Abstract
The article traces social work’s development in Israel’s Palestinian society from 2007 until a reform of the welfare bureaus in 2018, based on primary and secondary written sources, interviews with Palestinian social workers employed at the time, and a survey of social workers throughout the country’s Palestinian local authorities. Despite gains, social work in this society continued to face historical government-based obstacles to its professionalisation, namely, significantly reduced resources compared to its Jewish counterpart, absence of the Palestinian narrative in service provision and lack of Palestinian representation in policy formulation. The result was a continuing dual welfare system: one for the country’s Jewish citizens; and a significantly more restricted one for their Palestinian compatriots.
Introduction
Israel’s indigenous Palestinian society comprises 21 per cent of the country’s population, 85 per cent of whose members are Muslims, with the rest equally divided between Christians and Druze.1 From the inception of the state in 1948, almost all members of this community have been regarded, and consequently treated, by the country’s establishment as, at best, second-class citizens, being suspected of constituting a potential fifth column in light of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian and wider Israeli-Arab conflict (Ghanem, 2016). The community is also characterised by residing mainly in mono-ethnic towns, villages and cities, and by 45 per cent of its members living in poverty compared to 13 per cent of their Jewish compatriots (Endeweld et al, 2019).
The turn of the millennium marked significant steps in the professionalisation of social work in Israel as a whole and in its Palestinian society in particular. In 1996, a groundbreaking Social Work Act was adopted, which enables only academically trained social workers to practise the profession, and a few years later, accreditation was also extended to the graduates of a Palestinian and a Jordanian training institution that absorbed Palestinian-Israeli students. Concurrently, new social legislation regarding children, families and the elderly increasingly defined and directed social workers’ interventions, which though reducing the time and resources they could devote to self-referred service users, boosted their authority (Nuttman-Shwartz, 2019). Most importantly, however, was the declaration by former Minister of Welfare Isaac Herzog (Labor Party) in 2007 that he intended to close the gaps between the social welfare services available to Jewish and Palestinian citizens in place of managing or simply reducing the gaps (Herzog, 2010). Although this historically radical policy in Israeli terms failed to materialise, it nevertheless gave significant impetus to Palestinian social workers’ demands to alter the long-standing policy of the Ministry of Welfare of maintaining a dual system of welfare services: one for Israel’s Jewish population; and a significantly lesser one for its Palestinian citizens (Rosenhek, 1996).
This article traces the professionalisation of social work in Israel’s Palestinian society from 2007 until a large-scale reform of the welfare bureaus in 2018, the results of which have yet to be researched. It begins with the historical background to the development of social work in Palestinian society, followed by a brief description of the data on which the article is based. The subsequent section then presents professional profiles of the Palestinian social workers at the beginning and at the end of the examined decade, and the financial difficulties that beset the Palestinian local authority welfare bureaus in which most of these social workers were employed. The article ends with the major obstacles to the professionalisation of social work in Israel’s Palestinian society, as well as the achievements it has made.
The development of social work in Israel’s Palestinian society up to 2007
Historically, social work in Israel’s Palestinian society has been hindered by three stumbling blocks: chronic underfunding and poor infrastructures in comparison to its Jewish counterpart; non-recognition of the Palestinian narrative in welfare programmes; and a dire lack of Palestinian representation in social welfare policymaking (Agbaria, 2017). The establishment responded to demands to rectify these obstacles by implementing three strategies (Jabarin and Agbaria, 2010): the first was non-recognition, which ignored or rejected the demands; the second was ‘two-penny recognition’, which treated the demands as complaints that could be politically and socially endured; and the third was a ‘politics of contempt’, which recognised the problems but did little to resolve them. Over the years, the state institutions relevant to social work, particularly the Ministry of Welfare, employed one or more of these strategies to create and maintain a lesser welfare system for the country’s Palestinian population compared to its Jewish population (Rosenhek and Shalev, 2000).
