Economic Citizenship. Amalia Sa’ar
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 continuous financial support.
Interviews 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