Firearms are not uncommon in Israel. Armed security guards have long been a routine sight at shopping malls, clubs, and other large gathering spaces that present potential targets for attacks by militants. Police are heavily armed, and off-duty soldiers are constantly seen with their weapons in public as they head to or from their military posts. Settlements in the West Bank have armed guards around them.
Yet as militarized as Israeli society has always been, civilian gun control laws there have been restrictive, especially compared to the United States. In the most recent global study, the 2017 Small Arms Survey found that gun ownership was most widespread in the United States, unsurprisingly, with 120.5 guns per 100 people in the population. Israel, by stark contrast, had only 6.7 guns per 100 people. And Israel’s restrictive gun ownership laws and the difficulty of getting a license for a firearm did not change significantly until Itamar Ben Gvir came into office.
A far-right extremist, Ben Gvir became the Minister for National Security through Israel’s last election in 2022. He is a long-time extremist activist, head of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, who, in 2007, was convicted on charges of incitement to racism. His extremism is so virulent that he was exempted from serving in the Israel Defense Forces because of it. Soon after assuming office, Ben Gvir vowed to increase the gun permits issued by his ministry from around 2,000 to 10,000 a month, and to reduce the waiting period from six to eight months to two to three.
Long before the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Israeli society was already witnessing a rise in gun ownership. From 2021 to 2022, applications for gun ownership more than doubled, according to a March 2023 report by the BBC. But Ben Gvir wanted more. He wanted a large vigilante force among the citizenry — especially those Israelis who live in West Bank settlements and in mixed Arab-Jewish towns in Israel. It’s not hard to read that as an intent to promote Jewish Israelis shooting Palestinians, both citizens of Israel and those residing in the West Bank.
In April, Ben Gvir got the government to concede to his plan for a “national guard” that was essentially a private militia under his authority. He demonstrated what that authority would look like over the summer when he announced that settlers who shoot at Palestinians in the West Bank would no longer have their weapons confiscated. Until then, police would confiscate the weapon, usually temporarily, as they investigated the incident. Although the settlers would routinely get the weapons back, the change in policy sent a very clear message that it was open season on Palestinians.
Since October 7, Ben Gvir has moved even faster. “The minister’s policy to distribute weapons to eligible Israeli citizens is clear and ongoing,” read a statement in early December from Ben Gvir’s office.
“Ongoing” is an understatement. Since Oct. 7, the National Security Ministry has received about 255,000 firearm applications, and approved some 20,000, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. And those approvals are not coming about legally.
On Dec. 3, Yisrael Avisar, the head of the ministry’s firearms division, was forced to resign because he followed Ben Gvir’s directive to circumvent the process for gun ownership in order to accelerate approvals. Ben Gvir had appointed dozens of “temporary licensing officials” with virtually no training to expedite certain gun ownership applications. Given Ben Gvir’s stated intention to give guns to Israelis in settlements and in mixed towns, it is clear who was being prioritized.
One ministry official described it as giving out guns “like candy.” Consequently a country now engaged in the most destructive behavior in its history, as it literally flattens Gaza, is also moving more toward resembling its patron, the United States, in internal gun violence, as its once-restrictive attitude toward guns fades away in the shadow of rage and fear.
A recent incident illustrated the consequences to Israelis.
On Nov. 30, Israeli attorney Yuval Doron Kastelman was driving to work in Jerusalem when he saw an attack underway at a bus stop across the road. Hamas gunmen had undertaken the attack, which ended up killing three people and wounding eight before the attackers themselves were gunned down.
Kastelman, who had a licensed pistol, intervened to stop the attack. According to reports, it was he who killed the militants. But when Israeli soldiers arrived at the scene, they shot him. Worse, video of the incident shows that he threw down his weapon, opened his coat to show he was unarmed, and pleaded with the soldiers not to shoot. They killed him anyway.
Although the soldier who killed Kastelman was arrested, the action was one that would have been routine in Israel had Kastelman been the “terrorist” the soldier presumably believed him to be.
Palestinian attackers are routinely killed whether or not they still present a threat. In one case, in 2016, a soldier, Elor Azaria, killed a Palestinian man, Fattah al-Sharif, as he lay wounded and helpless on the ground. Azaria ultimately served only nine months in prison for the killing.
Al-Sharif was barely conscious, and had only been armed with a knife. He and another Palestinian had attacked Israeli soldiers as they enforced Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; they did not attack civilians.
During and after his trial, Israeli military and political officials said Azaria’s actions were against military regulations and “serious,” but did not condemn him. Some of the more militant leaders, such as Avigdor Liberman and future prime minister Naftali Bennett, even excused Azaria’s actions. Bennett called for him to be pardoned.
