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
