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
