Securing 'sovereignty' in sovereign land: Israel seeks to Judaize the Galilee and Negev - opinion

Over the past week, the media has been positively dyspeptic over the appointment of Yehuda Eliyahu, a close associate of Bezalel Smotrich and head of the Settlement Administration, as the new director of the Israel Land Authority.

But behind the inflated scandal lies the real story: Eliyahu is the architect of one of the most successful settlement projects in Israeli history.

As the selection committee itself acknowledged, he brings “special expertise in the field of enforcement and preservation of state land.” The government’s intent here isn’t a secret – they are determined to take his particular set of skills to Judaize the Galilee and the Negev.

“The current picture is that in the central Galilee area, there are about half a million Arab Israeli citizens and a hundred thousand Jews,” Chikli said. “That is not a good figure.” This is why he called the decision to appoint Eliyahu “more important than [appointing] the head of the Shin Bet” after it was announced.

This isn’t just demographic anxiety; it’s a security concern rooted in recent history. For residents of these areas, including Chikli himself, the 2021 violence of Operation Guardian of the Walls proved that a sparse Jewish presence leaves vital peripheral highways and isolated communities dangerously exposed to ethnic violence.

It’s not exactly a new idea; settlement-enabled sovereignty was the essential Zionist strategy for most of the pre-state period. But there is one fundamental difference between the strategy then and the reality now: the State of Israel.

Statehood introduces a few obvious complications. The first is the inherent tension of a state body openly preferring the ethnic rebalancing of a region. It immediately forces the classic Israeli dilemma: Jewish or Democratic? A state of the Jews, or a state for all its citizens?

But it raises an even more pressing, practical question: What does it actually mean to secure “sovereignty” in already-sovereign territory?

After all, while the new director was trying out his chair at the Land Authority, just north of the Galilee, a man was shot dead in the Arab city of Shfaram. That killing on Sunday marked the 100th death from violent crime in Israel’s Arab society so far this year, a number that has since crept to 104 in just the last few days.

Israeli Arabs are experiencing a historic, catastrophic collapse of internal security. In 2020, the crisis reached what was then considered a shocking peak, with 113 victims of violence representing a 90% increase over five years.

However, that “peak” now looks almost quaint compared to the slaughter of the last few years. According to tracking data from the Abraham Initiatives, 2025 saw a record-shattering 252 murders.

Now, five months into 2026, the pace is roughly 20% higher than last year. Approximately 72% of these deaths are the direct result of conflicts between organized crime syndicates, turf wars involving mid-level criminals, or deeply entrenched clan disputes.

Can a stretch of land ruled by a private gang truly be called sovereign state territory?

I’m not blind to the raw realities on the ground, nor to the fact that Jewish security and state sovereignty are not exact synonyms. It is undeniably true that there are residents in the Galilee who reject the state entirely and pose a genuine threat to their Jewish neighbors. However, sovereignty cannot be conditional on ethnic character.

If the state is going to simply cede responsibility for Arab cities to crime families, perhaps we should just hand Rahat and Nazareth over to the Palestinian Authority and be done with it.

Chikli’s approach seemingly forgets that the Galilee and the Negev are not Judea and Samaria. This isn’t a zero-sum battle between two peoples over disputed hills; it is sovereign Israeli territory populated by two groups of citizens.