In the months since October 7, Arab and Jewish Israelis have learned to live with a new vocabulary of fear: Rockets, Hostages, National emergency, and mass demonstrations. This vocabulary had further solidified under the two wars with Iran in June 2025 and March 2026. But there is another word that has quietly entered our lives, especially in parts of the country that rarely make front-page headlines: abandonment.

A few weeks ago, my ear caught a line from a song played in my son’s room, by one of his favorite artists – Jimbo J. The line goes: “We’ve dialed 100, 100 times. A 100 100s are not answering.” If you want to call 911 in Israel, you dial 100. With that, the line’s meaning is: We called the police a hundred times. A hundred cops are not answering. A painfully accurate description of the artist’s experience in a kibbutz in the Gaza envelope on the morning of October 7th. And yet, little had changed.

In Arab local authorities all over Israel, nightly shooting by machine guns had become the new norm. Just weeks ago, a criminal organization used military-grade drones to drop grenades from the sky over a family’s house in Kafr Kana in the Galilee. Before the use of drones, Arab citizens in Kafr Kana called the police for hours, and no one showed up. How can it be that in post October 7th Israel, citizens are calling the police for hours, daily, reporting massive shooting and the police don’t show up? How is it possible that a country capable of surgically attacking targets located over 2,000 km away is incapable of arresting criminals in its backyard? The only reasonable conclusion is that security is selective.

I urge you to spend a night in an Arab local authority, or simply ask a Jewish friend living in a Jewish town bordering on one. In the weeks that followed October 7th, the absence of the state was evident. Local authorities, civil society, philanthropy, and volunteers heeded the call and responded quickly and efficiently. Only a few weeks into the aftermath, the state began mobilizing the resources needed to protect and rehabilitate the people and the areas damaged. Nearly two and a half years later, there is still a long way to go, but we have a process in place. But while the state invested in protecting and rehabilitating the perimeter, something dangerous happened inside the house.

In communities already struggling with organized crime and the proliferation of illegal weapons, the state’s willingfully let go of its capacity for policing. When machine guns fire in residential neighborhoods and no squad car arrives, this is not merely an operational glitch. It is a rupture in the social contract. When citizens feel underprotected, they take arms in their own hands, and so the vicious cycle continues.  A state cannot be strong at the border and weak in its streets. It cannot promise protection in Sderot and neglect it in Sakhnin. It cannot speak of sovereignty while ceding neighborhoods to criminal actors who no longer fear intervention.

The erosion of deterrence inside the country is as dangerous as any external threat. When criminal organizations operate openly with automatic weapons for prolonged periods, they are not simply committing crimes. They are testing the state’s willingness and capacity to govern. And when citizens repeatedly call for help, and no one comes, two things happen. Fear replaces trust. And parallel systems of authority begin to fill the vacuum.

This is especially acute in Arab society, which has suffered a disproportionate share of homicides in recent years. For years, these communities have experienced a toxic combination: under-policing in prevention, over-policing in arrests, weak witness protection, and low trust. The diversion of state resources created more space for violent actors.

Chronic internal violence is the single greatest barrier to narrowing socio-economic gaps and the creation of stratified citizenship. It undermines education, employment, entrepreneurship, municipal governance, and shared society initiatives. The state of Israel requires deep rehabilitation, the kind that works from the bottom up. This begins with the weakest, most abandoned group in Israeli society.

October 7 taught us that ignoring vulnerabilities does not make them disappear. It magnifies them. We need a national call to action that recognizes internal violence as a strategic threat, not a peripheral social issue. We need leadership that understands that protecting citizens is not divisible by ethnicity, geography, or political convenience.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)