The Paradox of Professional Marginality among Arab-Bedouin Women

Introduction

This study examines the paradox of the professional marginality of Arab-Bedouin women in the labour market. By ‘professional marginality’, I refer to a newly revealed axis in the study of Bedouin working women. Most literature on this topic and in this context examined Bedouins through the lenses of culture and ethnicity that were considered the principal factors responsible for their economic inferiority and inequality. In this study, by contrast, intersectional analysis reveals an unmarked professional group constituting an evolving middle class among Bedouin women in the Arab-Jewish space. As its primary characteristic is professional capital, it conforms with other divisions and reproduces gendered, ethno-colonised, classed and tribalised distinctions and inequalities.

In this regard, research on Arab women at work primarily attributes their lack of participation in the labour market to quantitative factors in two frames (see Yonai and Krauss, 2010):

Addressing these two frames alone, however, overlooks multiple intersecting mechanisms of control that could be revealed in an intersectional analysis of Arab-Bedouin women’s everyday experiences as middle-class professionals.

In contrast to the literature focusing on quantitative aspects of Arab-Bedouin working women, this article directs attention inward, towards their everyday professional practices, examining the structuring of their professional marginality through their daily interaction with various actors in the professional sphere. It shows that when working Arab-Bedouin women’s professional capital intersects with other power axes within the public sphere – ethnicity/racism, gender, religious norms and tribalism – they are not accorded recognition or legitimacy by male Arab-Bedouin workers or Jewish co-workers, colleagues and clients, thereby strengthening what Crenshaw (1989) calls representational intersectionality.

Crenshaw (1993: 1283) explains representational intersectionality as the ‘cultural construction of marginal/black women’. In this case, representation is significant in providing a more thorough understanding of the mechanisms that replicate gender and racial hierarchies and thus intensify Black/minority women’s marginality. Below, I demonstrate how actors in the multi-level professional sphere continue to reinforce this structured representational inferiority of Arab-Bedouin women by relying on ‘cultural’ orientalist markers of binary distinctions that seek to perpetuate women’s cultural roles in public space. Such discourse inevitably reinforces social power patterns which produces inequality against women in the labour market. This study enriches literature on employment of women and minorities in three respects: first, the study problematises the chief category examined – professional women – regarding a priori assumption of a link between academic education and equal work participation. In the case at hand, there is a paradox between Arab-Bedouin women’s manifestation of the highest capital in their society – comparable to that of Arab-Bedouin professional men and Jewish men and women – and their marginalisation by these actors. Second, it reveals another mode of discrimination called tribal penalty, resulting from a clash between tribal and professional codes (reinforced by Israeli institutions), that has not been discussed in literature on minority and employment to date. This penalty not only endangers Arab-Bedouin professional women’s jobs but also places their clients (women and children) at risk. Third, it questions the advantages of ethnic economic enclaves for minority women by showing how unsafe this space is for professional women, who will be unable to manifest their professionalism to the fullest as tribal-patriarchal demands and threats penetrate this realm.

Women, Patriarchy and Colonial Practices

Bedouin women’s professional marginality is interrelated with their position as women in the ethno-national collective that produces legitimate mechanisms to preserve the economic marginality of women from racialised groups. Consequently, we should understand how such economic marginalisation is mediated by their position as women in the national and ethnic collectives alike.

In both national (ethnic or colonial) and kinship modes of collective thinking, women are perceived as markers of the boundaries of the (national or family) collective, differentiating ‘us’ from ‘them’. They are considered key figures in ethno-colonial and collective reproduction because of the discipline to which they are subjected, based on the symbolic representation of their bodies and sexuality (Yuval-Davis, 1997).

A wide range of postcolonial studies of Arab-Muslim societies points to use of women’s representation and bodies as a tool for colonial intervention, particularly through the rhetoric of ‘the politics of rescue’, supported by the discourse of ‘universal women’s rights’ (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Yegenoglu, 1998). Muslim women thus serve as a tool that renders cultural differences permanent and preserves hegemonic/colonial control in land and space.

