked out and sold.

Yeah, and it's not only the guns, like you mentioned earlier with the shoulder-fired missiles, there's a lot of grenades are stolen, frag grenades, but also stun grenades. Those are typically used just for intimidation, you know, so you throw it in somebody's yard because you didn't pay it. But, you know, you can steal these, people can steal these from a base or an arms depot, or just jump a soldier at a bus stop, you know, who's by himself looking at his phone, his head's buried in his phone at some bus stop, you know, kind of in a remote area, and he's got an M16 slung over his back, doesn't even have the magazine in and the safety's on. So,

you know, that's, that's pretty easy picking. And you can almost make the case arguably that if you're a soldier out there by yourself off base with a gun, uh, you're more of a target. It's more dangerous. And then these, these, these homemade guns are used, uh, quite, quite regularly. They're also used to have been using some terror attacks in Israel, including the, the Saronah shooting, uh, back in 2015 in Israel, they usually call them Carl Gustav guns or the police do. I don't know where they got that from, but there's the, there's a Swedish submachine gun called the

Carl Gustav. It looks vaguely like that. It looks a lot like, kind of like a Tech N9ne, but one that was made by Mr. Potato Head or something. I mean, they're very rudimentary. You get off a few shots and then I'd be surprised if the fourth or fifth doesn't just blow off your hand or the barrel of a gun. But again, if you're just going to kill one guy or pop off a few shots somewhere, it could be worth it. Yeah, and we're a little all over the place, but all these things lead up to this just massive amount of murder and violence that's just taking over.

And the gangs develop a sense of impunity because of this lack of policing and this feeling that the police don't care if Arabs kill Arabs, so they get emboldened. And that's how we kind of get to this present-day fiefdoms that are happening where everything's being settled with guns. And in 2019, as the murder rates keep climbing, protests kick off, calling for more policing, calling for something to be done about the violent gangs menacing these communities. At the same time, as we mentioned, I think, earlier, trust in the police as an institution is

has fallen to 20% among Israeli Arabs.

It sounds a bit high, to be honest. Maybe there was like a 20% margin of error. I don't know, but that sounds high. I guess it depends on how you characterize trust. I think I rounded up from 18%. Okay, there you go. I kind of like how this Haaretz op-ed from around then summarizes the whole situation. Quote, "...the Arab community has rightly pointed a finger of blame at the government and also at the police, which abandoned it to the mercy of criminal clans that so fear and have taken many lives."

The police counter that they are making great efforts, and they blame the Arab community's leadership for not helping them fight this battle. The truth must be stated right away. Both sides are correct. On one hand, it demands that the police enter Arab towns and take action against the criminal clans.

But on the other, many members of that same leadership oppose opening police stations in Arab towns, and they also oppose Arab citizens joining the police force. And it is like it's a hard solution to parse through, right? And we've been talking about this, but you do see it a lot in other marginalized communities, whether it's in projects or bad neighborhoods here in U.S. cities, or even in Berlin with the Turkish groups there and how to handle those situations.

It's just a conversation that comes up where, you know, you need the police to do a better job, but also nobody's allowed to help them. This sort of thing, right? And in some situations here, you have crime scenes being cleaned up before police arrive or police getting attacked when they come in. And,

The police are the ones who have lost the trust in the first place, right? And Israeli officials admit that the Arab communities in Israel have received less than adequate services for generations. But like, where do you go from here? All the things about neglect, you know, all the, all the assertions about neglect and all, and, and discrimination in Israel, it's all true. You know, it's, there's, there's a lot, and then you can explain and being a marginalized community and poverty and,

and access to guns, all of these things can be, there's, there's an explanation for, for them or there's, or there's ways to, you know, they're, they're compelling factors, but I, I, I just can't, maybe I'm naive, but I just don't think there's any sort of compelling explanation for the cruelty. In other words, like you see there's an eight year old girl in that car and you still open fire. You know what I mean? Like that's not the state and the police can only do so much at some point. Like people got to not realize each other like that. I don't know. I don't know what, what role, um,

Please having that, because what type of desperation gets you to do something like that, to just gun people down or kill a member of your own family? And I just, I don't know how to...

