by Rela Mazali, author and Israeli peace activist

There is a widely accepted “truism” about gun control in Israel: Israel isn’t the US. Gun licensing laws and their enforcement here are stricter by far than those of the States. They rule out the kind of virtually unchecked small arms proliferation that has plagued the US.

Yet many foreign visitors to Israel are shocked by the quantities of arms they encounter here. While it’s indeed the case that Israel’s gun licensing laws, and some of its practices, are considerably stricter than those in much of the US, Jewish Israelis’ complacency about entrenched militarization causes the virtual invisibility of unconcealed guns to Israeli Jewish eyes. Guns are perceived by many of the Jewish majority as benign, protective, there solely for “our security” — and not a risk.

The sense of security arising from small arms possession was described to me by the owner of a private security firm as an imagined one, based he told me, “on clients’ subjective sense of security. The firm produces feelings of security…The reality is much, much bleaker.”

Gun Free Kitchen Tables (GFKT), founded in 2010 and operating within the Isha L’Isha Feminist Center, is the sole arms control project in Israel’s civil society today.

The project aims first to achieve enforcement of an existing but unenforced law, which should bar security guards’ off-duty guns from going home by restricting guards’ gun licenses to their workplaces. Founded and led by both women’s rights and human rights Atty. Smadar Ben Natan and by writer, activist and independent scholar Rela Mazali the project works to end the current impunity of the private security industry, to subject it to public oversight, accountability and transparency. Finally, we aim to raise consciousness in Israel to the real and gendered risks of proliferating small arms.

In the last decade, twenty-eight innocent people have been killed in Israel with the off-duty guns of security guards. Others were seriously injured and still others killed with additional licensed small arms, including military and police guns. In the case of security guards, though, the very presence of guns in homes is in breach of law. Fifteen of the victims of these 28 distinctly preventable murders were women — in keeping with the over-representation worldwide of women among gun violence victims in the home. Also over-represented among these victims are the Russian speaking community and the community originating in Ethiopia. This too is consistent with international findings showing a heightened vulnerability to violence among immigrant women, largely due to lack of sufficient resources and networking. Other studies complement the above, demonstrating the reduction of women’s murders by intimates through tightened licensing laws and enforcement.

Gun Free Kitchen Tables has successfully convened a coalition of eleven civil society groups that share both its title and goals. It has just completed a second annual public campaign foregrounding its goals and drawing on the platform of 16 Days Against Violence Against Women.

Coinciding (painfully) with two more murders with a security guard’s after-duty gun and the shock of Sandy Hook, the campaign generated interviews with GFKT activists on prime time TV and major news sites. The upsurge of the gun debate in U.S. and world media has sent press attention to our project.

Recently this contributed to a cautiously hopeful development: Israel’s State Comptroller declared intent to investigate the licensing of small arms and the practices of private security firms’ practices, following recent murders of intimates with guards’ off-duty guns.

As Smadar Ben Natan and I concluded a recent (Hebrew) op-ed: “Both government and security firms need to do the right thing: namely, save lives. Firearms at home endanger family members, particularly women. They have no place on the kitchen table, under the pillow or in a closet. Homes are not the arms cache of security firms, the military or the police.”

Images courtesy of Gun Free Kitchen Tables via Facebook.