Majd Kayyal
ORIENT XXI / June 29, 2026
It’s been around for years, but the phenomenon of organised crime within the Palestinian community inside Israel has now reached explosion point. Debt, racketeering, embezzlement : violence affects all levels of this society. And all with the complicity of the Israeli state for which it is a way of further marginalising its Palestinian citizens.
Violence linked to organised crime is now tragically the main characteristic of Palestinian society in Israel. It’s not a matter of isolated incidents nor of a new phenomenon, but rather of a social structure which regulates all the details of everyday life in the Negev/Naqab, Galilee, the Triangle and the supposedly “mixed” coastal towns, with the active complicity of the state. No one is safe anymore. No human or social space is immune. It is impossible to imagine a single Palestinian in Israel who doesn’t have a connection, however remote, to the violence of generalised crime.
Over 1,100 murders since 2020 and thousands of wounded. Shots are fired almost every day in the streets of cities and villages. Guns, so rare in our homes ten years ago, are today impossible to count. Official Israeli estimates vary from 8,000 to 400,000 firearms. In other words, nobody has any idea. But what is certain is that the gangs here have just about everything : pistols, assault rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, roadside bombs, modified drones…And all this weaponry takes a toll of human lives, the lives of people involved in criminal activities and of hundreds of others who are completely innocent. They destroy whole families and make life in our communities unbearable. Criminal violence takes many different forms: armed attacks, drug trafficking, the use of firearms in the most trivial disputes, personal or familial; it transforms every settling of accounts into an endless cycle of blood-letting.
The social structure of these crimes rests on three money-related pillars : loan sharking, extortion, and the manipulation of competitive tendering procedures.
Loan sharking at astronomical interest rates
This bloody era began with the development of loan sharking. Financially distressed individuals or families in urgent need of cash, to pay alimony, to bail out an arrested offspring, to buy part of an inheritance to keep it in the family – or sometimes to gamble or purchase a luxury car – find themselves unable to borrow from a bank or their relatives, and will turn to loan sharks connected with criminal organisations. They get loans at exorbitant interest rates as high as 10 % per month, which compounded over time can more than triple the amount of debt in a single year.
The same thing can happen with debt assignment. If you are slow in paying off the loan, the lender may turn to a criminal organisation. It will pay him a certain percentage of the sum involved, and then settle the matter with the debtor, imposing huge interest rates on the balance of the amount due, using violence and threats.
A delay in repayment will lead to a cycle of abusive “tax collections”, involving not only the indebted person but his whole family from the closest to the widest circle: brothers, cousins, in-laws etc, because the repayment guarantee is not individual but involves a large social circle. The threats reach a crescendo: gunfire or explosives targeting cars or houses at the outset, then individuals – with the aim of causing injuries; the campaign expands extensively to include the debtor’s family in an increasingly wide circle. Often, in the end, the creditors will appropriate the property of the debtor and his family, be it his business, his home or his land..
This aspect has been decisive for it has widened the range of criminality, engulfing whole sections of society which were previously untouched and transforming individual debts into extended family indebtedness to catastrophic effect. The least of these consequences is to oblige people to sell their property – land or houses – to repay a debt which they themselves did not incur, all this in a real estate market under great tension on account of the over-population of those areas where the Palestinians are allowed to build after governmental confiscations, legal constraints on structural plans and the scarcity of building permits. Worse still : some families arm themselves for self-protection or turn to other criminal organisations to stand up to the ones that are threatening them, exposing them to more pressures in the future.
The strengthening of clan relations
For the extended family – essential to the local sociological structure, in that it is more visible than the nuclear family and benefits from greater cohesion than the clan – the debtor’s nuclear family becomes a burden which it is impossible to escape. The very nature of family relations is transformed, either by the isolation or exclusion of the debtor’s family or by a strengthening of its ties with the clan, a broader protective structure – but which is not, historically, the main structure of Palestinian society of the interior, except in the Negev.
From banking bans to bankruptcy, by way of gambling, families find themselves embedded in a situation of poverty and social crisis. Children growing up in this environment are exposed from their teens to violence, firearms, family breakdown and various kinds of threats, instability and illegality. The probability of their joining the world of crime as they grow up is all the greater as it is a world likely to take care of them, earn them easy money, give them a feeling of power and an opportunity for wielding authority which they sorely miss.
In most of the Palestinian regions, neither of these two scenarios – isolation of a bankrupt nuclear family or increased dependence on the clan – is natural or normal. Oscillating between these two poles under pressure from crime erodes the traditional structure of the Palestinian village and causes an artificial imbalance in the relations between the various levels that make up the family. We therefore find ourselves caught between two conflicting evils: anarchic violence where the force of arms of the most reactionary clans merges with the force of criminal organisations composed of thousands of young people who have grown up in tragic circumstances, in broken and socially shredded families.
Widespread extortion
Besides the debts, extortion – i.e. protection racketeering inflicted on owners of businesses and services to force them to cough up monthly sums if they want to continue carrying out their activities in peace – is one of the criminal organisations’ main activities. While this is nothing new, a decade ago it was restricted to certain establishments – restaurants, cafés and bars, especially in the large coastal, so-called “mixed” cities – and took different forms, more or less dangerous and more or less direct: obliging businesses to hire a “security” service in exchange for exorbitant sums, monopolising the supply of liquor etc.
