The Underworld Podcast - The Out of Control Arab Israeli Crime Clans Driving the Murder Rate Sky-High

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

In the last 5 years, murders in what's known as Israel's Arab sector have increased 50%, setting new records every year as criminal clans and organized crime have turned cities and towns into fiefdoms run by powerful gangsters who operate with impunity, where guns do most of the talking and Israel’s police are stuck trying to take back territory they abandoned. The clans have moved from extortion and drug smuggling to completely taking over municipal governments where they use shell companies to give themselves hugely profitable government contracts. Local politicians who get in the way have been killed, their families threatened, and attacks have gotten so brazen that even rivals traveling under police escort have been murdered. This week we are joined again by Ben Hartman, a former crime reporter in Israel who last guested on our "Car Bomb Wars of the Israeli Mafia" episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Late December 2020, in the mixed city of Lode in Israel. Lod's a tough town, been beaten down a bit, and it's known for its criminal elements. But Omar Abu Salek, 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 clan 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 revenge killing. You see, the night before, Salman or Asbarga 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 Abusalek family is in the crosshairs. The vendetta started in 2010, when a member of the Abusolic family knifed and killed a member of the Asbarga family after the Abus 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 Kassum. 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 Abu Salik 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. This is just one of the many murders that have plagued the Arab community in Israel. As criminal clans in organized crime have turned their cities and towns into fiefdoms run by powerful gangsters who operate with impunity, where guns do most of the talking and Israel's police are stuck trying to take back territory they've abandoned. In the last five years alone, murders have risen 50%.

And 2021 looks like they'll rise even higher. This is the underworld podcast. 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, a 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 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, one of the places they fled off to is kind of near where my in-laws live. And, you know, it's an 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 usually 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 to a large extent care about the larger Jewish community. But this one, it happened outside the community on Highway 6, the big cross-country toll road. It was in broad daylight. That thing is up and down cameras everywhere. And there was a police escort.

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, 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 even did a Patreon episode.

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, you know, 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. You know, that's not that, not one of those German names.

But yeah, at Ben Hartman won in on Twitter. Feel free, you 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. 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 it's the most fun for us.

So I think it's important to note really key, key fact on all this is that they, they are citizens absolutely 100% 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 the country. And a lot of those prior, you know, in earlier years, there could be a big story at time, there's violence in the area communities, largely because of the murders of women, which, you know, it's 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, you know, 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 and the air

communities. And part of why it's got 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, you know, always such a fun region to report on. So how bad is the problem, right? In 2019, 89 Arab citizens were murdered compared to only 36 Jews, even though Jews make up more than 80% of the country's population. In 2020, that number rose to 113, and that's a 50% raise in the last four years.

In 2021 is likely going to be higher, and the vast majority of these murders are never solved. 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 in just in the Arab community. communities between 2000 and 2006, they're about 150 per year. But again, that was across the entire community. And the population, like you said, they only make up 20%. So it's, it's disproportionately high. Also, the clearance rates for these homicides are much lower. It's bad on a lot of different ways. And it should be said, again, just to get perspective, I think I do this a lot when we talk about

violent crime in places that are in 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 it is who's going to kill you, or you're married or related to them. This is especially true for women. Or it's because you're tied up in the criminal life in some way. Obviously, in the state's majority of homicides, I'm pretty sure, are still related to the drug trade or still related to criminal activities. But you're much more likely in Israel if you get murdered for it to be somebody who is close to you. Someone who is not going to be hard to put two and two together where that came from.

