An Excerpt from “Good Intentions — Arab High Tech in Israel” by Roni Floman

Israel. Startup Nation. Arabs. Can Integration of Minorities into High-tech work?

This is an excerpt from the preface to my non-fiction book “Good Intentions: Arab High-Tech in Israel”

Note: the book is now available on Amazon.

“It’s a book about Arabs in high-tech,” I said. We were sitting in a café. Wearing a faded tricot shirt and sitting casually on his chair, no-one would have guessed that he was the managing partner of a venture capital fund, a person whose profession is to try to understand what makes the chosen few “hit the jackpot” and then to replicate that formula for success. He tells me about some of the companies he had invested in. In language that almost sounded like gossip, he painted a fascinating picture of personalities, technology, good luck, sleight of hand, and some business acumen too. He tries to break down the story into its individual pieces in order to crack the secret recipe for success. Yet to an outside observer he must have looked like someone with nothing better to do with his time than sit in a café in north Tel Aviv and watch the world pass by.

“That’s not a book you’re talking about — it’s a pamphlet at best,” he laughed. The idea of writing a book about Arabs in high-tech struck him as surprising and perhaps implausible.

Someone else told me that a book, or even a pamphlet, about Arabs in high-tech could not be a work of non-fiction: it must be science fiction. “How much high-tech is there? How many pages can you write about it?” he asked. The absence of Arabs in Israel’s high-tech industry struck him as an obvious fact. Until we spoke, he had never questioned the fact that Arab citizens of Israel (see footnote 1) are not involved in high-tech, just as they are not involved in many other aspects of Israeli public life. Arab high-tech? He had never considered the possibility. Yet although he was amused by the idea, he was reluctant to appear politically incorrect.

“So tell me, what is the book going to say?”

“There are Arabs in high-tech,” I begin, as if my job was to correct a misconception. “Intel has been employing Arabs in development since the 1980s. People say that the Pentium was developed by an Arab from Nazareth.”

“Then corporate Intel must have forced Intel Israel to employ them, told them it was discrimination. Intel Israel didn’t want to employ Arabs, but they had no choice…” He tries his hand at sarcasm but clearly feels embarrassed. “So how many people are you talking about?”

He adopts a more serious tone. Of course he knows Arabs. I mustn't think that he supports inequality; he isn’t like that. There’s even an Arab man working at this very moment in an apartment he owns. He’s called Ali and he’s a home renovator.

Every day he goes to see what Ali is up to — he is good with his hands and very reliable. Then they have coffee together. He’s a cool guy, Ali. Smart. He likes to have coffee with him.

He has heard about Arab high-tech. The Israeli financial press has been writing about Arab high-tech businesses since 2009. He knows some of the Jewish investors in Galil Software, which is based in Nazareth. He thinks they’re doing some really fine things there.

“Are you writing about that?” he asks me.

I tell him that while I was writing the book I had begun to work with Arab high-tech entrepreneurs and to advise them on various aspects relating to their start-ups.

Recently, he even met with people from Al-Bawader, a venture capital fund that specializes in the Arab sector. “Have you met the guys from Al-Barbur [he is alluding to the Hebrew word for swan],” he asks, laughing out loud. “Or maybe it’s Al-Babor, like that restaurant in Umm al-Fahm [an Arab town within the 1948 borders — RF]? Have you ever eaten there? I’m sure you must be eating some great food if you’re writing a book about Arabs. I guess they invite you to come over, lay out a real feast and slaughter a lamb for you?”

“Al-Babor is a gas stove, not a swan,” I correct him. “And Al-Bawader means first shoots” — shoots of high-tech and maybe shoots of a new future.

“Al-Barbur, Al-Babor — what difference does it make?” he retorts. “Do they even have any companies to invest in? Where is this Arab high-tech? Where can they find any investors? What kind of company valuations can anyone give in that market?”

__

In 1993, the year Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, a year of high hopes for a resolution, the Israeli author David Grossman published his book Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel (the Hebrew version of the book appeared a year earlier). The book examines a range of issues relating to Arabs in Israel, from their identification with the first intifada (which began five years earlier in the West Bank and Gaza) to issues of national choices (would they prefer to live in a Palestinian state or to remain in Israel), the unrecognized villages, attitudes toward women, and so forth. Grossman only touched in passing on the subject of employment, which is the central theme of this book. My subject was the question of equal opportunities in employment for Jews and Arabs in terms of status, salary, and interest. I ended up looking at much more than that, at what it’s like to be an Arab-Palestinian citizen of Israel. In our culture, employment is considered the key to happiness, identity, and self-realization. A person is largely defined by their career, which is supposed to meet all their needs, from survival to a life of dignity and self-actualization. Work even gives people the power to formulate and present their political aspirations. So, can Arabs get access to Israel’s most interesting employment — the Startup Nation?

The fourth chapter of Grossman’s Sleeping on a Wire (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux) opens with the following dialogue:

“I am Anwar Shadfani, twenty years old, from the village of Iksal.”

“I am Suleiman Zuabi, twenty years old, also from Iksal.”

