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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Social Economy
The Quest for Social Justice under Neoliberalism
The miracle of EEW is the tension that you see here between the business approach and the ideological attitudes. Women come to work here for ideological reasons and use business tools to promote their ideology. Here’s an example: I was sitting with Amit1 when she got a phone call from Phillip, one of our donors. He called to consult her on something that was not directly related to his support of EEW. There’s this American billionaire who wants to invest in Israel and his representatives are now exploring the terrain to help him decide where to invest. So Phillip, who was preparing for his meeting with these representatives, invited Amit to give him tips on how to include the idea of women’s empowerment in his recommendations, so that despite the fact that we are too small to get into the frame of this major investor, some of the money may eventually trickle down to us as well. I sat there listening to her and could hear how she led him, literally giving him words, to change the way he was thinking, all in a 15-minute conversation. She knows his world and understands that she needs to give him bonuses—to tell him what his foundation, and he personally, may get out of this. She used his business language to insert some of EEW’s ideology into his narrative.
—Ya’el Toledano, a freelance business consultant at EEW. (Interviewed by Amalia Sa’ar in 2003.)
This chapter describes the setting in which economic empowerment—as a practice and a vision—takes place, namely, the Israeli field of social economy. I portray encounters between actors with seemingly very different subject positions, such as the CEO of a philanthropic foundation and the feminist activist in the opening example, and the novel discursive tokens that are created as a result. I treat the accumulation of projects that aim to get low-income women out of poverty as a field of forces, in Bourdieu’s sense (Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990), in which actors struggle for positions using diverse strategies and negotiating the value of their assets by imbuing them with meaning. I set out the gaps and ideological inconsistencies among the people who operate the projects, as a precursor for the larger project of this book, which is how the idea of economic citizenship—the conditioning of civil inclusion on economic self-sufficiency—has come to make sense to people as remote from each other as radical feminists, minority rights activists, business philanthropists, and state agents.
I begin by outlining the history of structural inequalities in Israel and their culmination, at the present phase of aggressive economic liberalization, in extreme gaps and overlapping disadvantages. This review provides essential background for the stories of the women whose economic struggles are presented throughout the book, as well as for understanding the sense of urgency that fuels social economy initiatives. I then move to describe the new ideas that have emerged on how to restore social solidarity and social balance, starting with globally circulating notions of community economic development, and ultimately focusing on the local version that emerged in the process of adapting these notions to the Israeli context.
In the second part of the chapter I use ethnographic data to try to convey the spirit of the field. I do so by sketching its organizational structure, which is characterized by cross-sectorial partnerships, and by showing typical profiles of the actors who operate the projects, relating their motivations, their dilemmas, and their ideological perspectives. My intention is to communicate the unique beat of this field and the intriguing encounters and genuine dialogues that it creates among people who are grounded in very different social and ideological milieus.
In the opening excerpt, for example, a head of a middle-range philanthropic foundation, a Jewish-American man, was reaching out to the manager of a very small grassroots feminist organization, an Israeli-born woman, to consult her on how he may incorporate the idea of women’s empowerment into a strategic discussion about the investments of a major Zionist-American donor. Although the parties of this conversation represent different constituencies, they share a passion for empowering minority and low-income women. And while their rationales may be very different—at the time of this conversation, EEW was only three years old and still very attached to the radical feminist circles from which it had emerged, whereas the donor, Phillip, worked for a mainstream Zionist foundation that was a regular strategic partner of several state ministries—they were trying to create a common language in which to talk about social justice. The chapter includes more stories like this one: I use the biographies of different actors to show the diversity of the field, as well as the captivating power of the idea of diversity itself. Lastly, I dwell on some key terms that recur in the actors’ discourse and explore them in the specific context of structural inequalities to ask what is Israeli about this, or how this is a vernacular version of a global phenomenon.
Economic Liberalization and Social Inequalities in Israel
For the first three decades of its existence, Israel showed remarkable economic growth. State-led political economy combined a strong emphasis on nation-building and selective elements of social democracy. Centralist state control of capital, production, consumption, and labor was encouraged by the idea that the state’s central roles were social and economic development, absorption of massive Jewish immigration, and the building of a solid defense system whatever the cost (Levi-Faur 1998; Shalev 1999; Maman and Rosenhek 2012). On the capital front, the state acted as the main redistributor of incoming capital—compensations from Germany, donations from world Jewry, or foreign aid from the US government—either directly or through several Zionist agencies, allowing very little room for private foreign capital. On the labor front, the Histadrut, the General Union of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel, played a key role in stabilizing labor relations by securing protected employment for Jewish workers. This organization was established in the early 1920s as a pillar of the Zionist labor movement and held uninterrupted political hegemony until the late 1970s. With the direct help of the state, it became a key actor in almost every sector of the economy, owning some of the largest industrial business groups in the country, the largest construction company, the largest commercial bank, the largest insurance company, and the largest retail chain, and developing a large institutional network. It thus acted, at one and the same time, as the biggest workers’ union and the second major employer in the country, second only to the state itself (Maman and Rosenhek 2012; Grinberg 1993).
For the new state, close collaboration with the Histadrut was one of several tools utilized to fulfill its commitment to full employment for the Jewish population, together with massive investment in key economic sectors, notably industry, construction, infrastructure, and agriculture, and close supervision of import and export to protect local manufacturing. Particular attention was paid to the development of labor-intensive industries, notably textiles, metals, chemicals, construction, and agriculture (Levi-Faur 1998, 2001). Such occupations were deemed appropriate for the less-educated Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, the Mizrahim, and they seemed to achieve several goals at once: the immigrants would supply the necessary manpower for the rapid industrial development of the country (Levi-Faur 1995; Lavie 2006); in turn, steady employment of these immigrants, accompanied by subsidized housing, welfare, and standardized state education, would be the requisite channel to modernize them and thus enhance the future cohesion of Israeli society (Swirski 1989). Lastly, the geographic disposition of the new factories, agricultural communities, and construction jobs was strategically planned so that the demographic distribution of the Jewish population would prevent the return of the Palestinians, as well as severing territorial contiguity between the Palestinian communities that remained. The new towns built along Israel’s southern and northern borders were called development towns. New immigrants, or those already residing in transit camps, were given jobs and housing to encourage them to settle there, and were penalized by losing these and other benefits if they refused (Kemp 2002). Thus Mizrahi Jews were assigned early on to the doubly subordinate position of being working class and residing in the social-geographic periphery (Tzfadia and Yiftachel 2004; Chetrit 2004).
Newcomer Ashkenazi Jews too were sent to transit camps and development towns. Many of them were Holocaust survivors who reached the new state destitute and traumatized. Yet many among them managed eventually to get better jobs than the Mizrahim, and ultimately also to get closer to the center—of the country and of the political establishment. According to Bernstein and Swirski (1982), the better paid and better connected sectors in the newly developing workforce consisted mostly of Ashkenazim, both veterans and new immigrants. These formed the governmental entrepreneurial-managerial apparatus, a sizeable stratum of industrialists, bankers, and other entrepreneurs who received the investment capital obtained by the government, and an even thicker stratum of engineers, technicians, and skilled workers. Mizrahim, by contrast, found themselves mainly in the large stratum of semiskilled or unskilled laborers. This class positioning, as mentioned, often went hand in hand with their geographic marginalization. It was also accompanied by their routine framing as “culturally backward” (e.g., Dominguez 1989), with far-reaching implications throughout the state apparatus, notably in the healthcare system, or in the schools system, where second-generation Mizrahi children were systematically tracked to vocational occupations (Swirski 1999; Yonah and Saporta 2002b; Chetrit 2004). Still, their inclusion in the Zionist project meant that by and large they were embraced by the Histadrut, which made them eligible for health insurance, subsidized housing, welfare benefits, and other entitlements.
The outermost of these concentric circles of belonging, namely, the secondary workforce, consisted of the weakest: Mizrahim and Palestinians. Although the Palestinians who remained within the 1948 borders were granted nominal citizenship from the start, for the first decade and a half of Israeli statehood they were ruled by military government, which effectively segregated them in homogeneous communities and strictly limited their entry into the Jewish areas. The imposition of military government directly and adversely affected their capacity to generate livelihood, either through agriculture or paid work. With most of their lands confiscated following the 1948 war, and their being effectively prevented from cultivating the plots they still kept, the Palestinians who remained in Israel underwent rapid transformation from fellahi or small-scale agriculturalists to day-laborers (Rosenfeld 1978). Since their previous cultural and commercial connections were brought to an abrupt halt and no new economic venues were made viable within their communities, their only recourse was to work in the Jewish economy. This channel, in turn, was regulated closely by the military government, which rationed the provision of transit permits to protect the employment of unskilled Jewish immigrants (Rosenhek 2003). Thus in times of high unemployment during the 1950s, restrictions on the movement of Israeli Palestinians were tightened, whereas in the early 1960s, when full employment was attained and there was still a demand for cheap and unskilled labor in construction and agriculture, they were admitted in growing numbers. However, they were excluded from the Histadrut (Rosenhek 2003), which effectively kept them outside organized labor. So until 1967 the Palestinian citizens comprised a reserve army of commuter laborers, employed as temporary and casual workers in jobs with low wages, poor work conditions, frequent violations of workers’ rights, and high occupational insecurity (Rosenhek 2003; Semyonov and Lewin Epstein 1987).