But today we have moved on to another stage. Quite indiscriminately, a little falafel shop can be an extortion victim, or a clothing store or a filling station. All commercial services in Palestinian towns and villages have become potential targets. The practice has even extended to factories, warehouses and companies of all sorts, civil servants, teachers, insurance brokers, accountants, etc. All are now ordered to hand over a certain share of their income.
Nor does it stop there. The criminal organisations conduct “investigations” to flush out the “wealthy”. They track down people who display signs of material comfort, such as the purchase of an expensive car, or people who are known to own land or houses, and order them to pay hundreds of thousands of shekels in “taxes” on their possessions. In certain cases, these organisations have squeezed out of local bank employees the statements of their depositors to oblige them to pay a “tax” on their savings.
This generalised extortion can be explained in particular by the increase in the number of businesses and services in Palestinian towns and villages and the importance attached to investments in the money market and the purchase of properties outside the traditional economic structures. Several towns have thus been transformed into gigantic shopping centres, bursting with all sorts of services and shopping facilities.
The development of this lively economic scene is not unrelated to the rise of criminality. The economic landscape has developed as a function of the extortion : either the shopkeepers pay the required sums and their profit margins shrink to almost nothing, or they shut down to escape the racket, or they enter into a relationship with a protective structure – their extended family or another criminal organisation – or they may acquire some firearms and show themselves ready to fight.
So this dynamic economic ecosystem, established on the fringes of the Israeli economy – and offering an albeit limited alternative to the wage labour of the Israelis – is restricted, controlled and governed through the criminal organisations. In other words, the criminality of extortion contributes to asphyxiating an independent economy, a factor which binds the Palestinian economy to the central Israeli market. Hence the extortion prevents the emergence of any economic leverage that might enable Palestinians to accumulate wealth or become property owners. It limits any long term investment, as well as the purchasing power of fixed wealth and assets, and keeps this frozen capital under Israeli control for a long time.
Calls for tender and embezzlement of state funds
The third pillar of organised crime is the organisations’ dominant role in the field of calls for tender and the embezzlement of institutional and governmental budgets and their laundering. In the Arab towns and villages, the Israeli government allocates budgets – relatively small ones – to the municipalities and local councils, to schools and cultural and social institutions, among other agencies. This involves calls for tender in sectors such as building, caretaking, rubbish-collection, or the purchase of office supplies, or even cultural activities and entertainment : theatrical productions, lectures and educational workshops.
The criminal organisations put pressure on the administrators of these institutions so that they will divert the calls for tender to companies with which they are involved and threaten other companies to make them withdraw from the competition. In this way they exercise lasting control over the recruitment of these bodies’ administrators and an influence over local and municipal elections, imposing mayors and other civil servants who are beholden to them and will strengthen their hold on resources which will wind up in the grasp of the criminal organisations. The most telling illustration of all this was the arrest in January 2026 of Ali Salam, mayor of Nazareth – the largest Palestinian city in Israel – along with the city accountant, a good many high-ranking city officials and some bosses of criminal organisations, for having embezzled over 150m shekels ($51m) between 2015 and 2025.
These practices have major consequences for the Palestinians’ relations with the official Israeli institutions since they deprive them of any possibility of civic engagement with them as well as making it impossible to manage these budgets for the benefit of the population. The weight of the criminal organisations and the control which they exercise compromise every attempt at “integrating” the Palestinians into the state institutions in the sense of a real adhesion and not simply a functional one.
A three-fold negation
Where does the role of the state figure in all this ? For several years now, the Israeli authorities have succeeded in seriously containing and reducing the phenomenon of organised crime in Jewish Israeli society, while actively fueling it within Palestinian society.
Basically the Zionist colonial regime treats the Palestinians of the interior as so many “empty squares” whose civil life cannot possibly interest the authorities. They are dealt with solely by the intelligence services, the army and the police. In every aspect of life, Israel has left the Palestinian communities of the interior without any prospect of development, neglected and with no capacity for civil management or governance.
The authorities have repressed every attempt to create alternatives likely to politicise Palestinian society, that is, to give it a direction, preserve its social cohesion, help it move forward. Party politics, which for many years was a central part of the lives of the townspeople and villagers, has receded enormously. More significantly still, for the last decade, the Islamic Movement of the North, which was one of the largest social, political and economic Palestinian networks in Israel, has been outlawed.
Israel has maintained this enormous vacuum for decades, so that we remain a society with no clout in politics, history or the balance of power. Today, after the decade of rebirth which the Palestinians of the interior experienced and which led to the uprising of May 20211, crime serves an essential colonial function. It has created a power structure which has its symbols and its leaders, is capable of reproducing itself and of seducing the younger generation. It also has its language, which is now part of our daily vocabulary. Ultimately it has its methods and its power, etched hereafter in the dominant mentality.
Thus organised crime constitutes a three-fold negation: negation of the family, whose traditional structure it has ruined, the structure on which the Palestinian village is founded; negation of any possibility of wealth, since it erodes the capacity of the Palestinians of the interior to move towards market individualism independent of the state, in a way that might make them a force of central economic investment in Israel; negation of any possible citizenship, since it defeats their every attempt to adhere to the official institutions and the management of civil life under the aegis of the state and its budgets.
Majd Kayyal – Researcher and novelist from Haifa, Palestine; he publishes his articles on Palestine and on Zionism in Assafir Al-Arabi since 2012; in 2016, his novel The Tragedy of Sayyed Matar won the AM Qattan award; he published Mourir à Haïfa en (2019), and a musical album for children, Plus belle que Berlin (2020)