“We studied in the same class over the years. I majored in biology.”

“I majored in sciences.”

That was twenty years ago. The two men are more or less the same age as me. Like many of the Arabs I met while I was writing this book, they boast about the high school they attended. When university-educated Arabs from the Galilee talk about their background, they often begin with their high school studies. How many Jewish Israelis would begin with their high school when summarizing their professional past? Very few. For Arabs from the Galilee, and particularly those who attended one of the private Arab high schools, this detail can determine their future success. They aren’t proud of the neighborhood where they grew up, and of course they didn’t serve in an army unit they can be proud of like their Jewish peers (see footnote 2). For those who were lucky enough to attend one of the prestigious private schools, this becomes their starting point. As an aside, it is worth noting that the tuition fees in these Arab schools are relatively modest (approximately $ 600 a year, as of 2010).

Anwar and Suleiman met Grossman when they were both twenty. Now they are in their forties. Over the intervening years my Jewish acquaintances have gained an education and built a career. Many of us have found our place in the world of high tech – there came a point when everyone realized that this was the direction to move in, so they did.

Not Anwar and Suleiman. As they explained to Grossman:

“I finished high school in ’89, and I’ve been working ever since in home renovation, in agriculture, in the fields, non-skilled work.”

“I work in construction. I studied computer science at the Technion but I dropped out after half a year, because in our sector there’s no demand for computer professionals.”

“Because there’s no demand in our sector for computer professionals.” This casually-delivered comment implies that he had no chance, not even the faintest hope, and that this is simply a matter of the fate of the Arab sector. This fate is, supposedly, no-one’s fault. So the option of working “in computers” depends on the level of demand in “the sector.” If you want to work outside the sector, your choice is agriculture or construction. The world outside the sector is not interested in hiring you for a serious job. The mild and carefully-worded way this message is conveyed does not suggest any demand that those outside the sector should offer him an equal opportunity. At most, perhaps, it embodies a faint hope that this might be possible.

This laconic comment elegantly sidesteps the personal despair it must hide. One morning a Computer Science student at the Technion (an elite academic institution) wakes up, supposedly realizes there is “no demand” for what he is studying — an ostensibly objective, economic appraisal — and is instantly transformed from a future engineer to an unskilled laborer. Did he realize that there is “no demand,” or did he realize that there is no hope? One day he had to inform the Technion that he was leaving his studies and beginning to look for work in the home renovation industry. What did he feel? Did he know that this was what was going to happen from his first day at the Technion, or had he been hoping for a miracle?

Anwar and Suleiman were not only concerned by the lack of jobs, but also by the difficulties Arabs face in getting into university. Both of them complained to Grossman about the psychometric examinations (the equivalent of the SAT). They were not prepared for the material and the test’s cultural bias created additional problems. Today they could go to a preparatory course for the psychometric examinations held in the Arab sector; such courses are in high demand.

Are things any different now? On the one hand, twenty percent of the students at the Technion are Arabs — the same as the proportion of Arabs in the Israeli population as a whole. However, the proportion of Arab high school graduates with a poor matriculation certificate is much higher than among Jews. Arabs who do not manage to get into the Technion tend to be admitted to study tracks with low admission criteria and limited salary prospects.

Anwar and Suleiman complained to Grossman: “And today they give more weight to the test than to your high-school exam scores, because they saw that Arabs fail the standardized test more than Jews.”

Anwar and Suleiman argue that the system is biased against them deliberately, not coincidentally. Such a possibility does not even occur to the Jewish man sitting opposite me in the café. From his perspective the ability of Arabs to enter the high-tech field depends entirely on the individual: each Arab is admitted or rejected purely on the basis of his achievements.

It is reasonable to assume that the decision to attach so much weight to the standardized test was not part of a deliberate attempt to exclude Arabs, but this does not really matter. What matters is Anwar and Suleiman’s feeling — previously concealed by the claim that “there is no demand” — that they are simply unwanted.

I wonder what Anwar and Suleiman are doing these days. Turning down the possibility of a university degree comes at a price. In 2008, 10.6 percent of the Arab population in Israel had a degree compared to 26.5 percent of the Jews. The average number of years of schooling is 11.2 among Arabs and 14 among Jews. Regardless of education there is a significant salary gap between Jews and Arabs: Arab salaried employees have an average monthly salary of around $ 1,570, compared to $ 2,285 for Jews, while the figures for average monthly per capita income are $ 540 and $ 1,490, respectively. But the most revealing statistic is that the greater the number of years of schooling, the wider the gulf between the average monthly income of Jews and Arabs. In 2008 Arab salaried employees with 16 years of schooling or more had an average monthly income of $ 2,240, compared to $ 3,240 for Jews.

—

“Arabs in high-tech?” someone else asks me. “How are they going to work in high-tech? You know that there’s a security issue here.”

“Not everywhere,” I retort. “Did you know that HP Israel employs Arabs?”

“Really?” my acquaintance replies in amazement, and then quickly adds: “But I bet they’re all Christians. Muslim Arabs aren’t usually well educated.”