In the Israeli case as well, the gendered body constitutes an important element in the political organisation of the nation through practices that bind the female body to the collective body (Gooldin and Kemp, 2008: 263). Not unlike the national/colonial collective, kinship ties also control women through their bodies. Sociologists of Arab-Muslim society claim that the individual’s sense of belonging to a tribe, family or clan is a foundation of his/her identity, as kinship typifies and defines relations (Joseph, 1997). Furthermore, the woman’s sexuality and body are controlled by her clan, kinship, patriarchy and the traditional tribal system (Kandiyoti, 2003). A woman’s sexual purity is thus inseparable from the collective’s code of honour (Haj, 1992). One way to ensure honour is to define and regulate the physical and social boundaries within which individuals are permitted to move and act. Supervision of women aims at preserving the boundaries between the sacrosanct private sphere and the breached public space in which women are liable to endanger collective honour (Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Daher-Nashif, 2012).

Within this context, this study examines the obstacles to Arab-Bedouin professional women’s equal participation in the public sphere, relating them to two hegemonic power structures. The first is the colonialist racialised practices of the Jewish workplace (employers, co-workers and clients) through the use of Arab-Bedouin women’s cultural representation to preserve ethno-colonial power relations between the Arab minority’s inferiority and the Jewish majority’s superiority in the public sphere. The second is the tribal system’s attempts to reproduce patriarchal power relations in the public sphere (empowered by Israeli institutions) and preserve hegemonic tribal rule by using the cultural-gender habitus (embodied capital) of Arab-Bedouin society in an effort to exclude women from the public sphere.

In the context under examination, women’s economic inequality is constructed within the broader political history of the Bedouins, which is framed within the boundaries of racialised citizenship in the settler Zionist colonial state. Israel practises various forms of exclusion (ethnic, religious and belligerent) against the Arabs by creating segregation in definition, space and time, thereby retaining Jewish majority control. One such control consists of framing the Bedouins’ definition within a modernist discourse that categorises them under the exclusive nomadic framework and ignores their national (Palestinian), religious (Muslims) and political (Arab indigenous minority) frameworks (see Yiftachel, 2009).

Another control mechanism was the imposition of a military rule, between 1948 until 1967, on the Arab-Bedouins who were concentrated in the Siyagh (closed area) enabling control of this population and the lands it vacated. The 1950 Absentee Property Law declared the area outside the Siyagh a closed military zone, preventing Arab-Bedouins from working the land, grazing their flocks, blocking access to education and limiting employment opportunities (Abu-Bader and Gottlieb, 2009).

Land control was also accomplished by the forced displacement of the Arab-Bedouin in 1966 to permanent towns, justified by the discourse of modernisation. Although deemed ‘modern’ by Israel, they lacked infrastructures, industrial zones and other sources of employment and suffered from poor opportunity structure and resource allocation. This created two separate and unequal economies: a poor Arab-Bedouin economy and a flourishing Jewish economy which resulted in the Arab economy’s dependence on the Jewish economy and a consequent lack of job security.

Ongoing segregation created more racialised boundaries along the axes of time and space, as in the case of the unrecognised Arab-Bedouin villages. The residents of those villages constitute those Arab-Bedouins (about 90,000) who refused to be displaced, and remained on their lands in villages considered ‘unrecognised’ and consequently illegal (1965 Planning and Construction Law). These localities are not identified on any formal map of Israel and receive no public services except for the schools available in certain villages (Abu-Bader and Gottlieb, 2009). The illiteracy rate among women over 30 in unrecognised villages reaches 80 per cent, rendering it impossible to find jobs in the private sector or as professional workers in industry and construction. As a result, the cultural capital (embodied and institutionalised) (see Erel, 2010) of the Arab-Bedouin minority in Israel has been gendered and racialised by not having been accorded an equal opportunity to develop in the same manner as the Jewish majority. This process created a gendered and racialised class that is overrepresented in unskilled occupations in industry and services (66%) and exhibits very high unemployment (80%) and poverty (80%) rates (Abu-Bader and Gottlieb, 2009).