And yeah, I definitely want to get into two of the clan wars and the rampant attacks on local politicians. But I think we need to start back in the year 2000, right? Arab areas and 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 in Tafada 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 Shimbab, 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 the whole thing, it had a profound effect on how Israeli police. view these areas and how Israeli Arabs view of 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 Al-Moddor 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 that October 2000 shootings at the protest slash riots. I'd think of a previous incident that, you know, is not, it was obviously very different, but in terms of civilians, back in 1956, there was what's known as the Kwa Khosom massacre, and that was about 50 Arab civilians who were killed by police, Border Patrol, for breaking curfew. It was, you know, in all sense, the words, a massacre. And that left a lasting impact, even though, you know, a couple years is a lifetime. in the Middle East, but even, you know, in kind of a timeless conflict like this, you know, 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, a larger Arab cities in Israel and one that has a lot of problems right now with crime. But to get back to what we were talking 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 suffered at the same time from under-police. and also over-policing. In other words, you know, 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, you know, I can think of many occasions with, you know, marches or protests in Arab neighborhoods or towns for things like Land Day or Nakpa 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 out, hang back outside the entrance to the community because they know that their presence can be seen as a provocation, you know, for obvious reasons. But then where do you strike that balance between pulling back too much and not being a problem, you know, between pulling back so you're not, you know, inciting things.

things are igniting things or it's not, 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 or 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, a Hart article I'm going to quote now that had a pretty

great rundown to. According to Dr. Yael Littmanovitz, a researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University, would follow 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, Lid Manevitz participated in a study looking at how members of the force viewed 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, you know, Arab politicians and Israel and community leaders and just, you know, 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 cooperate, obviously, 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 withdraw 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 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. it's a very loaded thing. The Arab communities often, you know, these kind of two warings sort of takes on what's going on. It's that, you know, we don't get

cooperation for community, and the community will often say the police, you know, 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 and housing,

employment and education, which also leads to the, you know, 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-Hawords 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 were 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 prate 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. You know, the stereotype of the cliche is that this younger generation is just different than their parents or their great generation. grandparents. I guess, you know, every generation says that about the new one. But,

but there's something to it. 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 didn't have to use their wits the same way. 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 you got this real, this real dangerous mix. And then, you know, on top of all that, which you hit on somewhat before is just being an Arab citizen of Israel is got to be one of the most complicated and loaded national identities on earth in so many different ways. 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 states? The state for them or going after them. So there's so many things and it's so loaded. I mean, you could right, you know, books and books about that, how complex that identity is. And one of the places where it gets really, 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, should be mentioned, not every Arab citizen of Israel is part of some large clan or part of some large criminal clan. And for them, you know, what recourse do you have in a community like that where you're just from some small family? You know, who can you turn to you? 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. You know, there are efforts, obviously the state has true.

tried to take that the police have as well. Back in, it was either, it was either 2011 or 2012, I wrote an article about a police officer at the Ramlae police station, who had this special appointment to be sort of a liaison for the, for the Arab community in the town, which is a mixed Arab Jewish city, about half a half. He was Arabic-speaking Mizrahi-Ju, that's a Jew whose family's origin is in the Middle East. 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 the 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 relevant people on both sides to try to squash it before somebody gets killed because once sootopia two has come home to disney plus let's go get ready for a new case we're going to crack this case and prove we're victorious partners of all time new friends you are gay destiny and your last Name? The snake. Dream team. New habitats.

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Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song. Book direct at storeshiltails.com. Once the guns come out, you know, 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, you know, great.

on paper, but another kind of problematic side to all this, you know, comes back to this role of the state again. So in places like, you know, Ramley, 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 sulholt, like sit-downs, for lack of a better term, I don't even know you translate, but like the different sides, you know, sit down and they, it's like arbitration, you know, who wronged, who. what do you think the compensation would be? And then they agree to squash it at least at least temporarily. I remember being shown by this cop. He was showing me pictures of all these folk hold 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, well, 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, 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 families. If somebody, if you're from a small family in Ramla or Jafor somewhere, or a small Christian Arab family,

and somebody kills, let's say, your cousin or shoots your dad, you know, your family's, you know, your family's nobody to fear. You're not from some big, from some big clans. They're not going to fear the comeback much. the police, let's say, aren't going to get involved and they're not going to broker some arbitration. So what sort of recourse do you have? 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 with no answers. As we covered way back 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 80s, 90s, who were extremely powerful and expanded internationally were Jewish Israelis, especially the Moroccan Jews. 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 work together, whether they were trafficking drugs or murdering their enemies. The guys on both sides and 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 and 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 your people who are part of an underworld, a subculture and all that, even more so. So is it a beacon of hope? It's definitely, you know, maybe it is a model of coexistence. You know, not necessarily guys who would, you or I could coexist with. But I guess we can make an effort. I'm not looking to branch out, though. Yeah.