An important turning point occurred in 1967 following the Six-Day War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Having gone through a short-term recession in the mid-1960s, in the years immediately after the war the Israeli economy enjoyed a renewed boom, buttressed by the entry of a large reservoir of unprotected and cheap workers from the newly occupied territories and by a substantial growth in military industries. Concomitantly, the dual composition of the labor force was deepening. Like Israeli Palestinians, noncitizen Palestinians commuted daily to their places of employment, returning at night or at weekends to their families and communities. But unlike Palestinian Israelis, who by now enjoyed greater freedom of movement and some basic, if limited, state services, the noncitizens had no political or social rights. For the next twenty years, until the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, large-scale employment of noncitizen Palestinians remained largely unregulated despite some attempts to change this; their routine border crossings arguably served the political interest of the state to naturalize the territorial continuity of Israel with the occupied territories (Rosenhek 1999). More directly, they served the demand of Israeli employers, including the Histadrut in its capacity as a major employer, for cheap, unprotected labor. Noncitizen Palestinian commuters replaced the dwindling supply of Israeli menial workers and helped keep in check the wages of workers in the primary sector. Under conditions of full employment in the aftermath of the 1967 war (Rosenhek 1999) younger generations of Mizrahi Jews were now aiming for less precarious and more rewarding employment. Israeli Palestinians too were boosted by the entry of their noncitizen brethren and, with the annulment of the military rule and later also their gradual admission to the Histradrut, they started to enjoy better job selection and better employment conditions.
Less than a decade later, in the aftermath of the following war in October 1973, the economy started to slow down. Local production was not meeting the state’s rising military expenditure, and global economic restructuring also started to exert its effect. Four years after the war the Labor party lost power, for the first time in the state’s history. Stagnation deepened during the late 1970s and early 1980s, inflation was rising rapidly and threatened political stability; meanwhile the big banks and conglomerates were actually getting richer (Shalev 1999).
Finally, in 1985 a national unity government signed an emergency economic stabilization program. That year marks the starting point of a far-reaching process of economic liberalization and deregulation, which continues ever more vigorously today. It includes a transition of the major business groups from the ownership of the state and the Histadrut to private capital, downsizing factories and outsourcing production to poorer countries, and selling mega-concerns to private hands, thus generating massive pressure to liquidate organized labor in them. Instead of the labor-intensive industries, which were the hallmark of the Israeli economy in the early decades, the state has taken to investing in high-tech industries, often in close association with the military industries, and to making it a priority to attract private foreign investments.
All this has led to a swelling volume of unorganized labor, accompanied by an increase in individual employment contracts, greater fragmentation among workers between and within different economic sectors, ever-widening wage gaps, growing numbers of workers who are employed through manpower agencies and subcontractors, more part-time workers, and diminishing legal labor safeguards (Maman and Rosenhek 2012; Filc 2004). Parallel to the progressive weakening of labor rights for citizens, the Israeli economy has incorporated a huge number of migrant workers.
In 1993, in an attempt to reduce its dependence on noncitizen Palestinians and despite its official commitment to allow the labor movement to be part of the peace process, the state started recruiting large numbers of migrant workers, primarily from Thailand, Romania, and the Philippines to work in agriculture, construction, and nursing, respectively (Bartram 1998; Raijman and Kemp 2004). This trend, which started small, grew dramatically in the following two decades. For example, between 1992 and 1996 the number of licenses for migrant workers increased from 10,000 to 95,000; this figure was nearly doubled by unauthorized workers, who in 1999 were estimated to number about 80,000 (Rosenhek 1999). By 2010 the estimated number of authorized and unauthorized migrant workers combined was 211,500, or 10 percent of the local labor force. This placed Israel at the top of the industrialized economies most heavily dependent on foreign labor (Raijman and Kushnirovich 2012). Officially authorized or not, migrant workers have been subject to a high degree of regulations and atypical employment relations. Fixed-term contracts, the binding system enforcing the migrants’ direct dependence on manpower agencies and employers, and the threat of automatic deportation have made for a particularly harsh system that sometimes even degenerates into a human trafficking industry (Raijman and Kemp 2011). Besides introducing into the local labor force a large group of particularly cheap, flexible, exploitable, and expendable workers, this state of affairs has created shock waves that have left their mark on citizen workers as well.
A direct outcome of the economic developments over the last three decades is a huge increase in social inequalities. While Israeli society has never been egalitarian, the rising living standards of the population as a whole and the extraordinary affluence that economic liberalization has brought for a small, select group have opened yawning socioeconomic gaps. The following indications, taken from the Adva Center’s annual report (Swirski and Konor-Attias 2012), are unambiguous: the Gini index, which measures inequalities in income distribution, has risen by almost 14 percent since the mid-1980s, so that Israel now scores fifth highest among member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The middle class has shrunk even faster than in other postindustrial countries. In 2011, top senior executives average wage was about sixty times higher (!) than the national average wage. The incidence of poverty has been steadily on the rise, placing Israel next to worst in the OECD club, above only Mexico. Its incidence among Arabs is almost three times higher than among Jews; other marked groups, notably the ultra-Orthodox, old people, and women, are also particularly vulnerable.
This brings us to the issue of welfare. Israel has been known as a relatively strong welfare state, at least during the first four or five decades of its existence. Some observers (e.g., Doron 2007: 92) regard the Israeli welfare state as a universalistic distribution mechanism that “reflects the institutional expression of the modern state’s commitment to the welfare of all its citizens and their integration into the national community.” A similar presumption regarding the state’s equalizing intentions is implied in other studies as well (Lewin-Epstein et al. 2003; Zehavi 2012). By contrast, critical scholars argue that the Israeli welfare system is an important stratificatory mechanism and has been so from its inception (Maman and Rosenhek 2012; Levi-Faur 1998). Rosenhek (1999) even goes so far as to argue that the role of Israeli welfare in buttressing social stratification is not an anomaly, noting that welfare states operating in capitalist societies exclude subordinate groups as part and parcel of their inner logic.
In Israel, total exclusion from the welfare state has applied to noncitizen workers, first Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and later migrant workers. Palestinian citizens have been partially excluded, with some variations over time. In the earlier decades of the state this was done by channeling important benefits through nonstate Zionist agencies (notably the Histadrut), thus bypassing the ostensible commitment to universal attainment, or by physically preventing the Palestinian citizens from collecting benefits such as the child allowance, through restricting their movement under the military government (Rosenhek 1999). In later years some of these institutionalized forms of discrimination were eliminated or reduced;2 still, the effectiveness of welfare benefits in getting people above the poverty line remains grossly biased in favor of the Jewish citizens.3 Studies have shown consistent patterns of discrimination against the Palestinian citizens in the de facto transfer of welfare benefits, indicating that state welfare was and remains a major tool for ethnonational stratification (Rosenhek 1998, 1999, 2003; Lewin and Stier 2002, 2003; Lewin, Stier, and Caspi-Dror 2006).
Table 1.1 Selected Data on Social Inequalities in Israel
| Discriminatory policy against Palestinian citizens | Gross cumulative investments in construction for industry, 2000–2009 (in billions of Shekels) Total 21.20 Jewish communities 20.06 Arab communities 1.14 |
| Class polarization | The lowest five deciles get 24% of the national pie, compared to 76% that go to the top five deciles. Among self-employed, the lowest five deciles earned less than the average national wage. In 2007, deciles 1–9 made 1.9 billion shekels, as compared to 4.3 that were earned by the top decile, and 13.5 by the top one percent. |
| The Gini Index, measuring social inequalities, places Israel as fifth lowest among 27 highly industrialized countries | |
| Shrinking middle class | Israeli middle class, defined as households with 75%–150% of the median income, is the third smallest among a selection of 22 industrialized countries, consisting of only 36% of the population. |
| Gender wage gaps | Women’s monthly average wage is 66% of men’s, and their average hourly wage is 83%–84% that of men’s. These gaps are stable over more than a decade |
| Ethnic wage gaps among Jews (2011) | – Ashkenazi urban employees’ average monthly income was 33% above the average monthly income of urban employees – Mizrahi urban employees’ average monthly income was 7% above that average, registering an improvement compared to the turn of the millennium, when their income was 5% below the average. |
| Wage gaps between Jews and Palestinians | Arab urban employees’ average monthly income was 33% below the average, registering a worsening of their situation, compared to 2004 when their income was 25% under the national average. |
| Soaring unemployment in the Palestinian communities | In some Arab communities, unemployment in 2011 was 4–5 times higher than the national average. |
Adapted from Swirski, Shlomo and Etty Konor-Attias. 2012.
