Israel’s Arab Population Finds Itself in Dire Straits

By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

There has been an epidemic of criminal violence and state neglect in the Arab community of Israel. At least 56 Arab citizens have died since the beginning of this year. Many blame the government for neglecting its Arab population and the police for failing to curb the violence. Arabs make up about a fifth of Israel’s population of 10 million people. But criminal killings within the community have accounted for the vast majority of Israeli homicides in recent years.

Last year, in fact, stands as the deadliest on record for Israel’s Arab community. According to a year-end report by the Center for the Advancement of Security in Arab Society (Ayalef), 252 Arab citizens were murdered in 2025, an increase of roughly 10 percent over the 230 victims recorded in 2024. The report, “Another Year of Eroding Governance and Escalating Crime and Violence in Arab Society: Trends and Data for 2025,” published in December, noted that the toll on women is particularly severe, with 23 Arab women killed, the highest number recorded to date.

Violence has expanded beyond internal criminal disputes, increasingly affecting public spaces and targeting authorities, relatives of assassination targets, and uninvolved bystanders. In mixed Arab-Jewish cities such as Acre, Jaffa, Lod, and Ramla, violence has acquired a political dimension, further eroding the fragile social fabric Israel has worked to sustain.

In the Negev, crime families operate large-scale weapons-smuggling networks, using inexpensive drones to move increasingly advanced arms, including rifles, medium machine guns, and even grenades, from across the borders in Egypt and Jordan. These weapons fuel not only local criminal feuds but also end up with terrorists in the West Bank and even Jerusalem.

Getting weapons across the border used to be dangerous and complex but is now relatively easy. Drones originally used to smuggle drugs over the borders with Egypt and Jordan have evolved into a cheap and effective tool for trafficking weapons in large quantities. The region has been turning into a major infiltration route and has intensified over the past two years, as security attention shifted toward Gaza and the West Bank.

The Negev is not merely a local challenge; it serves as a gateway for crime and terrorism across Israel, including in cities. The weapons flow into mixed Jewish-Arab cities and from there penetrate the West Bank, fueling both organized crime and terrorist activity and blurring the line between them.

The smuggling of weapons into Israel is no longer a marginal criminal phenomenon but an ongoing strategic threat that traces a clear trail: from porous borders with Egypt and Jordan, through drones and increasingly sophisticated smuggling methods, into the heart of criminal networks inside Israel, and in a growing number of cases into lethal terrorist operations. A deal that begins as a profit-driven criminal transaction often ends in a terrorist attack. Israeli police warn that a population flooded with illegal weapons will act unlawfully, the only question being against whom.

The scale of the threat is vast. According to law enforcement estimates, up to 160,000 weapons are smuggled into Israel each year, about 14,000 a month. Some sources estimate that about 100,000 illegal weapons are circulating in the Negev alone.

Israeli cities are feeling this. Acre, with a population of about 50,000, more than 15,000 of them Arab, has seen a rise in violent incidents, including gunfire directed at schools, car bombings, and nationalist attacks. In August 2025, a 16-year-old boy was shot on his way to school, triggering violent protests against the police

Home to roughly 35,000 Arab residents and 20,000 Jewish residents, Jaffa has seen rising tensions and repeated incidents of violence between Arabs and Jews. In the most recent case, on January 1, 2026, Rabbi Netanel Abitan was attacked while walking along a street, and beaten..

In Lod, a city of roughly 75,000 residents, about half of them Arab, twelve murders were recorded in 2025, a historic high. The city has become a focal point for feuds between crime families. In June 2025, a multi-victim shooting on a central street left two young men dead and five others wounded, including a 12-year-old passerby. Yet the killing of the head of a crime family in 2024 remains unsolved to this day; witnesses present at the scene refused to testify.

The violence also spilled over to Jewish residents: Jewish bystanders were struck by gunfire, state officials were targeted, and cars were bombed near synagogues. Hundreds of Jewish families have left the city amid what the mayor has described as an “atmosphere of war.”

Phenomena that were once largely confined to the Arab sector and Arab towns are spilling into mixed cities and even into predominantly Jewish cities. When violence in mixed cities threatens to undermine overall stability, it becomes a national problem. In Lod and Jaffa, extortion of Jewish-owned businesses by Arab crime families has increased by 25 per cent, according to police data.

Ramla recorded fifteen murders in 2025, underscoring the persistence of lethal violence in the city. Many victims have been caught up in cycles of revenge between clans, often beginning with disputes over “honour” and ending in gunfire. Arab residents describe the city as “cursed,” while Jewish residents speak openly about being afraid to leave their homes

Reluctance to report crimes to the authorities is a central factor exacerbating the problem. Fear of retaliation by families or criminal organizations deters victims and their relatives from coming forward, contributing to a clearance rate of less than 15 per cent of all murders. The Ayalef report notes that approximately 70 per cent of witnesses refused to cooperate with police investigations, citing doubts about the state’s ability to provide protection.