I don't know how to get my head around that. Yeah, I mean, it's a tough conversation. I think we've talked about this too in another episode. It's like, you know, we are firm believers in personal responsibility, right? There are definitely societal factors, especially in this situation, that contribute to what's going on. But at the end of the day, people are still making the decision to squeeze the trigger, you know, and that's got to fall squarely on them, despite all the extenuating circumstances that, you know, kind of lead to it. Yeah, yeah. And all the extenuating circumstances that have, you know, adversely affected your community, right?

but you're going out and terrorizing your own community. And that's the thing, you know, you can say that about so many places in the States too. Yeah. Yeah. And the AP, I think back in 2019, they put it really succinctly quote, Arab citizens who suffer from widespread discrimination say Israel's vaunted security forces are suspiciously powerless when it comes to combating violence in their communities. Police say local leaders and residents must do more to help them impose law and order. I mean, I'm in Oda who,

very famous Israeli Arab politician, kind of, I guess he would be the one person to point to as like a voice of the community. And he's not shy about calling out the government for its mistreatment. He said this at a meeting of the Israeli parliament, quote, we have a police force that can do everything when it wants to. Don't you know the names of the crime lords? We, the joint list are calling on you to fuck them up. We want you to bash in their faces. We want to live in a society without weapons, no weapons. What are they good for? So yeah, I mean, that's complexities right there.

Yeah, you know, like, it's all very complex, just like we, you know, we said about the very nature of being an Arab citizen of Israel is extremely complex, or the fact that, you know, people want, they don't want under-policing, they don't want over-policing, they want...

The police to be in these communities to protect them, but they don't want the police to abuse their communities either. The police want to protect the people in these communities, but they say the people don't cooperate. But then when people do try to cooperate, a lot of times they pay for it. Like a very common assertion by a lot of Arab Israelis is that if somebody actually does go to the police to offer some sort of information...

they're very prone to try to turn them into an informant or to try to turn Arab journalists and community leaders into informants. So it's kind of like, which, you know, in a small community where so many people are related and, you know, people grow up together and know each other, like, you know, that can put your life in danger, even just the offer. So there's not a lot of positive incentives sometimes for people to want to cooperate.

Yeah. And we should say too, you know, in recent years, despite the fact that murders have only increased, the government has made some efforts to do something. More police stations were built, more Arab officers were hired. Jamal Hakrush now holds the highest rank ever for an Arab Muslim. He's the deputy police commissioner, which is the second highest rank on the force. And, you know, he himself has said it's a lengthy road towards undeclared

undoing what's been the case for 70 years, meaning the lack of resources, discrimination, lack of trust, but he's also addressed problems within the communities themselves. This is from a 2019 New York Review of Books article. Quote, speaking at a conference of Arab mayors in October, the police chief Hakruz said, in the Jewish community, when someone is murdered, they go to the police. The police speaks to witnesses. There are interrogations and trials. In the Arab sector, what's more common is there is a murder, then there's a revenge murder, and then another.

We see four or five murders before the blood feud ends. Many heads in the audience nodded in recognition. And though, you know, slight correction, as we detailed in the Karabam Wars of the Israeli Mafia episode, the Jewish Mafia certainly functioned with the whole revenge killing way as well. Yeah, and these killings there can spiral out of control and lead to...

you know, can have a real snowball effect there too. You know, there's been, there's been gang wars in the Israeli Jewish communities that have had, you know, dozens of people get killed. But by and large, the point is true though, like Jews feel much more common turning to the state for help, turning to the police for help. It's a fact.

And then just to give you an idea too of how wild things have gotten, how untouchable some of these families feel, in September of 2021, someone shot up the house of the police, the deputy commissioner I just mentioned, Jamal Haroosh. And then, you know, we have incidents like the opening of the episode with a 15-year-old killed while under a police escort, an incident in September where a wedding was shot up, five people hit and a man killed. And again, this is after an effort has been made to rein in these groups. Things just aren't going well.

And you have something like the 922 initiative, which passed a few years ago. This provided billions of dollars to the Arab sector to fix infrastructure like water and sewage pipes, train teachers, do education initiatives, health initiatives. And it's seen as a success, but it's also backfired in a way as the criminal groups now violently extort contracts out of the municipalities that were tasked with doling out this sudden influx of money.

And from a 2021 Times-Avizor report, quote, over the past few years, Arab criminal groups have proliferated and taken over spaces vacated by state institutions and police. A new reality has been created in Arab towns and cities, one in which powerful protection rackets have access to an enormous quantity of weapons, lend money, and collect payments at the barrel of a gun and open fire at Arab mayors and their family members. And this is, I mean, I didn't know this going into this, and it's pretty crazy that

Suha Arif, writing in Local Call in 2020, says, quote, these crime organizations, according to various sources, have expanded greatly in recent years. Along with their involvement in conventional crime, they maintain a large number of legitimate businesses and are trying to acquire control of local councils.

Evidence shows that they are also financed local election campaigns, provide firearms to rival political groups during election seasons, coerce tenders in their favor with threats of violence, and carry out drive-by shootings against contractors or senior members of local councils. In 2019 alone, assailants opened fire at 15 out of around 75 Arab local council heads. I mean, that's...