How does he know this? This is what he has heard. Muslims aren’t usually well educated; only Christians have a chance of finding work in high-tech. Both assumptions are completely untrue, of course.

A relative of mine is equally surprised. “How can Intel employ Arab engineers?” she asks. “Isn’t there a security problem?”

“What security problem?” I inquire. It is an excuse. She tried to think of one. I added that global Intel surely employs Arabs. Doesn’t she want Israel to be like the Western countries?

She changes her position. “There isn’t really a security issue. So do they manage to find work in Intel?”

“Not all of them. Some Technion graduates don’t manage to find work and go off to work as teachers with a degree in engineering.” I did not tell her about what became of Anwar and Suleiman.

“That’s terrible,” she said, completing her change of mind. “Things really shouldn’t be like that.”

—

My young son goes to a school situated between Kfar Hess and Herut, two Jewish villages in the Sharon region not far from the Arab city of Tira. It is not easy to find teachers to work in the school — most teachers live in the main cities and are unlikely to want to work in a school stuck between orange orchards and fields without public transportation. Although most Israeli Jews do not realize it, Israeli schools are highly segregated. No other Western country uses this kind of separation: schools for Jews and schools for Arabs. The study material is different, as is the language of study. With very few exceptions, the only Arab teachers in Jewish schools are those who teach the Arabic language.

The parents committee at the school was informed that there are teachers in Tira who are looking for work. One teacher who graduated cum laude has been looking for work for at least five years. “Why don’t we bring a teacher from Tira so we don’t have to worry about finding teachers every year?” people asked. “She won’t be able to teach the children about the Jewish holidays,” others commented. “So what about science or math?” The proposal was rejected. The year before the parents had reacted angrily when an ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman worked in the school as a second grade teacher. The idea of an Arab woman teaching in the school was too much to bear.

—

In 2007 and 2008 two bodies were established with the goal of strengthening the connection between Arab citizens of Israel and the high-tech sector: Galil Software, a company based in Nazareth that by 2012 employed some 150 Arab engineers; and Tsofen, which focuses on developing high-tech employment centers in Arab communities and on connecting the high-tech industry with Arab employees. Approximately eighteen months later, Al-Bawader was established as a venture capital fund backed by state guarantees for investments in the Arab “sector.”

The main objective is to connect Arabs to the profitable high-tech field as a tool for economic growth and civil equality. The economic growth aspect hardly needs explaining: Arabs will find work in high-tech companies, earn higher salaries, and unemployment will fall. Civil equality is a more complicated objective. While equal opportunity in employment for Jews and Arabs is a relatively simple idea, as is ensuring that all Israelis enjoy equal access to financial benefits and incentives to work in high-tech, civil equality involves additional issues, such as the allocation of state resources, and can raise fears within the Jewish population concerning the impact of full equality.

At least these bodies do not raise dilemmas concerning the Occupied Territories: they work solely with Arab citizens of Israel and are careful to steer clear of politics. These organizations — Tsofen, Galil Software, and Al-Bawader — have gradually overcome their image as quaint idealists and become a trendy niche sector for the Israeli business elite. Israel’s financial newspapers (TheMarker and Calcalist) have published articles about the organizations. President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mention them by way of proof that things in Israel are fine. Business people brag about their involvement in these organizations. In 2010, Peres even headed for Nazareth in a bus full of CEOs from major Israeli companies to showcase the economic future of the city, with an emphasis on high-tech.

This book focuses mainly on the activities of these organizations, and in particular on the lives of those Arabs who have become part of the Jewish-dominated world of Israeli high-tech and the liberal professions. In this sense, the book offers a glimpse into the reality of a small yet fascinating sub sector of contemporary Arab society in Israel. I believe it also tells the much bigger story of Israel’s Arab minority.

The first part of the book, For Profit, introduces Arab entrepreneurs and examines their efforts to recruit investors for the start-ups they founded.

The second part, Not for Profit, focuses on the nongovernmental organizations that are working to encourage the employment of Arabs in high-tech, preparing candidates to work in the field, and coordinating with the companies that employ them.

The third part, The First Arab, presents the personal stories of a selection of “first Arabs” — the first CEO of a company whose investors are Jewish; an attorney in a law firm on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv; and a man who is probably the first Arab high-tech entrepreneur in Israel.

The names of some of the people interviewed in this book have been changed, as have some other identifying details.

The fact that this book focuses on the economic sphere, with the hope of shedding light on many issues relating to the lives of Arabs in Israel, does not imply that I see economics as the be-all and end-all of the issue. I agree with the comments made by the high-tech entrepreneur Orni Petruschka, who also serves as chairperson of the Abraham Funds Initiatives, an organization that seeks to promote integration and equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Speaking at the annual Caesarea Forum economic conference in 2011, Petrushka commented: “These days everyone mentions the need to integrate Arab citizens in the Israeli economy, but there is no chance of a breakthrough the Israeli economy, but there is no chance of a breakthrough […] by economic means alone […] A basic condition for entrepreneurship and economic integration is a sense of liberty and belonging. Most Arabs do not meet this condition. They do not have a sense of identification with the state due to the extensive discrimination against them on national grounds, and due to legislative initiatives attacking Arabs.” (see footnote 3)

Petrushka’s favorite story is about an Arab entrepreneur who once asked him how he should reply to his son, who had told him that he wanted to be a pilot when he grew up. There are virtually no Arab pilots in Israel, since Arabs are exempt from conscription into the IDF — and being a pilot is an immediate ticket into the ranks of the elite. Petrushka says that this was when he realized that the problem is about more than employment and economics.