Between 1948 and 1952, the needs of Palestinian society were ignored, and meeting them was turned over to international organisations like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (Mahajne, 2019). From 1953 until 1957, the Ministry of Welfare implemented the two-penny recognition strategy. It established a Department of Minorities with an extremely limited budget and mainly unqualified personnel, which concentrated on resettling the internal Palestinian refugees produced by the 1948 war, and encouraged the males among them to take up occasional manual labour. Later, it also employed these workers to educate Palestinian society to look after itself (that is, without government assistance), using mainly community work methods, but it refrained from assisting individuals, such as the disabled, widows or orphans, apparently in order to sustain traditional Arab extended family solidarity. Concurrently, the few Palestinian probation officers of the day, while supervising persons who infringed the law, concentrated mainly on people whose offences were politically related, such as grazing their herds on lands the government had expropriated from them to settle newly arrived Jewish immigrants (Mahajne, 2019).
The third strategy, a politics of contempt, was employed throughout the military regime, to which most of the Palestinian population was subjected until 1966, though it was extended by the police until 1968 (Baumel, 2007). The Ministry of Welfare’s Department of Minorities was abolished and replaced by two parallel systems – one for Jews and the other, more restricted, for Palestinians, which continued to operate mainly by employing community work. Moreover, the Ministry of Welfare split the Palestinian community by appointing a special adviser for the Druze and Bedouin. Notwithstanding, Palestinian social workers also began some preventive work, such as educating people to avoid home accidents relating to electrical appliances. They also dealt with hygiene, sanitation and family planning, and a few female social workers tried to help liberate Palestinian women from traditional male oppression. The Palestinian probation officers, for their part, also expanded their work to rehabilitation; however, most of their endeavours still focused on political offences, such as the ‘infiltration’ of internal refugees to their former homes.
At the height of this period, Palestinian social workers constituted 5.3 per cent of the social workforce in the local welfare bureaus but received only 2 per cent of the Ministry of Welfare’s budget, even though their community already comprised 14.3 per cent of the population (Prime Minister’s Office, 1969). Most of these workers were urban Christian women, the majority of who were unfamiliar with the customs of the majority, village-based Muslim population. Half of the workers of the day also lacked any professional background, with the remainder having undergone only a few short courses in a Palestinian-only training centre. However, none of these courses exposed them to paradigms other than family cohesion, and all of them ignored the sociopolitical circumstances that created most of the problems their society endured (Mahajne, 2019).
During the following decade, the situation improved as more Palestinians were able to attend university-based social work training after the military regime was lifted. However, their working conditions still fell short of their Jewish counterparts: their caseloads were heavier but their wages were lower due to their local authorities’ poorer financial status; they worked in far more dilapidated buildings; and the Ministry of Welfare’s supervisors emphasised their administrative over their professional roles. Concurrently, however, they benefitted from the general transition of Israeli social work to family-based interventions that better suited their target populations’ social structure than community work. Buds of specialisation in children, youth and rehabilitation also took place following changes in legislation.
In 1978, as part of a policy of managing (as distinct from reducing) the Jewish–Palestinian welfare gaps, most of the local Palestinian authorities were persuaded to amalgamate their welfare bureaus into four clustered offices due to the financial difficulties in running small, independent bureaus. However, only one of these offices was established in an Arab town, and each local authority was allocated, at most, one-and-a-half social workers, who visited each community, at best, once a week. During the rest of the week, people had to travel up to 75 kilometres to their designated office. Also, in contrast to their Jewish colleagues, who were employed by their local authorities, the social workers in these offices were directly employed by the Ministry of Welfare, which enabled it to closely monitor and control their work. A decade later, the Ministry of Welfare split the Druze and Bedouin localities from these offices, establishing their own clustered bureaus, which further fragmented Palestinian social work (Mahajne, 2019). Another consequence of the clustered offices was that a general reform of the welfare bureaus towards the end of the 1970s, which sought to relieve them from undue administrative work, by and large bypassed the Palestinian bureaus. The reform was also not especially successful in the Jewish bureaus, but those in Palestinian society achieved 40 per cent less of its objectives (Korazim et al, 1988).
