PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: The making of Israel’s Palestinian mafia
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
[music]
Eilat Maoz
“Organized crime in Palestinian communities is not a success story of the Israeli state. It’s an indication of its failure. It’s an indication of a system that is creating the very forces that destroy its ability to even function coherent system, and the kind of complexities and entanglements that the state itself has entered into, and bargains that the state has entered into, in an attempt to square the circle.”
Ghousoon Bisharat
Welcome to The +972 Podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the river and the sea.
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I am Ghousoon Bisharat, editor-in-chief of 972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode.
In Israel today, rarely more than a few days go by without yet another Palestinian citizen being killed, part of an epidemic of criminal violence plaguing Palestinian society. As of September 17, 2026, the day we are recording this episode, the death toll for this year has reached 168, an average of one victim every day and a half. Police violence is also part of the picture – eight people have been killed in police shootings this year – but so is police neglect, or more precisely, under-policing.
Yet neither the raw numbers nor the question of policing tell the full story. Crime is not something that exists on the margins of society. Organized mafia networks have penetrated almost every aspect of life in Palestinian communities inside Israel: local government, education, welfare, banking, and even garbage collection. Crime has become part of both the formal and the informal economies, and perhaps most importantly, it ranks at the top of Palestinian citizens’ concerns and shapes their everyday decisions.
To better understand this phenomenon in its broader context—one of discrimination, racism, and persecution against Palestinian citizens alongside Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide—I’m speaking today with Eilat Maoz, an anthropologist at the School of Criminology at the University of Haifa. Eilat’s research focuses on the political economy of organized violence, crime, and policing in colonial and post-colonial settings. In Israel-Palestine, she studies the interaction between settler colonialism and illicit capital accumulation.
Eilat, welcome to The +972 Podcast, and thank you for speaking with me today.
Eilat Maoz
Thank you very much for the invitation.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Can we start with a brief mapping of the organized crime scene in Israel? Who are the major players or groups, and how many operate within the Palestinian community?
Eilat Maoz
This is a question that asks for, first of all, perhaps a definition. What do we mean when we say organized crime or criminal organizations?
According to the Israeli police, there are about 30 or 40 criminal organizations operating in Israel. They change the numbers, they change the way that they count and categorize these groups. In addition to what they call criminal organizations, they also speak of several hundred gangs or much smaller types of groupings that are involved in criminal activity. The larger ones that have actually been declared criminal organizations by the police, there are eight of them, six of them Palestinian or Arab criminal organizations.
These groupings operate across a variety of sectors, in recent years moving gradually from what we might call classical criminal pursuits, such as organizing gambling or prostitution networks or drug smuggling, to the legitimate economy, to a variety of contracted, privatized sectors. This is true of both the Jewish and Arab criminal organizations, but this also changes what we mean by organized crime. Because organized crime today might better be understood not only as the criminal organizations themselves, but also the ecosystems and markets in which they operate, which are networks of facilitators, brokers, sometimes politicians and entrepreneurs operating in the legitimate or illicit sector, and that are not per se members or soldiers of criminal organizations and are not professional criminals, one might say, but are part of broader networks that link these criminal groupings to a broader political economy.
Ghousoon Bisharat
When speaking about the Palestinian community in Israel and crime, the year 2000 is mentioned as a turning point. According to civil society organizations following the matter, Palestinian politicians, and researchers, organized crime groups were smaller and less powerful before then. And if we use the numbers of victims as one indicator, various reports show a significant increase in killings since 2000. What happened or what changed around that period?
Eilat Maoz
So let’s first begin with the data. First of all, we know that indeed if we take the number of fatalities or murder victims as an indicator, then in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000, we had about 4.5 killings a year on average, four to five killings a year on average, say. And this number increased exponentially since 2000, especially peaking after 2015 – 2016, and under the current government. So we really see an exponential rise.
We also see a transformation, as I said earlier, in the kinds of criminal activities these organizations partake in. And these transformations also have a spatial or a geographic aspect. So, if in the 1980s and 1990s, Arab criminal groups or gangs were mostly concentrated around frontier and border areas, which is quite understandable since most of what they do was smuggling and they operated under what we may call the watchful eye of Israeli security agencies. So we find criminal organizations, or what are today called criminal organizations—but at the time were maybe called something else, maybe gangs, maybe families, maybe smuggling networks, maybe simply collaborators, moving drugs, sometimes guns, oftentimes information, people across borders – we find them on the Lebanese border. Some of the most prominent criminal organizations in Israel today grew out of heroin smuggling from the security zone in Lebanon in the 80s and 90s. Some grew from smuggling networks across the West Bank, and others we might find in mixed cities, in internal frontiers between Jews and Arabs, which is, again, a place where illicit encounters can conventionally be found.