While I was researching this book, I met an Arab entrepreneur who has a doctorate in electrical engineering and founded a startup company in the United States. I asked him he confessed that it was his second choice. As a boy he wanted to be a pilot. A woman I met told me that her husband, who works as a physician in a Jerusalem hospital, would have been a pilot if he had been born a Jew. Pilots, it would seem, are the phantom of the missing opportunity.

—

Employing Arabs in high-tech is also a fashion of sorts. An investment manager in one of the largest financial bodies in Israel told me in 2008 that he met with Jimmy Levy, the founder of the Al-Bawader fund. Levy asked him to invest in the fund, which aimed to provide a financial return for investors, but which also had a social purpose.

The investment manager traveled to Nazareth and was impressed by what he saw, but decided not to recommend investing in Al-Bawader to his boss. He did not even present the fund to his boss. As a matter of policy, he explained, the body he works for does not invest in funds that have a social purpose, but solely in financial initiatives such as the Israeli venture capital funds based on Hamenofim Street in Herzliya. They do not want to mix business with social action, he explained. Yet the truth is that some of the funds on Hamenofim Street started life just like Al-Bawader — as small venture capital funds relying on a state guarantee whose goal was promoting investments in high-tech.

The state guarantee was provided so that investors would not be afraid to place money in the funds. At the time, these funds were no less “philanthropic” than Al-Bawader. They have managed to create a booming high-tech sector and their founding partners have become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Several months later, the large financial body nevertheless decided to invest in Al-Bawader. How did this come about? The venture capital fund Pitango began to encourage investments in Al-Bawader and sponsored the young initiative. The big financial institution boss, whose name appears regularly in the financial press, met with Rami Kalish of Pitango in his home and was persuaded to join in. This is how fashion comes into play.

Three years later, the investment manager was helping to raise money for a body that supports Arabs in Israel’s southern Negev region. But this is all completely non-political, he was careful to emphasize: the goal is purely economic development.

—

One more thing: initially I had many doubts about whether or not I should write this book. At first I was unsure whether it would be feasible. Could I really put everything else aside and start traveling to Nazareth, where this Arab high-tech was happening? Would people let me see this Arab high tech happening? What language would all this take place in?

Would I be able to find some crash course that would enable me to understand a conversation in Arabic between two Arab engineers? And anyway: who in Israel would want to read about Arab engineers, even if they had an interesting project?

I do not speak Arabic. Four year of Arabic studies in elementary school — the effort made by the Israeli education system to teach me the language of one-fifth of Israel’s citizens – left no impression on me. I know the words for teacher and school. I can curse in Arabic. Then someone told me that I was worrying too much about not knowing Arabic. Like some Israelis, he knows Arabic from his days in the Intelligence Corps in the army. He was taught Arabic in order to eavesdrop on Palestinians or Arabs in other countries and work out what they were thinking — not in order to engage in conversation with fellow citizens of his own country. He was not sure that he would be able to chat with Arabs in Arabic.

But my fear of writing the book was about more than language. The truth was that I did not know any Arabs. The Arab citizens of Israel constitute twenty percent of the population of the country in which I live but, like many Jewish Israelis, I do not know them. When I heard an Arab name I could not tell which was the first name and which was the surname. I did not know what their homes looked like from the inside and I was not familiar with any of their cultural norms or nuances, only with their stereotypic representation. The only encounters I had were from around the year 2000 when Arabs began to work in shops in Jewish areas: the Arab pharmacist in the local Super-Pharm branch; the Arab saleswoman in the bookshop that opens on the Sabbath; the shift manager at the checkout counter in a supermarket. I have never worked with Arabs. At university there were fewer than ten Arabs in my year and no-one made any particular effort to talk to them. I didn’t know anything about their language, their culture, even the most basic things. I noticed that the Arab students tended to keep to themselves, wary of us just as we ignored them; painfully polite and restrained. I suddenly found myself wondering if my typical Israeli lack of politeness, which I had seen as part of being a Sabra, might have its origins in Eastern Europe rather than the Levant.

I was familiar in broad strokes with the history of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. I knew that for the Arabs this was not a war of independence but a Nakba — a catastrophe – in which 600,000–700,000 Arabs refugees left the area that became the State of Israel, leaving some 100,000–150,000 Arabs who became citizens of the State of Israel. I knew that Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” — but I also knew that until 1966 most Arab citizens of Israel lived under military rule. “By means of the travel restrictions it [the military rule — RF] imposed on the Arabs, the government prevented them from working in the Jewish sector and channeled their access to employment to specific numbers and sectors according to its own objectives.