I mean, they both share a love of, you know, Armani tracksuits, giant sunglasses. Deodora. Yeah, yeah, other things like that. Hugo Boss. Isod. Lacost, sorry, Lacoste. LaCost is still big?

Yeah, the little gator. So what happened is, as the Israeli Mafias 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 a 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 up. in and take some power, feel some vacuums. It's kind of similar to what happened to the Italian mob in New York in the 80s and 90s, which paved the way for other organized crime groups of 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 could, you can, come in and you start blowing each other up, don't you? It's like, don't you already see what we're dealing with, you know? So the Israeli public was already, you know, fatigued and traumatized by the terrorism of those years and they just, you know, there was no tolerance. You know, there was pretty

sweeping public support for, you know, kind of an all-out war by police against these guys. And to some extent, to some extent, I had a lot of success about 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 real, 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's 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 the Toff's 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 Gleney that we recommend pretty much every episode. Yeah, I had that one 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 do anything with that whole other part of Israel, know some of these names and they carry a lot of. of weight. But I think if we're looking about 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 a neighborhood,

where the family lives, multi-generational households, tons of people who are members of that same family or work for that family. And, you know, people in a clan, just like clan organizations in a lot of other countries, criminal organizations that are families, that are families, based, you know, they're less likely to, you know, to switch sides in a gang more. 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 were 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 the 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 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, a 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 Batyam or Rishol-Natzioni, all these Jewish towns in Israel.

Like, you know, 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 Bersheva. And so you're going to just drive into Tel Sheva and, you know, get the guns out. It's not, it's not smart. and you might have trouble leaving. So, you know, there's a lot of kind of structure in these kind of family-based organizations can be a lot tougher.

Yeah, and we should talk about the, is it Jerushis? Yarushes. How do you say it? Jalushis. Yeah. That's how I would say. You know, I mean, their pronunciations are a lot better in mind. 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 Jerusis 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 Jalwish, it's not like talking about the Gambinos or the Genevese or, you know, Bonanos or whoever, like 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.

They are actually large families, and some of them have, you know, hundreds or even thousands of people, and most of them aren't necessarily involved in crime or involved in crime at all. So if you went to Romble, you'd find a lot of Jawushies who are doctors, nurses, lawyers, etc., work in pharmacies, school teachers, all that, perfectly law-abiding members of society. But, you know, they're part of that, still part of that extended family. So just because somebody has that last name doesn't mean they're involved with the people within that family or who have that family name who are doing these activities. But it is something that, you know, can stigmatize somebody who's got that same last name. 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,

a Lacoonlic actually, who, I mean, he's one of the right-wingerers 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. Lackey Works. Lackey works. Okay. Hinchman, yeah, whatever you want to call it. One of the guys who had tried out on TV to, you know, to yell.

He had a very close call this past year with COVID. He almost lost his life. kind of a similar, he's kind of like our Chris Christie in some ways. He ran a big furniture store and there was a big corruption case too. So very colorful character, indication of how, you know, could be a criminal doesn't mean you're organized crime. Also, if you're a politician doesn't mean you're not in organized crime. 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, you're huge among the criminal plans and we'll get into that in a bit. got to know what you're able to pay back before you take a loan. This is real basic stuff here. Another important lesson, especially if it's got an insane, insanely high interest rate, which I'm sure these do. 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 clan 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 Ramla 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, you know, they soon became incredibly powerful. Now, their main basis of operation is in Ramla, and the boss man is or was Ramadan Malad Jerushi, 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 cosmottium, as they were called.

