Israel’s Shin Bet is opposed to policing Arab sector murder wave – why?

Though quiet publicly, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) is behind-the-scenes vehemently opposed to being drawn deeper into policing internal Israeli-Arab criminal violence.

Why?

First, it is important to note that the agency has already been drawn deeper into domestic affairs in recent years than at any time in the last few decades.

In early 2020, the government brought the Shin Bet into the business of tracking Israeli citizens who were infected with the coronavirus.

This may seem like ancient history now, but it reduced the barrier between the Shin Bet’s standard role and proposals to expand its reach.   

The next turning point was the May 2021 Gaza conflict, which led to dangerous scenes of rioting and disorder in various Israeli “mixed” cities between Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens.

This led the political class to call on the Shin Bet to address aspects of Israeli-Arab crime which might have nationalistic tendencies.

On one hand, the idea was to bring to bear its powerful resources and unique technological and human spying capabilities to prevent a recurrence of such rioting within Israel.

Yet, on the other hand, all parties involved wanted to keep the agency primarily focused on its main mission of preventing external terrorists from penetrating and striking the country internally.   

How did the elite homeland security agency draw the line?

It tried to stay out of the vast majority of internal Israeli-Arab violence, while getting involved when a bomb was placed in a Health Ministry facility, when there was gunfire against the home of a top Israeli-Arab police official and assisting in busting cells which robbed weapons from IDF bases.

Just last week the Shin Bet was critical in tracking down and nabbing criminals who had stolen around 25,000 bullets of ammunition. So the agency’s work has sometimes paid off.

 Then why is it so opposed?

The Jerusalem Post has learned that the main reason is resources.

It is one thing to move a small team and a small volume of technological resources from the all-important fight against external terror to dealing with some isolated crime issues which could overlap with nationalist anti-Israel ideological problems.

However, if the Shin Bet was moving into dealing with Israeli-Arab crime on a systematic level in dozens of cities and villages across the country, this would lead to a huge drain of human and technological resources from combating terror.

The agency has a large budget and a dedicated service, but the budget and human resources is still tiny compared to the giant national police force or the even larger IDF.

It is used as a boutique agency to deal with specific issues of Palestinian terrorism emanating from the West Bank and Gaza, from Lebanon, from Syria, in very rare extremely volatile cases within Israel and from distant puppeteers in Tehran and Ankara.

Much of the counter-terror work it doe son the ground involves significant support from the IDF and the police.

Besides the limited human resources, technology and budget, there is a question of focus.

The more the agency’s teams move too focusing on Israeli-Arab crime, the more the mentality, strategy and tactics for addressing crime will dominate the Shin Bet’s corridors and DNA. This is a different phenomenon from countering terror and at some point there are concerns that this will downgrade the agency’s counter-terror capabilities in all kinds of intangible ways.

Some security officials also warn that injecting the Shin Bet is a “magic spell” way of the political class avoiding the hard work of investing in a more serious way in addressing poverty, unemployment and poor education in much of the Israeli-Arab sector.

In addition, the agency is concerned that overuse of its classified capabilities is more likely to lead to their exposure, which will make them less useful and effective in the fight against terror.

For example, during the corona era, the public learned that the Shin Bet’s cell phone tracking tool often has trouble with certain three dimensional issues, such as discerning between the different floors of a building.

This was exposed when the Shin Bet wrongly thought certain citizens had come into corona contact with each other, not realizing they were on different floors, though technically within two meters of each other.

The agency also has some legal concerns, but it leaves those issues to the Office of the Attorney-General.

Mostly, the Shin Bet’s concerns can be summed up simply as: the better it gets at fighting crime, the worse it will get at fighting terror. And as bad as crime has gotten, terror is still a far more dangerous problem.

JPost