These travel restrictions prevented Arabs from using state land and from entering areas defined as ‘security zones,’ which until 1948 had been inhabited by Arab peasants. The government prevented the domestic refugees who had remained in Israel (some 10 percent of the total Arab population) from entering their abandoned villages, establishing new villages, or relocating as they saw fit — particularly to the Jewish cities. Thus these restrictions served as the military government’s principal tool for removing Arabs from their land, thereby facilitating the confiscation of this land and its use for Jewish settlement. The military government regulations prevented the establishment of any kind of Arab leadership, Arab economy, or any other independent Arab system. The military government prevented modernization, industrialization, and urbanization and left the Arab sector at a poor level in material and employment terms, thereby leading to the creation of very large villages that lacked their own sources of employment.”

I knew about Land Day, which commemorated the mass confiscation of Arab land in the Galilee in 1976, as part of efforts to “Judaize” the Galilee, and I remembered October 2000, when I learned that live fire could be used against Arab citizens of Israel involved in demonstrations, and not only against Palestinians in the Territories engaged in “disturbances.” I also remembered learning at university about an Israeli law that is relevant only to Arabs — the Absentee Property Law.

But my fears did not relate only to my feeling that I was insufficiently familiar with the subject of my study or extremely uncomfortable with learning more about it. In contrast to my ignorance of the facts, I had a very extensive emotional knowledge. By this I refer to the inherent, almost physical, emotional knowledge of the racist. An Arab inspired a physical sense of fear in me — the product of a million internalized messages of ethnic loathing, stereotypes, history, and war. All these flow in my blood, and I would be lying if I pretended otherwise. During my army service I went to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem for some blood tests. An Arab intern took my blood. We engaged in polite chitchat, but the whole time I was absolutely terrified.

But curiosity is stronger than fear. Today I can barely remember the fear that accompanied me during the first few months of my work on the book. On the national level, however, the fear remains. For many Israeli Jews, I think, and that includes myself, any discussion of the Arab question arouses dread. It forces us to come to terms with what happened here in 1948, with the question of Arabs’ rights today, and with our hopes and aspirations for the future of our country. The rights of Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 and those of the Palestinians of ‘48, who are citizens of the state, are very different. Yet even the Arabs of ’48 call themselves, and are widely recognized, as second-class citizens. Confronting this makes most Israelis uncomfortable, righteous or apologetic.

But nevertheless, somewhere in the periphery of the start-up nation, Arabs have begun to be employed in high-tech. And that is the subject of this book.

—

On a warm winter’s day in 2009 I visited Adalah — The Legal Center for the Rights of the Arab Minority in Israel. I had scheduled a meeting with Hassan Jabareen, the founder and CEO of the organization, who had agreed readily to meet after I sent him an email. Jabareen was one of the first people I met as I began to research my book. I hoped that he could offer some ideas and avenues, and perhaps introduce me to a “first Arab” I could speak to and recruit as a subject for the book. When I mentioned the meeting to one of the investors in Galil Software, his reaction was negative. “You know that he isn’t a Zionist,” he warned me. If he were in my shoes, he would not go ahead with the meeting.

“Do you think he should be a Zionist?” I asked. Is this a precondition for joining the high-tech game in Israel or for working in an Israeli company? Is it even possible — let alone desirable — for an Arab to be a Zionist? My acquaintance told me that he understands that Jabareen sees himself as a Palestinian; that his narrative of history is the Nakba. He recalled a visit to the home of an Arab who works in the high-tech sector. On the wall there was a picture of Al-Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands). The picture bore the legend: “Jerusalem is ours.” My acquaintance continued: “He invites me into his home, but he dreams of a day when I won’t be here.” Their Jerusalem is not ours, the Zionist Jerusalem. My acquaintance could accept this picture in the living room as he knew the man concerned, but he finds it harder to tolerate Adalah, and is afraid that in meeting him I myself will cross the border between Zionist and non-Zionist.

“You know,” he explained, “although I’m left-wing, I’m a Zionist. He isn’t. He’s a radical.” I suspect that what he found difficult to accept is not so much Jabareen’s opinions, but the way he expresses them — provocatively, in excellent Hebrew, before the Israeli Supreme Court, not in a picture of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The organization he heads does not have a “respectable” Hebrew name like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, but the Arabic name “Adalah.” Few Hebrew speakers will know what the word means, and few will be comforted to learn that it means “justice.”

Adalah’s offices are situated in the heart of the Arab section of Haifa, close to Ben Gurion Boulevard, in an old building that was once part of the German Colony. The building was constructed by German Christians (Templars) and is populated by Arabs; it has nothing in common with Zionist architecture.

As I walk up the staircase I am reminded of scenes from Egyptian or Turkish movies, some indefinable quality of our region — the Levant — that can no longer be found in places in Israel where Jews have left their mark. It was as if I were in some foreign country, rather than an hour away from my own home. This experience would be repeated almost every time I visited some place while writing the book, as if I were passing through the looking glass into a parallel reality, which exists for twenty percent of the citizens of my country.

