Why are more Palestinian Israelis dying than any other racial group?

There are two kinds of Israeli citizens. The first kind live their lives so protected from the risks of deadly violence that their safety level is comparable with the “least violent high-income countries” like Singapore. They are mostly Jewish.

The other kind of citizens fare a lot worse, with a homicide rate that is galloping towards “Mexican or Colombian levels”, after leaving the “Chilean, Argentine and the US [rates] in the dust”. They are Palestinian Israelis, a mostly Muslim minority group of 1.6 million citizens, constituting 21 percent of the country’s population.

In 2023, there were 233 homicides in the Palestinian population, up nearly four times from 2011, according to a recent research study.

In contrast, the homicide rate – meaning the average number of violent deaths per 100,000 people – for Jewish citizens of Israel declined by roughly two-thirds over the same period.

Palestinian Israelis are subject to a “completely different risk of homicide” than their non-Arab, mostly Jewish, compatriots, says Alex Weinreb, the research director at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, who co-authored the research study.

“This is a complicated issue but the simple story is that about 10 years ago, Israeli authorities weakened Jewish-led criminal gangs but not Arab-led gangs. That created a vacuum into which Arab gangs stepped,” Weinreb tells TRT World.

In theory, Palestinian Israelis have the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis, but most of them live in poorer cities and face challenges that experts attribute to structural discrimination.

“Good policing has, in this context, failed, allowing criminal behaviour to flourish,” he says.

Eight of every 10 Palestinian citizens of Israel are Muslim. The rest are Christians and Druze, who follow a distinct faith and make up 1.6 percent of Israel’s population.

Human rights organisations accuse Israel of treating the Palestinian Israelis as second-class citizens and practising “systematic and institutionalised discrimination”.

The research paper says the ratio of Palestinian-to-Jewish homicide rates within Israel in 2023 was as high as 13-to-one.

For context, it is 1.6 times higher than the ratio of Black-to-white homicide rates in the US, where African Americans have traditionally faced a significantly higher risk of deadly violence than their white counterparts.

According to Sami Abu Shehadeh, a former member of Knesset and leader of the Balad political party in Israel, the country has built no mental health facilities in areas with a presence of Palestinian Israelis since its founding in 1948.

Shehadeh tells TRT World the government’s “ugly, racist policies” against the Palestinian Israelis are preventing it from addressing the issue of growing violence in the community.

“The policymakers in this racist Jewish state simply don’t care about Arab lives or Arab psychological health,” he says.

The gaps in access to mental health facilities are “very, very big” for Jewish citizens and Palestinian Israeli communities – a result of deep-rooted racism within the Zionist movement, he adds.

He says the Israeli state puts “a lot of barriers” to prevent the Palestinian Israelis from getting organised and seeking alternative solutions.

“If they had the same problem in the Jewish majority, I would say that the state could not deal with the problem,” he says, adding that the government is deliberately letting the Palestinian Israeli community suffer by shrugging the problem off.

One short-term measure the Israeli government can take to address this issue is the advancement of talented students belonging to the Palestinian Israeli community in psychiatric studies at the university level, he says.

“This is something very easy that the state can do. It will bring a big change,” he adds.

But access to higher education is doubly difficult for Palestinian Israelis, half of whom already live below the poverty line as opposed to about 13 percent of the Jewish population.

That is because all institutions of higher learning in Israel count military service towards the eligibility criteria for financial assistance – something that puts applicants from the Palestinian Israeli community at a disadvantage.

Weinreb of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, however, disagrees. “Israel’s Arab population has been advancing fantastically over the last 20 years,” he says, noting that more than 40 percent of new doctors in Israel are “Israeli Arabs”.

But that astounding statistic does not cover the Palestinian Israeli men who do not succeed in school. Their Jewish counterparts do mandatory military service for up to three years – a vocation that “keeps most of them out of trouble”, Weinreb says.

Palestinian Israeli leaders have refused to agree to even non-military service, which means that Palestinian Israeli youth who are not successful in school have to try to find a job in an increasingly sophisticated labour market, he says.

“It’s hard for them, so they’re pulled into criminal behaviour. But their leaders are blocking the easiest solution.”

According to Fida Shehada, a former Municipal Council Member in Lod, a city near Tel Aviv with a Palestinian Israeli population of 30 percent, the police response time is longer in Palestinian Israeli communities than that in Jewish communities.

This fact alone reinforces the feelings of discrimination and neglect among Palestinian Israelis, she tells TRT World.

For the past decade, over 80 percent of homicide cases have remained unsolved each year, she says. In one murder case in the city of Umm al-Fahm, the police arrived six hours after the incident, even though they usually take 20 to 45 minutes in most cases.

Such delays give the perpetrators time to clean up crime scenes and escape, she adds.

“Daily incidents of random gunfire go unpunished. In contrast, if a Jewish citizen is murdered, the crime is often solved within hours.”