In 1993, during the Labor Party-led government of the day, the policy of maintaining the gaps between Jewish and Palestinian social services was replaced by a policy of managing them. As part of this development, the clustered offices were dismantled and independent welfare bureaus were opened in all the Palestinian authorities. The Minister of Welfare of the day was also the first who met a Palestinian lobby group for social services, though she continued the Ministry of Welfare’s historic refusal to work with it, insisting that it could only deal with individual local governments. Moreover, she furthered fragmented the Palestinian community by appointing, in addition to an existing advisor for the Druze and Bedouins, a separate post for an adviser for the Muslim and Christian communities.2
By 2006, social work in Palestinian society benefited mainly from the Social Workers’ Act 1996, which established that only academically qualified social work personnel can be employed in social work tasks, and thus led to significant increases in the number of Palestinians with bachelor, master and even doctoral degrees in social work. In addition, in 2003, a Forum of Welfare Bureau Managers for the Arab Population (hereafter, FWBMAP) was formed as a non-governmental advocacy organisation, and partly due to its lobbying, the Ministry of Welfare became increasingly aware of the need to change some of its policies towards specific Palestinian population groups, particularly the Bedouin. Notwithstanding, due to extremely heavy caseloads and continued insufficient resources, Palestinian social workers still mainly doused fires, focusing mainly on the administratively based provision of material rather than professional assistance (Mahajne, 2008).
Database
The data for this article are based on primary and secondary written sources, the former drawn from the Israel State Archives and the latter from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv University social work libraries. It is doubtful, however, if these documents provide a full picture of the subject because the Ministry of Welfare denied us access in the Israel State Archives to files on ‘social workers in the Arab sector’, echoing historian Adam Raz’s remark that it is easier to study Israel’s (purposely vague) nuclear history than her policy towards her Palestinian citizens (Aderet, 2018).3 Hence, to enrich the data, two further steps were taken. First, a survey of all practising Palestinian social workers in the country was conducted on our behalf in January 2018 by the FWBMAP, covering where they worked, whether they were in full-time or part-time employment, their seniority, and their education.
Second, semi-structured interviews were held with 47 Palestinians who practised social work between 2007 and 2018, who were identified through the local authority welfare bureaus. The questions focused on: their work at the time (particularly how ongoing difficulties that beset their target populations were handled); working conditions (resources, relations with central and local governments, physical environment, and collective organisation); obstacles to professional practice; and the socio-demographic characteristics of their colleagues. Ten of the interviewees were social welfare bureau managers, 35 were field workers and two were Ministry of Welfare supervisors. Of these, there were 33 women and 14 men, and 27 Muslims, 15 Christians and five Druze. A total of 33 worked in the public sector, and eight and six worked in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, respectively. All the interviews were conducted in Arabic and the respondents were assured anonymity.
Palestinian social work since 2007
With the dawn of the new millennium, Palestinian society continued to suffer from a broad array of disadvantages compared to its Jewish counterpart: far higher rates of poverty, school dropout, unemployment, delinquency, illness, housing difficulties and poor basic infrastructure, alongside increasing weakening of its informal support systems (Galilee Society, 2018). All of these characteristics impacted the local welfare bureaus, especially due to widespread privatisation of the welfare field that began in the 1990s, particularly to non-government organisations as only 7 per cent of such organisations operated in Palestinian society. Moreover, even of these few, all were grossly underfunded as 98 per cent of all non-governmental welfare funds were directed to the country’s Jewish population (Madhala et al, 2018).
Professional attributes of the Palestinian social workers
The FWBMAP survey showed that like their Jewish counterparts, most of the Palestinian social workers during the period under review were employed in local authority welfare bureaus. The following descriptions focus on these social workers at the beginning and the end of the surveyed decade.
Palestinian social workers in the welfare bureaus: 2007
In 2007, the Ministry of Welfare allocated 520 social work posts to the Palestinian welfare bureaus (excluding mixed-ethnic cities where fewer than 10 per cent of Palestinian citizens resided), constituting 13.6 per cent of all social work welfare bureau posts (FWBMAP, 2010). However, even these posts were not fully filled as most of the Palestinian authorities were unable at the time to meet the 25 per cent matching funds required to cover their salaries. Moreover, only 4.3 per cent of the 15,000 persons legally recognised as social workers were Palestinian, so filling the posts would have been difficult from the start (Barnowsky, 2010).
