with Activists and NGO Workers
In 2010–2011 I participated in a research group sponsored by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, titled “NGO-ization of Civil Spaces: Transformation of Welfare and Women’s Organizations in Civil Society.” As part of this project, Nitza Berkovitch, Adriana Kemp, and I conducted a survey of organizations that work in economic empowerment, with particular focus on microentrepreneurship and microfinance. Senior representatives of thirty organizations participated in the survey. Research assistant Liraz Sapir interviewed them by phone using a structured questionnaire. Thirteen of these organizations worked only with Arab women, eleven worked only with Jewish women, five worked with both, and one targeted African asylum seekers. Sixteen of the organizations did business training, while the remaining fourteen ran general job training, skills enhancement, and job placement, or employed women in nonprofit projects that they started especially for that purpose. The survey, whose primary goal was to explore the institutional structure of the field, focused on cross-sectorial partnerships, funding, organizational structures, and self-measurement of efficiency and success.
Alongside these concentrated and focused interviews, I also used my share of the Van Leer grant to enlarge the sample of face-to-face interviews with actors in the field, at the level of project directors, group moderators, professionals and officials in the civil society, business, philanthropy, and government sectors. Several research assistants held face-to-face semistructured interviews with Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking actors from different parts of the country. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed. These interviews were added to those I had conducted at earlier stages, bringing them to a total of 42 (17 Jews and 25 Palestinians, 7 men and 35 women).
Two Notes on Language Use
Explaining the Referential Value of Some of the Terms Used in the Book
Because I am a non-English speaker writing in English, describing a non-English-speaking setting, I realize that some of the vocabulary that I use in this book carries a specific referential value that may not be self-evident to native English readers. Four expressions in particular—“feminist,” “radical activists,” “global,” and “low-income women”—which recur throughout the book, may merit explanation. “Feminist” appears in a variety of meanings. Besides scholarly or theoretical uses, which are accompanied by references to the relevant literatures, when I use the word “feminist” as part as the ethnography, I refer to grassroots activism against multiple forms of women’s oppression and patriarchal injustice. In the context at hand, people involved in such activism—“activists”—are usually also involved in the pro-peace/antioccupation camp, hence they are perceived and see themselves as “radical.” This word usually implies an antiestablishment stance, which in Israel commonly means non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, as well as support for an independent Palestinian state and for the right of the Arab citizens to self-identify as a national minority. In the case of feminists more specifically, “radical” means perceiving gender, ethnic, national, sexual, and class oppressions as mutually informing and inextricably entwined, and attempting to make the connections in all the protest and struggle activities.
Two other common expressions that I use regularly in the book, and which are less specifically Israeli, are “global” and “low-income women.” By “global” I mean ideas, practices, and connections that extend beyond the political and symbolic borders of the state, and which are relevant in multiple cultural settings simultaneously. “Low-income” serves to describe the class situation of the women who are the addresses or clients of social economy projects. As is often the case with class terminology, this term is somewhat vague. As shown throughout the book, the implications of family income levels on people’s quality of life, opportunities, and overall well-being are much too complex to be captured in a single term. Rather, “low-income women” is a minimalist expression that represents the official criterion for being included in the projects; I use thicker ethnographic descriptions to relate the complex realities of these women’s lives.
Disguising the Identity of Research Participants
Throughout this book the three organizations that I researched extensively are given their real names—the Microentrepreneurship Study, the Bedouin Village Study, and Atida (both operated by the same organization)—and so are the Mahut Center Study and the Van Leer Research Group Survey. Also appearing under their real names are the various research assistants and colleagues with whom I collaborated. The identities of the different participants whom I met through the interviews and observations are disguised. My choice of pseudonyms was guided by the principle of concealing individuals’ identities but keeping the ethnic or national markers of their names when such existed. In Israel, Jews and Palestinians can readily discern Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Arab names. Palestinians can usually also tell Christian, Muslim, and Bedouin names. Yet many Jewish names are Hebraized in ways that make their original ethnic identities untraceable. I, for example, only became Sa’ar at the age of twenty, when our family decided to Hebraize our original surname Sircovich. In contrast to this Eastern European name, Sa’ar is distinctly Hebrew (it means “storm”) and ethnically neutral. So Jewish surnames in Israel may or may not be ethnically marked. First names on the other hand are mostly unmarked, except for those of people who immigrated to Israel as adults and kept their original names; this is characteristic of people who are now old or who arrived over the past twenty years, when the trend of Hebraizing names began to subside.7 In choosing pseudonyms I have tried to keep these identifying/blurring markers as close as possible to the original.
Arguments
The Israeli field of social economy, like community economic development more generally, is a meeting place where actors from diverse subject positions come together in an effort to mitigate the rapacious effects of capitalism, yet without attempting to replace it altogether. These cross-sectorial partnerships yield a hybrid discourse on economic justice, social solidarity, and civic inclusion. I use the concept of economic citizenship to examine how these ideas form in a particular setting, at a particular moment in time. The notion that economic self-sufficiency is central to the fulfillment of civic entitlement originates in diverse—and very distinct—discursive fields. It means different things when spoken by grassroots feminist activists, who demand recognition of women’s invisible economic contribution and claim the right of low-income women to be gainfully employed; by business philanthropists who promote corporate responsibility; by developers who aim to maximize the social capital of the poor; or by conservative politicians who opt to measure civic entitlement by the perceived fiscal productivity of individuals. On the ground, however, the notion of economic citizenship allows genuine dialogues that bridge these seemingly vast ideological distances. Besides travelling across social sectors, the idea of economic citizenship also travels across cultures. In the particular example of Israel, its localization entails an accommodation of seemingly incompatible emphases on the rights and duties of individuals to earn money, and on collective belonging and making a heroic contribution to the nation. Yet while it may sound idiosyncratic to local ears, the idea of economic citizenship begins to make sense as actors go hands-on into concrete economic empowerment projects. So it happens that alongside—not instead of—the loud narratives of essential differences and ethnonational exclusion emerge narratives of inclusion that appear to open up unfamiliar spaces for diversity. As members of the mainstream sectors of society make active attempts to reach out to those who until recently were seen merely as welfare subjects, if not outright hostile elements—passive, needy, abject—they refashion them as “self-entrepreneurs,” hence active partners in the resurrection of a stronger civil society.
The grounded experiences of these newly admitted partners—low-income women of diverse ethnic, national, and linguistic backgrounds—reveal the role of gender in the adoption of the idea of economic citizenship. The ethnography shows that in handling the pressures to increase their income and become self-supportive, women are guided by the cultural schema of the gender contract, which expects them to participate in the workforce and earn money, but still keep domestic care work as their first