Although Arab-Bedouins succeeded in entering higher education institutions, structural barriers such as the psychometric examination ¹ still restrict their participation primarily to the humanities, education and social work. To study ‘privileged’ professions such as pharmacy, medicine and allied professions, to which access is limited by the above-indicated structural barrier, groups of women have recently begun acquiring their professional educations outside Israel, primarily in Jordan, the West-Bank and Eastern Europe, accompanied by male relatives – a practice that used to be permitted only to men. All attorneys (15 female, 100 male) studied at Israeli private law colleges. Bedouin women’s entry into higher education depends on their fathers’ confirmation and support, as has been shown in previous studies of Arab society in Israel (see Weiner-Levy, 2011). Accordingly, all participants in this study indicated that they received full support from their fathers to acquire higher education. As Arab-Bedouin women’s participation as professionals in the public sphere is relatively recent and their representation low (only 8% of Bedouin women work in the formal sector, while the majority ‘work’ in private and informal spheres), however, they are perceived as a threat to gender and colonial order.

Methodology

The study relies on intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. Inequality is examined according to its ‘relational’ nature, perceiving modes of stratification across the board, shaping the entire social system in ‘processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining and complex’ (Choo and Ferree, 2010: 129). The intersectional approach helps determine how multiple discriminatory systems create a complex configuration of inequalities that structure the relative positions of Arab-Bedouin professional women (see Hancock, 2007). The purpose of this analysis is to examine how various intersecting social divisions are subjectively experienced in Arab-Bedouin women’s daily professional lives in terms of inclusion and exclusion, discrimination and disadvantage.

This approach looks at the complexity of multiple institutions that feed back into each other in a way that reveals micro and macrostructures (Choo and Ferree, 2010: 146) of inequality as a non-separated, non-hierarchical social construction.

Rather than examining inequality as a list of restrictions defined as ‘content specialization’ (Choo and Ferree, 2010: 147), intersectionality provides methodological tools for theorising and reconceptualising power relations of centre and margins. It facilitates understanding of how race, class, gender and other social divisions are theorised as lived realities and provides a complex ontology of real, useful knowledge that systematically reveals the everyday lives of professional Arab-Bedouin women who are simultaneously positioned in multiple structures of dominance and power as gendered, racialised, classed, colonised and sexualised ‘others’ (Mirza, 2009: 3).

It is also important to determine which new categories might arise from analysis of a specific context (Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Yuval-Davis, 2006). I do not seek to devise an additive model of analysis that perceives subordination factors as separated, but rather to achieve an analytic interaction (Choo and Ferree, 2010: 131) that transforms the main effects of the multiple penalties into interactions.

Instead of adhering to the essentialist approach that characterised research on Naqab Arab-Bedouin women, this study applies intra-categorical analysis, as proposed by McCall (2005), that calls for focused cross-analysis of a given social group and attempts to reveal an unmarked group – in this case the group of middle-class professional women. The group is not assessed as ‘non-normative’ vis-a-vis the dominant group as a standard. Rather, as Mirza (2009: 3) claims, I seek to ‘demonstrate the ways in which regulatory discursive power and privilege are “performed” or exercised in the everyday material world of socially constructed “Arab-Bedouin women”’.

Research Sample

The study focuses on 50 college-educated Arab-Bedouin women, both married with children and single, in their mid-20s to mid-30s, employed in the public sector in Arab-Bedouin localities and nearby Jewish towns. The population includes teachers, school counsellors, social workers, nurses, physicians, scientists, researchers, lecturers, attorneys, psychologists, executives and pharmacists who have been employed for the past 5–10 years.