One important exception here is the National Health Insurance Law of 1995, which set a precedent in terminating the hitherto binding connection between health insurance and membership of health funds. Prior to that law, membership in a health fund was voluntary and nonmembers had no health insurance. Health fees were collected by workers’ unions, and the Histadrut’s ownership of the largest health fund gave it enormous power. By ending this binding connection, the new law granted mandatory health insurance to approximately 1 million citizens, mostly Arabs and low-income Jews, who had not been covered under the previous arrangement. That said, the law’s ability to generate universal health coverage eroded in the years after 1995, largely due to lack of a permanent mechanism to ensures an annual increase in government budget to meet population growth, aging, new technologies, and new medications (Horev and Keidar 2010). The government’s share in financing health costs has decreased steadily while that of the health funds has increased, compelling them to operate complementary insurance programs to cover their rising costs. So for example, between 2001 and 2011 households’ expenditure on complementary health insurances tripled, from 10 percent to 30 percent, with households in the top decile spending about ten times more than households in the second decile (Swirski and Konor-Atias 2012). In other areas too, notably education and crime prevention, the scope and quality of services have deteriorated. Many services have been outsourced to private companies, resulting invariably in higher costs for households and widening gaps in access to quality care, education, and personal safety.
Thus, contrary to the earlier version of Israeli welfare, recent privatization has had the effect of widening the gaps within the Jewish population, in addition to the gaps between Jews and Palestinians. It has also brought strikingly to the fore the interaction effect of class and gender, which entails significant advantages and substantial setbacks to upper-class men and lower-class women, respectively. Notably—and this feature of neoliberalism runs like a thread throughout the ethnography—the effects of the privatization of social services on low-income women are inconsistent, at once impoverishing and advantageous. On the one hand, it has worsened their job security as they are the prime employees of these systems. It has also often entailed a heavier burden of domestic care work, since it is they who now have to take care of their aging and sick relatives or keep their children busy during after-school hours. On the other hand, privatization of social services has facilitated the entry of migrant care workers, which has actually saved the day for many female citizens who would otherwise have to retreat from the job market to do care work at home. Then again, the advent of massive numbers of migrant workers has intensified the already existing orientation of a split labor market, which rendered low-income Mizrahi and Palestinian female citizens vulnerable to begin with.
Multiple Bases of Social Inequality
As this overview reveals clearly, the Israeli structure of social stratification has been organized along ethnic and national lines from the very beginning, and has remained consistent regardless of the dramatic economic and political changes over time. The initially hegemonic position of Ashkenazi Jews was shored up first through their dominance in the new state apparatus, in its Zionist subsidiary agencies, in the strong, highly connected economic sectors, and later through the military-industrial complex, the intellectual elites, and the high-tech and financial industries (Kimmerling 2001). Clearly, the ethnic labels Ashkenazi and Mizrahi are objectified forms of social distinctions that in reality are much more fluid and ambiguous (Dominguez 1989). Still, even considering changes over the years in educational, economic, and political attainments, the categories remain alive in local discourse. They retain tangible social implications, engender political organizing in and out of parliament, and stir heated identity debates (e.g., Hever, Shenhav, and Motzafi-Haller 2002; Levi 1999; Abutbul, Grinberg, and Motzafi-Haller 2005). Although Mizrahi Jews eventually also entered all the different elites, as well as the middle class, they nevertheless remain to this day overrepresented in development towns and peripheral neighborhoods, in low-wage jobs, and in the lower deciles. As shown in Table 1.1, in 2011, for example, the average wage of Ashkenazi employees residing in urban areas was 33 percent higher than the national average wage of urban employees, while that of Mizrahi employees was only 7 percent above the average. This, however, was mildly good news as it reflected improvement compared with ten years earlier, when their average wage was 5 percent below the national average (Swirski and Konor-Attias 2012). Mizrahim, furthermore, also remain more vulnerable to unemployment, poverty, and poor schooling (Swirski and Konor-Attias 2012). As of the 2010s, the complex picture of considerable number of Mizrahim at the centers of power and decision making while a critical mass still lingers in the periphery is a constant source of public debate on whether they are still the victims of racism and state discrimination. For the purpose of the present study, the long-lasting effects of structural discrimination may not be disregarded. They are discernible in the substantial presence of Mizrahi women among the participants, whose manifold vulnerabilities are related in the next chapter.
Table 1.2 Incidence of Poverty among Families by Population Groups (percentages)
(Table #8, the National Insurance Institute’s Annual Poverty Report 2014)
http://www.btl.gov.il/Publications/oni_report/Documents/oni2013.pdf
As for the Palestinian citizens, they continue to suffer diverse forms of discrimination and structural violence (Torstrick 2000; Haidar 2005; Yiftachel 2006; Khamaisi 2009; Saban 2011; Abdo-Zubi 2011), and despite certain improvements their status has remained truncated, and some would say hopeless and inevitably crisis-ridden (Rouhana and Ghanem 1998). On the optimistic side, I mentioned the moderate widening of job opportunities, greater freedom of movement, and greater access to state welfare; to these I may add increasingly autonomous political participation, some successful instances of collective bargaining,4 improving living standards for many, growing rates of education, and burgeoning cultural production. Against these, periodic surveys show many indications that the status of the Palestinian citizens has become fixed or has even deteriorated. While political protest has been allowed and has taken place continuously since the 1970s or even earlier, on several occasions—notably the first Land Day in 1976, the demonstrations at the outbreak of the second intifada in October 2000, and the protests at the Gaza invasion in 2009—it has instigated violent crackdowns that included the killing of protesters, mass arrests including minors, and heavy surveillance. Excessive police aggression against Palestinian citizens has been registered also during routine crime patrols. For example, according to a 2004 report of Mossawa (Arabic, “equality”), the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, in the three years following the killing by police forces of thirteen citizens during the Galilee protests of October 2000, sixteen more citizens were killed in various incidents, nine by the police and six by the army or the border police.5 Hate attacks against Arabs, whether verbal, physical, or symbolic, are prevalent.6 They largely go unpunished even when the anti-incitement law has clearly been violated, and they are actively and explicitly encouraged by numerous public figures, including rabbis and members of the Knesset. Between 2009 and 2013 the Netanyahu government was particularly active in legislating a series of laws expressly designed to curtail the Palestinian citizens’ civil rights; most notable among them is the citizenship law, which bans entrance of Palestinians from the Palestinian Authority for purposes of family unification (Barak-Erez 2008). Adala (Arabic, “justice”), the Legal Center for the Arab Minority Rights in Israel, enumerates seventeen new laws or amendments to existing laws since 2009, designed unambiguously to restrict political self-expression, rights of residency, and land rights of Palestinian citizens, or the activity of NGOs that support such rights.7
Table 1.3 Wage Gaps in Israel, by Ethnonationality and Gender, 2012 (in Israeli New Shekel)
Adapted from Dagan-Buzaglo, Hasson, and Ophir. 2014
Ethnic and national divisions are readily identified in local discourse as two of the major cleavages in Israeli society, alongside the religious-secular and the right-left divides. However, a comprehensive analysis of social inequalities, which takes into account citizenship, social class, and gender as structural mechanisms of stratification, has been much less tolerable in the local public discourse. Citizenship, for example, is widely regarded as the legitimate boundary of entitlement and belonging. Noncitizens’ rights, or more specifically the human rights violations and the overall plight of noncitizens residing in Israel for lengthy periods, have come increasingly to the fore since the early 2000s, with the swelling influx of migrant workers and asylum seekers over the past two decades or so. Besides widening the already existing split in the labor market, the presence of noncitizens has had a direct bearing on social inequalities by eroding public standards of dignified existence, spurring xenophobic sentiments, and stoking up the mood favoring annulling or setting conditions on the citizenship of Palestinian-Israelis. But so far, public debates on noncitizens’ rights have immediately turned the spotlight onto the identity of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than the all-Israeli structure of social inequalities.
Social class has been somewhat more admissible in the local discourse, but still limited. Although the rising rates of poverty have become a very popular topic for the media (Doron 2004), there is no readily available vocabulary to talk about “class,” which continues to be vaguely articulated as a “social” issue. As I show shortly, the discourse developing in the social-economy field seeks to understand class structure differently, its polarizing effect gradually overtaking ethnic and national divisions in importance. The popular social protest of summer 2011, which was led by and oriented precisely to the middle-class and mainstream political circles, gave this interpretation a further boost. However, as I discuss in the epilogue to this chapter and show in more detail in Chapter 5, this nascent discourse on economic citizenship and the right to dignified livelihood has been forming largely within, not against, the hegemonic ethnonational framework of belonging.
