Mind The Gap
By Trends • Jun 1st, 2010The prestigious OECD votes this month whether to include Israel as a member. But the country’s chances could be harmed by inequalities within its population.
Earlier this year, two Israeli leaders prepared themselves for very important meetings with Jose Angel Gurria, chairman of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the association of the world’s 30 most developed countries. Gurria was visiting the country to discuss Israel’s potential membership in the prestigious club.
In the week before the chairman’s arrival, Israeli President Shimon Peres took a busload of Israeli chief executives to the Arab city of Nazareth to show them the beginning of high-tech developments in Arab-Israeli society, and to encourage them to employ Arabs. And before his own meeting, Dr. Ahmed Tibi, a leading and vocal Arab member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, simply armed himself with statistics of Arab poverty.
Gurria arrived in January, OECD report in hand. Its contents were explosive, not because it revealed something new, but because both the information and the report were coming from an international organization that Israel very much wanted to be a member of.
After praising the country’s rapid growth and development, the report went on to show Israel as like a Third World country with a variety of problems holding it back. The report focused on the enormous social and economic gaps between the general Jewish population and those of the Arab and ultra-Orthodox sectors.
The statistics were appaling: “Israel’s deep socio-economic cleavages must be given due priority … Poverty is concentrated among the 20 percent of the population who are Arab-Israelis whose poverty rate is around 50 percent and the (estimated) 8 percent who are ultra- Orthodox Jews whose poverty rate is around 60 percent,” wrote the OECD.
In other words, 50 percent of Arab families live below the poverty line, a rate three times higher than that among Jewish Israelis.
The OECD understood that, although the ultra-Orthodox Jews’ poor lifestyle was one of choice because they prefer to study religious books than work, that was not the case for the Arabs. “The OECD’s review of Israel’s labor market and social policies documents econometric evidence comparing wages and employment rates that points to discrimination against Arab-Israelis,” wrote the OECD, putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of the state.
