Economic Citizenship. Amalia Sa’ar
another (a community center or some other public institution) may provide the room in which classes and conferences actually take place, perhaps with some secretarial services included, while a third partner may pay for the lecturers and moderators. In other cases collaboration among the partners may be much closer and active, with the more mainstream partners keeping a close eye on progress through participation in steering committees, demanding detailed interim reports, or paying routine visits to the field.
The Tapestry of the Field
In the course of this study I conducted and recorded focused conversations with forty-two people, thirty-five women and seven men, who were directly involved in the field as project managers, lecturers, group moderators, impact evaluators, consultants, or representatives of foundations and ministerial agencies. I interviewed thirty-one of these people myself, and the rest through research assistants. A few of them also participated in a focus group that I held in Haifa in 2009. For the rest of this chapter I draw on these conversations to outline some of the prominent features of the field—discursive motifs, biographies, strategies, motivations, and dilemmas—as seen from the perspective of the people who operate the projects.
Overwhelming Encounters across Class and Ideological Divides
Rivka Shamir was about sixty years old when I interviewed her in 2003 in her office at the private accountancy firm where she was an associate. Two years earlier she had joined an NGO that works with low-income women as a freelance lecturer in their business training courses. Rivka opened her interview with me with a statement: “FemiBiz [pseudonym] has fulfilled a dream for many women, and also for me.” Then she continued:
For years, I’ve dreamed of teaching economics to women. I contacted a bank and offered to teach for them, and then MATI [the agency of the MITL that gives consultancy services for small businesses] but I didn’t get any response. Why do I want to teach women? Because a woman cannot be independent who depends on her husband’s purse strings …
Then one day I was invited to give a talk at the women’s club at this regional council [names the council] and I titled it “What do economics and feminism have in common?” In my ignorance I knew nothing about feminist activity here in the north and I drove all the way to the Women’s Lobby in Jerusalem to collect material. Anyway, after my talk the organizer talked about me to someone from FemiBiz, who had also given a talk there, and they called me to ask if I’d work with them. I was so happy that I shouted “I want to!” … The beginning was very exciting. In the first few meetings of the course that I taught I was so nervous. I expected the women to say that the material was too difficult. But no, they said it was very interesting and that I was being very respectful. Now, I’ve taken many courses in my life and attended many lectures, I never paid any thought to whether the lecturer was being respectful. Respect didn’t come into it because I simply took it for granted … Then I got similar reactions also in the second course [taught in a different city] … Women said that not all the lecturers had treated them with respect.
Later in the interview Rivka talked about the learning difficulties of women who attend the classes when they are preoccupied with pressing problems at home:
Disempowered women do not just suffer from low energy. The opposite is also true. They can be very stormy. Any slight comment that someone makes might start a fire. Sometimes this made teaching really difficult. I think it is possible that other lecturers, whom the women experienced as disrespectful, were not necessarily offensive. They were simply reacting to the personal disquiet of some of the participants … [And later], Their distress was so overwhelming that it was very difficult for me to listen to them. So I actually didn’t tell them that I was also a volunteer at the hotline for battered women. I didn’t want to encourage them to share with me more than I was prepared to take in.
A complete stranger 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;