It kind of shows you, why bother intimidating these guys if you can just get your own person in there? It's the dream of every organized crime group all over the world. Yeah, for sure. You've had a lot of cases of this sort of violence also against Jewish local council members and local politicians in Israel, but it's much more common in the Arab sector and also

Local politics there, people are much more invested in it and much more passionate about it. Not to downplay, that sounds like a kind of funny way to talk about it, but it's a much more powerful thing, local elections, local politics in Arab communities.

than any Jewish ones. If you get people like that, organized criminals, into the government, it's a very hard thing to undo. There's a really great story in Haaretz about this town called Kalansuwa, where threats and attacks have caused numerous local officials to quit their job, and the gangsters have effectively taken over City Hall. They control the businesses, contracts, everything from waste management to school lunches. A man named Maruf Zmiro

He was a principal, decided to run for mayor, and he was a reformer. He wanted to right the ship, and he was actually projected to win the election. But two weeks before election day, the threats start. His house gets shot up, and him and his wife, their cars get shot up. There's threatening phone calls, including video clips of his adult children who don't even live in the city.

And after that, he just had enough. He steps away and the incumbent ends up winning the election. I should also mention his cousin, who was city manager, he was killed in 2011. And yet the problem right now, it's just raging out of control. We've seen a ton of media on it. 2021 already seems like it's going to set a new record, like a grim milestone. The 100th Arab-Israeli was killed just a day before we recorded this on October 17th.

The man who was killed, his brother was also killed by gunfire in 2019. And apparently the family is locked in a feud. And I think they just announced that the Shin Bet, who usually deal with terrorism, are going to be investigating and trying to do something about this problem and the criminal groups. And it's kind of been met with a mixed response. And for good reason. I mean, this is often a response in Israel when crime gets out of control. Back in about 2014 or 15, there was also a big wave of

of mafia violence and Jewish organized crime families. And, you know, the center of Jewish population centers, Israeli population centers in Israel, car bombings, all this stuff. And there was a ton of heat on the police to do something. And you saw a lot of these same, you know, these same kind of messages and slogans come out, you know, get the shin bed involved, let them use their quote, expanded means and quote, advanced top secret technology, which of course means, you know, all types of surveillance stuff that,

The law typically protects citizens from being used against them without any sort of due process or probable cause. Expanded means can be arresting people without, you know, charge and or bringing them in front of a

a magistrate, administrative detentions, like what they do in the West Bank or Gaza with Palestinians. What they do in the West Bank with Palestinians, a great deal. So this idea that you can, you know, whenever there's a problem in Israel, just throw the army or the shinbet at it. And I get why that makes sense. They have these technological means. They're very, very talented, the people in the shinbet. They're all over the place. They have this dragnet, this secret police network.

If you're going to have the Shin Bet fight crime in Israel like they fight terrorism in Gaza and the West Bank, you can see where this leads and why it's problematic. The people who are committing these crimes in Israel, the people who are the victims of these crimes in Israel, are both citizens of this country. They have every right. According to Israeli law, they're supposed to have every right that I do or anyone else in this country is. Including the due process, including to not be treated like they're enemy combatants in a

counter-terrorism capacity. So it's really, really loaded, really problematic, and if you think the Arab citizens in Israel are going to have trouble being convinced to cooperate with police, I mean, with the Shin Bet, like,

I mean, that's even a whole other level. So I get why people push for that, and they have some means of disposal that they could use, but that's a real dangerous road to go down. And I think in America you can look at that kind of like the war on terror and the Patriot Act or what have you, you know. Start spying on your own people.

Yeah, it's definitely something that I think we're gonna be paying attention to over the next couple months and kind of see how this plays out. But yeah, Ben, thanks again, man. We always enjoy having you on and having you bring in a lot of real on the ground experience from reporting on unorganized crime in Israel. Is there anything you want to you want to plug you want to say anything like that?

Oh, yeah, definitely. Well, thanks for having me on. I always enjoy it. It's always fun. I'm glad everybody out there is listening. You can check out a lot of my writing at BenjaminHartman.com, B-N-J-A-M-I-N-H-A-R-T-M-A-N, again, one N, BenjaminHartman.com, or Twitter at Ben Hartman.

Um, or I write about cannabis, cannabis news and all that for a website called conigma.com C A N N I G M A. Who else we got? Who else? Who's got a, who's got a mixtape coming out? I think that's it. Hit me on those. Um, and yeah, happy to, uh,

I'm going to keep this conversation going wherever you find me. Yeah, I think you're our only multi-episode returnee so far. So hopefully we'll figure something else out to bring you on. I want to thank, too, our Patreon sponsors that hit the high levels. Pete Thomas, Mike Ulrich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Chris Cusimano, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, Doug Prindle, and Jared Levy. And to everyone else, join them, and I will read your name as well. And until next week...

Bye.