Crime, Law & Social Change 34: 159–182, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 159 Military government, political control and crime: The case of Israeli Arabs ALINA KORN Bar-Ilan University, Department of Criminology, Israel Abstract. This paper deals with the different methods used to control the Israeli Arab pop- ulation during the military government (1948–1966). I have sought to expand the standard conceptual framework that serves most criminologists in Israel, and discuss the broader con- text in which the political control of the Arab population took place. It is vital to consider this context because a significant amount of criminality among the Arab population was an outcome of the political control imposed upon it. The principal goal of the analysis is to clarify the ways in which the political control influenced the criminal process, and to point out to the theoretical and empirical importance of the links between politics and crime, when discussing crime amongst the Arab minority in Israel. Introduction Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and until December 1966, a system of military government was imposed on the Arab population living within the boundaries of the state. During the eighteen years of the military government, the main, and perhaps only, contact of Israeli Arabs with the state was through the army, the police and the criminal justice system. There was hardly any area in which the Arab residents were not dependent on the security forces and the law enforcement agencies. Although social control featured so centrally in the relations between the Arab population and the state, neither historical research, nor the social sciences in Israel have dealt with the topic of crime and its control during this period. Criminological research in Israel is no exception in this respect. The con- ceptual framework that serves the majority of Israeli criminologists is not capable of explaining how the criminality amongst the Arab population had emerged and was constructed. In my opinion, it is important to expand this framework and discuss the broader context in which the political control of the Arab population took place, since this was a major source of crime among Israeli Arabs, certainly until the middle of the sixties, but afterwards too. Standard analyses of crime and delinquency rates in Israel show that the percentage of Arab offenders amongst all of the convicted offenders had risen steadily from 1948 to the beginning of the sixties. The Arab average