Focus on the last generation originates in the numerous social changes that affect Arab-Bedouin society in the Negev, especially with regard to all that concerns employment of women, as well as in the desire to present as up-to-date a picture as possible of the political and social changes and of the manner in which they are reflected in the integration of women in the public sector. The literature attests to a disparity between the integration of first- and second-generation immigrant women (Muslims or those of other minority groups) in favour of the second group, comprising women born in their country of residence, although to a lesser extent than the majority group. Although indigenous (not immigrants), in the Bedouin context, we should pay particular attention to the integration of second-generation women, who were born into urban realities and have already been employed at the labour market over the past 5–10 years.

The group examined in this study is part of a developing population of middle-class privileged professional women compared with less educated Bedouin women and the vast majority that do not participate in the formal labour market. Although their salaries are higher than the minimum wage (~$1000/month) in Arab-Bedouin society and the average number of children they have (two to three children) is lower than the Arab-Bedouin average (7.1) (Negev Bedouin Statistical Data Book, 2010), they remain a marginal, reduced minority group within their society, accounting (in 2010–2011) for 9 per cent of the Arab sector population (Flug, 2012), 5 per cent of the Bedouin sector and 49.9 per cent of the Jewish sector (Ghara, 2015: 120).

Research Procedure

As a member of the studied society who is personally acquainted with many of the participants, I did not find it difficult to locate candidates for the study and persuade them to participate. Most of the women I interviewed, however, were those with whom I had no earlier acquaintance, as I sought to maintain some distance from the participants, enabling analysis of their narratives without personal bias (interviews with the other women were conducted by research assistants). They all opened up to me, enthusiastically telling their stories. My position as a pioneer Bedouin professional who experienced both tribal patriarchy and ethno-colonial discrimination as an Arab and as a woman rendered me aware of new categories of discrimination – such as the tribal penalty – and of the various layers of discrimination within each category.

Data were collected through two-part narrative interviews in which the first part focused on personal background questions such as age, number of years of schooling, number of years at work, marital status, number of children, workplace and residence (Arab or Jewish), while the second solicited occupational narratives, asking open questions about choice of occupation, workplace selection, hiring processes, relations with colleagues and clients, barriers in choice of occupation, role and perceptions of husband, extended family and community and family–work conflicts. The questions are based on studies of minority women and employment designating these factors as the principal determiners of women’s participation in the labour market (see Perrucci, 1970).

Analysis of the data followed Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) grounded theory procedure of open, axial and selective coding. I initially read through the data several times and took notes to determine patterns and regularities. The data were then coded into derived categories and subcategories in two primary layers: discrimination and agency. Discrimination includes two time axes – professional choice and the various penalties experienced in the workplace – while agency includes the strategies women employ to negotiate between their public and private lives.

Findings

Religious Penalty

Racial discrimination on a religious basis revolves around religious attire, especially head covering, as part of the embodied cultural capital of Muslim women. The colonial politics of the veil considers it as representing the inferior Muslim woman and Islam as discriminatory (Zine, 2004). Studies of minorities and employment claim that religious garb may impede Muslim women’s entry into the hegemonic work force (Dale, 2002).

In the case described below, attempts are made to persuade an Arab-Bedouin professional to remove her headscarf, thereby ‘rescuing’ her from religious ‘coercion’ by rendering her outward appearance similar to that of non-religious Jewish women, the symbols of ‘enlightened culture’. The Arab-Bedouin woman responded as follows: ‘They thought that I would’ve liked to be like them, but I said it was my personal choice. “Perhaps you should dress the way we do? You’re pretty. Take off the headscarf. Look and act like we do.”’

Abu-Lughod (2013) claims that the colonialist conception uses the veil to exploit a politics of fear regarding Islam and Muslim women, especially since 11 September.

The politics of fear is reflected in everyday life among women whose attire repels Jewish co-workers. A Muslim woman who came to join an office that employs Arab men and Jewish women tells of her Jewish co-workers’ dismay with her religious appearance: ‘[s]he was shaken when she saw me. She was waiting for me outside because I didn’t know where the office was and she was appalled when she first saw me.’

