Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs informed government ministries in an internal email that there is a plan to divert funds from the previous government’s five-year plan for Arab society toward programs aimed at fighting crime in Arab communities, to be carried out by police and the Shin Bet.
The plan refers to Government Resolution 550, approved during Naftali Bennett’s term as prime minister, which still has NIS 1.3 billion in unspent funds. Senior officials familiar with the matter said the amount that would be transferred to the Shin Bet “has not yet been finalized” and is still being worked out.
(Photo: Olivier Fitoussi, Effi Sharir)
In any case, the estimate is that the sum would be about half of the remaining funds, no more than NIS 650 million, and possibly less.
The transfer could allow the Shin Bet to enter the fight against Arab crime organizations more significantly for the first time, but only in matters related to weapons and smuggling.
“If anyone thinks the Shin Bet will come in and handle the crime organizations themselves instead of the police, that is nonsense,” said a senior government official familiar with the issue. “What the Shin Bet will do is deal with weapons smuggling and the arms-trade world, because some of it spills over into terror organizations.”
Under Israeli law, the Shin Bet cannot handle Arab crime as such, and that is not expected to change. At present, the security agency is involved in the issue only at the margins.
“It is clear that weapons smuggling goes to crime organizations, but this is a limited niche. If anyone thinks the Shin Bet will replace the police in the fight against crime, that is not true. It is more of a spin against the surge in Arab crime and the helplessness of the police,” the official said.
In the past, the Shin Bet opposed becoming involved in the fight against Arab crime because of concerns that such activity could harm intelligence sources. The shift now comes in the form of transferring budgets to the agency, creating a dedicated department and using intrusive tools.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared three years ago that he was determined to bring the Shin Bet into the fight, but little has happened since.
In June 2023, Netanyahu said: “We are determined to fight this criminal phenomenon and the head of the snake. To that end, I will convene a special meeting on integrating the Shin Bet into the focused effort against crime families.”
“We allocated huge budgets to the police to hire thousands more officers, but all of this takes time, and we have no time,” he added at the time. “The murders in the Arab sector have become a national plague.”
The issue resurfaced about a month ago following the shooting attack in Tzur Yigal, in which reservist Master Sgt. Haim Klomiti, 55, was killed. A senior security official said then that “the Shin Bet now understands very well that it must get under the stretcher of the criminal world in order to solve and prevent terror attacks.”