notes that besides the traditional identification of the religious and the Mizrahi populations with the political right, their estrangement from the idea of a New Middle East was rooted in their realization that the anticipated fruits of economic growth would not trickle down to the lower classes and the social peripheries. Thus the collaboration between the business elite and the Labor Party, which is traditionally identified as Ashkenazi, marked the peace process as an interest of the elites, not the rank-and-file. Instead of winning hearts for peace, the business investments in regional economic enterprises served mostly to solidify the overlap of ethnic, class, and political divisions. Be that as it may, by the end of the 2000s no one was talking any longer about regional economic enterprises. Still, in the circles of the leading business elite, the link had been forged between minimizing political conflict and enhancing economic sustainability.
Another major force behind the new motivation to include Palestinian citizens in social economy initiatives is economic liberalization, which has made global connections and discourses an important part of the local business culture. In 2010 Israel finally joined the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The negotiations leading to its admission, as well as its eventual membership, have created pressures to abide by the organization’s standards of economic governance. Among other things, these dictate that the government must take direct action to reduce poverty, foster the periphery, and protect minority rights. A particularly conspicuous example of such influences is the surging preoccupation with the low labor force participation of Arab women, which as I document elsewhere (Sa’ar forthcoming) has rapidly become a consensual concern of government officials, grassroots activists, and experts of all sorts.
Indicative of the deeply paradoxical nature of the social-economy field, this sudden openness on the part of the bureaucratic and business elites to Palestinian citizens, and their consequent immersion into economic empowerment projects, have brought them into close contact with social change activists, who therefore constitute a third important source of influence. As shown throughout the book, and particularly in my discussion of civic entitlement and economic citizenship in Chapter 5, the collaborations in the projects of actors with very different subject positions make for strange bedfellows. Admittedly, the impact of the neoliberal logic on all participants in these encounters is enormous; but nor does the critical counterdiscourse of the grassroots activists go unnoticed by their more mainstream partners.
Going back to Noa’s narrative, another interesting motif, which reflects the mood in the field more generally, is the spirit of dynamism, creativity, and ambitiousness as essential elements of economic success. When Noa talks about the organization that she represents, which she was recruited to establish, she points to its anticipated dissolution (ideally within seven years) as the ultimate measurement of its success. In a similar vein, in my field diary I recorded several times the term “exit” (in English) spoken by NPO directors and representatives of foundations to whom I listened as they envisioned their involvement in particular projects. The idea of “exit” resonates strongly with the high-tech logic of success. Israeli popular culture is full of legendary stories of bright young men who started up a company with merely an idea and some seed money; then a few years later they managed to sell it to a global conglomerate, which brought about the demise of their original company and made them multimillionaires. This, of course, is not the experience of most high-tech workers, nor is the pick-up-and-go a feasible option for the average woman in the business world. Yet the possibility is believed to be there, and deemed to be reserved for those who have the additional spark, and the courage to listen to their innermost voice and follow it even before they know where it is leading them. These elements, reflected in Noa’s narrative of her personal career path, are central in Israeli neoliberal discourses of success. To varying degrees they are also popular throughout the field of social economy—among those who conceive, finance, and operate the projects, as well as among some of the low-income women who enroll in them.
A Bottom-Up, Radical Approach to Social Economy
The next excerpt is taken from an interview I conducted in 2003 with Ofra Gonen, a woman in her mid-fifties who worked as a coordinator and group moderator in an economic empowerment project. Ofra’s background was very different from Rivka’s and Noa’s. In important respects her life history actually resembled that of many of the projects’ clients. Her brief biography, as she told me on that occasion, reflects vividly the sense of growth that some women have experienced through their involvement in the field.
I grew up in a poor neighborhood, but I didn’t know that until I was accepted at a good high school in a different area, after I passed the state exam, the seker. Only after I joined the new school did I become aware of the enormous gap between the few of us who came from there and the majority who came from the more affluent neighborhoods. I had academic difficulties but refused to get assistance, even though I was eligible. I found it insulting, me being a good student and all. So I left, and at fifteen, after only one year in high school, I was already working. I did office work and worked as a cashier at a stall at the food market. I was always very strong in math. On this kind of job you have to work out large numbers really fast. Think how it is in the market. You don’t have time to write things down. You need to have a good brain and a good memory. I was very good at it and the boss liked me a lot. He’d send my parents complimentary boxes full of fruits and vegetables to show his gratitude. I did that until I was drafted to the army [at eighteen], and I stayed in the army for four years, instead of two, because I didn’t want to go back home. After four years I left and immediately found a job in a factory. I worked there for two years until they went bankrupt; then the man who bought the company took it on himself to teach me accountancy. I managed all the accounts of the factory and the shops, and took night classes to complete my matriculation certificate. I stayed on that job until I was about thirty, except for a year and a half, aged about twenty-five, which I spent in London. Eventually I decided that I wasn’t getting much there. I wanted to find myself, maybe study. I’ve never stopped wanting to.
After I left the factory I found a job as a caretaker at the shelter for battered women. The pay was less. By the way, the guy who took my job at the factory immediately got a salary that was double what I had. When I pointed that out they said that he was a breadwinner, married with kids, and that if I stayed they’d give me the same. Not that I hadn’t tried to get a raise before. Anyway, I worked part time at the shelter, which got me right into the feminist “business.” A year later I already got arrested in a proabortion demonstration. I also found a job doing interviews for a study on Mizrahi disenfranchisement. That got me onto the Mizrahi issue. We had that NGO [names the NGO and some well-known Mizrahi activists]. The next stage was studying how to moderate Jewish-Arab dialogue groups.
Around the mid-1980s a guy who had worked with me in the factory asked me to do part-time accountancy in his new business, so I started doing that, and my salary for working a few afternoons a week was the same as what I got in the shelter. So I left the shelter and made that company my main place of employment. My job there grew with the years and I stayed until 1998. All that time I volunteered for feminist activities, did consciousness-raising groups in poor neighborhoods, went to demonstrations, and became more and more active. In the late 1990s I went to study senior business management in a program at the university. They accepted me even though I didn’t have the credentials, because I had good recommendations and they saw my record at the company. Now I’ve finally left my job as an accountant and I work only in NGOs, doing several part-time jobs.
Ofra’s narrative affords us the perspective of grassroots social-change activists in the social-economy field. In her case, preoccupation with the economic or class situation of women in the periphery is but one stopping point in a continuous collective engagement in discrimination, oppression, and social injustice. Like the narratives of grassroots activists generally, Ofra’s is first and foremost political: the economic plight of the women is related to their ethnic and national marginalization, which are in turn magnified by the gender power structure; it is impossible to tackle the one without the other, or to choose to focus on internal inequalities without taking a stand on the Israeli