But it's definitely what places in Lod and Romley 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. Ajami is a neighborhood in Yafo, 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 Sulha, with some Bedouins. actually in Tel-Shavan, 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 learn 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 Hararets 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 some poor schmuck owns a little bit of money from gambling, so he borrows some money and then he can't pay that off. There's that too, but it's a lot bigger than that. There was a report in 2015 by the Justice Ministry that estimated the worth of that whole underground banking scene. The old gray market scene is about $130 billion shekel, which is about $40 billion. which seems extremely high, but also doesn't seem not plausible, you know, 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, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars,

basically. And, you know, those interest rates are high, like payday loans, you know, I mean, you can't, before you know it. And so these are actual real large loans. And it's actual, it's big enough, this world is big enough to the extent. into where it's actually legit competition for the overall banking system. But again, it's another one of these places where the underworld is kind of filling in the vacuum by the legal world, the legal banking world or 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. You know, I don't think about those guys. But, you know, 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, you know, 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 in organized crime in Israel, who asked to remain anonymous told the Times of Israel. And the Jerushies, they previously, he 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 Karajas and the Jalushes was in 1997, someone actually fired a shoulder-fired missile. They launched a shoulder-fired missile at a house in John Rish neighborhood in Ramele. Apparently no one was hurt. The missile was a dud. But that's the type of thing that gets noticed

outside of Ramele, you know, when people are firing you know, RPGs and, you know, 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 Karasjah's 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 young couples to move there, weren't really having much luck because it was seen as kind of, you know, 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 rather different place. But that whole war and the way it was, you know, quote-unquote, 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 Jerushi Money Man, Hamuda 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 Ha'ar. It's quote, what's going on here began in the 80s. This place stanked 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 collaborators 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 collaborators, the word in Hebrew is a mustapim, which is Phepaula

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 to the Zionists, the Jews. So what else are the 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 area 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, they, you know, their numbers increased and they have, you know, 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 that often comes up is that they're kind of a protected class. In other words, their informants for the police, or they were informants for the Shabak, the Shibat, 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, you know, the scapegoating and the stereotypes of allegations, There's a kernel of truth in a lot of that. But I would say that the overall violence in the Arab communities is very, very homegrown, very local, very real.

And we can't just blame it on guys from the West Bank of 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, was the latest hit in a war of succession that kicked off between Zayed Jerushi, who's the current head of the family and his cousins, Haram and Amir. The man killed in that shooting,

Yousef 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 Zayyad's brother and Zayyed was kind of in hiding. He dodged an assassination attempt to 2019 and was heavily protected or just 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-Aasca mosque in Jerusalem to pray during that recent flare-up in Israel that saw riots and protests. And it's interesting how they use the cover of that to commit this murder. Fearing even more violence, many families and 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 Harare, it's quote,

every store paid him 130 shekels, $40 a month, and he came to guard 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 sort of 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, you know, 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, security company is going to burn down, you know, when you're cranes or something. And there's equivalence 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 shagles a month, you know, that's nothing to sneeze out. 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, you know, one more way in which this place can be hard. I mean, that seems to be the bread and butter of a lot of these crime families. And another one, as documented by Asafgura Tablet, is the Uda organization, led by Coco Uda. Coco got a start as a soldier under Yehia Hariri, who ran one of the biggest crime families in the Arab-Israeli world. He, Coco, gathered a bunch of, like, the other young Shabab from the neighborhood. he formed his own group. And this included building a fortified compound in a, how do you say, Jal Jullia?

Jal Julia, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, what's the deal with the compounds? Because I feel like you've mentioned that to me before. Yeah, so it's not, 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 question is, you know, involved in the criminal life,

that can lead to these organizations having these sort of family compounds where they hold court which can kind of increase their power in a way obviously you know Jewish organizations have their 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 big bars and cafe social clubs and all that but this multi-generational family clan compound is a you know as a feature of the air community and it's a sort of thing to where you can go to different Arab communities all over Israel or different