These figures roughly match the findings of the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on the Appointment of Arab Employees in Public Services (2008), which reported that 550 social workers were employed in the Palestinian authorities, the slight difference in numbers probably stemming from some posts having been filled by more than one person. The Minister of Welfare of the day provided three explanations for this situation: (1) a severe shortage of Palestinians ‘who meet the skills required by the Ministry’ (as he noted: ‘We advertise endlessly in the Arab media and people do not come forward, do not offer themselves as candidates’); (2) poorly functioning local authorities (‘It is the local authorities that employ the workers. They should be able to publish tenders and absorb the female [sic] social workers in the Arab sector’); and (3) culture (‘The budgetary gap between Jewish and non-Jewish authorities stems from culture and tradition – not from discrimination’) (Herzog, 2010: 5, 33).
However, data published only two years earlier reveal a different picture. A comparison of the Ministry of Welfare’s financial allocations to 11 Jewish and 11 Palestinian local authorities’ welfare bureaus of roughly the same population size showed that they had risen between the years 2000 and 2005 at an average rate per capita by 35 per cent more in the Jewish localities, despite far higher levels of need in the Palestinian sector (Sikkuy, 2007). Consequently, according to the State Comptroller (2007), the Ministry of Welfare’s average per capita outlay on service users in Jewish welfare bureaus was double that in Muslim and Christian bureaus (NIS2,130 and NIS1,047, respectively), with Druze and Bedouin bureaus receiving even less (NIS882 and NIS853, respectively). On a more positive note, in contrast to the past, all the posts were filled by qualified social workers due to the requirements of the Social Workers Act 1996, though not all as yet had academic degrees because the law recognised long-practising social workers as qualified without the stipulated education.
The FWBMAP (2010) also reported the different services offered by the Palestinian welfare bureaus. All had family (generic) social workers and most had workers who specialised in the elderly (70 per cent), which was slightly more than those for youth and girls at risk (65 per cent) and children at risk (50 per cent), even though the proportion of elderly in Palestinian society was negligible (3.8 per cent) and that of children was high (57 per cent) (Hamaisi, 2011). About half the bureaus also had a community worker (55 per cent), 35 per cent had an addictions worker and 25 per cent had a volunteer coordinator.
From the interviews, we learnt of a continuing increase in the numbers of Muslim, Druze and Bedouin women, including from rural areas, joining the profession. In fact, social work was ranked second in a list of ten subjects chosen for study by Palestinian women, preceded only by education (Hadassah Career Counseling Institute, 2002). This preference can be explained by the social routing of Palestinian women to occupations that can be relatively easily combined with their roles as wives and mothers: jobs available near home, with reasonable working hours and adequate wages as second family earners, especially as local authorities encouraged half-time employment by increasing its pay to 60 per cent of full-time work (FWBMAP, 2010).
Palestinian social workers in the welfare bureaus: 2017
At the end of 2017, the FWBMAP survey showed that 890 social workers were employed in the Palestinian welfare bureaus, an increase to 16.5 per cent of the total number of social work posts in the country’s bureaus, albeit still short of the Palestinian share in the general population (20.9 per cent). An additional 30 per cent were employed in for-profit and non-profit social service organisations. The vast majority (98 per cent) of the welfare bureau workers graduated from Israeli universities or colleges, with 2 per cent from Palestinian and Jordanian training institutions.
The interviews revealed that more Bedouin, male as well as female, joined social work thanks to the establishment of peripheral colleges. The profession also continued to be predominately female (82 per cent), as in Jewish society, but with an increasing number of men, partly due to their reduced employment opportunities in education, as well as in law (due to high failure rates in the Bar Association qualification test).
Underfunding
Financing of the local welfare services was investigated in a series of studies, all of which found large inequalities between Jewish and Palestinian localities. Belikoff and Abu-Saleh (2011) reported that only 10.6 per cent of the Ministry of Welfare’s budgetary allocations reached Palestinian localities, despite significantly higher rates of poverty (51.5 per cent) and of poverty depth (37.8 per cent) than in Jewish localities (Sikkuy, 2005). Indeed, the State Comptroller had already concluded that the gap was ‘unreasonable’ and demanded that it must be narrowed four years earlier. Similar findings were unearthed by Sened, Rosen-Zvi, Hamaisi and Abou-Habla (2015).
