Suppose you were in a neighborhood shopping area with your young children at 1100 in the morning and a young man on a motorcycle stops, pulls out a gun and fires into the air. Fida Nara Tabony, co-director of programs at the New Israel Fund and a resident of Nazareth, writes that this is commonplace in her community. But it should not be, not anywhere in Israel.

She writes: “Guns are everywhere. Crime and violence are all-pervasive. I am not being dramatic: People from Palestinian communities inside Israel go to the hospital for gunshot wounds at a rate that is six times higher than their Jewish neighbors. In just the first six weeks of 2026, 42 people have been murdered; that’s nearly one a day.”

Most of us living in Israel have interacted with enough members of the Israeli Arab community to know that, for the most part, our local Arab neighbors are not any more violent by nature than we are nor are they, for the most part, on the bottom of the economic ladder.  Remember that approximately 21% of Israel’s population is Arab, totaling over 2 million people. This demographic includes Muslims, Christians, and Druze who are citizens, along with permanent residents in East Jerusalem. They constitute a significant minority, with the majority living in Arab-majority towns and cities, such as Rahat and Nazareth, to cite just two examples. So why so much violence?

Driving in those cities, it is obvious that residents in these Israeli Arab communities have more or less been abandoned by our government. The infrastructure is decaying, the streets are often strewn with uncollected garbage, building codes are not sufficiently enforced, and the educational system does not offer the same level of instruction compared to the rest of the country.

To be sure, nowhere is the discrepancy greater than in basic education. An examination of the disparities in the education systems that serve Jewish and Arab students alone shows one aspect of the negative differential in the Arab sector.

While the Arab system historically faced significant funding, infrastructure, and pedagogical disparities, thankfully gaps in matriculation rates are narrowing, with 2021-2022 data showing a 75.6% Arab matriculation rate (close to the 77.2% rate for their Jewish peers). Nevertheless, Arab schools generally receive fewer resources, fewer teaching hours, and lower budgets per student compared to the Jewish sector, particularly in the lower Nurture Index quintiles.

The Nurture Index (Madad HaTipuach in Hebrew) is a socioeconomic ranking system used by Israel’s Ministry of Education to measure educational deprivation and determine the allocation of resources to schools. Schools are divided into five groups (quintiles), with 1 representing the highest socioeconomic status (lowest need for support) and 5 representing the lowest socioeconomic status (highest need for support).

The Arab system also faces challenges with lower-quality infrastructure, fewer supervision resources, and fewer teaching hours, especially for disadvantaged students. When it comes to teacher quality, the gap is smaller than in many other nations, yet teachers in the Jewish sector tend to have higher seniority and better digital skills, with only 22% of Arab teachers possessing medium-to-high digital skills compared to 70% of non-Haredi Jewish teachers.

Couple the issues of lower educational resources along with the resultant limits on professional growth in the larger Israeli community, and the personal frustrations of the residents in many locations put them at the mercy of illegal weapons, extortion, drugs and organized crime.

As Tabony rightly opines, “Personal security ought not be a radical demand. It is the most basic condition of citizenship.”

The scale of the crisis begs for attention. In 2025 alone, the deadliest year on record, 252 Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed. This, as homicide rates among the Jewish population are generally just 25% of what occurs among the Arab population. Truth be told, both numbers are too big and both need attention.

To be sure, under the current government the Arab population of Israel is somewhat at the mercy of our racist minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir. He, himself, has prior convictions of incitement to (Jewish) racism and support for a (Jewish) terrorist group, and has directed the police force to deprioritize the Arab community’s safety. However, that is only one aspect of the problem. The bigger issue is the relative lack of interest on the part of the Jewish population of Israel to address the root causes of this cancer in the Arab community

But hope is on the horizon. Two weeks ago tens of thousands of Jews and Arabs filled the streets of Tel Aviv in a protest demanding protection for their lives. The message to the government was clear: it is the government’s responsibility to protect all of us from both internal and external threats to our safety and survival.

We were taught a costly and devastating lesson about our unpreparedness for the external threat that manifested itself in the massacre of October 7th, no doubt about that. We should not have to wait for some similar internal disaster to occur before we allocate maximum resources to addressing the ills inside our country.

Former US President Franklin Roosevelt once said: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.” In a free and democratic society, we have an obligation to provide safety and security for all of our citizens equally. May we merit living to achieve that goal.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)