What we see since the 2000s is the dispersal or the spread of types of organized crime throughout Palestinian localities inside Israel. And this has to do really with the transformation of these groups from mostly dealing in smuggling to finding their way into legitimate economic sectors as well as the accumulation of political power, which makes these groups increasingly reminiscent of what was called in the literature on organized crime mafia-type organizations.
This has a lot to do with a number of developments that were taking place around 2000. One of them actually starts a little bit before, in the end of 1990s, when we see the liberalization of the Israeli economy. This we find throughout the globe, right, with the relaxation of border controls, with the increase in global trade in licit goods and services. We also find an increase in other types of illicit trade. Another thing is the liberalization of the financial sector in Israel, which makes money laundering and these types of activities easier. Importantly, in the context of Palestinian society in Israel, there’s a vast increase in commercial activity within Palestinian communities themselves that wasn’t as prominent before. This, of course, has to do with the fact that the liberalization of the Israeli economy opens up opportunities for entrepreneurship for Palestinians that were not there previously.
And this form of development takes place in a context where the Israeli state, in effect, does not provide any kind of protection to these newly opened markets and entrepreneurial initiatives in Palestinian communities. So that’s one side of the story: so there is an economic transformation without a parallel transformation in state institutions, or in the context of very weak state institutions. That calls forth a whole set of criminal protection rackets that provide services of protecting these new assets and commercial establishments, enforcing contracts, and resolving disputes within this new economic business ecosystem that is basically operating partly in a gray space with no state institutional services available.
Then, of course, this happens in the context following October 2000, following the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the historical uprising, not only in the West Bank, but also inside 48, inside Israel. This political moment both highlights this rise of a new Palestinian generation, much more willing to confront the Israeli establishment and confront it on the foundational terms of the state, how the state defines itself, its relationship to the state, with the Palestinian identity becoming much more prominent in this context. At the same time, this upwardly mobile middle class comes up for the first time on the historical stage.
The Israeli establishment has since been trying to deal with this challenge in a variety of ways that have been, on the whole, quite contradictory. It is to a large extent within the contradictions of these new attempts to contain, repress, and co-opt the Palestinian society inside Israel that we find organized crime emerging really as a new social force. Because on the one hand, we have more oppression, perhaps a more extensive use of local brokers, violent entrepreneurs, violent middlemen, or collaborators in order to keep the “industrial peace,” as they may call it, amongst the restive natives from the point of view of the establishment. But at the same time, efforts to co-opt through economic development, create an environment where people have something to lose.
So within these tensions we find organized crime really emerging because it links these two processes. In effect, what these new mafia-type organizations are able to bring together is a form of economic entrepreneurship or financial entrepreneurship on the one hand, while on the other hand becoming these new bases of social control over the population.
Ghousoon Bisharat
And they break the society.
Eilat Maoz
Of course, they break the society in their effort or in their competition to become new sources and centers of power, they seek to establish themselves as a new political authority over communities – not only through violence and intimidation, but also through distribution, through forms of patronage that they are able to put their hands on and then redistribute across society, which is one of the important bases of their power.
Of course, exploiting growing social disparities within communities, which are also an important aspect of the neoliberal transformation that Israeli society as a whole has undergone. So of course, there is a segment of Palestinian society that became socially mobile and rose to the middle class—it’s about 30 percent of the Palestinian population, according to estimates. But the vast majority remain poor, excluded from steady labor, in highly precarious conditions. These are very fertile grounds for the development of organized crime or criminal groupings anywhere in the world. Add to that a state that might have an interest sometimes in turning a blind eye or instrumentalizing some of these groupings, and you have a perfect storm situation, which is what we’ve been seeing in recent years.
Ghousoon Bisharat
You mentioned before that six of the eight declared crime organizations are Palestinian Arab. Two are Jewish Israeli, I assume. So what’s happening within Jewish Israeli society when it comes to crime and organized crime and violence?