This dismay is translated, in many cases, into racist rejection of Muslim women for jobs in the Jewish sector because of their religious attire, as one woman attorney indicates:

I wanted to clerk there, but the manager looked at me and I was in full [religious] attire. Right at the beginning, when I came in, she said ‘Oh, you’re religious.’ The minute she said that, I knew. She didn’t want someone religious working there. So I wasn’t accepted. Then I realised they are not interested in someone with a head covering.

The boundary delineation for this group of professional women is mediated by religious markers (such as the veil) that constitute binary distinctions between Islam and the West. This construct represents Islam as oppressive collective and religious terror fed by the politics of fear. According to prevailing anti-Muslim consciousness, Islam poses a threat to the modern and democratic foundations of the western liberalism of which Israel considers itself a part. These distinctive markers produce classificatory discourse on Muslim women, resulting in another intersecting barrier that excludes these women – as Muslim professionals – from participation in the Israeli Jewish market.

Gender Penalty

In Arab society, because of the fluidity of boundaries between public and private domains, patriarchy that originates in all kinship idioms permeates all domains of life: public/private; state/civil society/kinship; governmental/non-governmental/domestic (Joseph, 1997). This ‘sexual contract’ (Pateman, 1988), which transfers patriarchy from private to public domains and maintains the perception that a woman’s place is at home, disrupts the activity and professional development of working women even if they attain a powerful public position. In the Bedouin context, this includes definitions of gender roles, wherein femininity is linked with the domestic sphere and masculinity with the public sphere (Mernissi, 1987), as well as definitions of permitted (the home and neighbourhood) and forbidden spaces (the public masculine and multi-tribal sphere) imposed by Israeli urbanisation (Fenster, 1999).

In the Arab-Bedouin labour market, women who access the public sphere are entering a space that men had always appropriated for themselves. In response, male dominated society attempts to discipline them by ridiculing their identity as professionals and viewing them exclusively through the gender prism as women who have overstepped permissible boundaries, as in the following account by a woman attorney:

When I left for court, you see that all the attorneys around you are male Arab-Bedouin, who assess you as a woman and not as an attorney – I felt as though I were entering the shig [a place where men gather to make family decisions], as though it were a place that would cause me aib (shame) were I to enter. Everyone immediately looks at you and labels you. They were amused by a young woman who is both an Arab-Bedouin and an attorney. I felt that they were belittling me as a professional woman.

Despite the rise in their number in the professional sphere, women judged according to non-professional criteria may develop certain doubts about their professionalism. One participant recalled her personal experiences in this respect:

Here I was, an attorney with a proper job who is accomplishing something highly professional – and I suddenly felt that I was being judged according to non-professional criteria. You sense that you are a woman and are not fulfilling the professional standards that they (the men) set for you and that you can never do so because you’re a woman.

One consequence of doubting women’s professionalism is the consequent erosion of their clientele, leading them to lower their prices to attract clients from men’s firms and leaving women, most of them attorneys, working for standard wages at social organisations instead of as self-employed persons in the private market. Furthermore, women report that male clients usually prefer to have male attorneys handle family issues, in which there is preference for male interests. This gender contract gives rise to various economic disparities, such as income, as it positions most men in the private market, where income is higher.

The institutionalised cultural capital that professional women bring to the public sphere, which was controlled by professional men until their arrival, challenges men’s authority by instituting intra-group differentiation between men’s and women’s authority, thereby threatening to erode the largely dominant male professional group. To maintain their authority and control in this sphere, professional men apply a kind of symbolic violence by replicating the deterrent power of patriarchal sanctions from private to public space. By legitimating honour code regulations concerning women’s bodies, they designate professional women in the public sphere as women who have escaped patriarchal supervision and possess no legitimate place within the mixed public sphere, as opposed to men who continue to establish their dominance as legitimate owners of the professional public sphere.

