Thus, contrary to the earlier version of Israeli welfare, recent privatization has had the effect of widening the gaps within the Jewish population, in addition to the gaps between Jews and Palestinians. It has also brought strikingly to the fore the interaction effect of class and gender, which entails significant advantages and substantial setbacks to upper-class men and lower-class women, respectively. Notably—and this feature of neoliberalism runs like a thread throughout the ethnography—the effects of the privatization of social services on low-income women are inconsistent, at once impoverishing and advantageous. On the one hand, it has worsened their job security as they are the prime employees of these systems. It has also often entailed a heavier burden of domestic care work, since it is they who now have to take care of their aging and sick relatives or keep their children busy during after-school hours. On the other hand, privatization of social services has facilitated the entry of migrant care workers, which has actually saved the day for many female citizens who would otherwise have to retreat from the job market to do care work at home. Then again, the advent of massive numbers of migrant workers has intensified the already existing orientation of a split labor market, which rendered low-income Mizrahi and Palestinian female citizens vulnerable to begin with.
Multiple Bases of Social Inequality
As this overview reveals clearly, the Israeli structure of social stratification has been organized along ethnic and national lines from the very beginning, and has remained consistent regardless of the dramatic economic and political changes over time. The initially hegemonic position of Ashkenazi Jews was shored up first through their dominance in the new state apparatus, in its Zionist subsidiary agencies, in the strong, highly connected economic sectors, and later through the military-industrial complex, the intellectual elites, and the high-tech and financial industries (Kimmerling 2001). Clearly, the ethnic labels Ashkenazi and Mizrahi are objectified forms of social distinctions that in reality are much more fluid and ambiguous (Dominguez 1989). Still, even considering changes over the years in educational, economic, and political attainments, the categories remain alive in local discourse. They retain tangible social implications, engender political organizing in and out of parliament, and stir heated identity debates (e.g., Hever, Shenhav, and Motzafi-Haller 2002; Levi 1999; Abutbul, Grinberg, and Motzafi-Haller 2005). Although Mizrahi Jews eventually also entered all the different elites, as well as the middle class, they nevertheless remain to this day overrepresented in development towns and peripheral neighborhoods, in low-wage jobs, and in the lower deciles. As shown in Table 1.1, in 2011, for example, the average wage of Ashkenazi employees residing in urban areas was 33 percent higher than the national average wage of urban employees, while that of Mizrahi employees was only 7 percent above the average. This, however, was mildly good news as it reflected improvement compared with ten years earlier, when their average wage was 5 percent below the national average (Swirski and Konor-Attias 2012). Mizrahim, furthermore, also remain more vulnerable to unemployment, poverty, and poor schooling (Swirski and Konor-Attias 2012). As of the 2010s, the complex picture of considerable number of Mizrahim at the centers of power and decision making while a critical mass still lingers in the periphery is a constant source of public debate on whether they are still the victims of racism and state discrimination. For the purpose of the present study, the long-lasting effects of structural discrimination may not be disregarded. They are discernible in the substantial presence of Mizrahi women among the participants, whose manifold vulnerabilities are related in the next chapter.
Table 1.2 Incidence of Poverty among Families by Population Groups (percentages)
(Table #8, the National Insurance Institute’s Annual Poverty Report 2014)
http://www.btl.gov.il/Publications/oni_report/Documents/oni2013.pdf
As for the Palestinian citizens, they continue to suffer diverse forms of discrimination and structural violence (Torstrick 2000; Haidar 2005; Yiftachel 2006; Khamaisi 2009; Saban 2011; Abdo-Zubi 2011), and despite certain improvements their status has remained truncated, and some would say hopeless and inevitably crisis-ridden (Rouhana and Ghanem 1998). On the optimistic side, I mentioned the moderate widening of job opportunities, greater freedom of movement, and greater access to state welfare; to these I may add increasingly autonomous political participation, some successful instances of collective bargaining,4 improving living standards for many, growing rates of education, and burgeoning cultural production. Against these, periodic surveys show many indications that the status of the Palestinian citizens has become fixed or has even deteriorated. While political protest has been allowed and has taken place continuously since the 1970s or even earlier, on several occasions—notably the first Land Day in 1976, the demonstrations at the outbreak of the second intifada in October 2000, and the protests at the Gaza invasion in 2009—it has instigated violent crackdowns that included the killing of protesters, mass arrests including minors, and heavy surveillance. Excessive police aggression against Palestinian citizens has been registered also during routine crime patrols. For example, according to a 2004 report of Mossawa (Arabic, “equality”), the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, in the three years following the killing by police forces of thirteen citizens during the Galilee protests of October 2000, sixteen more citizens were killed in various incidents, nine by the police and six by the army or the border police.5 Hate attacks against Arabs, whether verbal, physical, or symbolic, are prevalent.6 They largely go unpunished even when the anti-incitement law has clearly been violated, and they are actively and explicitly encouraged by numerous public figures, including rabbis and members of the Knesset. Between 2009 and 2013 the Netanyahu government was particularly active in legislating a series of laws expressly designed to curtail the Palestinian citizens’ civil rights; most notable among them is the citizenship law, which bans entrance of Palestinians from the Palestinian Authority for purposes of family unification (Barak-Erez 2008). Adala (Arabic, “justice”), the Legal Center for the Arab Minority Rights in Israel, enumerates seventeen new laws or amendments to existing laws since 2009, designed unambiguously to restrict political self-expression, rights of residency, and land rights of Palestinian citizens, or the activity of NGOs that support such rights.7
Table 1.3 Wage Gaps in Israel, by Ethnonationality and Gender, 2012 (in Israeli New Shekel)
Adapted from Dagan-Buzaglo, Hasson, and Ophir. 2014
Ethnic and national divisions are readily identified in local discourse as two of the major cleavages in Israeli society, alongside the religious-secular and the right-left divides. However, a comprehensive analysis of social inequalities, which takes into account citizenship, social class, and gender as structural mechanisms of stratification, has been much less tolerable in the local public discourse. Citizenship, for example, is widely regarded as the legitimate boundary of entitlement and belonging. Noncitizens’ rights, or more specifically the human rights violations and the overall plight of noncitizens residing in Israel for lengthy periods, have come increasingly to the fore since the early 2000s, with the swelling influx of migrant workers and asylum seekers over the past two decades or so. Besides widening the already existing split in the labor market, the presence of noncitizens has had a direct bearing on social inequalities by eroding public standards of dignified existence, spurring xenophobic sentiments, and stoking up the mood favoring annulling or setting conditions on the citizenship of Palestinian-Israelis. But so far, public debates on noncitizens’ rights have immediately turned the spotlight onto the identity of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than the all-Israeli structure of social