Eilat Maoz
There are a number of different theories and hypotheses explaining what exactly happened to the Jewish Israeli criminal scene in recent years, and, of course, very heated debates among crime connoisseurs and specialists about how Arabs replaced Jews at the helm of the criminal world or the underworld.
One of the leading or mainstream explanations for why Arab criminal organizations were able to emerge and amass so much power in recent years has been that Jewish criminal organizations were partly successfully repressed by the police in the late 2000s, from 2009 to 2015. The police were partly able to crack down on some of the larger criminal organizations, and they also mostly cracked down upon each other in a series of very bitter wars between these organizations. The theory goes that that created a vacuum into which these Arab criminal organizations—which grew to a large extent under the sponsorship, protection, or in collaboration with these Jewish groups—stepped. They didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Arab criminal groups have always been working alongside Jewish criminal organizations, sometimes providing the so-called “black labor” or more violent labor for them, because criminal economies have a racial division of labor that is quite akin to what we find in the ordinary economy.
From what I understand, Jewish criminal organizations did not so much disappear and disperse as diversify. Some of them were advised by the police or took it upon themselves to leave the country and establish business elsewhere. So that’s where we see Israeli organized crime relocating to Eastern Europe, for example, or even Latin America in some places.
Ghousoon Bisharat
And if we go back to the crime scene among Palestinians in Israel, there is a debate over whether this should be understood as state neglect or as something more intentional—a policy that allows Palestinian communities to become weaker and more fragmented. How should we understand the role of the state? Is this a question of policing, more precisely of under-policing? In other words, we are looking at a system that knows how to use violence when it chooses to, but also knows when to look away. Or is it even more complicated than this binary?
Eilat Maoz
Although there are good reasons to understand the state as a kind of differential state—as a state that is both very present and very absent at the same time—it can be very present when it wants to demolish Palestinian homes, repress a demonstration, arrest a political dissident, or break up a wedding in Umm al-Fahm. The police, as the evident face or arm of the state, have no problem doing that very forcefully. At the same time, it is experienced as completely lacking, absent, negligible, even collusive when it comes to dealing with ordinary crime whose victims are Palestinian Arabs.
That is the experience of most Palestinian citizens: a state that is differential, selective, present and absent as it wishes, and politically selective as such. Therefore, it becomes clear why people say that the state is choosing not to do anything and, in effect, promoting crime through this neglect and abandonment. I think there’s a lot to that.
But I think we need to add something to this analysis. We should not only look at the state in terms of the quantity of its presence or absence. Presence and absence are still thinking about a state that is either there or not there. We should look at the quality of the state relation, and the quality of the state relation is evident also in policing.
When a Palestinian citizen— he can a civil servant threatened because he wants to obey the law in a way that might disrupt some kind of criminal interest in his locality, a woman facing violence at her home, or a landowner extorted to give up land to a criminal organization, goes to the police, and the police tell them, “Why don’t you go speak to the person threatening you and come to some agreement?” or “Maybe we can organize some mediation through a traditional sulha [reconciliation process],” when the police themselves refer people to these local strongmen who are often strongly linked to criminal organizations or at least enjoy a criminal reputation for using violence, and are sometimes the very people intimidating or extorting those asking for help—that is not presence or absence per se. That is a form of relation, and it is a colonial form of relation. It is a form of policing that actively devolves authority, sovereignty, and responsibility to middlemen that it has empowered, directly or indirectly, to act on its behalf. That is what we see happening very often, and that is less commented upon than presence and absence. It’s not a question of capacity or strength; it’s a question of how this state understands and organizes its relationship to 20 percent of its citizenry.
Ghousoon Bisharat
And to follow up on the state and the government and what the government is trying to do on this issue, last July, the Israeli government approved a plan for the Shin Bet (Shabak), which is Israel’s internal security agency, to work against crime organizations or maybe to help the police, and allocated budgets for that—budgets allocated to local councils and other agencies supposed to fight crime. Is that really needed, in your opinion, and what does it mean to have the Shin Bet involved?
Eilat Maoz
Well, first of all, we don’t know what it means. The very essence of the Shin Bet is that we don’t know how it operates or according to what procedures. It’s by no means transparent or accountable to any civil authority. In effect, we don’t know what it means, and in that sense, it’s quite dangerous because it actually gives carte blanche to the state to continue operating in a way that we already see is selective, uninterested and partial.
