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
