As violent crime soars, Arabs see jobs, training as key to getting youth off streets

Mohammad Azbarga, a 25-year-old from southern Israel, knew violence wreaking havoc on the Arab community would be top of mind when he joined other teens and 20-somethings in a Kafr Qasim conference room last week. But he could not have imagined how close to home it would hit that morning.

And then he saw the news.

“Today I woke up in the morning, opened my phone and saw that a woman was murdered near our village,” Azbarga told a group of municipal officials and reporters taking part in a tour in the central Arab city. “It’s very shocking. I had been getting ready to speak about this violence later in the day, and suddenly I wake up and there’s a woman murdered.”

The woman, 48-year-old Aisha Kabua, had been found shot dead in the pre-dawn hours, her body left on the side of Route 80 in the Negev desert town of Ararat an-Naqab, just down the road from Azbarga’s home in Kuseife.

Hours earlier, an Arab man was gunned down at a cafe in Jaffa, and by 6:30 a.m., a third victim, shot to death in Lod, was added to the bloodletting.

Azbarga was in Kafr Qasim as part of a program aimed at steering young Arab adults away from crime and into the job market. They had come from across the country to discuss solutions to the violent crime wave plaguing their communities.

The eight participants that day had joined the gap-year Matzpen-Tech program seeking to escape the cycle of violence that has come to dominate day-to-day life for many Arab citizens in recent years. Many of the participants had witnessed violence firsthand in their communities, and some had even lost loved ones to murder.

The killings in the hours before the meeting, which were all thought to be unrelated, marked a sharp spike in the already spiraling murder rate besetting Arab society.

Since the start of 2025, a total of 149 Arab Israelis have lost their lives in violent criminal incidents, a 13 percent jump over the number killed by the same point last year, according to the Abraham Initiatives, which tracks murders in Arab society.

Violent killings have run rampant in Arab cities and towns over the past decade, but the issue worsened considerably in 2023, when the murder rate shot up to 244 in a year, doubling the previous year’s number of 116. The previous record high, set in 2022, was 126 murders.

A decade ago, 58 murders were recorded in Arab communities the entire year; at the current pace, this year will see the figure top 250.

“To be Arab in Israel today is to go around with a feeling of daily uncertainty, to feel in danger all the time,” said Sara, a 22-year-old from Lod, a mixed Jewish-Arab city, who asked to withhold her last name. She divulged that she had lost a close friend from school just a year ago. “I’ve experienced it, I know exactly how it feels.”

A recent survey of Arab society commissioned by Tel Aviv University found that 75.4% of Arab citizens feel they lack personal security. A solid majority of respondents (54%) said the most pressing issue to be dealt with is crime and violence in Arab communities, ranking it as ending the war in Gaza, with 23% listing it as the most urgent issue.

Upon hearing of a new murder, Sara said, “The first question I ask myself is always whether or not it will this time once again be someone I know.”

Police often present crime in the Arab community as a question of enforcement alone, describing operations in Arab locales as aimed at imposing “governance” or “sovereignty.”

But staff at the Negev-based civil society group AJEEC-NISPED, which founded Matzpen-Tech, pointed to deep-seated economic issues as the root of the problem, arguing that brute force alone won’t stamp out the unrelenting crime wave.

Instead, what is needed is investment in Arab education and post-graduation programs, presenting those from low-income families with a promising alternative to crime as an avenue to make money, argued the group’s co-CEO, Sliman Al-Amour.

The tour of Kafr Qasim, which included AJEEC staff, municipal officials, Matzpen-tech participants, and others, had been organized to mark the unprecedented violence in Arab society and highlight efforts being made to thwart crime.

Sheikh Kamal Rayan, founder of the NGO Aman, the Arab Center for Safe Society in Israel, pushed back against the notion that the violence is an Arab “cultural problem.” He argued that such a viewpoint does not account for the massive upswing in murders in recent years.

