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