towns or villages. And there will usually be a number of very large families. You know, they can have, you know, 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, you know, speak to the family or interview them or whatnot, like there was a, there was a story about a kid who left Israel to try to join ISIS in Syria and he was arrested. And, you know, there had been a few guys like that by then. And most people writing this up without necessarily speaking their family. So 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 in the town, stop at the first convenience store, ask the guy at the counter, and he's related to him and just gives me directions right there. And that's the type of thing that by and large, that almost always worked in those communities, you know, you 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 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 everybody in Israel almost knows each other. but in the air 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 hit men for other organizations. And even Koko himself, is said to have traveled to South Africa to practice with a sniper rifle. After being refused to 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. You got to be fearless if you make it to, you know, if you make it to adulthood named Coco in one piece, you know. As a gangster, especially. That's, 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 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, you know, a couple sort of situation. Yeah. Alprone's had a sort of, kind of a, you know, father knows best sort of thing. That aired, and then 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, oh, it was cute. She was like, no, it was, they're 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, you spend time around people who are in that, in that sort of life. You also put your own, own life in danger, you know, I mean, because. If you're hanging out with them when they get shot up or whatever, you know. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money.

Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Stitch fix. Stop shopping. Get styled. Not today, sweatpants. Somebody's wearing jeans that fit.

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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, where the bullets going, you know? Where is the gunshot? Is it below the, below the waist?

Oh, not getting shit. 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, yeah. The Hariri's the family we were just talking about. They previously had a feud going with the Abd al-Qad. 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 a drug dealing and extortion. And the man who ran the family, Mabruk Abd al-Kaudaudeau, 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.

Wynet and 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 the depth chart. As I am about to mispronounce some of these, if any of the members of these families are listening, I do apologize. Up top, they had the Hariri clan, who you mentioned, followed by the Abu Latif clan from up north. Arar family from Jaljulia and the wider Chiron region, Chagun. Then you, you know, following, moving down the death chart, you had the Karajas up in Harish and Bakar al-Garbia in that area. the Draushi clan and Ramley, Abu al-Kyan clan from the south,

and the Al-Aryash, family from the Umal-Fahmary, Umul-Fahim, which is in the Wadi, are, uh, that was the site of a lot of the, um, that October 2000, uh, writing and shootings were, we were around there. Um, and again, if we mispronounce your name, please, please hit us up on Twitter. So yeah, these are, these are the Warren Cruz. There's a whole bunch of others, I think, too, and they're armed of the teeth,

and they don't hesitate to shoot each other. And there was a video we actually tweeted out from the other world 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 looked kid 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 Almondo wrote it up in 2014, and again, this is even before the really crazy waves of violence happened.

And they quote an Arab member parliament, Isawi Fresh? Is that how you say? Yeah, Zahui, He's from the Meritz party, which is a Jewish left-wing Zionist party. He's an Arab member of party. He's from, and he's from Qfakasim, local boy. 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 Al 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. I'll monitor asked French 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're talking about before. Like, you know, if you're not, 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, a 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 he said. I do kind of like, too, how the Ammonitor journalist was like,

you know, maybe he might be getting a little carried away here, but let's hear him out, you know? He's like, what about midnight basketball or maybe get him into youths, 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 people are desperate, you know. People are, yeah. Well, I mean, we'll see, I think I have a quote from Oda later on.

That's pretty, 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 Arab villages or in the West Bank. Others are smuggled in from Jordan and 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. Fragg 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, he was by himself looking at his phone. His head's buried in his phone of some bus stop, you know, kind of in a remote area. And he's got an M-16 slung over his back.

It doesn't even have the magazine in and the safety's on. So, you know, 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, you're more of a target. It's more dangerous. And then these homemade guns are used quite regularly. They also have been used in some terror attacks in Israel, including the Sarona shooting 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. There's a Swedish submachine called and called the Carl Gustav. It looks vaguely like that. It looks a lot like kind of like a tech nine, but one that was made by Mr. Potato-Head or something. I mean, they're very rudimentary. Like, you get off a few shots and then the, I'd be surprised that the fourth or fifth doesn't just blow off your hand or the barrel of guns. 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 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 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. You know, I guess it depends on how you characterize trust, you know? I think I rounded it up from 18%. Okay, there you go. I kind of like how this Ha'Arts 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, you know, projects or bad neighborhoods here in U.S. cities, or even in Berlin in with the Turkish groups there and how to handle those situations. It's just a conversation that comes up where 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 all the assertions about neglect and discrimination in Israel it's all true you know so there's

there's a lot and then you can explain and being a marginalized community and poverty and access to guns all of these things can be there's an explanation for for them or there's ways to you know they're compelling factors but 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 role, um, police having that, because what, 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, it's a tough conversation. I think

