The Guardian / June 8, 2023
Police believe Yafa an-Naseriyye incident was connected to dispute between organised crime families.
Five people have been killed in a shooting at a car wash in an Palestinian town in northern Israel, police said, the latest incident in a wave of criminal violence tearing through the minority community.
Police said they believed the shooting on Thursday in the town of Yafa an-Naseriyye, near the city of Nazareth, was connected to a dispute between organised crime families.
Speaking from the scene of the killings, police spokesperson Eli Levy told public broadcaster Kan that “one person or more” opened fire at a group of men at the car wash.
Maher Khaliliya, head of the Yafia local council, called the shooting a “massacre”, accusing police of responsibility due to lax enforcement.
Israel’s Palestinian minority has long suffered from poverty, discrimination, crime and neglect by the national government.
Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, promised to crack down on crime in Israel’s Palestinian sector when he took office late last year. But the violence has only worsened, and nearly 100 people have been killed this year.
In a statement at the crime scene, Ben-Gvir said years of neglect had turned Israel’s Palestinian sector into the “wild west”. He also blamed a manpower shortage in the national police force and, vowing to halt the crime wave, called for the establishment of a controversial “National Guard”.
Ben-Gvir said the force was meant to fill in gaps in areas where police are spread thin, including in crime-ridden Palestinian communities. Critics say that Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist with a history of violent rhetoric against Palestinians, will use the force as a personal militia.
In a separate incident on Thursday, a shooting in a nearby Palestinian town left a 30-year-old man and a three-year-old girl seriously wounded, police said. The circumstances of that shooting and the identities of the two wounded were not immediately known.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he was “shocked” by Thursday’s killings. “We are determined to stop this chain of murders,” he said. He vowed to enlist Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency – whose main task is to monitor the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip – in the effort.
Mansour Abbas, leader of the Palestinian party Ra’am, accused the government – and especially Ben-Gvir – of failing the country’s Palestinians. “To bring into the ministry of national security [of] Itamar Ben-Gvir, who doesn’t know what his powers are, in no normal country would they allow such a minister to continue,” he told Israel’s army radio station.
Merav Michaeli, leader of the opposition Labor party, also blamed Ben-Gvir for the growing violence. “This is exactly the opposite of what the boss promised,” she said. “The worst police minister in history. A disgraceful government. Go home.”
Thursday’s shooting is separate from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has seen more than a year-long surge of violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. That fighting has intensified since Israel’s new far-right government took office in late December.
Nearly 120 Palestinians have been killed in the two areas this year, nearly half of whom were members of armed militant groups, according to an estimate by AP. The military says the number of militants is much higher. Meanwhile, Palestinian attacks targeting Israelis have killed at least 21 people.
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[April article]Netanyahu’s ‘National Guard’ deal with Ben-Gvir raises fears of intercommunal violence
Bethan McKernan
The Guardian / April 27, 2023
Political rivals have denounced the National Guard plans as creating a personal ‘militia’ for extremist minister.
After a dramatic day of wildcat strikes that shut down much of the country last month, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally announced that his government’s controversial plans to overhaul the judiciary would be suspended until the Knesset’s summer session.
The Israeli leader struggled for hours to reach a compromise with the recalcitrant far-right elements of his coalition pushing for the judicial changes. But that evening, the extremist anti-Palestinian Jewish Power party, led by the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said it had agreed to back the pause in exchange for a promise to create the minister’s long sought-after “national guard”.
Before the Passover recess began, the government agreed in principle to establish a new national guard force. Details are still scant, and the exact makeup, budget allocation and leadership structure will be determined by a committee that is due to report back to the Knesset in June.
With rumours swirling that Israel plans to step up operations against Palestinian groups after its independence day on Wednesday, it is possible that both the judicial overhaul and the national guard plans will be kicked into the long grass.
The prospect of an official armed body under Ben-Gvir’s direct control, however, has already caused alarm.
“There is a need to strengthen the police in Israel, yes,” said Omer Bar-Lev, Ben-Gvir’s predecessor under the 2021-22 “coalition of change” that briefly ousted Netanyahu from office. “Whether you call a new force a ‘national guard’ or not is a cosmetic question … Adding another force, with a different chain of command, is not necessary or even possible.”
The security situation in Israel has sharply deteriorated over the last year. Terrorist attacks by Palestinians are at a 20-year-high, and in the Palestinian community, which makes up 20% of the population, organized crime is rampant and murder rates are surging.
Ben-Gvir, who has a conviction for racist incitement and in the past advocated for the deportation of all Palestinian citizens, campaigned before last year’s election on promises of stability and public safety. Over the last two weeks, aware that his party is losing support because it has delivered the opposite, he has publicly vented frustrations with what he deems the “constraints” of his new role in government.
He is not the first security official to call for enhancing or reinforcing a national guard force designed for emergency situations: the previous government began moves to set up an auxiliary police force.
But political rivals have denounced the national guard plans as creating a personal “militia” for the extremist minister, and trying to create a loyal force that will crack down on the countrywide demonstrations against the government’s judicial overhaul plan.
And Ben-Gvir’s assertion that the new force will focus on “areas with criminal organisations and mixed cities” – meaning Israel’s poverty-stricken “central triangle”, home to Jews and Israeli Palestinians – has raised the spectre of intercommunal violence.
In May 2021, when Israel fought a brief war with Hamas, the Palestinian militia in the blockaded Gaza Strip, ethnically charged street fighting, rioting and lynching on a scale not seen in decades on the streets of Israeli cities deeply shocked the public.
Maisam Jaljuli, a well-known feminist and political activist from the central town of Tira, said: “This talk about a Ben-Gvir militia, it is already happening. We saw it in 2021, when the young men from the settlements came to Lod and Ramle to fight and make trouble.”
She was referring to Israeli settlement communities in the occupied West Bank deemed illegal under international law. Ben-Gvir himself lives in the restive Palestinian city of Hebron, and much of his party’s base are settlers.
She said: “It would give them an official licence to kill Arabs [Palestinians]. It’s an adaptation of the actions settlers take against Palestinians in the West Bank, with great success, into our society. He has the men, and he has the money: the government has already approved the budget for this initiative.”
A spokesperson for Ben-Gvir did not respond to requests for comment about the plans for a national guard.
Like many other ambitious and unfulfilled policies that have arisen in Israel’s chaotic political wrangling of the last few years, it is not yet clear whether Ben-Gvir’s national guard will come about as planned. There is establishment opposition, including from Israel’s police chief, Insp Gen Kobi Shabtai; the proposal could also face legal challenges, and it is not impossible Ben-Gvir will quit the fractious governing coalition before the plans get off the ground.
Jaljuli said Israel was going through a dark time, but she took hope in the massive protest movement against the new government’s judicial overhaul, which has united the usually deeply polarized society.
“Something is changing. More and more Jewish people are understanding the danger right now, and that’s good,” she said. “I don’t know if it will improve society or end the occupation. But they are starting to think and ask questions.”
Bethan McKernan is Jerusalem correspondent for The Guardian