A strong aroma of black coffee brewed on a stove top pervaded Adalah’s offices. There was an electric hot plate for heating water, a small pot for brewing the coffee, and a small plate thoughtfully placed on top of the pot to keep the coffee hot. I waited in a room that was actually a balcony at the end of a long, rectangular room from which doors led into other rooms on both sides. Perhaps this was originally the living room of those who lived here. A woman brings in black coffee in a small plastic thermos flask shaped like a traditional Oriental coffee jug. She puts the jug down and places small plastic cups and cookies alongside. No one serves coffee this way in offices in Tel Aviv.

Jabareen comes into the room. He is a stocky man wearing a loose-fitting shirt that comes down to his mid thighs. He wears a cap on his curly black hair — a fashion accessory I saw on many Arab men of his age as I traveled around the Galilee.

Jabareen comes originally from Umm al-Fahm and is the oldest of seven children. His father, well educated and from a wealthy family, was the first attorney in what was then a large village and is now a city. Jabareen explains his decision to study law: “What appealed to me about this profession is that it has to do with political power. I realized that in this profession you become part of the power game and you enjoy legitimacy. People listen to you. Legal work and legal rules provide an opportunity to play a legitimate part in the game and to influence things. This is the only profession that is political, in the sense that an attorney takes part in the balance of forces in the market.” Jabareen has always worked in the human rights field. “I was attracted to this field while I was still a student. I was the only Arab in my class at the Faculty of Law in Tel Aviv University. Everyone knew that I was an Arab, and although I had friends in the class and we maintained relations of mutual respect and admiration, my Arab identity was always present in the background. Among themselves, the Jewish students did not need to know my name. I studied during the first intifada, and if I happened to miss a class the other students would comment that ‘the Arab’ had not turned up. That was sufficient – everyone knew who ‘the Arab’ was.”

During his internship Jabareen joined the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), a “Zionist” organization. After spending several years in the organization he received a scholarship to study for his master’s degree in the United States. “While I was studying there I worked briefly as an intern in the NAACP, the largest, strongest, and oldest African-American organization. I realized how important it is to have an organization that sets its own agenda… After I returned from the United States, my scholarship required me to work in ACRI for another year. That was a very difficult year for me. At that time ACRI was a conservative organization that was very concerned about remaining within the consensus. I got involved in some ideological and other arguments with the organization because of our different understandings of various aspects of Arab rights and human rights. I soon realized that there were differences between our worldviews… so I should establish an Arab organization whose agenda would be set by Arabs, so that we wouldn’t have to struggle to prove that we should not face discrimination, but turn our energy to the actual struggle against discrimination.”

Adalah was established in 1996. In the 2000s Aharon Barak, then President of the Supreme Court in Israel, offered Jabareen a chance to serve on the Supreme Court, but he declined. Another Arab justice was appointed instead: Salim Joubran, who was attacked in the Israeli media at the beginning of 2012 after he failed to join in singing Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah,* at an official ceremony.

Jabareen does not think that a book about Arabs in high-tech is a good idea. “Why do you want to write a book like that about Arab yuppies,” he asks, disappointed and almost bored. Is that why he cleared time in his diary — to listen to me talk about a handful of yuppie Arabs in the high-tech industry?

I try to explain: the idea is to examine a small part of the picture in order to learn about reality as a whole. I refrain from explaining that I can hardly write about all the rest of it. What does he want me to do — travel to a refugee camp in the West Bank? Walk around Gaza? Confront his non-Zionist identity? No-one would read that and I can’t deal with it.

“You’re writing about a few successful individuals who have found good jobs for themselves. Your basic message is that there is no problem. Anyone who is brilliant enough will succeed, it’s just a matter of equal opportunity.”

“I know that there isn’t equality,” I begin my reply. “I know that the fact that they are highly-qualified doesn’t guarantee them work. I know that there are lots of ordinary people who also deserve a good job, even if they don’t have any particularly outstanding skills. I don’t want to create the impression that anyone who is bright enough can make it or to imply that those who don’t find work are to blame for their situation.”

“The people you are writing about suffer from a lack of equal opportunities,” Jabareen explains. “Here it’s just a matter of discrimination, a struggle for land, whether or not people manage to find work. But anyway, they get by. Why are you writing about Arabs here who face discrimination when in East Jerusalem there is apartheid and in the Territories there is occupation? And in Gaza? You want to write about coexistence,” he summarizes in conclusion, uttering the word “coexistence” with disdain. The people I write about in this book dislike the term “coexistence,” which they do not interpret as implying peace but a reality that deigns to allow Arabs to survive. “I can write about high-tech,” I reply. “I can’t write about anything else.”

Our conversation fizzles out. I ask about Adalah. He explains that he has no problem with employing Jews in Adalah, but he is proud that it is an Arab organization and not a Jewish one. He is happy to employ Jews, but not Zionists. I reflect: he wouldn’temploy me. I ask him which of the petitions Adalah has submitted to the courts make him proudest. One of his most famous petitions, for example, led the Supreme Court to rule that the Israeli army cannot ask Palestinians to act as mediators and go to the homes of wanted persons to tell them to come out before the army attacks (this was called the “Neighbor Procedure”). But Jabareen tells me that he is proud of a petition concerning the allocation of land for Muslim cemeteries in Israel. The petition was successful and the court ruled that land must also be allocated for this purpose. Everyone has an equal right to be buried. “We all die the same way in the end,” he tells me.