Gender, lastly, is probably the most difficult to pin down as an autonomous power mechanism. Despite some mainstreaming of public discussions about wage and other gender inequalities, gender is popularly perceived as “a women’s issue” and as secondary to the major divisions of Israeli society; it is generally seen as narrower and less explosive—the lingering legacy of inequality rather than a core mechanism with present implications. Several reasons may explain the evasiveness of gender as a structure of power in itself: one is that regardless of the many forms of discrimination against women in Israel, they are not unilaterally “oppressed.” Another is that gender cuts across all other social divisions: Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, Palestinians and Jews, religious, secular, right- and left-wingers, poor and rich … all involve women and men together. Last but not least, the inscription of gender onto the most intimate layer of self-identity—the construction and experience of femininity and masculinity as natural and personal—effectively disguises its systemic aspects. In contrast to this popular impression, this book treats gender not merely a marker of personal identities, but as a power mechanism that informs all the major institutions of society, and draws on feminist intersectionality theory (Crenshaw 1989; Anthias 1998; Yuval-Davis 2006) to trace the multiple articulations of gender with other bases of exclusion and stratification. In the following chapters I look at various aspects of these intersections: the multiple vulnerabilities of low-income women (Chapter 2); their immersion in emotional capitalism and their agency in utilizing the opportunities afforded them in the field of social economy (Chapter 3); their approaches to wage labor (Chapter 4); and finally, in Chapter 5, their integration into emerging discourses on economic citizenship.
Adapting Ideas of Social Justice and Social Responsibility
Since the end of the twentieth century, poverty reduction initiatives in high-GDP countries, particularly in large urban areas, have taken a clear community-oriented, participatory turn, combined with a growing focus on enhancing poor people’s capacity for economic self-sufficiency. In direct response to globalization and economic restructuring, large numbers of programs, commonly termed community economic development (CED), have emerged, which draw on the shared efforts of community organizations, public agencies, local businesses, and private actors. These initiatives offer comprehensive strategies that combine social and economic objectives (Morin and Hanley 2004).
Capitalistic-Bound Responses to Growing Social Gaps, the Idea of Community Economic Development
According to Alison Mathie and Gord Cunningham (2003), the evolution of CED theory represents a confluence of three different development paradigms: developing or improving economic systems and infrastructure, developing the economic capacities of individuals, and developing the economic capacities of groups to undertake community economic development. The first perspective sees CED as akin to the old concept of development-as-economic-growth, but taking place at the community level. The community is seen merely as a geographic location and has no theoretical importance. This perspective also sees development as a primarily exogenous process: the initiatives employed tend to involve technological improvements and infrastructure development, in the hope of attracting investment and industry from outside. The second perspective, individual capacity building, sees CED as the by-product of the economic success of individuals. “Community” tends to refer to a target group of individuals rather than to a geographic locality. Collective action may be employed not as an end in itself, so the main actors in the development process may be external NGOs and donors or local organizations. Lastly, the group capacity-building perspective sees collective action as an end in itself. Collective action enables individuals who lack the resources to independently improve their well-being to work together to achieve this end. This perspective defines CED as an endogenous process. The main participants are the members of marginalized groups who undertake collective action. In practice, though, as Mathie and Cunningham observe, all three perspectives are often present in initiatives of economic development. This has also been the case in the Israeli version documented in this book. CED then is initially a hybrid approach, and its implementations in effect condition it to retain this quality, since they invariably bring together groups, individuals, and stakeholders with very diverse subject positions. As we shall see later in the chapter, this characteristic is of central importance to understanding the cultural production that occurs through and around CED initiatives.
Another prominent characteristic of CED programs, besides their inherent hybridity, is their openness to feminist discourse and action, an openness that owes to their strong egalitarian, localized, and hands-on emphases. Since feminist approaches to women’s economic empowerment are central also to the Israeli case, I have chosen to borrow, for the purpose of this brief outline of CED, the definitions of Canadian feminist activists. In their study of young women in two inner-city Winnipeg neighborhoods, Molly McCracken and her partners (McCracken et al. 2005) define CED as follows: Community Economic Development is a bottom-up rather than top-down route to economic development that takes a capacity-building approach to poverty, and considers individual and community assets as starting places for building local communities’ capacity and economy. Community economic development aims to go beyond problem solving and build healthy and economically viable communities. It is an alternative to conventional approaches to economic development, founded on the belief that problems before communities—unemployment, poverty, job loss, environmental degradation, and loss of community control—need to be addressed in a holistic and participatory way. It can be defined as action by people locally to create economic opportunities and enhance social conditions in their communities on a sustainable and inclusive basis, particularly for those who are most disadvantaged. Along similar lines, with a slightly more focused emphasis on employment, the Canadian Women’s Foundation (2010) defines women’s economic development and sustainable livelihood as enhancing their employability, exploring and consolidating their economic possibilities, and facilitating their gradual passage from survival to asset building.
Community economic development then, proffers a very contemporary for-mulation of development that aims to combine growth with justice, through applying both socialist and capitalist ideas. While many CED initiatives are an evident continuation of the mid-twentieth-century movements against urban poverty, the close collaboration between grassroots activists, private businesses, and state agencies inevitably imbues them with pragmatic and mainstream political-economic ideas. Unlike the older social democratic emphases on the state as a benevolent redistributor of welfare, CED gives more credit to poor people’s economic agency by replacing their depiction as endemically needy and highlighting their “assets” and “capacities.” But—and this point will recur throughout the book—reorienting the discourse on economic justice to poor people’s assets is a potentially thorny move. While such focus celebrates their ingenuity, recognizes the value of their cultural knowledge, and ultimately underscores their humanity, at the same time it serves as a convenient token for drawing them straight into the neoliberal logics of self-sufficiency. One of the most widely discussed examples, to which I return in my discussion of empowerment later in the book, is the co-optation of traditional women’s saving circles by microlending conglomerates. Still, despite the emphasis on paid work as a major, if not the major source of dignified livelihood, the discourse of community economic development rejects extreme versions of neoliberal individualism. As indicated by its name, it aims to shift responsibility for poor people’s well-being back to the community. Also in contrast to the unilateral emphasis on growth, as appears in more extreme versions of neoliberalism, this discourse emphasizes balance among the diverse components of human communities, and between economic and environmental development. Lastly, despite its immersion in global webs of discourses, re-sources, and powers, it aims to cushion the crushing effects of globalization by taking a decisive stand against unlimited economic growth in favor of more balanced local economies.
Social Economy: The Israeli Version of Community Economic Development
In Israel too the structural changes that accompanied economic liberalization have created a need for a new discourse on social justice. Against surging social and economic inequalities, worsening job insecurity, shrinking state welfare, and continuous stalemate in the peace process, ideas of sustainable economic growth and a more balanced approach to social, ethnic, and environmental forces are gaining in popularity. The term “community economic development” itself, however, has not entered the local discourse. Instead, ideas generally associated with CED in other parts of the world are more commonly identified with the Hebrew term “social economy” (kalkala hevratit) (Levy 2004; Ilany 2005).
The appearance of “social” in the Hebrew version of CED is not coincidental. As I show in my previous work (Sa’ar 1998, 2006a), in Israeli public discourse attempts to tackle contentious issues, primarily those related to ethnic, national, or class relations, almost invariably spark quarrels on whether the issue at hand is “political” or “social.” Labeling an issue “political” is generally regarded locally as highlighting its conflictive components. By calling controversial issues political, speakers habitually communicate their belief that efficient civil action must acknowledge issues of power and domination. The counter-argument is usually that anything “political” is tainted with interests, and that a constructive approach to touchy subjects must frame them as “social” or “apolitical,” so as to create consensus rather than deepen divisions (see also Simchai 2009).
Two implied meanings in particular are often associated with “the social.” First, “social” is a common euphemistic reference to tensions involving lower-class Mizrahi Jews. As mentioned earlier, despite their numerical majority Mizrahi Jews have been a sociological minority for several decades, and are still overrepresented in the lower socioeconomic echelons. The fact that many Mizrahim are highly educated, that they figure in the different elite groups, and that interethnic (but intra-Jewish) marriages have become commonplace, has not eliminated old grudges against the deep-rooted and practically institutionalized Ashkenazi racism. Quite the reverse: these resentments have been politicized—in parliamentary politics, in intellectual production, or in the actions of civil society groups working to resurrect Mizrahi cultural production and quick to make loud protests at the periodic racist slippages of public figures. Then again, this kind of Mizrahi identity politics has itself caused substantial resentment. Many Israeli Jews, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi alike, reckon that it aggravates historical injustices unnecessarily and unjustifiably because, as noted, things have improved significantly for large numbers of Mizrahim. In this touchy discursive terrain, those wishing to skirt ethnic tensions tend to replace explicit mention of the topic by talking about “the social issue.”
