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In Israel today, rarely more than a few days go by without another Palestinian citizen being killed or wounded in the epidemic of criminal violence plaguing their communities. So far this year, 171 Palestinians have been killed — an average of one victim every day and a half — following a devastating 252 deaths last year. 

But the numbers tell only part of the story. Organized crime networks have penetrated almost every aspect of Palestinian life in Israel, from local government to education, welfare, banking, and even waste collection. On this episode of The +972 Podcast, anthropologist Eilat Maoz from the University of Haifa’s School of Criminology joins us to break down how criminal networks came to wield so much power, and what it reveals about the Israeli state’s mechanisms of control.

Maoz traces the roots of this epidemic to two overlapping developments around the year 2000: the liberalization of the Israeli economy and the political upheaval of the Second Intifada. Pointing to the city of Nazareth, she shows how the state can be hyper-present when it comes to political repression, yet completely absent or ineffective when criminal networks tear apart the social fabric of Palestinian society. But she also emphasizes that the state routinely relies on unofficial power brokers and local strongmen to maintain order.

The discussion then expands to the West Bank and Gaza, where Maoz observes similar patterns of violent brokerage. Yet she cautions against viewing these entanglements as evidence of a single, coordinated state conspiracy. Instead, different branches of Israel’s security apparatus often have competing interests, producing a chaotic system in which the state’s insistence on managing the occupation rather than ending it has unintended consequences even its own institutions cannot control.

Ultimately, Maoz argues, the rise of organized crime in Palestinian communities is not a triumph of state control, but a testament to its institutional breakdown. As she puts it: “It’s an indication of a system that is creating the very forces that destroy its ability to even function as a coherent system.”