The other more important aspect derives directly from what I just said earlier. Often the pretext or argument of security agencies, police, and states in general regarding their challenges in fighting organized crime is that they don’t have enough resources, technological capacities, or financial means to fight this effectively. But if the problem is not state weakness, incapacity, or lack of resources, but rather the way that the relationship is organized or how resources are used, then it’s not about giving more resources. I don’t think the Israeli security system is lacking in resources.
Although of course we should say, to be frank about the situation, that some aspects of the Israeli law enforcement agencies have been weakened by successive governments. Not the security agencies per se,and not the police per se or the Shin Bit but law enforcement capacities of those agencies were diluted over the years. Today, for example, we read that the police have funds to recruit officers, but can’t recruit them because people don’t want to join or for various other reasons. We also know that the police have become much more militarized, like in other countries around the world, but have become far less professionalized when it comes to investigations.
That is not coincidental. The law enforcement capacities of states were weakened to facilitate forms of corruption in high places and to enable other forms of rule and law breaking, which in Israel you can find wherever you look. You don’t want a strong law enforcement system and you don’t want agencies that uphold the rule of law when you’re expanding settlements that violate your own state’s laws or when you’re constantly breaking a variety of laws across government capacities.
So yes, Israeli law enforcement and the rule of law were weakened in general, and this has implications for the fight against organized crime. But it’s not really about resources as such, which in this case were also taken from the empty pockets of Arab local councils that are being stripped of their budgets—on the one hand, by a government unwilling to provide basic budgets for everyday services, and on the other hand, extorted by criminal organizations that have taken over the management of these services to extract funds from these municipalities. They are stripped from all directions, basically incapable of doing anything at this moment.
Ghousoon Bisharat
You just mentioned the municipalities and local councils. Anyone living in Palestinian towns and villages and any member of the Palestinian community, like me, and anyone who goes and visits Palestinian towns and villages like you, knows that organized crime has become deeply embedded in local government and municipal services. Let’s discuss crime and local government by telling a “tale of two cities” to understand more.
The first city is Arraba. Arraba is a Palestinian city in the Lower Galilee with a population of some 30,000 people, known locally as the “city of doctors.” Arraba’s mayor, Ahmad Nassar, was shot in March 2026. He suffered a serious injury and spent 78 days in the hospital, but he’s now back at work. He was shot because he had been trying to confront corruption involving garbage collection and organized crime groups, and had also been publicly critical of government policies, both internally and also vis-à-vis Palestinians and the war on Gaza.
Back then, when the mayor was shot, you wrote a Facebook post in Hebrew saying, among other things: “It is an assassination attempt. Police knew he was threatened. To understand the assassination attempt of Ahmad Nassar, the mayor of Arraba, you need to understand the method. Don’t say it’s about Arab culture.”
What is that method?
Eilat Maoz
Well, in Israel, for many many years—like in other countries around the world—waste management is a criminalized sector. Israel has a waste mafia proper operating throughout the country in both Jewish and Arab towns, well known and reported upon since the 1990s.
In recent years, alongside the rise of Arab criminal organizations and their expansion, especially their interest in developing and sponsoring their own political and territorial power, waste collection is one of the fastest routes to take over a local municipality. It’s one of the largest ongoing tenders; it’s a contract that is ongoing, you have to pay it every month, and it’s one of the largest expense items. It’s very easy to launder money through waste collection because it’s so amorphous—no one really knows how much you collected and how much ended up in a landfill.
It’s also very attractive for criminal interests, it’s very attractive for contractors both Jewish and Arab, who use criminal organizations in order to divide territories amongst themselves and reduce competition to zero. Criminal organizations entered waste collection through securing cartel arrangements among contractors. These contractors, alongside criminal groupings, found in Arab localities ripe conditions or ripe environments to create extra profits—even more than in Jewish communities—because Arab localities are suffering from planning distortions due to land confiscations over the years, limited budgets, and very small oversight departments. And a variety of other reasons that have everything to do with the colonial situation. They are much more vulnerable to be exploited and extorted.
When Ahmad Nassar assumed the mayorship in March 2024, he encountered what every Arab mayor in Israel deals with on a daily basis: a threat from his waste contractor to stop collecting trash unless he raised the contract by 20, 30, or 40 percent. Nassar was unwilling to surrender to this extortion and went on a kind of journey to try and streamline waste collection to take it out of the hands of this cartel-backed contractor. He tried to issue six different tenders through a variety of channels and state agencies, and none of them worked.