Many Israelis shared this sentiment. There was clearly a sense among those Israelis that even after Palestinian militants presented no threat, they were deserving of immediate execution without trial.
This atmosphere has only grown more intense over the intervening years. As Israel’s government lurched farther rightward and incursions into Palestinian areas became more frequent and violent the sense that any Palestinian militant must die has grown stronger. A December 2, 2023 editorial in Haaretz noted that this view has been promoted for years by Israeli politicians and more recently by social media influencers and right-wing media figures.
This is the dangerous atmosphere into which Minister of Public Security Itamar Ben Gvir stepped. Almost immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks, Ben Gvir announced the purchase for distribution of 10,000 rifles, along with some number of helmets and bulletproof vests. All of this was intended not for Israeli security, police, or military, but for private citizens.
Ben Gvir even caused consternation among Americans when a video went viral showing him at public events simply handing out rifles. The events were right-wing political rallies in the towns of Bnei Brak and Elad, two strongholds of religious Zionism in Israel. The videos were taken seriously enough that even the administration of Joe Biden, which has backed Israel to the hilt in its assault on Gaza, threatened to stop selling Israel rifles if they were going to be distributed to civilians.
Yuval Kastelman’s killing reflects a shoot-first mentality when it comes to Palestinian assailants, or those whom security forces mistake for Palestinians. But the principle that you don’t shoot, much less kill, a person who is no longer — or perhaps never was — a threat, is there precisely to avoid tragedies like the one that befell Kastelman.
The United States has failed to learn that lesson, to our sorrow. The list of people killed by police unnecessarily is distressingly long. Kastelman’s death resonates particularly with the police killing in a Chicago suburb of Jemel Roberson in 2018. He was a security guard at a club who subdued a shooter and was gunned down by police when they arrived.
Israel is always a more tense place than the United States. Its dispossession of Palestinians and ongoing occupation widen the likelihood that there will be some sort of unexpected attack. That has been the case for all of its history, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the subsequent massive violence Israel has unleashed on Gaza and the intensified attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since Hamas’ operation greatly raises that state of tension. While that state of fear and alarm leads, unsurprisingly, to many Israelis wanting to arm themselves, it is also the most dangerous atmosphere into which to pump a large flow of firearms.
As the already-mentioned editorial in Haaretz pointed out about the Kastelman killing, “The link between this campaign [to justify killing Palestinians even if they no longer pose a threat] and the policy of wholesale distribution of firearms initiated by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has brought anarchy and the Wild West to Israel. In the incident in Jerusalem the mistake was made by soldiers, but there is no doubt that the continued distribution of weapons will lead to further mistakes in the future.”
Long-time Israeli peace and justice activist Rela Mazali told the BBC in March 2023 that there is no evidence that more guns reduces either the number of attacks or the number of victims. “It is claimed and claimed again, and it’s claimed so often that it’s widely believed to be the truth. But there are really no supporting statistics,” she said.
Instead, Mazali said, more guns have led to more murders in Israel and to a general rise in gun violence, with the victims being largely focused in the community of Palestinian citizens of Israel and disproportionately affecting women, both Jewish and Palestinian.
A Times of Israel report by Jeremy Sharon at the end of April, 2023, backed up Mazali’s words. It noted that in the first four months of that year, homicides in Israel had doubled over the same period in 2022. This was largely due to Ben Gvir’s inattention to crime in the Palestinian communities of Israel, yet homicides among Jews had risen as well.
But the greatest concern is in the West Bank. Attacks by settlers under the protection of the Israeli army had already been rising before Oct. 7, but they have grown since. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, between Oct. 7 and the beginning of December Israeli settlers murdered eight harmless Palestinian residents of the West Bank, all by shooting them with guns.
More guns also means more impunity. As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reports, settlers have led the ongoing campaign to force Palestinians to abandon their villages in the West Bank, an object that has characterized many of the armed settler attacks since Oct. 7.
Despite Ben Gvir’s efforts, Israel still has a long way to go before it even begins to approach the United States in its internal gun epidemic. But if that epidemic in the U.S. is greatly exacerbated by issues of institutional racism and societal misogyny, those same conditions exist in similar forms in the context of Israel — and in Israel they are magnified by the trauma of Oct. 7, not to mention the heightened tension in the country due to the massive killing of Palestinians (over 27,000 as this goes to press, mostly women and children) in Gaza.
While the Biden administration displayed a welcome bit of good sense in making it clear to Israel that it would not supply guns to be given to civilians, Ben Gvir is unlikely to allow that to stop him. Few Israelis will object right now to equipping settlers with rifles, as hostility toward Palestinians in general has intensified. But a permissive attitude toward guns will only lead to an increase in violence and, just as importantly, will crystallize the anger felt by both sides, making any hope of justice and reconciliation even more remote.