Nor does it explain the massive gap between Arab Israeli society and neighboring Arab countries. The number of murder victims per million people in Israel’s Arab community stands at 120 this year, an astronomical rate compared to Jordan, where it is 10, and Lebanon’s 22, according to data compiled by the UN. In the West Bank, there are nine murders per million people.

Among Jewish citizens of Israel, eight people per million residents were murdered this year.

There wasn’t always such a wide gap between Arab and Jewish society when it came to murder rates, with both communities historically enjoying relatively low murder rates.

In 1980, 17 Arabs and 18 Jews were killed per million people, according to the Knesset Research and Information Center.

According to experts, that began to change in the mid-aughts, as police cracked down on organized crime in Jewish towns, pushing mob activity into the Arab community. Bolstered by a lack of banks and policies restricting approvals for new housing, crime syndicates have taken root, with black market lending, protection rackets, and other types of organized crime proliferating along with deadly violence. Clan disputes and domestic issues have also been blamed for fueling the killings.

Rayan, who formerly headed the local council in Kafr Bara, founded the Aman Center after his son, who had opened a supermarket in the town, was murdered on the street.

“We are a regular family. I have a son who is an accountant and another son studying medicine in Germany. When I entered the field [of crime prevention], I discovered that it was not my son, but our entire society that was murdered,” he said.

Kafr Qasim’s mayor, Haitham Taha, offered the city as a model for the rest of Arab society, touting its locally-run Civil Guard.

The long-standing security teams present an alternative to the police, whom Taha claimed are often ill-equipped to deal with crime in Arab society. Not only do they help to fight crime, but the teams also nip disputes in the bud before they can turn violent.

Taha, a veteran resident of the city who was elected mayor two years ago, said he was taken aback by the guards’ efficiency, but had been familiar with them even at the turn of the century, noting how they helped to kick out crime families who tried to enter the city two decades ago.

“This body started to deal with problems at the source; there is a dispute between neighbors, they take care of it — solving it instead of allowing it to grow… with time, the city grew, and this body grew with it,” he said. He noted Kafr Qasim’s growing prominence as an accessible city in the heart of the country, with a steadily growing economy and three separate industrial areas.

Indeed, one feels safe walking around the city’s downtown, with a sense of openness in conversations with passersby. However, not all is perfect in the city, which has seen three of its residents murdered in the past year despite the best efforts of the municipality, police and Civil Guard.

NEETs trick

Disputes are to be found in any community, whether Jewish or Arab, but not all disagreements end in murder.

The question of whether disputes turn violent when left alone is primarily socioeconomic, according to AJEEC’s representatives, and can be solved through increased investment in Arab youth.

According to researcher Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya, 34.5% of Arab Israelis ages 18-24 in Arab society are defined as “NEETs” — not in education, employment, or training. This is one of the underlying causes contributing to the Arab sector’s skyrocketing murder rate, she argued, as inactivity has a well-documented link to crime and violence. The national average is just 18%.

Haj-Yahya presented data showing that an Arab student in Israel’s segregated school system will receive 35% less state funding on average than a Jewish student. This gap is evident in the results from the OECD’s standardized PISA tests, which provide an international benchmark for academic skills, with the majority of Arab students testing below minimum proficiency in reading, science and math.

Arab students face an additional hurdle after graduating due to their exclusion from the army or national service, which can often provide a path into the job market.

Matzpen-Tech is designed to divert young Arabs on the verge of entering the criminal world into productive livelihoods. To find candidates, AJEEC works with the Public Defender’s Office to identify young Arab Israelis facing legal repercussions for relatively minor offenses.

Participants are given training and mentoring opportunities with a focus on tech and other STEM fields. The curriculum is intensive, demanding participants attend sessions five days a week, eight hours a day, for six months.

Yazan Amar, 24, from Kuseife, joined the program after he was imprisoned for reckless driving. He was released to house arrest for four months, and presented with only one option to get out of the house each day — joining the vocational program. He now works at the Bezeq telecommunications company.

“A month in prison was enough for me to know I needed to change course,” he said.