Then he did something even more extraordinary: he bought waste collection trucks from the Tel Aviv municipality, brought them to Arraba, and operated them through the municipality itself. The contractor was very unhappy with the attempt to destroy his livelihood and his profit base and retaliated against Ahmad Nassar and retaliated very violently against civil servants in the area. He burned the trash in the city.
What is interesting about Nassar’s story is that he approached almost every state agency and ministry that could possibly help him: the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Ministry of Interior that budgets municipalities, and the police multiple times. No one was willing to help him. He encountered what has become conventional advice: “Go sit down and mediate the issue, solve it with the contractor.” That’s what the police told him, while also spreading rumors that he had a personal interest in allocating the contract to someone else.
Eventually, after a lot of violence and very little backing, he was forced to surrender. The municipality of Arraba is now paying about three times what they should be paying for waste collection, and of course it is not the only Palestinian municipality that its meager budget is being channeled to the hands of these contracting networks. Eventually, the person who shot Ahmad Nassar was not the contractor who got his way through a variety of means, including some kind of formal backing, but a temporary contractor Nassar hired while the other contractor was halted. It’s a complicated case and I do not think this is the place to go into all of the complications of the case, but I think that the fact that he was eventually shot, almost killed by the person who operated the service temporarily and who was aggravated and enraged by the fact that eventually did not get the tender and that the mayor was unwilling to provide him with any other kind of source of income from the public budget just comes to show how when these kind of extortive practices are not stopped and are allowed and are allowed to flourish, they become normalized and they shape expectations. If ordinary entrepreneurs see that all they need to do to get a contract is threaten someone with a gun, and they do not get what they want they might shoot them, that is no longer just a story of organized crime or criminal organizations, it’s a story of violence really becoming a means of accumulation and means of social breakdown at the same time.
Ghousoon Bisharat
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The end result in Arraba is that the mayor had to accept the method. He couldn’t continue challenging it despite the public anger that I remember seeing and watching and reading when he was shot.
Eilat Maoz
Around the time this incident happened, I interviewed quite a few people operating in the waste sector, including civil servants across many Palestinian communities, especially in the north. For most of them, it was very clear that this is how the system operates. There is a very clear set of codes and rules in the waste sector and in other contracting sectors in Israel, like construction and infrastructure. The rules are made by criminal groups: they divide territories, enforce rules, decide who works where, who gets paid what, and who subcontracts from whom.
And a variety of relations, economic, political, labour relations are regulated by illegal actors, not the state. And these are public services. For most civil servants, it was clear that challenging a system linked to high echelons of Israeli politics would be impossible. The major contractors in the waste sector are not Arabs from the Galilee. Most of them are well established Jewish contractors who pay their dues to the Likud party center, financing politicians in primary elections and have a variety of exchange relations with people who give out licenses, that regulate the sector and can influence law enforcement. So it’s a system that is really difficult to challenge. The kind of violence we see in Palestinian communities is often just the very end result of a much broader system that is very very difficult to challenge.
What is very significant in my conversations with people working in the sector is that they often have to rely on non-state forms of protection just to operate according to the law or to operate transparently in the public interest. It’s an insane paradox: when a civil servant wants to ensure a contractor accurately weighs waste, they can’t do it without the backing of a contractor they managed to cultivate some kind of relationship with and is able to protect them from retaliation from another contractor, or maybe they have to use their family’s names or backing in order to operate according to the law. This is completely absurd. It just comes to show how the normative environment is completely upside down and upended, where the state is in an inclusive relationship with various forms of contracting power and people operating according to the law have to rely on other sources of protection.
Ghousoon Bisharat
The second city is Nazareth, which is very dear to my heart; I grew up there. It used to be the biggest Arab Palestinian town in Israel—now it’s the second largest after Rahat in the Naqab—and it used to be the political capital of the Palestinian minority.
Maybe Nazareth offers another example within the same method. Ali Salam served as mayor from 2014 until December 2025. He was arrested in December last year and later charged with corruption, money laundering, and stealing municipal funds, all in cooperation with one of the biggest crime organizations. He spent more than three months in prison and is now under house arrest. The municipality is currently run by an appointed committee headed by a Jewish Israeli mayor.
