Abstract
Facing Barriers: Palestinian Women in a Jewish-Dominated Labor Market, by Vered Kraus and Yuval P. Yonay, Israeli scholars in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa, offers a first-rate example of the use of official statistics to approach answers to a perplexing societal question: How can we account for the much lower rate of participation in the Israeli labor force by Palestinian women citizens and Palestinian women residing in East Jerusalem (about one in four) compared to the rate of labor force participation (LFP) among Jewish Israeli women (about three of every four)?
The book is loaded with data and statistical analyses—much of it presented in the nearly three dozen figures and more than three dozen tables included—which build support for a significant conclusion. However, the argument Kraus and Yonay develop will trouble those readers who resist any criticism of Israeli state policies and practices aimed at Palestinians—in this case, Palestinian Israeli citizens and Palestinians residents of East Jerusalem (Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza, who remain under Israeli control, are not part of this analysis).
The authors conclude that the low rate of Palestinian women’s LFP and their poor achievements in the labor market stem not from Arab culture and Muslim religion (a facile explanation they problematize) but from “their position in a society [that is, Israeli society] that discriminates against them in almost every aspect of social life” (p. 243). Moreover, they maintain that, rather than the state enacting policies intended to facilitate employment, the Israeli state has actively created barriers to Palestinian women’s access to and achievement in the Jewish-dominated labor market.
A grant from the Israeli Science Foundation supported the authors’ access to data collected by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). The data come from labor force surveys, income surveys, and two population censuses (1995 and 2008), and they allow for rigorous analysis that recognizes and takes into account the heterogeneity of “Palestinian women.” The authors make careful, compelling comparisons over a 35-year period—from 1974 through 2009—among the five groups of Palestinian women they identify and between women in those groups and Jewish Israeli women as well as comparisons to the Palestinian men in those groups and (to a lesser extent) to Jewish Israeli men.
According to the state’s CBS, in 2012, the Israeli population numbered about 7.8 million people—about 1.6 million of whom were Palestinians. Of those Palestinians, about 296,300 were residents of East Jerusalem (which was annexed to the state in 1967 in violation of international law) who have the status of “permanent residents,” not Israeli citizens (p. 19). According to the state’s system of ethno-religious categorization, 83 percent of Palestinian Israelis are (Sunni) Muslim. The vast majority of Muslims (over 80 percent) live in the north—the Galilee—and in the center along the border with the West Bank—known as “the Triangle.” Women living in these areas are the focus of the authors’ analysis of Muslim women. However, within the Muslim Palestinian category, Bedouins make up a distinct social group; they constitute almost all the (approximately 200,000) Palestinians living in the southern desert—the Naqab. Kraus and Yonay treat the women in that population separately in their analysis, comparing women in state-established Bedouin towns with those in “unrecognized [by the state] villages.”
Among the remaining 17 percent of Palestinian Israelis, 8.7 percent are Christian—of a dozen different denominations but constituting a notable social group—and 8.3 percent are Druze, who constitute an exceptional Arab minority that is allied with the Israeli state. The labor force participation of each of these two groups of women receives its own focus as well. Finally, because the state collects data specifically on the population of East Jerusalem, the women residing there are analyzed as a separate group. They are overwhelmingly Muslim (97 percent), thus the authors compare the labor market engagement of Jerusalemite women to Palestinian Israeli Muslim citizens also living in “mixed”—Jews and Arabs—cities (Haifa, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Acca, Lydda, Ramla).
Guided by their theoretical framing of women’s labor force behavior as shaped by economic opportunities, structural conditions, and state policies, Kraus and Yonay comb the data for what they call “clues” to the “puzzle” of labor force experiences among these five groups of Palestinian women. I highlight here a few of the eleven significant patterns they uncover.
For example, the authors examine trends in LFP among Muslim women in the Galilee and the Triangle with a focus on both personal determinants—most significantly, educational attainment—and structural determinants of those trends. Among the key findings: the evidence supports the claim that the downward trend in employment among Muslim women with tertiary education indicates a saturated employment structure—for Muslim women only, given that the employment of Jewish women with tertiary education (who are much greater in number) continued to increase over the 35-year period studied (p. 79). The idea that Muslim women would take on the cost and the challenges—studying in Hebrew for the first time coupled with discrimination and exclusion in the setting—of tertiary education without the intention of working upon graduation lacks any support. “Lack of available positions rather than . . . cultural preferences” explains this trend among highly educated Palestinian women (p. 232).
