Our blood is crying out. Arabs and Jews must fight together to stop the killing

A protest against rising crime in Arab society and government inaction in Sakhnin, 22 January 2026

Ayman Odeh writes in Haaretz on 29 January 2026:

The voice of our children’s blood is crying out to us from the ground. The voice of our brothers’ blood is crying out to us from the ground. The voice of our parents’ blood is crying out to us from the ground.

That passage, which is contained in the biblical account of the first murder, has become a living, breathing reality in our time. The murder. It constitutes the soundtrack of Arab society in Israel. Last year, 252 Israeli Arabs were murdered; this year, the figure has already reached 23.

Behind these numbers are people with names, houses that have been left empty, families that have had to learn again how to breathe and children who discover too early that the country they live in is not capable of protecting them. Every number, every life that is cut short, is a testament to the violence of organized crime, which casts a shadow over the lives of so many.

The blood of Dr. Abdullah Awad, 29, from the village of Mazra’a, cries out from the ground. A young pediatrician, he was murdered last February in the middle of his workday at a medical clinic, before the eyes of the people who had come to seek treatment from him. He was a husband and father of two young children.

The blood of Susan Abdelqader Bishara, a 40-year-old social activist, cries out from the ground. Murdered in April 2025 in Tira, she had dedicated her life to the community, human rights and a more just society.

The blood of Nabil Safia, a 15-year-old high school student studying biology from Kafr Yasif, cries from the ground. Like many his age, he dreamed of a better future and should have been thinking about his grades and his loving family today, but instead he lies buried.

The voices of hundreds of others – women, men, many of them young – join a deafening chorus of blood, of lives cut short. They wanted to live, to raise families, to travel, to be happy. People like you and me. The voice of their blood has been crying out from the ground for a long time; we can no longer pretend that we don’t hear.

Those who seek to lay the blame on the Arab community for this insufferable situation frame it as “it is part of their culture.” But the facts say otherwise. For comparison’s sake, note that in 2025, the homicide rate per 100,000 people in the West Bank was 0.6 and in Jordan 1.1, while in the Arab Israeli community it was 12 – 10 times the Jordanian rate and 20 times the West Bank rate. In other words, it is not culture; it is the state.

We are responsible for 99 percent of our society – family, schools and everything else. Our culture, the culture of life, educates and sustains the vast majority of the Arab public. But the state, which is responsible for dealing with 1 percent of organized crime has chosen not to act. It has abandoned the lives of its citizens, and that choice is being paid for in blood, time after time, and in every place.

Fifty years ago, Arab Israelis embarked on a popular struggle against the expropriation of our land, and thus Land Day was born in the town of Sakhnin. I was just a baby then. Fifty years later, the Arab public returned to that same town to engage in another struggle – not over land but for life itself.

If Land Day expressed the struggle for the land under our feet, the current struggle is for the simple right to walk on it without fear. More deeply, last week’s protest in Sakhnin was a defining moment for Arab society. Some 100,000 people cried out, thus turning the event into Man’s Day.

People went out into the streets to demand that organized crime be stopped and that the government not countenance illegal guns in the streets (large numbers of which are stolen from army bases), and to end the policy of conscious neglect. It was a genuine expression of pain – and of deep political consciousness. Because we are tired of seeing blood on our streets. Because nothing is more important than human life.

On Saturday, a mass rally is scheduled in Tel Aviv – a black flag protest. It will be a call to the entire Jewish public to join us, to become our partners.

We want to be a community without guns. We want to raise children without fear. We want streets you can walk on in the evening hours, not as places you have to hide. We want a country that protects its citizens, not one that abandons them to their fate. This is all we ask for.

I do not believe in separate struggles. The struggle for democracy and against the government coup would be a lot more effective if Israel’s Arab citizens were a part of it. The struggle against organized crime would be a lot more effective if it included large numbers of Jewish Israelis. We cannot succeed without you, and you cannot succeed without us. This is not a political slogan; it is a simple fact. The struggle must be a joint Arab-Jewish one. We have the same interest, even if we have a hard time admitting it.

The voice of our brothers calls from the ground. This time the voice refuses to be silenced. It is growing louder to be heard everywhere. And to ensure that that voice is indeed heard, we need you with us in Tel Aviv at 7:30 P.M. at Habima Square.

No more crime, no more neglect – we want to live!

Ayman Odeh is a Knesset member and chairman of the Hadash-Ta’al list.

This article is reproduced in its entirety