How should we understand what happened in and to Nazareth?
Eilat Maoz
We might understand Nazareth as first of all another instance of the destruction of Palestinian urban life. It was the most prominent city: a cultural capital, political center, and economic center that has been taken over by criminal violence over the past decade.
How did we come to that? I think we should trace the process: Ali Salam was elected mayor in 2013–2014 with the support of residents tired of the long-standing reign of the Communist Party [Hadash]. The party had risen to power in Nazareth in the 1970s during an inspiring political moment leading up to Land Day in 1976, when Palestinians inside ’48 understood the crucial importance of local councils as a site of politics, being mostly excluded from political decision making in the higher levels of government and in the Knesset, the local councils were important as a site of politics and also as site of organizing especially in the attempt the to overcome divide-and-conquer methods of the state. The state used local councils in quite manipulative ways in the first few decades of the state to a certain extent until today. Challenging resources differentially to a variety of groups with each locality in order to create fissures, co-opting some elements and so on. So the 70s was really a moment where there was an attempt and a quite successful one to create these local fronts that will stand together against those efforts to divide and fracture the community. Nazareth was perhaps the crown example of this effort, embodied by Mayor Tawfiq Zayyad.
That experiment lasted until 2013 when Ali Salam built a populist coalition around himself quite successfully but he came into the Israeli establishment’s consciousness a few years later in 2015 when he publicly and on primetime television expelled Ayman Odeh, at the time the newly elected head of the Joint List, from Nazareth after a demonstration against the bombardment of Gaza. Salam’s message was clear by Ali Sallam: “I’m here to block demonstrations. I’m sick and tired of 48”. He distanced himself from any commitment to a Palestinian identity or struggle, and that made him the darling of the Israeli right, which was looking for partners in the Palestinian community in order to undermine the success of the unity project, the Joint List, and usher a new type of “good Israeli Arab” that will be the token face for its new economic plans, and Ali Sallam really became the face of this project. Really the kind of Arab politician that could go around and say I do not need the Palestinian politicians in the Knesset. I have my own connections to ministers and I bring my own budgets, and at the same time provide a lot of legitimacy to the Israeli system and the Israeli establishment returned in favour and bestowed legitimacy on Ali Sallam.
For many years, although it quickly saw the deterioration of the municipality’ s situation, especially from 2018-1019 after he was elected for a second term, the Israeli ministry of interior received annual reports on growing budget deficits and police were aware of various forms of mistreatment of funds – it was clear that the city was not being managed properly – and it became increasingly clear that criminal organizations taking over both the city space and the municipality, it took a very very long time for the state to put an end to this. And it happened only after the municipality collapsed under hundreds of millions of shekels of debt, unable to pay its employees, unable to pay contractors, famously included waste contractors that themselves also benefited handsomely from the municipality that was not managed and that they could basically feed upon.
And even when the Ministry of Interior launched an investigation committee to look into what happened in Nazareth, a senior official stated on record that police advised them to be “very delicate” because they preferred Ali Salam over other nationalist elements. That exposes for a moment or for a fraction something that is not usually exposed or documented in official state documents, but here we have it on paper: the political and security considerations that go into turning a blind eye to criminal offenses. But one has to say that Ali Sallam is over 70 years old and he served the government of Israel very faithfully and when he was used up, he was sent to prison and criminalized. And that very often happens to collaborators with the Israeli establishment. So Israel is not particularly generous to those who are willing to help it. It uses them and throws them away and that is also a tragedy.
Ghousoon Bisharat
We spoke about Arrabi and Nazareth to try and understand how the method works and what the system does as well to those who even collaborate with that method, but this is happening across many Arab local councils and the organized crimes groups have also penetrated other areas like education, welfare, employment, banking, and housing. How does all of this affect people’s everyday lives—where and how they live, what profession they work in, or what businesses they open?
Eilat Maoz
From my conversations with people and of course I am not a Palestinian I can’t convey the lived experience of the sheer terror of everyday life in Palestinian communities inside Israel today, but from what I hear from people, from what people share, there are a number of distinct experiences. So we can talk about the experience of civil servants. Mayors are often highlighted in the media that they are threatened and they are sometimes targeted, but the people on the front lines are the municipal workers, the civil servants, that have to approve, sign, finance and they are under daily pressure, daily fire and daily threats.