we've talked about this to 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,

but you're going out and terrorizing your own community. And that's a thing, you know, you can say that about so many places in the States, too. 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 voluntary 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 said about the very nature of being an Arab citizen of Israel 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, you know, 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 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 the 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 he himself has said it's a lengthy road towards 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 Hakrush 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 Karban 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 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. Do Jews feel much more common turning to the state for help, turning to the

police for help? It's the 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 Haqqq. 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 9-22 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, you know, 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 the sudden influx of money. And from a 2021 times it is a 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, this is, I didn't know this going into this, and it's pretty crazy. Suha Arif writing in Local Call in 2020 says, quote, these crime organizations, according to various sorts of 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, coerced 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, like, it kind of shows you, you know, yeah, like, why, why bother intimidating these guys if you can just get your own person in there? You know, it's the dream of every organized crime group all over the world.

Yeah, for sure. And you've had, you've had a lot of cases of this sort of violence also against a Jewish local council members of local politicians in Israel, but it's much more common in the Arab sector. And also, local politics there are much more, 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, but it's a much more powerful thing, local elections, local politics in Arab communities, the Jewish ones. If you get people like that or as criminals into the government, it's a very

hard thing to undo. There's a really great story in how it's about this town called Kalansua, 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, the contracts, everything from waste management to school lunches. A man named Maroof Zamiro, he was a principal, decided to run for mayor. And he was a reformer. He wanted to write the ship. And he was actually projected to win the election.

But two weeks before Election Day, the threat 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. 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 mafia violence and Jewish organized crime families. And the center of Jewish population centers, Israeli population centers in Israel. car bombings, all this stuff.

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equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Seafull terms at mintmobile.com. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond,

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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 charged and or bringing them in front of a a magistrate administrative detentions. Matalami and Ali like what they do in the

West Bank or Gaza with Palestinians. What they do in West Bank and we call it with Palestinians a great deal. So this idea that you can you know whenever there's a problem is just throw the army or the shin bed at it and you know I get why that makes sense you know they have they have these technological means they're very very talented to people in the shin bed they're all over the place they have this you know this dragnet this secret police network. But, you know, if you're going to have the

Shibet fight crime in Israel, like they fight terrorism in Gaza and the West Bank, you know, 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 and they're 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. And, you know, including to due process and including to not be treated, like they're any to be combatants, you know, in a counterterrorism, you know, capacity. So it's really, really loaded, really problematic. And if you think, you know, the, you know, Arab citizens in Israel are going to have trouble, you know, being convinced to cooperate with police, I mean, with the shin bed,

like, I mean, that that's even a whole other level. So I get why people push for that, and they have some means of the disposal that they could use, but that's a real dangerous, It's a real dangerous road to go down. And I think in America, you can look at that kind of with like the war on terror and the patriot actor or what have you, you know. Start spying on your own people. Yeah, it's definitely something that I think we're going to 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 organized crime in Israel.

Is there anything you want to plug? You want to say? Anything like that? Oh, yeah. definitely well thanks for having me on it's always uh always enjoy it um it's always fun i'm glad everybody's out there's listening um you can check out of my writing at uh benjamin hartman dot com b n j m i n h a r t m a t r t m a n a jr t m a n again one in uh ben hartman dot 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-g-g-a who else we got Who else? Who's got a mix tape coming out? I think that's it. Hit me on those. And yeah, happy to keep this conversation going wherever you find me. Yeah, I think you're our only multi-episode, you know, returnee so far. So hopefully we'll figure something else out to bring you on. I want to thank to our Patreon sponsors that hit the high levels. Pete Thomas, Michael Rick, William Wintercross, train ants, Matthew Cutler,

Chris Cusamano, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, Doug Prendiville, and Jared Levy. And to everyone else, you know, join them. And I will read your name as well. And until that week. Have no fear. Chosen Foods is here to defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients. With cooking oils, salad dressings, and mayo, all powered by the good fats from 100% pure avocado oil and simple delicious ingredients. Chosen Foods.