After an hour and a half, I leave. Jabareen does not like the book, and to an extent I agree with his criticism. My book is the product of my own limitations and those of the society in which I live, with its unwritten rules defining what we may or may not think about or write about. Above all, I am haunted by the sense that Jabareen himself is haunted and restless, and that the questions I raised trouble him and prevent him from being happy. I wonder if the collective reality intrudes into the personal realm far more than he would be willing to admit. For example, when I asked him whether the situation embodies an element of racism as well as a simple “struggle for land,” he became furious, but I could not understand — and he did not wish to explain — whether his rage was against racism or against the situation. And if he feels this way, as someone who has made so much of himself and self-actualized, then how must other members of the collective he belongs to feel? Those who, unlike him, do not feel at liberty to provoke and dissent?

A few days later I met a prominent academic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — a Jewish man who has written about the Arabs in Israel. Like Jabareen, he objected to the idea of a book focusing on Arabs in high-tech — on the few who “make it.” At that stage I was still unable to point out to him that there in reality there is no such thing. Every “successful Arab” I met is just as haunted as Jabareen. I did not meet a single Arab yuppie who is contented with his lot — not among those who have enjoyed professional success, not among those who live in prosperity, and not even among those who live “like Sayed Kashua,” as they put it — those whose children, like Kashua’s, go to a joint Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem, live in the west of the city and work in prestigious positions, including physicians at the best hospitals in West Jerusalem. They, too, were restless and their financial wellbeing was the wellbeing of someone who has a comforting transitional object to hold, rather than an authentic inner wellbeing.

I tell the academic about one of the Arab entrepreneurs I met and about the Jewish investors in his company. “That Arab guy you’re talking about is a collaborator,” he declares.

“Collaborator” is a strong word — it reeks of betrayal. It is not used lightly. I was taken aback by his use of the word. I knew that he was only saying this to be provocative in the style of an academic who enjoys using crude words from the world beyond his ivory tower. Nevertheless the word irritated me, with its military overtones, its echoes of the secret police, and its artificial attempt to express an assumed position among Arabs themselves regarding what an Arab in Israel may or may not do. Above all, I was struck by the judgmental tone of his remark. With his tenured position at the university can he really judge someone else who wants to build a career? Is someone who tries to encourage employment in the high-tech industry in his own community a collaborator? Could he not have chosen a different, more respectful word?

During my conversations with Arabs themselves, by contrast, the word collaborator was never used: not when I was told about someone’s father who made a fortune from business with Jews, and not even when someone talked about an Arab who was suspected of working with the Israeli security services. The words that were chosen seemed to imply a degree of compassion. You should not judge someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes — perhaps things happened over the course of that mile that forced them to “collaborate.”

In any case, how can anyone avoid collaborating with life? Anyone who was born here after 1948 has lived in the State of Israel all their life. Should they suspend their life in order to avoid “collaboration?” I felt that the academic was allowing himself to use a word he should have avoided, even if he was only trying to make a clever point.

“Why is he a collaborator?” I asked him.

“Haven’t you heard of BDS?” he replied.

“No.”

“It stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions,” he informs me. “A boycott of Israel based on the withdrawal of investments and other sanctions. It’s a movement that began in 2005 and aims to boycott Israel until it recognizes the Palestinians’ rights, including the right of return, and gives them their land back.” He added that this is what Palestinians believe in now. There must be no cooperation with Israel. That is certainly the position of the Arab world.

“But how can the people I am interviewing for my book be collaborators?” I ask, outraged on their behalf. “That might be relevant for Palestinians outside Israel, but these are people who are living here. And people only live once. Do you expect people to boycott Galil Software because it gets funding from the Ministry of Industry and Trade? And if they don’t shouldthey be called collaborators?”

“You said that they have Jewish investors,” he replied. “If they were Arab investors maybe that would be okay… but Jews?”

“So what do you suggest? Should people go back to working as teachers in the village?” I asked, wondering just how relevant BDS is to the people it is supposed to help. “And are there even any Arab investors to invest in them? How many very rich Arabs are there?”

He fell silent.

I was angry with him.

After I got home I read about the BDS movement, which has also urged people to boycott Intel because of its connections with Israel. If BDS had its way, no Arab from Nazareth would have developed the Pentium.

__

“My elder brother was the first person in the village to study accounting at Tel Aviv University,” an Arab (Muslim Arab!) man from the Lower Galilee tells me. He comes from a displaced (“internal”) refugee family that moved to the village in 1948; the family is poorer than most of the well-established families in the village and less well connected to the local power bases.

“People in the village immediately assumed that he was a collaborator.”

The villagers assumed that the brother’s skills and achievements had nothing to do with his acceptance to a competitive study track with high entrance requirements. From their standpoint the only possible explanation for one of their own being so successful is that it was not due to his abilities. He surely was a collaborator.