As another example, the authors document the very narrow range of employment situations open to Palestinian women. A much smaller share of them than Jewish women work in the private sector (with minor differences across groups). The “Palestinian” economy within the Israeli economy offers limited employment prospects; in the Jewish-owned economy, Palestinians face discrimination, if not exclusion. Palestinian women’s public sector employment is largely confined to their own under-resourced communities—Palestinian neighborhoods in mixed cities or Palestinian municipalities. Thus, at the end of the period under study, according to the detailed (three-digit) classification of occupations, 71 percent of all working Muslim Palestinian women (in contrast to 39 percent of working Jewish women) were engaged in only 12 (out of 400) occupations—teachers (including kindergarten assistants, 36.5 percent), nurses (9.1 percent), and clerical workers (9.6 percent) being the top three. Even more striking is the percentage of teachers among university-educated Muslim women—holding at 58 to 60 percent across all the years studied. These data show again the restricted number of positions “fitting” educated women open to Muslim women in the Israeli labor market (pp. 98–99).
A final example is the authors’ elaboration of how power relations and political tactics have affected the labor market and the structure of economic activity faced by Palestinian women residents of Jerusalem. This includes discussion of the 1967 annexation of East Jerusalem and 28 adjacent “villages” (which is the typical reference, although “neighborhoods” is more apt—and less disparaging), which resulted in a divided society—with noncitizens whose residency can be readily revoked—as well as a divided education system: the Palestinian Authority curriculum plus Hebrew classes in schools built and administered by the municipality. Notably, a June report by the state comptroller, Joseph Shapira, highlighted the extent of East Jerusalem’s division from the rest of the city, severely criticizing both the state and the municipality for conditions there. The report identifies deficient social services and educational opportunities (e.g., a shortage of 2,000 classrooms), neglected sanitation (e.g., overflowing dumpsters and garbage in the streets), and high poverty rates (75 percent of East Jerusalemites live under the poverty line, compared to 29 percent of Jews across the country), among other disparitiesa 1 . The authors also discuss the devastating consequences for East Jerusalemites of the “separation barrier,” which runs not along the Green Line (the armistice line of 1949) but snakes over some 700 kilometers—142 of them meandering in and around Jerusalem, cutting through and cutting off Palestinian neighborhoods, with the intention of “placing” as many Palestinians as possible on the “other” side of the wall (p. 153). That only 13 percent of East Jerusalem women—and a shocking 50 percent only of highly educated women—participate in the labor force is due to their weak political position in the municipality, the economic neglect of East Jerusalem by the state, and living on the frontlines of the Israeli occupation.
Other “clues” include: the lack of opportunities for Palestinian women (across all groups) with only secondary education compared to similarly educated Jewish women—75 percent of whom were employed at the end of the period studied; the generally better opportunities for Palestinian women in mixed cities than in homogeneous Palestinian localities—the former having benefitted from public investment and the latter having experienced systematic economic neglect by the state; the prevalent involuntary part-time employment among Palestinian women—from about one-half to two-thirds of those employed part-time would rather have full-time work, but only 25 percent of Jewish women express a preference for full-time employment; the consequences for women’s employment in two distinct social groups due to relations with the state—highly negative for Bedouin women, whose communities have long experienced economic neglect and political harassment by the state, and quite positive for Druze communities, which have realized some of the economic advantages that come with (men’s) service in the Israeli military, including a protected market for Druze textile factories (employing local women) that produce military uniforms; and the substantially lower returns to Palestinian women on their human capital—Muslim women earn about two-thirds of what Jewish women earn despite the fact that Palestinian women in the labor force actually have higher levels of education than employed Jewish women.
I have barely begun to convey the rich and significant analysis in this work; it stands as an extraordinary addition to the transnational literature on Arab/Muslim women’s labor force participation. However, I do not share the authors’ optimism that their analysis might convince Israeli state officials that “traditional culture and Islam” are not the main obstacles to increasing Palestinian Israeli women’s employment but rather the problem is a labor market that is effectively closed to them. To the extent that this issue is, in fact, on the national agenda, it is hard to reconcile the changes Kraus and Yonay advocate with their analysis of how racist attitudes of Israeli Jews toward the “Arab Other” have been institutionalized in the state’s differential policies toward Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis. Their own critical assessment of the question of the Israeli state as “Jewish and Democratic” coupled with the new Basic Law: Israel—The Nation-State of the Jewish People passed by the Knesset in July 2018 (after this book had gone to press, I expect) suggests no basis to expect more inclusive policies.
I have more hope that policy-makers in other (western) countries—where concern exists about fuller inclusion of Arab/Muslim-origin women in society—might hear Kraus and Yonay’s message: invest in professional/occupational training, fight discrimination, and provide social services women need rather than blaming culture and regulating women’s clothing!