The other common implied meaning of “social” concerns intra-Israeli Jewish-Arab relations. Here the major tension revolves around the dual Jewish-cum-democratic definition of the state, two components that the Palestinian citizens generally regard as irreconcilable while the Jewish citizens generally consider as reasonably compatible, even if not perfectly so (see, e.g., Smooha 2002).8 Under the democratic heading, the Arab citizens are entitled to certain important individual civil rights but their exclusion from the Jewish national component means that their collective rights, notably the right to identify as Palestinians, to exercise cultural autonomy, or to have collective land ownership, are severely curtailed. Moreover, as I explained earlier, even rights that are seemingly not controversial, such as access to education, healthcare, police protection, or defense against discrimination in the workforce, are very poorly fulfilled. This multifaceted exclusion provokes civil society groups to protest, litigate, and organize in order to claim the rights of the Arab citizens. Among the Jews, responses to such actions and discourses range from meek justification through ambiguity and suspicion to outright hostility, depending on how these acts are interpreted. If they are considered “political” they are all too likely to generate suspicion and hostility. But if they are successfully framed as “social,” then tolerance is claimed under the justification that these are legitimate democratic practices/discourses (see also Al-Haj 1995).
Given this semantic resonance, one may understand why the local version of community economic development is called social economy. As I show in the following sections, the incorporation of CED-related ideas into the Israeli context has been filtered through the intricate intersections of ethnic, national, class, and gender hierarchies. The attempts to mainstream potentially radical ideas about social justice and better integration of marginalized populations have required delicate packaging and sophisticated negotiation. Against this background, the calming timbre of “the social” is a good indication of the shape this new discourse of civic entitlement and economic justice is taking.
The Israeli Field of Social Economy
Social economy, then, can be said to stand for bottom-up poverty-reducing efforts that offer an alternative to routine state-centered approaches to economic development. Contrary to the old socialism, the discourse taking shape around social economy can accommodate collective ideas of social justice with individual desires for well-being. It sees enterprise and business development as a lever for growth, not as an inevitable source of social malfunction. It fosters work with and not against the economic sector, with and not against the government. It contains ideas of success, happiness, and wealth for everyone. It also gives greater weight than the old socialism to individuals’ agency, wishes, and responsibility.
Projects and the People Who Operate Them
Since the late 1990s and increasingly in the 2000s, Israel started to fill up with semiprivatized, NGO-led programs aiming to better the economic situation of groups in the social and geographical periphery, with particular, though not exclusive, emphasis on women.9 The projects commonly target women from marked populations, notably Arab, Jewish ultra-Orthodox, migrants from Ethiopia or the former USSR, as well as Mizrahi women from poor neighborhoods. Far fewer projects target men (primarily Jewish ultra-Orthodox, Arab, or new immigrants) and youth. The overarching aim of most projects is to enhance the economic situation of members of these groups, by giving them occupational training, either specific or general, boosting their self-confidence, and increasing their overall ability to negotiate their way in the workforce. By my estimate, in 2015 economic empowerment projects across Israel number several hundreds. They range from very localized and small-scale courses to well-oiled and heavily financed projects that train hundreds and even thousands of participants yearly and operate in several locations simultaneously. Some programs are sectorial, targeting women from particular ethnic, religious, or language groups, while others are more inclusive. Adriana Kemp and Nitza Berkovitch (2013) estimate the number of low-income women who participated in the various projects in the field so far at 17,000.
Training courses are by far the most popular form of action in these projects. Themes usually include computer skills, marketing, product development, writing CVs, and Hebrew. These may then be supplemented by more specific branch-related topics, such as training as an assistant in tender-age education or as a secretary at insurance agencies, acquiring particular technical skills, or marketing and business management (in microentrepreneurship projects). Along with this teaching component all the programs without exception have a component called “dynamic” (short for group dynamics). This is moderated group discussion, in which the trainees are invited to reveal their feelings, fears, and innermost dreams, as they stand at the threshold of becoming income-generating, “productive” members of society. As I discuss at length in Chapter 3, this effort to boost the participants’ self-esteem, generally referred to as “empowerment,” is at once a key scenario in the social-economy field and the locus of some of its major paradoxes. Other types of activities taking place in the field, in addition to training and empowerment courses, are litigation, protest, unionizing, legal and professional counseling for low-income employees, cross-sectorial and international networking, and producing professional and academic knowledge about women and work.
A particularly popular component in the projects is entrepreneurship. To clarify, unlike the UN-supported development industry, in the Israeli social-economy field, microenterprise, while popular, is not the only or even the most prevalent form of action. For example, of the sixteen programs reported on the website of the Special Projects Fund of Israel’s National Insurance Institute in 2013, under the rubric “integrating women in the workforce” only seven had “entrepreneurship” in their title (I explain the role of this institution in the next section). A higher proportion, fifteen out of thirty projects, emerged in the Van Leer Research Group Survey, one of the five primary sources of this book, where we explicitly sought out projects that did entrepreneurship. The scope of microlending, moreover, is smaller still, with one important agency, the Koret Israel Economic Development Funds (KIEDF), which works primarily with Bedouins and new immigrants, and a handful of much smaller projects that operate among asylum seekers and work migrants. According to Kemp and Berkovitch (2013), between 2006 and 2009 KIEDF provided a total of 2,280 microloans, of them more than half to Bedouin women. Other existing foundations, by contrast, set requirements and charge costs, which are too high for typical women microentrepreneurs, the result being that women comprise only a third of their clientele (Kemp and Berkovitch 2013). Nevertheless, the idea of entrepreneurship has come to be perceived as an important general work skill, even in projects that focus on helping women find paid employment, communicating the message that whether salaried or self-employed, people must be able continuously to rebrand and market themselves to succeed in today’s dynamic workforce.
Characteristically, the personnel operating the projects include project managers, coordinators, fundraisers, and women whose main occupation is to teach the courses. A relatively high proportion among them are Palestinian and Mizrahi women, and some men, for whom the social-economy field offers new and exciting career paths. Typically, the lecturers, group moderators, and economic consultants who do the actual teaching of the courses, and who subsequently accompany their low-income clients in their business ventures, are freelancers with two major types of expertise. They have a background in finance, accountancy, business management, human resource management, and related themes; or they have worked as facilitators of group-dynamics sessions in feminist circles, Arab-Jewish dialogue programs, or support groups for welfare recipients. Another important type of expertise is legal knowledge, sought particularly in organizations that engage in lobbying, policy initiatives, and legal support. Last but not least, the field also engages actors whose main expertise is knowledge production, to develop operational models and evaluate impact, or to work as action researchers.
Cross-sectorial Partnerships
Organizationally, the projects commonly operate as partnerships of several bodies, often combining nonprofit civil society organizations, state or municipal agencies, private philanthropists, and representatives from the business community. So at the grassroots level, the partners are often nongovernmental organizations firmly rooted in the arena of women’s rights, minority rights, and social change activism. Alternatively, they may be less ideological nonprofit organizations affiliated with local or national establishments, with previous experience in tender-age education, women’s health, and the like, who have directed some or most of their activity to the economic empowerment of women. These organizations raise funds for each project, and the type of funding dictates the degree to which they operate alone or in collaboration. Usually projects are operated through dense networks of local and national partners, with funding from international donors or national benefactors, or both. Typical partners are local municipalities and their various subsidiaries (community centers, welfare bureaus, Neighborhood Renewal agencies), state ministries (notably the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor [MITL], the Welfare, and the Immigration Absorption Ministries), other state agencies (Special Project Fund of the National Insurance Institute, Authority for Small and Middle-Size Businesses, Centers for Fostering Entrepreneurship called MATI, or several authorities within the Prime Minister’s Office), actors from the business community, and large Zionist foundations that function as semiprivate extensions of the state.
Since the establishment of Israel, large Zionist foundations have played a major role in the development and operation of the state’s social and economic infrastructure. Actors such as the Jewish Agency, the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Jewish National Fund, the Rothschild Foundation, the Rashi Foundation, and others have been heavily involved in the development of new communities around the country. This longstanding outsourcing of state responsibilities to such bodies, which are explicitly committed to enhance Jewish and Zionist goals, and which as private bodies are not bound by the criteria of universal redistribution, has been strongly criticized as an institutional form of state discrimination (Kretzmer 1990). However, these lines of national exclusion seem to have loosened somewhat with the recent involvement of these bodies in economic empowerment and antipoverty schemes. Having rearticulated their interpretation of “democratic strength” to include reducing inequalities between Jews and Arabs, these foundations have become important partners in projects that target Palestinian citizens.