When the man’s brother came home on vacation from university the villagers would come to see him to ask favors, telling him about relatives who had not been accepted to university and problems with the authorities. They hoped he might pass on their requests to the people with whom he was collaborating or pull some strings for them. He told them that he had no idea why they were making these requests to him, that he could not help, and that he had been accepted on his own merit. But they still kept on coming.

“One day I came home and found him crying in his room,” the younger brother told me; the younger brother was the first person from the village to study industrial engineering and management, also at Tel Aviv University.

“I asked him why he was crying and he told me that he couldn’t cope with all the requests.”

“Was he angry?” I asked.

“Sure! No-one appreciated his achievement, they only thought about what they assumed he had done to get there. As if it was impossible that someone smart and successful might simply be accepted.” His brother’s achievements more or less ceased to exist as far as the community was concerned. For the villagers, convinced that everything is a matter of personal contacts and that their lives depend on someone’s willingness to include them in the plot, all they could see was his collaboration.

“What did they think about you when you got into university?”

“The same thing: how else could they explain that I was the first person from the village to get in? Even though my psychometric score was also ‘the first in the village’ — and everyone knew that.”

Almost all the brothers in the family have been interrogated by the General Security Service in connection with their political views. Some of them are affiliated with movements such as Abnaa al-Balad (“Sons of the Land”), which advocates “a secular and democratic Palestine that will realize the national liberation of the Palestinian people that has been expropriated and oppressed by Zionism.” Despite this, they are all suspected of being collaborators, because they did well at university.

“What happened to your brother?”

“He could not find work and he was unhappy. Eventually he found a job in Jerusalem, and when they offered him a chance to move to Germany he did so. He still lives there today.”

This man told me about a real collaborator from his village who helped the Israeli army in Southern Lebanon. He pities the man and believes that he is haunted by feelings of guilt. He believes he will never be completely honest and he will always end up on a crooked path, unable to achieve happiness. If he were not haunted by his past as a collaborator, perhaps he would have a better life. I am sorry to report that I did not manage to interview even a single Arab who told me that he likes this place and this country and looks forward to a good life and a good future in Israel. Not a single interviewee seemed free of the worry about where to position himself on the impossible spectrum from collaboration to boycott, from national pride to an inferiority complex.

Footnotes:

(1) “Arab citizens of Israel,” “Arabs” or “Arabs in Israel” refer to Arabs or Palestinians who are citizens of the State of Israel. After the 1948 War and Israel’s establishment, those Palestinians who remained within the borders of the new state were granted Israeli citizenship and Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised them equal rights regardless of sex, race or religion. This population includes Muslims (by far the largest group), Christians, Bedouins, and Druze. Many of these Israeli citizens consider themselves Palestinians. Since the 1967 War, more Palestinians have come under Israeli rule – in the West Bank (and Gaza). With the exception of the Druze in the Golan Heights (taken from Syria in 1967), who were granted Israeli citizenship in 1981–1982, none of the additional Palestinians taken under Israeli rule in 1967 have been granted citizenship. So: a Palestinian in Jaffa (part of Israel since 1948) is an Israeli citizen; a Palestinian in Wadi Ara (ceded to Israel by Jordan under the 1949 armistice agreement) is also an Israeli citizen; but a Palestinian from East Jerusalem (occupied and annexed in 1967) is an Israeli resident, but not a citizen; and a Palestinian from Ramallah (occupied since 1967 and not annexed) is neither a citizen nor a resident of Israel.

I have not used the term “Palestinian” to refer to Arab citizens of Israel — not because I ignore their right to self-identify as Palestinian but mainly to prevent confusion (Palestinians are mostly referred to within the context of the West Bank and Gaza that have been occupied since 1967) and to reflect the Hebrew vernacular which refers to this group as “Israeli Arabs.” Many Arabs refer to this group as the “Internal Arabs” or the “’48 Arabs” — i.e. those who stayed within the State of Israel after the 1948 War and did not become refugees.

(2) Arab citizens have been exempted from Israel’s compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. One of the reasons cited is that they may find themselves identifying with Israel’s enemies. Bedouins do volunteer into the IDF and about 85 percent of Druze men also do so, as part of an arrangement reached with the Druze community in 1956.

(3) I will refer to each of these laws as they appear throughout the book. The most recent law was the Nation-State Law (which did not pass as of late 2014), which attempts to “resolve” the conflict between Israel’s being a Jewish and democratic state through an assertion that in case of conflict the “Jewish” will prevail, and which declares that only Jewish communal rights will be recognized. Additional laws include a requirement for an oath of loyalty in certain cases of granting of citizenship, the Nakba law, and the Admissions Committee Law. While these laws may not have an immediate impact on many Arabs in Israel, they are perceived as acts of hostility towards Israel’s Arabs, initiated by right-wing parties that are set on denouncing Arabs for lack of loyalty to the state, refusing their right to mourn the “Nakba” or limiting their ability to petition Israel’s Supreme Court by invoking Israel’s democracy and their discrimination under its laws.