Challenge no.58

A New Mood in Ein Mahel

Roni Ben Efrat interviews Wehbe Badarneh, Manager of the Workers Advice Center (WAC) in Nazareth

- Out of your experience defending the rights of the Arab jobless, what would you say is different about the case of Ein Mahel?

Most of the cases we've handled till now involved individuals or groups. For example: a worker or group of workers who were unjustly classified as refusers and who came to us because they'd been stripped of their unemployment benefits. With Ein Mahel, though, it's the case of an entire village, about three hundred families. Here a community has been cheated by the employment service in a wholesale, cunning way just because they are Arabs. In our political lexicon we call that "apartheid".
Ein Mahel became a workers' village after Israel confiscated most of its lands in the course of the years. Recently it's become a major focus of unemployment with about 480 people out of work. The employment service - I assume in cahoots with the Treasury - decided on a simple solution: Instead of finding work for them, just reclassify them as refusers.

- How did you learn about this?

Within two months the employment bureau registered 200 refusals. This coincided with the transfer of the Ein Mahel workers from the bureau in Arab Nazareth to the one in Jewish Upper Nazareth. There they segregated the Arabs. (See article.) We suspected something fishy, and together with the workers, we began tracking the work-places the bureau was sending them to. Most of these turned out to be fictive. The purpose seemed to be to wear the jobless down, so they'd stop looking. We made contact with a journalist from Yediot Aharonot, someone with good connections to government offices. She checked and confirmed our suspicions: the workers of Ein Mahel have been victims of bureaucratic fraud.
On October 9, two weeks before the article came out in Yediot, we called for a meeting at our office in Nazareth. The invitation went out to all the unemployed in the area, but those who came were mostly from Ein Mahel. We saw that they were furious. We suggested they set up a committee of the village unemployed and begin to wage a public struggle with our help.

- Is it true that this is the first time that unemployed Arab workers in Israel have organized an action committee?

Yes, and the fact has enormous significance. One result of unemployment is to fragment the workers into atoms, causing each to fend for him- or herself. Here, in the framework of joint struggle, we translate the individualized personal problems into a broad social issue. Given the political vacuum among the Arabs in Israel, this is an extraordinary step, signifying a change in the very nature of the struggle. In past years, the Arab population used to organize mass struggles around land problems - the parade example was the Land Day demonstration in 1976. With the retreat of the national movement, however, the struggle stopped, and people began to refer their problems to the Arab Knesset members, who didn't do a thing. The Arab leaders used to oppose the Histadrut (the national trade union), which hasn't the slightest interest in the Arab worker. Since Oslo, however, they cooperate with it. Until WAC came along, Arab workers had simply no one to turn to.
The Ein Mahel jobless elected a committee consisting of three women and three men. They sit with us and plan the struggle step by step. This is a new experiment both for them and for us. I feel how they have regained their self-respect.

- What part did the Histadrut play in this affair?

It's hard for us to believe that the Histadrut didn't know what the employment service was up to. On October 20 we had a stormy demonstration at the bureau. No one came from the Histadrut. Two weeks later we made a sit-in there, and fighting broke out. After it was over, Histadrut people arrived along with members of Ein Mahel's Village Council, essentially in order to quiet the workers and usurp the campaign. They were in for a surprise. The workers simply threw them out, saying that WAC alone represents them. The police had to do all the negotiating with us.

- You mentioned that the action committee includes three women out of the six. What is the role of the female workers in the struggle?

Without downplaying the performance of the men, I can say that the women have had a leading role. They were the first to make contact with us, and in fact, they drew the men in. This confirms what we have always said: a woman who goes out to work experiences a major change in her whole attitude and way of life.

- What are the plans for the future of this campaign?

We are focusing on the popular struggle and organizing assemblies to demand an answer to all the claims. To date we have made seventy appeals for people classified as refusers. We explain to the workers that we must translate our enthusiasm into consciousness and organize ourselves, because unemployment will be here as long as capitalism is. The important thing is transform each fight like this one into another stone in the building of worker resistance. Success at Ein Mahel is important for the entire Arab sector.
The workers of Ein Mahel know that their case has become a public issue. They do not intend to give up. They say that now they want to establish a WAC Center in the village and organize social actions just as we do in Nazareth. I feel that pessimism and passivity have here turned to an activism full of hope.