One prominent characteristic of the involvement of large Zionist foundations in the social-economy field is their tendency to be active partners, as opposed to detached donors. For this purpose, some of them establish large nonprofit organizations that work in close collaboration with state ministries on the one hand, and with civil society organizations on the other. One such organization, which fits the description of what Ardhana Sharma (2006) called a government organized NGO (GONGO), is Tevet (Hebrew acronym for tnufa be-ta’asuka, “momentum in employment”). Established in 2005 as a joint project of JDC Israel and the MITL, Tevet aims to increase the workforce participation of men and women from five socially vulnerable categories in particular: young people with no family support, new immigrants, Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and people with mental disabilities. Tevet’s main mission is to enhance expert knowledge on workforce participation of such populations, through developing courses, textbooks, and operational models, and then training personnel in different civil society organizations on how to implement it. In the present research, Tevet figured repeatedly in its capacity as senior partner in several of the projects that I studied and as a highly influential actor in the field generally.
Another important actor of a slightly different character is the Special Projects Fund of the National Insurance Institute, the central state agency responsible for all social benefits. This fund, which defines itself as a future social hothouse, “aims to support and encourage experimental welfare services for at-risk groups and people with particular needs, such as battered women, dysfunctional families, released prisoners … job seekers, street dwellers, and more.”10 In 2013 the Special Project Fund, which acted as a strategic partner in two of the projects in which I did fieldwork for this study, reported twenty-one active welfare-to-work programs, all addressing women or adolescent girls—again, over a wide range of “disempowered” groups.
As mentioned, a different source of funding in the field is the business community, which has shown increasing interest in social entrepreneurship. Several recent millionaires from the high-tech, financial, and industrial sectors have established foundations, sometimes forming attached nonprofit organizations (NPOs) or channeling the funds directly to existing NPOs, to combat poverty and social inequalities through promoting education, employment, and well-being in the periphery. These tycoons characteristically see themselves as working for the national good, and they have a sense of obvious entitlement to talk directly to policy and decision makers inside the state system as well as among Zionist donors, offering generous matching if the government agrees to invest in enterprises they deem important. They are just as keen to work directly with grassroots actors on account of their presumed hands-on experience and because they are perceived as a way to bypass the ponderous state bureaucracy.
An example of a business-organized nonprofit organization (BONPO) is Be’atsmi (Hebrew, “By Myself”). This organization, established in 1995, is sup-ported primarily by private businesses (including a bank, several large industrial and financial concerns, and middle-range and small firms) and philanthropic foundations, and receives matching funds in cash or kind from several government ministries, state agencies, and local municipalities. Be’atsmi’s declared goal, as stated on its website, is to help low-opportunity people of diverse backgrounds—women and men, Jews and Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, new immigrants, and former prisoners—find sustainable and fair employment to match their skills and ambitions. In 2012 it reported operating forty-one projects in thirty-three communities across Israel, with a cumulative total of 7,500 participants.11 Over the years, Be’atsmi has won tenders to operate projects that had been developed by Tevet-JDC. One of these, whose operation was divided between Be’atsmi and the Women’s Lobby, was Eshet Hayil (Hebrew, “Woman of Valor”).
In 2010, research assistant Liraz Sapir held telephone interviews with representatives of Be’atsmi and the Women’s Lobby, as part of the Van Leer Research Group Survey, to map the involvement of civil society organizations in the field of social economy. In her interview, the Be’atsmi representative reported Eshet Hayil as the main project of that organization. Designed “for women from Ethiopia, the Caucasus, Bukhara, Arabs and locally born Israelis on welfare … Very weak, with hardly any education … ,” Eshet Hayil reportedly operated slightly over thirty groups in a wide variety of localities across the country. Each of the two representatives (of Be’atsmi and of the Women’s Lobby) gave a similar estimate of 1,500 trainees per year and over thirty employees, most of them working part time. The Be’atsmi representative also said, “Soon there will be a new tender from the Welfare Ministry and we’ll start operating on their behalf,” and noted, “It’s a great success for the program that a government ministry wants to adopt it.”
As it turned out, both organizations eventually lost their franchise to operate the project. In 2013, Tevet’s website reported that Eshet Hayil was operated by the Association for Encouraging and Advancing Community Centers in Israel, together with the MITL, the Ministry of Housing/Neighborhood Renewal, the Ministry of Immigration Absorption, and local municipalities. Yet while this particular program moved entirely to the domain of the state and local municipalities, the two above NPOs continued to be active through other programs. As of 2013, Be’atsmi reported a different large-scale project, Mifne (Hebrew, “Change”). Another product of Tevet, Mifne offers “intensive individual and group escort in order to create an occupational change in people’s lives.”12 As for the Women’s Lobby, this veteran liberal-feminist organization continues its general cause of promoting women’s rights. Since its franchise to operate Eshet Hayil ended, it has continued its ongoing activities of lobbying, producing indexes and data analyses, and doing empowerment work with women and girls. For this feminist organization, like others that we shall meet in Chapter 3, getting into a large-scale project in the specific field of employment made sense considering the momentum that gathered around this topic. Yet because its basic agenda is more general, it could afford to “lose” it and stay active.
As the idea of corporate responsibility began to gain popularity, so did the attempts to standardize and regulate “social giving” (netina hevratit), as Israelis like to call this type of philanthropy. For example, in 1995 a group led by businessman Ronny Douek established Zionism 2000, which aims to promote active citizenship by standardizing social philanthropy and creating collaborations of the business community, the government, and civil society. Designating three target populations—children and youth at risk, residents of Israel’s periphery, and the business/private sector, Zionism 2000 involves “thousands of volunteers, educators, social leaders, philanthropists, and business corporations” in “promoting a new and improved social agenda.”13 In 2006 it established Shitufim (Hebrew, “Sharing”), together with three other philanthropic foundations. Shitufim’s declared goals are to further the establishment of “effective” [using the English word] and meaningful Israeli charity, to promote third-sector organizations, and to foster active dialogue among NGOs, businesses, and government. To achieve these goals it organizes intersectorial round tables and creates knowledge: it produces databases, publishes reports, and popularizes catchy terms such as “social capital” and “diversity.”
Zionism 2000 with Shitufim, like JDC Israel with Tevet, in their capacity to mobilize substantial funding, engage decision makers and high-profile politicians, execute ambitious projects, and exert significant influence on the agenda and discourse of social responsibility, are strategic actors in the field of social economy. Eitan Shani, a social analyst I interviewed in 2013, who has been evaluating the impact of social economy projects since 2008, counted them as “infrastructure organizations,” together with about ten others. Beyond immersion in particular projects, these organizations aspire to plan and organize philanthropy and corporate responsibility better, to develop standardized measurements of social impact, promote transparency and accountability, professionalize NGOs’ financial and organizational management, and develop a language in which ideas of social sustainability can be communicated across the full spectrum of government, businesses, and civil society.
Grassroots Grounded Projects
Despite the heavy involvement of the business and government sectors, grassroots organizations have played an important part in shaping and operating the field of social economy. These are human rights, minority rights, and feminist organizations, which in the late 1990s began to shift their focus toward the domain of economic rights and launched pioneering initiatives in that direction, taking inspiration from CED initiatives in other countries. These groups sprang up from the legacy of human rights, so when they started working on the economic empowerment of women and minorities they were ill-equipped, ideologically and organizationally, to collaborate with the business, state, or municipal sectors. For example, when Economic Empowerment for Women, one of the grassroots organizations in which I did fieldwork for this research, launched its first microentrepreneurship course in 1999, its representatives were laughed out of the offices of MATI, an agency of the MITL that gives consultancy services for small businesses, to which they applied for collaboration. Less than a decade later, this same organization had become a regular partner of MATI and a prominent participant in forums on women’s economic empowerment, along with high officials in state agencies, municipal welfare bureaus, large philanthropic foundations, and BONPOs. Other social change and feminist organizations likewise continue to play an important role in the ongoing development of the field.
Hence the field of social economy produces somewhat unexpected encounters of actors with very different subject positions and identifications. A clear ideological and institutional opposition exists between people who are identified with the dominant political and economic systems and those who have made it their vocation to criticize and oppose these systems; nevertheless, individuals across the board have reason to engage each other in their quest to promote their projects. The distances between them therefore widen and narrow as they engage in overt disagreements or, conversely, as they discover social, professional, and sometimes even political affinities, or as personal careers carry individuals across from one arena to another.
