Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Arab minority – comprising approximately 21% of the total population – has endured institutionalised and systematic violations of fundamental human rights. These include the rights to equality, due process, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of occupation, family life, and the right to vote and be elected. Such violations have been enacted through legislation, government policies, and administrative practices, while judicial oversight has remained limited and insufficient to effectively curb them.In recent years, however, the state and its authorities have also enabled violations of the Arab minority’s right to life – a right the Supreme Court has defined as fundamental, as it is the prerequisite for the realisation of all other rights. As retired Justice Ayala Procaccia wrote, “Without life, nothing remains.”The Knesset, too, has recognised the importance of the right to life. Section 4 of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty provides that “every person is entitled to protection of their life.” Former Deputy President of the Supreme Court Elyakim Rubinstein explained that this provision imposes an affirmative duty on the state to protect the right to life.Supreme Court justices have likewise repeatedly affirmed the police’s fundamental duty to protect the public from criminal harm to life and bodily integrity, and have ruled that the police are not immune from tort claims where they are found to have been negligent in fulfilling that duty.But when it comes to Arab society, the state and its authorities disregard both the law and court rulings – and this is no accident. Approximately 750 people have been murdered in Arab communities over the three years since far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir was appointed minister of national security. This toll reflects not only an abysmal rate of solved cases and a sharp deterioration in police performance, but also the entrenchment of a Kahanist apartheid regime within Israel itself.Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir kisses the casket of Israeli hostage Ran Gvili, whose remains were brought back to Israel, in the southern town of Meitar on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. Photo: AP/PTI.The practice that has taken shape in Israel aligns with apartheid and Kahanist ideologies, which imply that the state need not protect the right to life in Arab society and that Arab lives are less valuable than Jewish lives – lives the state does protect.At the same time, the murders reinforce the rationale for racial segregation. Much like proponents of Jim Crow laws in the southern United States and the apartheid regime in South Africa, one of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s central arguments for absolute racial separation in Israel was that the employment of Arabs and their residence in Jewish communities lead to a spike in crime and violent attacks. In this way, Kahanists sought to create – or intensify – existing fears of racial integration.In the final years of South Africa’s apartheid regime, many Africans who were killed were not murdered directly by security forces, but in “internal” conflicts between African movements over ideology, political patronage, land, and other resources. The regime fuelled these conflicts, armed some of the movements, and exploited the resulting violence for propaganda – amplifying the white minority’s fear of the day apartheid laws would be dismantled. Similarly, members of Netanyahu’s far-right government are eager to talk about “Arab crime,” but not to confront it.It is therefore hardly surprising that Kobi Shabtai, who served as police commissioner during the first year and a half of Ben-Gvir’s tenure, said: “There’s nothing to be done. They murder one another. It’s their nature. It’s the Arab mentality.” In other words, there is no point in the police addressing the murders, and Jews are better off keeping their distance from Arabs so as not to be harmed by their supposedly violent “nature.”Recently, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu from Ben-Gvir’s party – who during the war suggested dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza – said in an interview with public radio that “this is a cultural and values-based question,” adding that, unlike the Arabs, despite the lack of law enforcement against Jews in the West Bank, they do not kill one another.Arab criminal organisations understand the boundaries clearly: as long as they do not expand the circle of victims to include Jewish society, they enjoy de facto immunity. When Jews are murdered, however, the government, the police, and Shin Bet may classify the killings as security incidents, deploying every available tool to bring the perpetrators to justice and dismantle their organisations.In April 2025, a political storm erupted following the leak of a Shin Bet official’s claim that, at the request of its former director Ronen Bar, the agency had investigated the infiltration of Kahanism into the police. But the problem is not only those who personally identify with Kahanism; it also lies with those who enable a Kahanist apartheid regime to take root in Israel. There is no indication, for example, that the attorney general or her deputies are Kahanists – yet they have not issued warnings to the government over unlawful conduct regarding the murders in Arab society, as they routinely do in response to initiatives aimed at undermining the constitutional order.Many opponents of the Netanyahu regime change fear that Israel, within its internationally recognised borders, is sliding toward a Hungarian-style authoritarian model. Yet the state’s handling of the murder of its Arab citizens suggests that the real trajectory – and the one Israelis should genuinely fear – is not Hungary, but South Africa.Eitay Mack is an Israeli human rights lawyer who has filed petitions to the Supreme Court that helped reveal details of Israel’s involvement in Lebanon.