Here’s why Israel is allowing record murder rates in its Palestinian towns
Palestinian citizens of Israel protest, calling on the Israeli government to tackle a wave of crime and killings within their communities through effective law and order, in Sakhnin, northern Israel, 22 January 2026
Neve Gordon writes in Al Jazeera on 5 February 2026:
While the international media has rightly focused on the genocide and enormous displacement in Gaza alongside the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, the 300 murders inside Israel in 2025, 252 of whom were Palestinian victims, garnered little to no media coverage outside Israel. Yet last year marked the deadliest year on record for murders among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 21 percent of Israel’s population but sustain 80 percent of the murders. That is one murder every 36 hours.
The international media have also covered the rise in antisemitism across the world, even as there has been little to no media coverage of how Israel has been exaggerating and instrumentalising a Zionist notion of antisemitism to create moral panic among Jews everywhere. Indeed, when I speak to Jewish friends in Israel, they often ask how I, who live in London, cope with antisemitism. As consumers of Israeli news, they can be forgiven for thinking that Jews across the world are in imminent danger.
These two phenomena – the crime epidemic within Palestinian communities inside Israel and the weaponisation of antisemitism to amplify Jewish fear – might seem totally unconnected. Yet there is a clear thread linking them, and it is called demographic engineering.
The foundational acts
Demographic engineering has been at the heart of the Zionist project. During the 1948 war, about 750,000 Palestinians were displaced in what Fayez Sayegh called “racial elimination”. As part of this process, Palestinian cities were depopulated, and about 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed. By 1951, the Palestinians who had become refugees had been “replaced” by a similar number of Jewish immigrants, both Holocaust survivors from Europe and Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries, thus transforming the state’s racial composition without altering its overall population size.