As for funding, grassroots social-change organizations direct much of their fundraising efforts to private and public foundations outside the GONGOs and BONPOs, so that in at least part of their projects they may remain the sole visionaries, operators, and representatives. Characteristically, these are progressive Zionist foundations such as the New Israel Fund or particular Jewish federations, which define their mission as supporting human rights and a democratic culture, or non-Jewish international bodies that support minorities, women, workers’ unions, and the like. I mention some of these projects in Chapter 3, in a brief review of radical feminist initiatives that do not explicitly center on the economic issue. This pattern, moreover, is particularly characteristic of Palestinian organizations, which are less likely to receive support from state and related mainstream agencies. Although the target populations of such bodies now tend to include Arabs, their entitlement is limited to issues distinctly considered “apolitical,” a serious qualification as many of these Palestinian organizations have an explicitly political discourse and orientation.
However, when they operate projects in the more specific field of social economy, the vast majority of grassroots organizations work in close collaboration with larger, more mainstream bodies. Projects typically are run by clusters of partners, with one NGO usually acting as the main operator and the others varying in their degree of involvement. Thus one partner, say the local welfare bureau, may be active at the stage of recruiting participants; another (a community center or some other public institution) may provide the room in which classes and conferences actually take place, perhaps with some secretarial services included, while a third partner may pay for the lecturers and moderators. In other cases collaboration among the partners may be much closer and active, with the more mainstream partners keeping a close eye on progress through participation in steering committees, demanding detailed interim reports, or paying routine visits to the field.
The Tapestry of the Field
In the course of this study I conducted and recorded focused conversations with forty-two people, thirty-five women and seven men, who were directly involved in the field as project managers, lecturers, group moderators, impact evaluators, consultants, or representatives of foundations and ministerial agencies. I interviewed thirty-one of these people myself, and the rest through research assistants. A few of them also participated in a focus group that I held in Haifa in 2009. For the rest of this chapter I draw on these conversations to outline some of the prominent features of the field—discursive motifs, biographies, strategies, motivations, and dilemmas—as seen from the perspective of the people who operate the projects.
Overwhelming Encounters across Class and Ideological Divides
Rivka Shamir was about sixty years old when I interviewed her in 2003 in her office at the private accountancy firm where she was an associate. Two years earlier she had joined an NGO that works with low-income women as a freelance lecturer in their business training courses. Rivka opened her interview with me with a statement: “FemiBiz [pseudonym] has fulfilled a dream for many women, and also for me.” Then she continued:
For years, I’ve dreamed of teaching economics to women. I contacted a bank and offered to teach for them, and then MATI [the agency of the MITL that gives consultancy services for small businesses] but I didn’t get any response. Why do I want to teach women? Because a woman cannot be independent who depends on her husband’s purse strings …
Then one day I was invited to give a talk at the women’s club at this regional council [names the council] and I titled it “What do economics and feminism have in common?” In my ignorance I knew nothing about feminist activity here in the north and I drove all the way to the Women’s Lobby in Jerusalem to collect material. Anyway, after my talk the organizer talked about me to someone from FemiBiz, who had also given a talk there, and they called me to ask if I’d work with them. I was so happy that I shouted “I want to!” … The beginning was very exciting. In the first few meetings of the course that I taught I was so nervous. I expected the women to say that the material was too difficult. But no, they said it was very interesting and that I was being very respectful. Now, I’ve taken many courses in my life and attended many lectures, I never paid any thought to whether the lecturer was being respectful. Respect didn’t come into it because I simply took it for granted … Then I got similar reactions also in the second course [taught in a different city] … Women said that not all the lecturers had treated them with respect.
Later in the interview Rivka talked about the learning difficulties of women who attend the classes when they are preoccupied with pressing problems at home:
Disempowered women do not just suffer from low energy. The opposite is also true. They can be very stormy. Any slight comment that someone makes might start a fire. Sometimes this made teaching really difficult. I think it is possible that other lecturers, whom the women experienced as disrespectful, were not necessarily offensive. They were simply reacting to the personal disquiet of some of the participants … [And later], Their distress was so overwhelming that it was very difficult for me to listen to them. So I actually didn’t tell them that I was also a volunteer at the hotline for battered women. I didn’t want to encourage them to share with me more than I was prepared to take in.
A complete stranger to the world of organized feminism, Rivka lacked both the conceptual and the institutional framework to implement her dream to impart her economic knowledge on other women. Her early attempts to offer a course were rejected because they were made in a void. In the early 2000s FemiBiz and other grassroots organizations were only just beginning to communicate their message beyond the confines of feminist circles. Meanwhile, outside the “social world”—as we shall also see in the following interview with Noa Golan—sentiments were starting to brew about the need to “do something” and reach out to people in the periphery. The world of social activism provided access to such people, which seemed fresh and unmediated. It also seemed to offer compelling narratives, albeit, as interviewee Omar Azayza (below) put it, somewhat too sharp or “radical.”
Another topic arising from Rivka’s interview is her overwhelming experience of actually encountering low-income women. As another business lecturer, Nira Bergman, put it in her interview with me around the same time, “These are battered women. They have had so much agony in their lives. They barely have the energy to open a business.” Thus the projects conceived and implemented in the social-economy field provide a unique opportunity for direct engagements between people radically different in their class positions. Like the two upper-middle-class Ashkenazi-Jewish women cited here, actors of diverse social backgrounds are attracted to enter into such engagements; so are the women on the receiving end. Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, present a comprehensive description of the multiple vulnerabilities of the low-income women who enroll in the projects, and document their agency in utilizing the new opportunities to network and associate beyond the boundaries of their social class.
“Diversity” and the Surprising Embrace of the Palestinian Citizens
Noa Golan, fiftyish, and a manager of a BONPO, was interviewed for this study by Noor Falah in 2010.
I worked as a lawyer and then spent many years doing strategic planning and marketing consultancy, so I can say that I grew up in the business world. Then one day, when I already had status and money, I got up, left everything and went to look for the social world. Heaven knows why. I haven’t a clue. I just had this gut feeling. So I took a position in a company that promotes corporate responsibility and also did some consultancy for partnerships between businesses and civil society organizations. Five years down the line I left to establish a new organization that promotes such partnerships, and two years later I was recruited by [names a well-known magnate] to do this new project that helps integrate Arabs into the business world. When we started it was clear to us that we needed to generate a sea change in the attitudes of the business world to diversity [Noa uses the English word] in general, and to Arab university graduates in particular. There was nothing in the country back then in the field of diversity. So we started developing knowledge and tools for businesses; started piling up a directory and reaching out for businesses that would be willing to give Arab candidates a chance.
Later in the interview Noa says:
We have come [into existence] for a limited time—I would like to say seven years. I now know that it’s more realistic to talk about fifteen years. However, we are merely a mediating factor. We want to ripen the conditions for change and then leave … The large manpower agencies, such as Manpower and Hever, we consider them our partners, not our competitors. We pass on to them all the knowledge that we accumulate and develop, because we don’t really want to be doing placements for long. We’d rather they did that, just as they do with Jewish job seekers.
This excerpt touches on at least two issues that characterize the social-economy field more generally: the resonance of a high-tech logic in the new discourse on economic empowerment, and the elaborate symbolic work that goes into framing Palestinian citizens as a legitimate target group for “social” investments. To start with the latter, the inclusion of the Palestinian—or “Arab,” as most Israeli Jews prefer to call them—citizens among the target populations of the social-economy field, and the framing of their well-being as critical for the Israeli national well-being, is quite a recent development. The term “diversity,” which in the United States for example is so popular that it may be regarded as a key symbol of American culture, is very new to the Israeli discourse. Although diversity may be translated literally into Hebrew (givvun) or Arabic (tanawu’), it has no emic parallel; the insertion of these or similar words into daily speech does not have the effect of a nonantagonistic evocation of social divisions, which the English “diversity” does. That is why Noa, like other actors I spoke to in the business, philanthropy, and government sectors, used the English word and not any Hebrew equivalent. Grassroots activists, by contrast, used it only very rarely, when in their communications with high-power officials they sensed that their message might come across as too radical.