Violence in Arab society is not just an Arab sector problem; it poses a direct and serious threat to Israel’s national security. The impact is twofold: on the one hand, a rise in crime that affects the entire population; on the other, the spillover of weapons and criminal activity into terrorism, threatening both internal and regional stability. This phenomenon reached a peak in 2025, with implications that could lead to a third intifada triggered by either a nationalist or criminal incident.

The report suggests that along the Egyptian and Jordanian borders, Israel should adopt a technological and security-focused response: reinforcing border fences with sensors and cameras, conducting aerial patrols to counter drones, and expanding enforcement activity.

This should be accompanied by a reassessment of the rules of engagement along the border area, enabling effective interdiction of smuggling and legal protocols that allow for the arrest and imprisonment of offenders. The report concludes by emphasizing that rising violence in cities, compounded by weapons smuggling in the Negev, is eroding Israel’s internal stability.

 

Freeland Lectures America. But What is Her Record?

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

After a sudden political retirement in Canada, former finance minister Chrystia Freeland has made a leap back onto the American media stage. She’s done the rounds on U.S. TV, including the big political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, presenting as a kind of elder stateswoman: someone who’s been in the room and can point to what’s coming next in our uncertain, tumultuous time.

 Her latest appearance is an op-ed piece in the New York Times, the country’s premier newspaper, entitled “The Great Capitulation Is Over. What Will Take Its Place?” It purports to be a thesis about the world moving from a state of helplessness, in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s various foreign policy moves, to a more united and courageous front.

 Readers may agree or disagree that this is what’s happening internationally. But one could be forgiven for being skeptical about Freeland’s political position and interest in the issues she’s talking about. In fact, Freeland’s argument is not principally a reasoned case about the state of the world, but a partisan appeal to U.S. voters for the Democratic party, which is gearing up for mid-term election season.

 Whatever their politics, her American audience deserves to know what Canadians already do: namely, that her record in government in this country is deeply spotty, and the very matters on which she claims expertise she in fact has almost no credibility.

 The era of Freeland Liberalism in Canada began in an old, pre-MAGA world. Her boss, former prime minister Justin Trudeau, rose to prominence when the Grits had been reduced to a small parliamentary caucus. In the 2015 election campaign, Trudeau outmuscled the opposition New Democrats as the change option to defeat former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

 It is fascinating how things have changed. Since, we have seen around the Western world a heightened skepticism of immigration, a rejection of globalism and elite institutions like the World Economic Forum, and backlash against energy policy centred more on environmental aims than the economy or security.

 Yet instead of reckoning with the heart of these developments, Freeland puts lipstick on them. She claims Trump’s victory over former vice-president Kamala Harris in 2024 “should not be understood as a secular or global shift toward the extreme right by the populace itself.” Meanwhile, she admits that “making market democracy work for working people is a daunting challenge, but it is hardly a new one.”

 You’d think, reading her article, that Freeland had nothing to do with the past decade of policymaking. Yet the populist backlash she dismisses did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged after years of policy choices by governments like her own: large-scale immigration without corresponding housing supply, unprecedented pandemic-era monetary expansion, surging housing costs, and public spending at levels even her successor, Mark Carney, has described as unsustainable.

 Perhaps the most important indicator is Canada’s falling living standards, the consequence of lost productivity gains. As of 2024, our per-person GDP (a broad measure of living standards) stood at US$51,649, a mere 3.2 per cent higher than in 2014, according to data from the Fraser Institute. Contrast that with the U.S., which had per-person GDP of $72,350, which is 20.2 per cent higher than it was in 2014, and is now 40.1 per cent higher than in Canada.

 In other words, Americans enjoyed growth in their living standards at almost six-times the rate we have seen over the last decade or so, and now have living standards 40 per cent higher than us.

 This is the record of Freeland’s time in office, which originated in Canada’s own policy choices, not pressure from Washington.

 The project, then, of “making market democracy work for working people” is in fact a correction to the circumstances Freeland helped create. What business does she have telling us how to fix the economy when she was part of the group that broke it?

 Freeland’s op-ed also glosses over a number of inconvenient realities. She praises China for resisting Trump, noting only that it is “hardly an avatar of liberal democracy.” Missing from the discussion are Beijing’s intellectual-property theft, threats against Taiwan, interference in Canadian elections, and its unjustified detention of two Canadian citizens.

 Her description of New York’s Zohran Mamdani as merely a “democratic socialist” similarly omits the controversies surrounding his views on Israel, which make him a deeply divisive figure.

 And in praising public resistance to immigration enforcement, she ignores the illegal immigration and border issues that lie at the heart of the American political divide. ICE’s excesses, and the public response, are a symptom of a wider, continental crisis. They aren’t the foundation of a political movement to rebalance America’s immigration needs and pressures.

 Freeland’s op-ed presents her as a seasoned guide to a changing world. But Canadians remember the record she left behind. No doubt she has seen much. But her record suggests she has more yet to learn than teach.