May Golan, Israel’s Minister of Social Equality and Advancement of the Status of Women, sat down with Sophia Tupolev for C14 Israel Debrief hours after Tupolev reported from the site of a weekend arson attack at Havat Gilad in Israel’s heartland, where 17 homes and 14 businesses were destroyed. Police have arrested two Arab suspects, and local officials are pointing to intentional arson. Golan traced her 500 million shekel program to fight Arab organized crime back to a five year, 50 billion shekel plan she says the Bennett-Lapid government handed to Mansour Abbas, the “actual boss for the former government.”
“They gave Mansour Abbas a blank check for 50 billion shekels,” Golan said. When Tupolev asked whether she was accusing Abbas of laundering the money, Golan went further: “I’m accusing him of something worse than that. I’m accusing him of allowing this money to go to criminal people, for allowing this money to actually be what help the crime and the murders in the Arab sector to increase.”
Golan described how crime organizations operate once city budgets pass through them: “If the mayor dares to say no to you, then basically you burn the house, you threaten the family, you go to the nephew, which is a doctor, that has nothing to do with it, and you shoot him in the knee so he can’t work anymore.”
Asked whether organized crime and terrorism are separate phenomena in Israel, Golan said they are, for now, but that the line won’t hold. “Once Arab crime organizations are so strong, it’s just a matter of time before it leaks to terror,” she said, pointing to Abbas’s own comments distancing himself from Hamas, a designated terror org, and from October 7th.
Tupolev pressed Golan on whether her crime-fighting program would also reduce terror attacks in Judea and Samaria, where 104 attacks were recorded in June and 54 so far this month. Golan drew a sharp distinction. Arab-Israeli citizens are a matter of law enforcement, she said, while the Arabs of Judea and Samaria are a different population entirely: “People that first of all don’t recognize the state of Israel as the Jewish nation,” she said, citing polling she says shows more than 70% supporting the October 7th massacre.
That distinction, Golan argued, is why Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria matters. “The holy people who sit in Judea and Samaria in our land… shield us from the next massacre,” she said, invoking President Trump’s past comment that Israel’s earlier disengagement was “a mistake” that opened the door to Hamas and, ultimately, to October 7th. “One of the most important tools we have, one of the most important, is taking land, taking our land,” she said.
On antisemitism, Golan connected the security question to her own portfolio. “As the only democracy in the Middle East… I know now that we are alone, except our best friend, Donald J. Trump,” she said. “If we won’t defend ourselves, no one will defend us.”
Golan pushed back hard on comparisons to apartheid. “I invite any moron that talks about apartheid in Israel to see how Arab citizens in Israel… live,” she said, arguing Arab-Israeli citizens hold “even more rights than Israeli citizens,” including in university admissions.
Pressed on whether police and the IDF are actually equipped to protect Judea and Samaria, Golan was candid: “It’s not enough. I can tell you. It’s not enough.” But she added, “We have the most moral army in the world. I repeat, we have the most moral army in the world.”
On the question of Jewish return to Gaza, following a march that drew 10,000 Israelis that she co-sponsored, Golan said holding territory is a security tool she supports personally, while acknowledging the government is divided on the issue. She also called for scrapping the Oslo Accords outright. “I think it brought only terror and only sorrow and only death to the state of Israel,” she said, adding that a death penalty for terrorists and further land measures should all be “on the table.”
Asked about calls from some Israeli parties for a binational, “all citizen” state, Golan called the idea dangerous, and described being told, in response to her own family’s history, to “go back to Iraq,” where her mother is from.
Closing the interview, Tupolev asked what single change would most improve Israel’s domestic security. Golan’s answer moved away from crime and terror entirely, toward the judiciary. “It’s the courthouse of Israel,” she said, accusing “a minority of judges” of overturning elected government’s security legislation in what she called “a dictator kind of way.” Real security, she argued, requires judicial reform that lets the courts function democratically “but cannot rule out” the decisions of an elected government.