The inclusion of the Palestinian citizens in BONPO- and GONGO-led projects of social economy is striking considering the centrality of Zionist money and Zionist discourses in these projects. As presented in the background section of this chapter, in the early decades of Israeli statehood the large Zionist foundations were used precisely to bypass the state’s nominal commitment to universal redistribution and to actively oust the Palestinian citizens from the sphere of economic development and social integration. This does not mean that the mechanisms of ethnonational exclusion have been reversed or annulled. Arguably, as I pointed out earlier, marginalization of the Palestinian citizens remains solid and in some important respects has even worsened: poverty among them has deepened, their relative deprivation has increased parallel to the relative rise in their living standards, and judging by the recent series of racist laws and vocal expressions of anti-Arab feeling, their alienation seems to have even become more blatant. That said, it is noteworthy that their inclusion in the recent initiatives of social economy is not limited to the radical margins of grassroots activism. The Palestinians are in fact taken into account by the full range of partners operating in the field. Among them is the Prime Minister’s Office, where a special authority was created in 2008 to “maximize the economic potential of the Arab, Druze and Circassian populations by encouraging their integration into the national economy.”14 Similarly, economic development projects fostered by the Jewish Agency now explicitly place the advancement of Arab citizens on their agenda, including projects specifically designed to develop the Negev and Galilee, two regions that have been the emblems of state Judaization.15
This development, whereby the Arab minority is declaratively and actively brought under the wings of the Zionist apparatus, does not necessarily indicate a weakening of the hegemonic perception of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, or a shift towards the state-of-all-its-citizens position upheld by the non-Zionist left. Rather, it signifies a sense of urgency in the mainstream, secular Ashkenazi-Jewish elites to reduce social inequalities as a means of strengthening the democratic component of the state, which they perceive as complementary to its Jewish component.
Several forces concurrently are responsible for this twist in the historical course of ethnonational exclusion. One, as just mentioned, is the old elites reacting to the rising tide of religious fundamentalism by clinging to the liberal component of democracy and cultivating an image of civil society as a space for apolitical pluralism. The connection between “diversity,” social strength, and economic strength is traceable back to the early 1990s, with the Rabin-led peace process that culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Guy Ben-Porat (2004) documents the sweeping support among the leaders of the business community of the idea of a New Middle East as an engine of economic prosperity, and their commitment to invest billions of dollars in regional economic initiatives out of the conviction that “the war industry has run its course and peace is a better investment” (cited in Ben-Porat 2004: 190). The heads of the business organizations remained vocal in their support for the peace process even after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, publicly expressing their concern that stopping the peace process would have terrible implications for Israel’s economic future. This optimistic vision of peace and economic prosperity notwithstanding, Israeli public support for the peace process was and remains bound by ethnic and class lines. Ben-Porat notes that besides the traditional identification of the religious and the Mizrahi populations with the political right, their estrangement from the idea of a New Middle East was rooted in their realization that the anticipated fruits of economic growth would not trickle down to the lower classes and the social peripheries. Thus the collaboration between the business elite and the Labor Party, which is traditionally identified as Ashkenazi, marked the peace process as an interest of the elites, not the rank-and-file. Instead of winning hearts for peace, the business investments in regional economic enterprises served mostly to solidify the overlap of ethnic, class, and political divisions. Be that as it may, by the end of the 2000s no one was talking any longer about regional economic enterprises. Still, in the circles of the leading business elite, the link had been forged between minimizing political conflict and enhancing economic sustainability.
Another major force behind the new motivation to include Palestinian citizens in social economy initiatives is economic liberalization, which has made global connections and discourses an important part of the local business culture. In 2010 Israel finally joined the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The negotiations leading to its admission, as well as its eventual membership, have created pressures to abide by the organization’s standards of economic governance. Among other things, these dictate that the government must take direct action to reduce poverty, foster the periphery, and protect minority rights. A particularly conspicuous example of such influences is the surging preoccupation with the low labor force participation of Arab women, which as I document elsewhere (Sa’ar forthcoming) has rapidly become a consensual concern of government officials, grassroots activists, and experts of all sorts.
Indicative of the deeply paradoxical nature of the social-economy field, this sudden openness on the part of the bureaucratic and business elites to Palestinian citizens, and their consequent immersion into economic empowerment projects, have brought them into close contact with social change activists, who therefore constitute a third important source of influence. As shown throughout the book, and particularly in my discussion of civic entitlement and economic citizenship in Chapter 5, the collaborations in the projects of actors with very different subject positions make for strange bedfellows. Admittedly, the impact of the neoliberal logic on all participants in these encounters is enormous; but nor does the critical counterdiscourse of the grassroots activists go unnoticed by their more mainstream partners.
Going back to Noa’s narrative, another interesting motif, which reflects the mood in the field more generally, is the spirit of dynamism, creativity, and ambitiousness as essential elements of economic success. When Noa talks about the organization that she represents, which she was recruited to establish, she points to its anticipated dissolution (ideally within seven years) as the ultimate measurement of its success. In a similar vein, in my field diary I recorded several times the term “exit” (in English) spoken by NPO directors and representatives of foundations to whom I listened as they envisioned their involvement in particular projects. The idea of “exit” resonates strongly with the high-tech logic of success. Israeli popular culture is full of legendary stories of bright young men who started up a company with merely an idea and some seed money; then a few years later they managed to sell it to a global conglomerate, which brought about the demise of their original company and made them multimillionaires. This, of course, is not the experience of most high-tech workers, nor is the pick-up-and-go a feasible option for the average woman in the business world. Yet the possibility is believed to be there, and deemed to be reserved for those who have the additional spark, and the courage to listen to their innermost voice and follow it even before they know where it is leading them. These elements, reflected in Noa’s narrative of her personal career path, are central in Israeli neoliberal discourses of success. To varying degrees they are also popular throughout the field of social economy—among those who conceive, finance, and operate the projects, as well as among some of the low-income women who enroll in them.
A Bottom-Up, Radical Approach to Social Economy
The next excerpt is taken from an interview I conducted in 2003 with Ofra Gonen, a woman in her mid-fifties who worked as a coordinator and group moderator in an economic empowerment project. Ofra’s background was very different from Rivka’s and Noa’s. In important respects her life history actually resembled that of many of the projects’ clients. Her brief biography, as she told me on that occasion, reflects vividly the sense of growth that some women have experienced through their involvement in the field.
I grew up in a poor neighborhood, but I didn’t know that until I was accepted at a good high school in a different area, after I passed the state exam, the seker. Only after I joined the new school did I become aware of the enormous gap between the few of us who came from there and the majority who came from the more affluent neighborhoods. I had academic difficulties but refused to get assistance, even though I was eligible. I found it insulting, me being a good student and all. So I left, and at fifteen, after only one year in high school, I was already working. I did office work and worked as a cashier at a stall at the food market. I was always very strong in math. On this kind of job you have to work out large numbers really fast. Think how it is in the market. You don’t have time to write things down. You need to have a good brain and a good memory. I was very good at it and the boss liked me a lot. He’d send my parents complimentary boxes full of fruits and vegetables to show his gratitude. I did that until I was drafted to the army [at eighteen], and I stayed in the army for four years, instead of two, because I didn’t want to go back home. After four years I left and immediately found a job in a factory. I worked there for two years until they went bankrupt; then the man who bought the company took it on himself to teach me accountancy. I managed all the accounts of the factory and the shops, and took night classes to complete my matriculation certificate. I stayed on that job until I was about thirty, except for a year and a half, aged about twenty-five, which I spent in London. Eventually I decided that I wasn’t getting much there. I wanted to find myself, maybe study. I’ve never stopped wanting to.
After I left the factory I found a job as a caretaker at the shelter for battered women. The pay was less. By the way, the guy who took my job at the factory immediately got a salary that was double what I had. When I pointed that out they said that he was a breadwinner, married with kids, and that if I stayed they’d give me the same. Not that I hadn’t tried to get a raise before. Anyway, I worked part time at the shelter, which got me right into the feminist “business.” A year later I already got arrested in a proabortion demonstration. I also found a job doing interviews for a study on Mizrahi disenfranchisement. That got me onto the Mizrahi issue. We had that NGO [names the NGO and some well-known Mizrahi activists]. The next stage was studying how to moderate Jewish-Arab dialogue groups.
Around the mid-1980s a guy who had worked with me in the factory asked me to do part-time accountancy in his new business, so I started doing that, and my salary for working a few afternoons a week was the same as what I got in the shelter. So I left the shelter and made that company my main place of employment. My job there grew with the years and I stayed until 1998. All that time I volunteered for feminist activities, did consciousness-raising groups in poor neighborhoods, went to demonstrations, and became more and more active. In the late 1990s I went to study senior business management in a program at the university. They accepted me even though I didn’t have the credentials, because I had good recommendations and they saw my record at the company. Now I’ve finally left my job as an accountant and I work only in NGOs, doing several part-time jobs.
Ofra’s narrative affords us the perspective of grassroots social-change activists in the social-economy field. In her case, preoccupation with the economic or class situation of women in the periphery is but one stopping point in a continuous collective engagement in discrimination, oppression, and social injustice. Like the narratives of grassroots activists generally, Ofra’s is first and foremost political: the economic plight of the women is related to their ethnic and national marginalization, which are in turn magnified by the gender power structure; it is impossible to tackle the one without the other, or to choose to focus on internal inequalities without taking a stand on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. While in this particular excerpt she mentions a proabortion demonstration (a gender/sexuality issue) and Mizrahi activism, Ofra, like many of her partners in the civil society organizations in the social economy field, is also a core member of the feminist peace movement.