Two explanations lie at the heart of this ‘unreasonable’ gap. One returns to the difficulties faced by the Palestinian authorities in meeting the matching funds required of them for almost all social welfare provisions. Beginning in 2001, not a single Palestinian authority was financially stable, and at the peak of this crisis in 2006, 41 were subjected to a Ministry of Interior external accountant who restricted their expenditures to their (meagre) revenues, and 36 were unable to meet even their salary commitments for months on end (Ben-Basat and Dahan, 2008). Under these circumstances, it is quite understandable why the majority (75 per cent) of Palestinian mayors claimed that the demand for matching funds precluded them from providing adequate social services, if at all (Sela Kolker, 2016). Thus, for example, a central government budget of NIS49 million designated for nurseries in Palestinian society over the years 2014–16 had to be turned down because the local authorities could not actualise it (Ilan, 2017).
In 2012, the FWBMAP and the Israel Religious Action Center submitted a joint petition to the Supreme Court challenging the fixed-rate matching fund formula, calling for it to be replaced by a proportional formula that would take account of each local authority’s financial capabilities. The organisations argued that ‘residents of the local authorities whose population is in the lowest socio-economic stratum receive the smallest share of the state’s welfare budgets [and that] this is especially true when it comes to the Arab authorities whose socio-economic rating is the lowest’ (Ephraim and Magnezi, 2012). As a typical example, the Ministry of Welfare’s own data showed that a service user in the Palestinian town of Rahat enjoyed services at a cost of NIS1,450, while their equivalent in Jewish Raanana was budgeted 4.5 times as much. The petition, however, like a further one tackling the same difficulty (Biton and Lankri, 2017), was rejected because the Ministry of Welfare continued to insist that the differences were due not to discrimination, but to ‘cultural differences between the local authorities that impact their budgeting’ (Ephraim and Magnezi, 2012).
The second explanation for the budgetary gaps lies with the Ministry of Welfare’s allocation criteria for social work posts, which form part of its formula for determining its total financial contributions to local authorities. Up to the mid-2000s, six criteria were in use, two of which were irrelevant to Palestinian society: proportion of (Jewish) new immigrants to Israel in the authority; and its location in national priority or combat zones (from which all but a handful of Palestinian authorities were excluded). A third criterion – the proportion of single-parent families – was also largely irrelevant because their number in Palestinian communities was negligible (Sikkuy, 2005). Later, these criteria were dropped (apart from the national priority zones) but other criteria remained vague. ‘The Ministry argues that its allocation considerations are based on clear criteria and that priority is given to local authorities with fewer resources’, concluded Gal, Madhala and Bleikh (2017: 29) in the most intensive study of the subject to date, ‘but in the absence of full transparency … this claim could not be corroborated. In practice, a gap exists to the disadvantage of weaker local authorities and this is especially noticeable when comparing Jewish and Arab localities’ (Gal, Madhala and Bleikh, 2017: 11).
Towards the end of the studied period (in 2016), the average Ministry of Welfare expenditure per service user in Palestinian welfare bureaus was NIS3,387 compared to NIS7,318 in Jewish localities, that is, a 54 per cent difference (Gal et al, 2017: 11). These differences, however, were reduced to ‘only’ 2.2 times as much when donations and the local authorities’ own contributions were added to the Ministry’s allocations: NIS3,326 and NIS7,318, respectively. Moreover, these differences also extended to designated funds. For example, the average expenditure on Palestinian girls at risk was 40 per cent less than on Jewish girls at risk (Yehimovitz-Cohen, 2016).
Obstacles to Palestinian social work’s professionalisation
At least ten factors negatively impacted the development of social work in Israel’s Palestinian society.