Tribal Penalty

Besides the penalties outlined above, this study reveals an additional type of intersecting discrimination, the tribal penalty, which has been disregarded in literature on minority employment in post-industrial societies. The colonial history of the Middle East demonstrates application of the politics of notables, according to which traditional leaders are granted privileges and reinforcement in return for imposing order on their respective groups and keeping them loyal to the colonial rule (see Khatar, 2001; Watenpaugh, 2006). The Ottomans and the British also used this strategy to control the Bedouins in Mandatory Palestine by placing tribal chiefs in charge of administrative units in various geographic areas and negotiating with them as key representatives of Bedouin society (Nasasra, 2015). Israel perpetuates such strategy to this day: confining Bedouins to towns divided into neighbourhoods according to tribal origin, maintaining tribally based appointments of officials and reinforcing tribal leaders in conflict resolution all continue the policy of striking alliances with the tribal leadership, which is backed by the establishment and operates without supervision even when its actions conflict with professional women’s codes of ethics, as told by the participants of this study.

These participants attest to a conflict between tribal codes – such as prohibition of involvement in the affairs of other tribes – and professional codes, such as those demanding legal intervention in the affairs of other tribes or dissemination of information outside the tribe for professional purposes (usually among social workers, attorneys, school counsellors, teachers and principals who have to deal with taboo issues such as all forms of violence against children and women). The women are torn between expectations of behaviour according to tribal codes and ethical and professional commitment to their jobs and professional codes.

This situation endangers not only Arab-Bedouin professional women, but also their clients, especially those belonging to at-risk population groups (violently abused women and children). For example, a school counsellor notes that she often cannot report sexual or physical abuse, fearing violation of the codes that forbid releasing information outside the tribe: ‘[i]f I discover certain types of information that require mandatory reporting because of my job, I’m obligated to report it to the authorities or to government agencies, but I don’t, because it goes against the codes of society’.

It is important to understand the significance of violation of tribal codes, which may complicate the situation rather than achieve a solution, as reflected in the counsellor’s report: ‘I had cases where after reporting, they took the girls out of school and halted their studies altogether. After that, their younger sisters did not attend our school either.’

When professional women do insist on following professional ethics that conflict with tribal codes, the client or community may object and attempt to discipline such women by applying collective tribal sanctions against her and especially against her father, thereby trying to subjugate her to her father’s authority. For example, in treatment professions in which women have to intervene in families from other tribes, as in child custody cases, the professionals pay the price of a ‘Bedouin trial’, where the opposing community appeals to her father.

The institutionalised cultural capital that professional women introduce into the tribal sphere challenges tribal capital and existing traditional authorities, thereby creating intra-group differentiation between the authority and power of cultural capital and that of tribal-traditional capital. To maintain authority in this sphere, the collective’s gatekeepers apply symbolic violence by replicating the force of Bedouin law (perceived as superseding civil or religious law) from tribal to public space, thereby excluding the professional power of women and their professional capital from this sphere and their authority and control thereof as professionals. The gatekeepers thus maintain collective-tribal dominance by delineating the boundaries of the developing professional group. To cross the border and enter this space, women have to blur, forgo or adapt use of their cultural capital and thereby avoid challenging the authority of the tribal ethos.

This conflict is maintained by alliances created between tribal gatekeepers and governmental institutions that support tribalism as a cultural marker for colonial control. Unable to overcome tribal control, social workers, counsellors and attorneys ask the local Israeli institutions to intervene in enforcing professional codes, but these institutions turn a blind eye as well.

