Underemployment Versus Relocation: Coping Mechanisms of Palestinian Women in Israel with Patriarchal and Spatial Impositions

Abstract

Over the past decade, rates of Palestinian women in Israel with an academic degree have increased. However, the corresponding increase in their rate of employment has been slower, and the paucity of suitable positions is evident. The aim of the present, qualitative study was to gain insight into the barriers that educated Palestinian women face in finding employment suitable for their training, the coping mechanisms they employ in their attempt to overcome these barriers, and factors that contribute to the selection of these coping mechanisms. Towards that aim, educated Palestinian women residing in northern Israel (n = 17) and ones who relocated to southern Israel for employment purposes (n = 42) were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed three coping mechanisms with the shortage of suitable employment: underemployment, retraining, and relocation to southern Israel for employment. This study may help policymakers find ways to increase the percentage of Palestinian women working in their field of training.

Notes

1 Women and men with an academic degree, who have at least a bachelor’s degree.

2 In 2014, the Palestinian population lived in 120 Palestinian localities and eight localities with mixed populations, while a few lived in Jewish localities (Gharrah 2018).

3 The conventional definition of an urban locality in Israel is based solely on the population size criterion according to routine population estimators that the Central Bureau of Statistics drafts and updates from the Population Registry of the Israel Ministry of the Interior. The determining population size for transition from rural to urban locality is 2,000 persons (Cohen-Kastro 2007). These definitions, however, do not take the complexity that transcends population size into account and do not differentiate between rural localities with urban features (e.g., population density, proximity to built-up areas, percentage of population engaged in non-agricultural occupations and the like) and urban localities with rural features in which the primary difference is population size only. Moreover, the definition of a locality as urban is likely to accord it certain benefits such that the decision to declare it so may be of a political nature. Consequently, in the case of Arab localities, such decisions overshadow population estimates. Indeed, claims Cohen-Kastro (2007), Arab localities in Israel have developed according to entirely different processes over the years that went by since the establishment of the State of Israel, in accordance with social, geographical, economic and institutional limitations that are entirely different from those that shaped Jewish residential space.

4 Only one participant was living in a Bedouin locality at the time of the interview because she had married a Bedouin man. Throughout the interview, however, she often mentioned that she planned to move to Beersheba soon.

5 Although such migration has existed for several years, it is difficult to estimate the extent of the phenomenon using data from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and other figures. Not all the families or single women formally change their address, since “northern” teachers who change their permanent address in the Population Registry to southern Israel lose their rights to benefits, even if they have not purchased an apartment.

6 Fuchs & Friedman-Wilson (2018), showing that about 35% of the teachers in Arab education in the south of Israel come from the north.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tal Meler

Tal Meler (Ph.D.) – Senior lecturer in sociology and gender studies on research track at Zefat Academic College. My dissertation, “Negotiating support, working through control: Widowed and divorced Israeli-Palestinian women within their kin and community relations,” was submitted to the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. My areas of specialization include: sociology of the family; Palestinian women citizens of Israel; the Palestinian family in Israel -with an emphasis on feminist theories of sociology.

My recent work on the topics of Palestinian families and mothers, divorcees and widows, and the relocation of Palestinian women have been published in the Journal of Social Identities, Comparative Sociology, Journal of Middle East Women Studies (JMES) and Marriage & Family Review. I have also published several papers in Hebrew, including “Palestinian single mothers’ right to adequate housing in Israel” in Israeli Sociology. My book, Multiple marginality of single motherhood in Palestinian society in Israel, was recently published [2017] in Hebrew. My present studies focus on: economic violence in Palestinian families in Israel with respect to single mothers; Palestinian women’s attitudes to inheritance and the normative trend of inheritance renunciation; urbanization within Palestinian society in Israel.