Insufficient professional labour
Following the FWBMAP’s aforementioned petition to the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Welfare asked the FWBMAP to withdraw it in exchange for enlarging the number of social work posts in the Palestinian welfare bureaus. This advance notwithstanding, many local authorities were still unable to fill the new posts, whether due to financial reasons or due to the lack of candidates, thereby continuing the chronic shortage in social workers. This shortage was particularly felt in the Bedouin communities and in specialised areas of intervention in the mixed-ethnic cities, particularly for drug addiction, released prisoners and domestic violence (Elroi et al, 2018). A typical example in 2016 was the mixed-ethnic city of Lod, where although 40 per cent of the welfare bureaus’ clients were Palestinian, only two of the 60 posts were filled by Arabic-speaking social workers. The municipality explained: ‘Only two Arab workers applied and were immediately accepted…. Other posts were not filled for a long period of time…. In the course of time, the Ministry of Welfare allowed us to absorb non-Arab workers in order to continue to provide adequate services for the city’s entire population’ (Yarkatsi, 2016).
It must be noted, however, that an additional barrier to filling the posts is internal to most Palestinian localities, which are characterised by deep extended family, religious and ‘ethnic’ cleavages that dominate their sociopolitical arenas. As a result, local authorities often hire people from a particular group in order, at best, to maintain internal balance or, at worse, to prefer the members of one group over the other. Consequently, a post can remain empty or offered only temporarily until a ‘suitable’ candidate is located. At times, this also leads to the appointment of poor candidates, to the detriment of the profession.
Low wages
Social work wages throughout the country were seriously eroded after a generous wage agreement in 1995, and in the following agreement (in 2011), the Israel Union of Social Workers failed to substantially alter the situation – as it later admitted: ‘the agreement we reached [was] “controversial”’ (IUSW, 2017). However, throughout most of the covered period, these low wages were more direly felt by Palestinian than by Jewish social workers due to their authorities’ financial difficulties and being subjected to external accountants. As a welfare bureau manager recalled: “We were not allowed any additional salary beyond the base; just what is determined by law. For example, my workers could not receive car expenses. Even the emergency duty team was limited. The new male employees had additional jobs [outside the bureau]. I understood their need for money.”
Physical conditions
‘After being moved from one place to another, we gained another floor, but the walls were peeling due to dampness, plasterboard partitions divided the rooms so that every word could be heard throughout the building, and we suffered from the noise from an adjacent makeshift market. There were defects and malfunctions all the time. It was close to impossible to work under these conditions.’
Rapid turnover
There was also rapid turnover due to burnout, with the remaining workers finding themselves engaged in political and budgetary quarrels in place of their professional tasks. The Forum for War on Poverty (2014) report found that the deterioration in the ratio of social workers to service users in the Palestinian social services was far more severe than in Jewish services because of the Palestinians’ higher poverty rates and new social legislation that required increased social work involvement (Levy, 2008; Dettel, 2011). Consequently, Palestinian bureaus were forced to restrict their work to quelling fires rather than offering systematic professional services (Gal et al, 2017). Similar conclusions were reached by the Committee for the Drafting of a Reform in Local Welfare Services (Ministry of Welfare, 2010).
Focus on material aid and mediation
‘I understand their need to receive discounts and arrangements. They are economically deprived and find it difficult to cope with the bureaucracy. Justifiably, they feel they need constant guidance, someone to defend and support them. Otherwise, they won’t obtain their rights. However, I miss the therapeutic process that I learnt at university, but stopped complaining. I got used to the situation.’
Decentralisation
Decentralisation of most of the welfare services from central to local government led Palestinian social workers to being increasingly caught between the hammer and the anvil as each entity claimed them for its own ends. The Ministry of Welfare, which supervises them, demanded that they prioritise people whose care was mandated by law at the expense of the self-referred. In contrast, the local authorities, which employ them, failed to separate politics from professional considerations and demanded populist projects, especially to maintain social order by preventing vandalism, violence and the like (Ministry of Welfare, 2010).
Local status of the welfare bureaus
Partly due to the high levels of poverty in their midst that largely characterises their constituencies, and partly because they employ relatively few workers, Palestinian mayors accorded the welfare bureaus low priority, with some having even threatened to close them. Welfare bureau managers also reported that their authorities did little to ensure that the funds they were entitled to would reach them, and that they were often excluded from deliberations on their budgets. In addition, local politicians often interfered in professional matters, such as dictating who should be given assistance and how much, and would verbally and even physically abuse members of staff if refused (Shallan, 2016).
