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
