Last night, Saleh Jabr, 30, was shot to death in the northern Israeli town of Kafr Kanna. The killing represents the 38th homicide within Israel’s Arab community since the start of the new year, 40 days ago. It came after a day-long national protest against the record-high and still rising levels of crime and violence within Arab Israeli society.

Throughout the day yesterday, thousands of Arab Israelis and Jewish supporters held demonstrations across the country — blocking highways, protesting outside government offices and keeping businesses closed — as they called for the Israel Police and the government to address the rampant violence and unchecked aggression by criminal organizations, which nonprofit leaders say are corrupting all of Arab Israeli society. 

Levels of violent crime and homicides in Arab Israeli communities have long outpaced those of Jewish ones, but in recent years — particularly under the current Israeli government and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — they have increased dramatically. Until 2015, there were four murders in the Arab community for every one in the Jewish community, according to the Taub Center think tank; in 2024, there were 14. 

Seeing the rise in homicides and other violent crimes, in late 2023, a group of philanthropic organizations and foundations from Israel, the United States and elsewhere came together to launch the Funding Collaborative Focusing on Crime and Violence in Arab Society. The collaborative now includes Yad Hanadiv, Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Rayne Foundation, New Israel Fund, Pears Foundation, Social Venture Fund, Mubadarat/Bader Philanthropies, Slifka Foundation and others.

Talia Horev, the former director of the Forum of Foundations in Israel, was tapped to serve as the collaborative’s coordinator, spearheading efforts to identify how philanthropy could play a role. This included mapping the field, connecting organizations and developing strategic guides for the field, among other things.

“Philanthropy is not big money,” Horev told eJewishPhilanthropy last week. “But it comes in places where it can make a difference, can make an impact and develop certain models that can make a difference. And this is the time to be there because if this is not stopped, it’s a ticking time bomb. It’s terrible, it’s out of control. There are hundreds of thousands of weapons in Arab society. Hundreds of thousands.”

While there is growing awareness of the severity of the issue in Israel, Arab Israeli crime prevention has not historically been a top priority for Jewish funders, save for those organizations that are already focused on so-called “shared society” initiatives, who more readily understood the detrimental impact of crime on their efforts, Horev said.

One Arab Israeli nonprofit leader, who spoke to eJP on the condition of anonymity out of safety fears, said that the lure of money from criminal enterprises can pull Arab Israeli teenagers out of school, undermining education initiatives. Criminal gangs can threaten the therapists and social workers helping victims, preventing welfare and family violence prevention programs from succeeding. In some cases, she added, Arab criminal gangs demand a “cut” of government tenders for public programs as part of a protection racket. “It’s complicated, isn’t it?” she said. 

When the funding collaborative first launched, Horev said that she believed that the issue of crime and violence in Arab Israeli society was too big and too complicated for philanthropy and civil society to address, but an early trip to the United States changed her mind. “We thought, ‘There isn’t much civil society can do because it’s the government’s and the police’s job,” she said. “We learned in the States that there’s a lot that civil society can do. And that was transformative for us. That affected our whole strategy.” 

The main takeaway was that civil society does not need to solve the entire issue on its own, but can have an outsized impact by focusing on the core population that is involved: young men, who are overwhelmingly the people doing the shooting and the people getting shot. By focusing just on teenage boys and young adult men, the number of people involved drops from roughly 2 million total Arab Israelis to tens of thousands — a far more manageable sum, Horev said.

In the coming months, eJP will be reporting more on the ways that Israeli civil society, supported in large part by Jewish funders, as well as Arab philanthropy, is working to bring down the soaring crime rate.