Lack of suitable policies
Throughout the reviewed period, the Ministry of Welfare failed to adapt interventions to Palestinian society’s structure, values and religious norms. According to a former chairperson of the FWBMAP, ‘no government body trains social workers for Arab society. After large waves of [Jewish] immigration many Ethiopian social workers were trained, so why not do the same for the Arab population? A social worker who understands the population’s mentality can really help’ (Barnowski, 2010). Recent research on the Ministry’s regulations, programmes and care institutions corroborates this gap (Jeraise, 2013; Nijam-Aktilaat et al, 2018).
Social workers’ initial training in Israel adds to this difficulty. At the end of the studied period, 37 per cent of all the social work students in Israel were Palestinian. Notwithstanding, only nine posts in the country’s 14 training institutions were held by Palestinian academics (two of which by psychologists and a half-time post by a criminologist), in addition to four external Arab lecturers (Mahajne, 2018). Moreover, of all the courses in these institutions, only four related to Arab society, two of which were taught by lecturers in education. One explanation for this lacuna is that most of the Israeli social work and social welfare literature has ignored the existence of the Palestinian population. Another reason is that relatively few Palestinian students undertake their practicum in Palestinian social services, so there is little incentive to adapt the teaching material to their culture.
Lack of Arab representation in relevant policymaking
The very fact … that there is no Arab regional manager or regional deputy-manager and no senior post held in the head office [of the Ministry] indicates a defect. I have one sharp memory. Once, as part of my mistakes, I dreamt of becoming a deputy-manager of human resources [in the Ministry]. When I competed for the post … I received a blunt hint: ‘Forget it, give it up’. So I understood that I could not compete and withdrew my candidacy. (Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on the Appointment of Arab Employees in Public Services, 2008)
The absence of appropriate Palestinian representation was also noticeable on central social work committees. For example, of the 28 letters of appointment issued to the Committee for the Drafting of a Proposal for Reform in Local Welfare Services, only two were addressed to Palestinians, and out of the 157 members on its subcommittees, only eight Palestinians took part, half of them on the Committee on Small Welfare Bureaus (Ministry of Welfare, 2010). Likewise, out of the Committee on War on Poverty’s 50 members, only two were Palestinian (Sikkuy, 2014), even though Palestinians made up nearly half of the country’s population living in poverty.
Fragmentation
Testifying before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on the Appointment of Arab Employees in Public Services (2008), the Minister of Welfare of the day declared that he was proud to be accompanied by three non-Jewish assistants on his staff: ‘There is Fayed Ghanem from the Druze sector, Eidan Kaabia who is a Bedouin Muslim, and Hanna Masaad who is a Christian from the North.’ However, our interviewees saw this quite differently. In their opinion, splitting the Palestinians into Bedouin from the south, Bedouin from the north, residents of mixed towns, Muslims, Christians and Druze negatively influenced the development of social work in Palestinian society since it prevented the pooling of professional resources and mutual enrichment.
Changes for the better
Notwithstanding the difficulties, social work in Palestinian society has been positively influenced in the new millennium by changes in the training institutions and the Ministry of Welfare, as well as by the increased organisation of Palestinian social workers.
Training
Recent years have seen a steady growth in the number of Palestinian students completing basic (Bachelor of Social Work [BSW]) and higher social work degrees, especially since 2007, when most Israeli colleges began to offer Master in Social Work degree programmes without a final thesis (which would usually require them to master English as a fourth language in addition to spoken and written Arabic and Hebrew) (Shpiro, 2010). Another significant development was the official recognition in Israel of the BSW degrees from Palestinian An-Najah University and Granata College, an annex of Jordan’s Al-Balqa’ Applied University. Although it has not yet been examined, it is reasonable to assume that the absorption of graduates from these institutions into Palestinian social work in Israel will affect the values, professional knowledge and skills of the profession because they studied in Arabic (in contrast to Hebrew in Israel), were taught by Arab lecturers (partly according to non-‘Western’ curricula) and undertook their practicum in Arab social services. It is likely, however, that this process will take time since, according to the interviewed welfare bureau managers, there are covert instructions from the Ministry of Welfare to channel these graduates to private social services or, at most, to organisations adjacent to the welfare bureaus (such as clubs for the elderly or the blind), apparently due to doubts regarding their level of training and insufficient knowledge of Hebrew.