An attorney at one of the legal centres for Bedouin women’s rights relates that women come to her with cases of violence against them that the town police refused to investigate. Rather than bringing charges against the perpetrator, the police send the victim back to the jurisdiction of a sheikh (traditional leader) or other tribal representative to resolve the problem within accepted tribal rules in order to avoid conflicts between tribes. She recalls:

Even when I approached Jewish officials at the Social Services Ministry, they simply turned a blind eye and were unwilling to talk to me. These contracts are a kind of barter with which to appease [Bedouin] society and avoid violent conflict among tribes, even if women’s interests are sacrificed. They perceive us as, the professional women, [as] a risk to society and therefore refuse to cooperate with us.

The failure of state institutions to intervene in cases of violence against Arab women in Israel – a phenomenon that has reached vast proportions (murder of women, domestic violence (80%), polygamy (40%) – see Abu-Rabia, 2011; Abu-Shareb, 2013) – is not a new development. Researchers (Abu-Rabia, 2011) explain that by not taking action to protect women from violence, the state enables patriarchal control and repression of women and constitutes a continuation of colonial control strategy. The alliances thus formed effectively trap women (as professionals and service recipients) and perpetuate their inferiority by creating an unsafe space for them, or, in the words of one participant: ‘[y]ou are not protected in your own sector’. In some cases, women prefer to leave their professions because they are unable to realise their institutional professional capital to ‘save lives’, thereby exacerbating the shortage of working hands in lifesaving occupations.

Thus, work in the Arab-Bedouin sector is not always ‘a channel for mobility among minorities’ (Lewin-Epstein and Semyonov, 1994: 628), but constitutes a neglected and abandoned space offering fertile soil for the cultivation of intra-group divisions and conflicts (between professional and tribal actors and/or types of capital) strengthened by colonial-tribal contracts as an extension of colonial ‘divide and control’ strategy.

Consequently, this professional group, whose work embodies the dual lifesaving functions of treatment and obligatory reporting of violence, suffers the most discrimination of all, as it threatens broader sectors of the population. While their colleagues in other professions may face a lack of job mobility, these women suffer punishment that extends to spheres beyond the professional realm. This is what Crenshaw (1993: 1249) calls an ‘intersectional subordination that is frequently the consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with pre-existing vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment’.

Discussion

Bedouin women’s professional marginality is structured and mediated through practices reflecting cultural and religious binaries (embodied respectively in the ethno-racial and religious penalties) and distinctive markers of tribal and patriarchal ethos/capital. These binaries create legitimacy to preserve the dominance of professional boundaries with regard to collective-tribal, patriarchal and ethno-colonial capital. The intersection of these power structures is inherent in their common practice of clustering to block recognition of the professional capital that these women introduce into the public sphere, giving rise to the paradox of marginality of the professional middle class in Bedouin society. Intersectionality reveals the point at which these power structures intertwine and intersect and give rise to a multiple force that refuses to recognise women’s capital as professionals in all relevant spheres, causing clashes between this capital and the dominant power structures. The common denominator of these power structures is the operation of an apparatus of non-recognition of these women’s professional capital along all axes analysed. This is the essence of the efficacy of intersectionality, as it uncovers covert layers of oppressive power mechanisms while revealing unmarked power structure categories (such as the tribal penalty discussed earlier). Non-recognition creates the paradox responsible for the ethno-economic marginality of professional women in the split labour market, as this professional group – which attempts to advance and develop despite its status as a small minority in Naqab Arab-Bedouin society – is in conflict with other power structures. The professional capital bears status and prestige that challenges the ethno-colonial and gender representation of women as perceived in both Israeli and collective Arab-Bedouin public discourse.

Arab-Bedouin professional women who attempt to enter hegemonic spheres as equals (not only economically but also in terms of public consciousness), are liable to upset the symbolic triangular balance of ruling power within the minority to which they belong: they challenge the symbolic boundaries of ethno-colonial power relations (between the Arab minority and the Jewish majority), threaten gender power relations (between women and men in the working world) and undermine the tribal power of the collective in favour of individual-professional power which is also manipulated by colonial powers.

