A TV news report based on police data revealed that though Arabs make up just 20% of the population, they are involved in 95% of shootings in Israel.
By: Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up a fifth of the population, are involved in 95.2 percent of all shootings in the country, according to a report by Israeli news site Hadashot, based on police data.
Israel’s Arabs are also involved in 76 percent of all cases of illegal weapons possession.
Many of the crimes, it should be noted, take place within their own communities, meaning Arab-on-Arab violence.
In an interview on Army Radio, Aymen Odeh, head of the Arab Joint List party, mourned the numbers while blasting police for not doing their job when it comes to Arab victims.
“The statistics are shocking,” Odeh said, “especially since behind each number is a person who is a world unto himself.”
He then questioned how the authorities “manage to gather the evidence when the victim is a Jew.” He gave as an example the Arab town of Kafr Kassem, in which 15 Arabs and one Jew were killed last year.
The Arabs who killed Reuven Shmerling were caught quickly and convicted, but none of the other murders were solved.
He also condemned police for eliminating Arabs all too quickly in confrontations, citing a statistic that in the last 18 years, 57 Arabs and only three Jews were killed by the authorities, charging that the reason is that “the police treat us as criminals and not as citizens.”
There are organized crime gangs all over the Arab sector, whether in the Galilee or Lod-Ramle or Jaffa, he said, calling “in the clearest possible manner” for the police to go into the villages and town and defeat them. “That’s the job of the police,” he exclaimed.
In their defense, police put out a statement noting that there has been marked improvement in the last year. “In 2017, there was a 9.5% rise in arrests and a 42% rise in the number of indictments filed” in crimes involving Arabs, they said.