Economic Citizenship. Amalia Sa’ar

I found it insulting, me being a good student and all. So I left, and at fifteen, after only one year in high school, I was already working. I did office work and worked as a cashier at a stall at the food market. I was always very strong in math. On this kind of job you have to work out large numbers really fast. Think how it is in the market. You don’t have time to write things down. You need to have a good brain and a good memory. I was very good at it and the boss liked me a lot. He’d send my parents complimentary boxes full of fruits and vegetables to show his gratitude. I did that until I was drafted to the army [at eighteen], and I stayed in the army for four years, instead of two, because I didn’t want to go back home. After four years I left and immediately found a job in a factory. I worked there for two years until they went bankrupt; then the man who bought the company took it on himself to teach me accountancy. I managed all the accounts of the factory and the shops, and took night classes to complete my matriculation certificate. I stayed on that job until I was about thirty, except for a year and a half, aged about twenty-five, which I spent in London. Eventually I decided that I wasn’t getting much there. I wanted to find myself, maybe study. I’ve never stopped wanting to.

      After I left the factory I found a job as a caretaker at the shelter for battered women. The pay was less. By the way, the guy who took my job at the factory immediately got a salary that was double what I had. When I pointed that out they said that he was a breadwinner, married with kids, and that if I stayed they’d give me the same. Not that I hadn’t tried to get a raise before. Anyway, I worked part time at the shelter, which got me right into the feminist “business.” A year later I already got arrested in a proabortion demonstration. I also found a job doing interviews for a study on Mizrahi disenfranchisement. That got me onto the Mizrahi issue. We had that NGO [names the NGO and some well-known Mizrahi activists]. The next stage was studying how to moderate Jewish-Arab dialogue groups.

      Around the mid-1980s a guy who had worked with me in the factory asked me to do part-time accountancy in his new business, so I started doing that, and my salary for working a few afternoons a week was the same as what I got in the shelter. So I left the shelter and made that company my main place of employment. My job there grew with the years and I stayed until 1998. All that time I volunteered for feminist activities, did consciousness-raising groups in poor neighborhoods, went to demonstrations, and became more and more active. In the late 1990s I went to study senior business management in a program at the university. They accepted me even though I didn’t have the credentials, because I had good recommendations and they saw my record at the company. Now I’ve finally left my job as an accountant and I work only in NGOs, doing several part-time jobs.

      Ofra’s narrative affords us the perspective of grassroots social-change activists in the social-economy field. In her case, preoccupation with the economic or class situation of women in the periphery is but one stopping point in a continuous collective engagement in discrimination, oppression, and social injustice. Like the narratives of grassroots activists generally, Ofra’s is first and foremost political: the economic plight of the women is related to their ethnic and national marginalization, which are in turn magnified by the gender power structure; it is impossible to tackle the one without the other, or to choose to focus on internal inequalities without taking a stand on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. While in this particular excerpt she mentions a proabortion demonstration (a gender/sexuality issue) and Mizrahi activism, Ofra, like many of her partners in the civil society organizations in the social economy field, is also a core member of the feminist peace movement.