Israel: A New Shade of Blue
Matti Friedman

Since June 2001, Sgt. Major Suwaed, a Beduin from the nearby village of Salameh, has been in charge of a community policing center, or CPC. In addition to battling crime, Suwaed, later reinforced by two more officers, has been settling local disputes, directing police volunteers, teaching classes, and generally making himself available if anyone wants to talk.

When last April, for example, a 19-year-old from one clan killed an 18-year-old from another, Tamrah faced the prospect of being rocked by a full-blown feud. Suwaed and his colleagues stepped in and, together with the town’s notables, brokered a sulha, a traditional reconciliation. In late October, the offender’s family agreed to pay the victim’s relatives 350,000 shekels ($79,000) and the matter was deemed closed.

A diplomatic role is not one the Israel Police is used to playing, least of all in the Arab sector. "The only time police would ever enter Tamrah was during a criminal incident," says Suwaed, sipping black coffee at the CPC. "When we opened the station, people said we had come to recruit collaborators, or to take revenge on residents for the riots. I went around the town convincing them we were here to help."

A look at Tamrah’s statistics show a town with a population that is increasingly young -- nearly 70 percent is under the age of 30 -- and where half of the work force is dependent on state subsidies, both conditions conducive to social ills. Indeed, residents’ most urgent complaints were connected to crime, and it was when the CPC managed to deal with some of the most pressing -- arresting drug dealers and prostitutes who until then had been tolerated by the police -- that opinion in Tamrah began to change. Today, Suwaed has 70 local volunteers who direct traffic, guard the post office on days when National Insurance subsidies arrive, serve as armed escorts for school trips, and patrol the streets.

"The beginning of the move to community policing came three years before the disturbances," explains Chief Supt. Hai Yitzhak, commander of the community arm of the police’s Northern Sector. "But especially after October 2000, we concluded that we must move inside the Arab towns, so that they would not only see police when they come to demolish a house or disperse a riot."

Over 350 CPCs have opened nationwide since 1997; 56 are in the Arab sector, and 42 of those are in the north, home to the majority of Israel’s Arabs. Suwaed says some villages prefer Jewish officers, whom they believe can be more objective in mediating internal conflicts.

Police say that, since October 2000, they have been making efforts to use the CPCs to improve their ties with Arab communities, ties which were never warm and friendly but which reached an all-time low during that month’s violence. But short on money and personnel, they realized they were not equipped to do this alone.

This realization led them to the Abraham Fund Initiatives, a non-profit organization that runs projects encouraging coexistence between the Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. "The police had already come to some clear conclusions before they approached us, a year and a half ago," says Lee Perlman, the Jerusalem-based fund’s project director. "They wanted us to help them create a culture of awareness, and to give them skills and tools to deal with the Arab minority."

This year, the Abraham Fund put over $100,000 into assisting police in training community officers and in long-term planning. It also provides funding for community outreach projects like "My Safe School," which sends Sgt. Major Suwaed into two junior high schools to teach a class on personal safety once a week.

"At first we were hesitant," recalls Mahmoud Hijazi, principal of al-Farabi Junior High. "But when they explained it was about increasing security and fighting crime, we changed our minds, and the views of students and parents started to change as well."

Sbaa Knaneh, a seventh-grader at al-Farabi, pronounces the program a resounding success. "At first we thought the police only existed to punish people, to give out traffic tickets," she says in eloquent Hebrew. "Now we know that the police can do positive things as well. And if the kids’ views change, then the views of the whole community will change."

The Or Commission report on the violence of October 2000 -- which accused the Israeli government of "prejudice and neglect" in its treatment of Israeli Arabs -- singled out the CPCs as a positive trend, but also said that the police persisted in seeing Israel’s Arabs as "an enemy." The question is whether the police’s new initiative is merely a belated PR campaign. The "My Safe School" program is still a pilot, run only in six Arab schools, and most Arab towns still do not have a CPC.

To rescue the lost trust of the Arab sector, says Hussam Abu Baker, the Abraham Fund Initiatives’ strategic coordinator, the police will need to extend and deepen these programs. "If we thought that it was only about image, we would not be involved," says Abu Baker. "This effort could well serve as a lever for real change. But it is not the change itself."

November 17, 2003