To preserve ethno-colonial and patriarchal boundaries, actors in the hegemonic work sphere refuse to recognise the new representation introduced by the professional women. ‘Strategic denial of privilege’ (Hunter, 2010: 451) is a well-known strategy for maintaining the social power of the dominant, structured through multiple power relations that operate across the board to interlock non-recognition of women’s professional identity, resulting in racialised, gendered, religious and tribalised exclusion.

Lawler (2005: 797) explains that inequality in the labour market is not measured solely in economic terms but also in symbolic and cultural terms of representation and recognition. There is a close connection between redistribution and recognition, as

social actors may be denied the status of full actors in questions of distributive justice because they belong to groups that are not recognised as having a parity with those others, normalised groups to whom material and symbolic goods are deemed to rightfully accrue. (Lawler, 2005: 799)

Economic capital is thus not the only marker of middle-class professionals. The social and symbolic significance accompanying professional status also affect economic inequality: ‘[i]f people are not recognised as being legitimate social actors with legitimate claims, why should those claims be listened to?’ (Lawler, 2005: 800).

Non-recognition is expressed in repeated attempts by the power structures actors to regulate women in the public sphere by employing various cultural markers of differential distinctions, thereby replacing professional markers with ‘cultural’ markers, through which gaps between Arab and Jewish professionalism in Israel are preserved.

As such, the discourse will divert responsibility for the prevailing situation from actors in establishment circles to the cultural ethos of Bedouin society.

Not surprisingly, the collective-patriarchal hegemony – strengthened by Israeli institutions – also attempts to prevent recognition of the women’s professional capital, lest Arab-Bedouin women be considered equal to Arab-Bedouin men in the public sphere, thus threatening the social-patriarchal order. In his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, Alvin Gouldner (1979) describes the new middle class as an intellectual class that rebels against the old traditional authority and establishes itself on a foundation of civil thinking: logical and rational claims, critical discourse, individualism and an attempt to escape the control exercised by the extended family and collective, employing democratic codes rather than authoritative ones. Effectively, this group thus attempts to apply ‘professional’ values whose justification does not rely on traditional authority or on ascribed origin. This capital, which women seek to apply at work, undermines the accrued knowledge of traditional authority systems, especially (male) patriarchal and tribal systems (strengthened by colonial hegemony), in the Arab-Bedouin labour market. The ideological significance of professionalism is thus embodied in its concern for the well-being of society, as reflected in the new capitals of the emerging ‘middle class’, embodying the advantages of professional knowledge and expertise and its attendant cultural and symbolic capital. By basing itself on professional capital, this evolving group thus offers a new social and gender order – and herein lies the paradox: college-educated Arab-Bedouin women with professional jobs are part of the most educated group in society (resembling highly educated Arab and Jewish professional men and women), and have succeeded in crossing boundaries by gaining access to economic and human capital resources. Ironically, this traps them in a matrix of socially constructed distinctions – gender, patriarchy, tribalism and racism/colonialism. These interconnected power structures confine the women within liminal space where they suffer from interlocking forms of racism and discrimination as women in a patriarchal-tribal society and as part of a national and religious minority.

This paradoxical situation creates a glass ceiling effect (Cotter et al., 2001), which intensifies at higher levels of advancement, as one ascends the hierarchy and gains professional experience.

Thus, these women will have to cross more complex boundaries and barriers than do Arab-Bedouin men and many more than do Jewish professionals (men and women) to be equal in the split labour market. Thus, paradoxically, professional inequality is reproduced regarding group manifestation of the greatest capital in Naqab Arab-Bedouin society.

Only when Israeli discourse changes its perception towards the Arab minority from a ‘security threat’ (see Amal, 2011) to full equal citizens – and only when patriarchal Arab discourse regarding Arab women recognises non-cultural markers and accepts women’s new representation – will Arab-Bedouin professional women become a legitimate part of the public landscape, heralding an opportunity for conceptual change that may well reduce the dimensions of inequality and discrimination in the work sphere.