People would tell me about losing 30 pounds when working as a head of the department of sanitation or someone telling me that he ran away from home for 6 months because criminal organizations were after me, in collaboration with the mayor in that case. People are paying the price for trying to do their job.
Then you find entire families drawn into extorted relationships. This could be simply because one member of the family (could be a distant cousin) has a small debt to some other person. Criminal organizations have found a lucrative market in debt collection, buying small debts, inflating them tenfold, and extorting the debtor’s entire extended family using their strong local presence. So they buy a debt and they become its owners and then they go and collect it, inflating the debt tenfold or twenty fold or however much they want and go to collect it from the entire family of that person. They are very well located so they can find the entire family. They have a strong local presence, so nobody is safe. If your cousin had a small debt, you are not only accountable but also threatened on a daily basis and the entire family is extorted.
They also enter into family land disputes, representing one family member against another, which breaks the family. You have a whole range of conflicts in which they intervene and exploit in ways that are not only terrifying, terrorizing and destructive to individuals but to entire social fabrics.
This constant blackmail and extortion has a severe dampening effect on small businesses. People refrain from expanding their businesses or making visible purchases like new cars because it attracts extortionists. It leads people to move away, breaking up communities and destroying the social cohesion that held these communities together on their land for over 70 years. In that sense, even if not planned or orchestrated from above, it serves the regime’s purpose.
Ghousoon Bisharat
I would like to expand the geographic scope of the discussion to include Gaza and the West Bank. How do you understand Israel’s backing of militias in Gaza—or, as reported in +972 Magazine, the Israeli army’s role in operating these groups? And also how do you understand the growing presence of mafia groups in the West Bank, where residents report these groups operating while the Israeli army turns a blind eye or facilitates their movement through checkpoints?
Eilat Maoz
In Gaza, we find the most obvious and blatant form of what we see here (inside Israel) in a much more neoliberal modality of colonial control. In Gaza you say it very clearly, you have militias that are given the privilege and authority to use violence internally against other Palestinians and the right pillage resources and establish their authority under the sponsorship and protection and auspices of the Israeli army to build local power. And what criminal organizations in Israel are or how they evolved is not at all that different in form and in practice from how these milias in Gaza operate. The colonial logic behind them is the same.
But in both cases, I think, much more evidently inside 48, but of course also in Gaza to a great extent, these kinds of violent subcontractors, we may call them, or proxies, or however we want to call them, they are a way to maintain control, but they’re also sometimes a liability and a threat. We can all remind ourselves that Hamas was also armed and supplied with resources by Israel because it preferred Hamas control over Palestinian Authority rule, because the Palestinian Authority was a group that one could actually perhaps come to a political agreement with, and Israel is not interested in that. But these groups can become a liability. A variety of states historically and today use these kinds of groups and then have to deal with the consequences of empowering them.
In the West Bank, first of all, we noted this very briefly or in passing earlier. Some of the criminal organizations operating in 48, their rise cannot be understood to begin with, separate from the economy of the occupation and the trans border movements, of labor, waste and contraband. So, this is nothing new. What is new, and what I’ve also been hearing about in recent months, is the expansion of these extortion networks that reach into the West Bank and also forms of debt collection in the context of “cross border economic relations” between Palestinians in 1948 and Palestinians in the West Bank. Like in all of the other examples that we’ve been discussing, these criminal organizations thrive on difference. Wherever there’s a border, or a difference, or a gap, or a regulatory gap, or a checkpoint that needs to be crossed and someone can’t cross it, they’re there to mediate it and take a percentage from the transaction. That’s what they do. Essentially, that in the most basic sense, they’re brokers using violence to broker relations. And if a businessman from the West Bank cannot collect a debt from someone in the Galilee or vice versa, then a criminal organization will be more than ready to facilitate that transaction for a handsome fee.
This is one space. This is really an intertwined and highly connected economic and social and political space from the river to the sea, but it’s so highly segmented, segregated, fragmented, divided, that it creates endless opportunities for these kinds of brokers to operate. But it’s also interesting, I think, to highlight that these extortion networks in the West Bank appeared in the media in the context of the Israeli police collecting evidence and collecting testimonies from residents of the West Bank in order to crack down on one of the larger criminal organizations in the Galilee. This is not obviously because the Israeli police became surprisingly very interested in the fate of the Palestinian residents of the West Bank that are terrorized by settlers daily. The police couldn’t give a damn.