Ministry of Welfare
Government policies since 2006 have sought to increase the number of Palestinians in the public services, which encouraged the Ministry of Welfare to move from a policy of managing or, at best, reducing the gaps to one of closing them (Herzog, 2011). Consequently, most of the Palestinian welfare bureaus were able to diversify their responses for wider ranges of age groups, social difficulties and target populations. In one of the largest Arab towns, Umm-al-Fahem, for example, the welfare bureau included generic social workers and social workers for the elderly, girls at risk, addictions and released prisoners, as well as community workers and volunteer coordinators. There were also welfare law protection officers, rehabilitation workers for the physically disabled, intellectually challenged and the blind, deaf and speech-impaired, and social workers for early childhood and violent families. In addition, social workers managed preschool playgroups, occupational workshops for youth, family clubs and a centre for families coping with poverty.
Organisation of Palestinian social workers
In 2003, as the Palestinian local authorities’ financial crisis deepened, their welfare bureau managers established the FWBMAP as a lobby organisation, one of whose major aims is to ensure equal and fair distribution of resources between the Jewish and the Palestinian communities, and that intervention programmes should suit the needs and characteristics of the Palestinian community. Our interviews suggested that although the FWBMAP had yet to be recognised by the Ministry of Welfare, it had significantly contributed to the advancement of Palestinian social work. It united different parts of Palestinian society, encouraged Palestinian social workers to conduct studies that challenge official data, held conferences and seminars that presented shared difficulties, and gave voice to the most deteriorated Palestinian localities. Similar organisation within the Israel Union of Social Workers did not take place. This is most probably because the union’s subdivisions are organised solely by expertise (health, community work, probation and so on), and like all Israeli professional unions, it avoids organisations along other bases, such as gender or ethnicity.
Summary
Social work in Israel’s Palestinian society developed despite a general Israeli (Jewish) perception that regarded its members as citizens with lesser rights (Ghanem and Mustafa, 2018). As a result, historically, the government, though recognising their needs, provided their local authorities’ welfare bureaus with far fewer resources than their Jewish counterparts, excluded their representatives from relevant decision-making bodies, and disregarded their narrative in the country’s training and intervention programmes. Thus, in practice, the establishment continued to employ two parallel, historically grounded systems of welfare services: one for Jewish citizens and a significantly lesser one for Palestinian citizens. To justify this distinction, it enlisted the concept of ‘culture’, preferring difference to equality. In other words, it justified exclusion by policies that adapted (lesser) services to the culture of a particular group.
Over the studied decade (2007–18), Palestinian social workers and the welfare bureaus that employed them faced four major challenges: (1) the decentralisation of a significant portion of their areas of responsibility from central government to their financially and politically weak local authorities; (2) the privatisation of most of the national and local welfare services (apart from the welfare bureaus themselves) without suitable backing; (3) policies that failed to fit their service users; and (4) the government’s continued disregard of their representatives.
Notwithstanding, they also enjoyed certain professional advancements: a consistent increase in the number of academically trained social workers took place; significant increases occurred in the number of posts they were allocated when the clustered welfare bureaus were replaced by independent local authority welfare bureaus; and increased awareness began among decision-makers in the Ministry of Welfare regarding the need to alter its policy towards Palestinian society due to its sociopolitical and economic costs. In addition, Palestinian social workers began to organise as a collective body, though it remained unrecognised by the state authorities.
Notes
The article covers exclusively Israel’s Palestinian citizens in the country’s pre-1967 borders, that is, it excludes Palestinians in conquered East Jerusalem and Syrians on the Golan Heights, the overwhelming majority of whom are not Israeli citizens, but only ‘permanent residents’.
See Israel State Archives, minorities sector (from 31 January 1996 through 27 March 1996, pp 20, 21, 23, 25–28, 60–62), ISA-LaborSocialAffaris-Minister-000k22l.
Indeed, it has recently been reported that the Ministry of Defence is systematically closing researchers’ access to ‘embarrassing’ documents on Israel’s actions towards her Palestinian citizens in all public and private archives (Akevot, 2019).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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