integrating formal and practical expertise, in order to promote the employment of Arab women.
In practice, Atida compiled a database of women job seekers in the Nazareth area and a parallel database of potential employers. It offered intense two-month courses in skill enhancement (primarily Hebrew language, computer, and Internet skills) and general empowerment, intended to nurture among the participants a sense of entitlement to work for wages. It accompanied its graduates through the job search and during their early stages on the job. A planned component that did not mature during the pilot period was to work directly with both Arab and Jewish employers to encourage them to absorb Arab women into their ranks.
The two main tools used in this research (see Sa’ar 2011) were semistructured interviews with sixteen of the participants and with all twelve professionals employed in the project, as well as observations during selected sessions of the course. Research assistant Noor Falah conducted all the interviews with the participants and most of the observations; occasionally I substituted her. Both of us together held the interviews with the professionals. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed.
Sawa—Community Empowerment of Women in a Bedouin Village in Galilee
Between 2003 and 2011 al-Tufula conducted a community empowerment project with women in several Bedouin villages in Galilee that had been unrecognized for decades and therefore suffered extreme deprivation of the bare basics of infrastructure and social services. Until the mid-1990s these villages had no sewer systems, running water, electricity, or roads; no public transportation, telephone lines, or proper building permits; no schools or medical clinics (Kanaaneh et al. 1995). These extreme conditions started to improve after the villages gained state recognition, although by 2010 they were still highly deficient (Hossein 2012). Al-Tufula started working with women in six villages, at first in collaboration with other grassroots organizations and afterwards on its own, inspiring holistic, community-oriented feminist empowerment. It was determined to break away from the common tendency to focus on the needs of the women, who are on the very edge of the social periphery and indeed face tremendous objective difficulties, and instead engage them from the start as capable and knowledgeable agents.
For nearly a decade al-Tufula representatives paid regular visits to the villages, dedicating the first two years to reaching out and building trust among the women; later, groups of village activists met weekly or biweekly to discuss their vision, share their experiences, create a language of capacities, and define projects that they wanted to promote in their villages. With certain differences in intensity and success, each different group managed to obtain a room to meet in—a striking achievement considering that in the initial stages none of the villages had a public facility that could be used for that purpose. They opened small libraries for children where they ran extracurricular activities, wrote histories of the villages from the perspective of their womenfolk, organized activities for women, and lobbied and petitioned the regional council for improved public services and facilities. In one village the women even managed to seat a regular representative on the village committee, which was unprecedented in this all-men’s institution. Over the decade of al-Tufula’s involvement, some groups were active more or less continuously, while others operated for a while, then stopped for various reasons. For one thing, many women became employed and therefore had less time to attend group meetings. For another, many were deterred by their relatives’ and neighbors’ resentment. Although the activities focused by and large on consensual topics such as education and health, they still provoked hostility, as people suspected that the women might become too radical and undermine men’s authority. Toward the end of al-Tufula’s involvement only one village—Hseiniyye—still had an active group. In the others the groups had ceased to operate although individual members remained socially involved.
In 2010 the director of al-Tufula invited me to document the project in the recently recognized villages in the Galilee, as a form of participatory feminist action research. Nisreen Mazzawi, an anthropology master’s student who had been the first coordinator of that project, joined me in conducting a six-month study in Hseiniyye. This consisted of interviews and participant observation at the weekly meetings of the women’s project, called Sawa (Arabic, “equal” or “alike”). For the first two months Nisreen and I attended the group meetings together and compiled our field notes into a joint diary. Thereafter Nisreen went to most meetings on her own; from time to time I accompanied her, and I read and commented on her weekly reports. Nisreen also collected the life histories of twelve of the group’s core members; I interviewed another member and the four employees from al-Tufula, who had worked in the project over the years. All these interviews were recorded and transcribed. A first publication from this study (Sa’ar 2012) appeared in a book edited by Johayna Hossein, the then coordinator of the project, which detailed the story of the villages and the story of the project.
Mahut Center—Training Jewish Women to Be Employees
Mahut Center was established in Haifa in 2005 as a nonprofit women’s organization. It had actually started a year earlier as a project of the Haifa coalition of women’s organizations that aimed to help victims of domestic violence become economically independent. After it became an independent organization, Mahut expanded its mission to improving the economic situation of low-income and marginalized women in the Israeli employment market, and to fostering a just and secure employment market, in which women might enjoy their right to a respectable livelihood free of discrimination and harm.6 Mahut carried out four main activities. First, it offered job-placement services to individual Jewish and Arab women, escorting them over extended periods of time and offering diverse types of support. After an initial in-depth interview so that Mahut’s operatives could grasp the complexity of the women’s situation, they would teach them how to search and apply for jobs, write a CV, and manage an interview. The operatives would keep in touch with women even after they became employed, since often the job did not last and women had to start all over again (I discuss the discontinuous employment pattern at length in Chapter 2). The support mostly took the form of personal and/or group conversations. When possible, Mahut also referred its clients to other organizations for vocational training, and in at least one case even initiated such a course.
The second activity was knowledge production. Over the years of its operation, Mahut initiated four research projects: Women in a War Economy (documenting the crisis of women in the periphery during the 2006 war with Hizbulla), Women in a Precarious Workforce (on the gendered aspects of nonstandard jobs), Managers in Chains (on low-level store managers), and Women between Age and Employment (on ageism at the workforce). The publication of each final report was accompanied by a conference, to which Mahut invited high-profile policy makers. Each report was the basis for subsequent advocacy work. Besides the research reports Mahut published several position papers on issues pertaining to women’s employment.
Mahut’s third line was working directly with employers, challenging them to be more active in employing women, alerting them to the concept of abusive employment, and attempting to engage them in changing this norm. And lastly, like many of its sister organizations, Mahut dedicated many of its resources to cross-sectorial networking, another characteristic activity of the social economy field, on which I elaborate in the next chapter.
Mahut is represented in this study through a set of sixteen semistructured interviews with low-income Jewish women who were its clients. The interviews were conducted by Ya’ara Buksbaum, who was an employee of Mahut and the author (in partnership) of at least two of its reports. During her years with Mahut Ya’ara was also a master’s student in sociology, and wrote her thesis under my supervision on the employment of low-income Jewish women. I sponsored part of her research with my ISF grant, and in return she shared with me the content of the interviews. I interviewed the founder and director of Mahut, who also participated in a focus group I held in 2009. She was one of several leading actors in the field who became close friends of mine, and subsequently key informants. Mahut Center closed down in December 2013 due to difficulties in securing