And this relates to the Gaza question, to the militia question. These criminal organizations are useful to some arms of the state, but other arms of the security sector or the security agencies also see them as a threat. So, for example, local police departments in the Galilee might use them regularly to settle disputes, to keep the peace, to repress demonstrations. And we find this, and there’s evidence for this in court cases where we actually have testimonies of the police talking about engaging in such practices. But on the other hand, the national units or the countrywide units that are responsible for dealing with criminal organizations are interested in cracking down on these groups that are increasingly seen as a threat to Israel’s own national security, because obviously these are quite opportunistic actors. They can collaborate with Israel but they have no qualms about collaborating with other political movements as well, perhaps those that are anti Israeli. And I think this duality or this both mutual dependence and extreme hostility between arms of the state and these criminal movements is very important to keep in mind while analyzing this issue, because it’s very easy to move from concrete analyses of shared interests or even ongoing relations of collusion between some of these groups and, police or political actors in kind of the center of the Jewish establishment to an understanding of this kind of overarching conspiracy of using organized crime in order to achieve unified political ends of the state. And I think it’s more complicated than that. I think, in effect, what we’re seeing is unanticipated, unintentional growth of an attempt to manage the conflict and not resolve it. And we’re seeing these unintended consequences of managing colonization and apartheid. We’ve been seeing them in a variety of areas in Israeli Palestinian life in recent years. And who bears the burden of most of the resulting violence of these failed attempts are Palestinians, of course, throughout Gaza and the West Bank and 48, and the variety of diasporas that have also come under Israeli violence. But it’s not a success story. Organized crime in Palestinian communities is not a success story of the Israeli state. It’s an indication of its failure. It’s an indication of a system that is creating the very forces that destroy its ability to even function as a coherent system. And the kind of complexities and entanglements that the state itself has entered into, and bargains that the state has entered into in an attempt to square the circle.
Ghousoon Bisharat
I can’t let you go before we speak about the Caribbean. Your research also looks at the Caribbean, where you use the concept of “police economies” to describe structures of governance and power that operate within and beyond formal state boundaries. Why did you decide to research the Caribbean?
Eilat Maoz
In the most general sense, because I am interested in colonial forms of power and I’m interested in their transnational movements and travels with these forms of power. Jamaica and Palestine not very often thought together in the same frame, but they were part of the same British Empire and actually share a number of important kinds of legal and constitutional histories and institutional histories as well, because British bureaucrats and legal codes and officers moved throughout the empire and learned from a variety of places. And of course the racialized histories and the institutional histories that colonialism implanted in different places are very, very different from each other, but they can also help us develop a kind of perspective on a variety of questions, but among them, the question of nationalism and identity. And one of the things that I think is interesting, or that was interesting for me in Jamaica, a number of very interesting things because it’s a really, really interesting place. One of the most interesting things was how you can very easily create political identities that are almost ethnic identities, that are almost ethno national identities within a community that is over 90 descendant African. You see this throughout the Caribbean. You find polarized political systems with very, very fierce and ongoing violence between groups that, from our perspective, are basically one group. But for people living in there the divisions are real, and the divisions were basically created by how violence and resources were allocated. That’s it. It’s really, really easy to create ethno national identities through differential distribution of resources and access to violence.
First of all, I think it really helps to relativize our own identities as Israelis and Palestinians. Not to take them as carved in stone, but to understand them as historic contingent groupings that emerged in material conditions and that can be transformed if we transform the way that we divide up resources and commitments. So that was very important. And another important thing that I learned there is to rethink the state. In Israel, the state is omnipresent and we’re used to seeing as this unified, coherent entity that stands over every social setting. that it’s very clear that the state exists and is there and has real, robust material consistency. The same cannot be said about the state in Jamaica or in a variety of other countries or states in the south. The state is not taken for granted to exist outside or in separation from class interests or from the government or from the elites. No one thinks that the state just exists out there separately from very concrete interests that can be named and have faces and addresses. And there’s something very, very sobering about really sort of de-reifying the state and remembering that states and societies interpenetrate and that there’s no state out there that is disconnected from its social underpinnings and bringing that back to Israel helps me to a certain extent think not through the state, but in a way about the state, or try to think about it in new ways, not as something only external to society, but something that is really entrenched in the social relations.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Thank you, Eilat, for this illuminating conversation and for your work on this important issue.
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