Dozens of Bedouin women from southern Israel join the work force after an Israeli phone company opens a service center inside a local mosque, where women feel they can work without any inhibition.Now, how can the anti-Israel crowd spin this to prove Israeli Jewish racism?
The country’s largest telecom group, Bezeq Israel Telecom, in a joint venture with the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, launched the center inside the mosque in an attempt to combat unemployment among Arab Bedouin women.
“Bedouin women would like to work, most of them, and they want to be a part of the work market and to contribute to the economy of the house alongside their husbands. But because there are no work places in the villages and they are not able to work outside the villages, this is preventing many of them from being a part of the work force,” Mahmoud Alamour, director of Rayan Center, said.
Because of their traditional, patriarchal lifestyle, persuading husbands and fathers to allow wives and daughters to go to work was not easy and the best way to allay fears was overcome by housing the call center at the mosque.
”The girls felt safe when we told them that they will work under a mosque. They were so happy because a girl feels she is in a safe place, like in her house and her village. Now we have two shifts, morning and evening and the girls work until 23:00, and we could only get this because we operate from the mosque,” said Naifa al-Nabari, vocational coordinator for Rayan Center.
“As a Bedouin woman I am so proud of myself because as a Bedouin girl I started from zero. This is my first career, I never had another job, it took me not too long in order to be a manager in a company like Bezeq,” said Dalal Abu-kaf, team manager at telephone service center.
“I think I have no problem with this project and if I sometimes need to go out of work in a specific time, like when a child is sick, Bezeq helps me –- they allow us to go and tend to our children,” said Manal Abu-keren, a Bezeq employee.
Itamar Harel, vice president of Bezeq’s private marketing division, said the company recruited workers throughout Israeli society and was happy to take on the Bedouin women in the belief also that investing in their training was economically sound.
Speaking confidently in Hebrew and attired in traditional Arab garb, Bedouin women helped customers solve phone line faults from a call center housed in a mosque in a desert town in southern Israel.
Only some 20 percent of Israel’s Muslim women participate in the job market, according to official figures, and among Israel’s Bedouin, that number is even lower, at around 15 percent, Rayan told Reuters.
That's an easy one. I figure within two days we'll see an article on Mondoweiss about how Israeli occupiers are exploiting Arab women for slave labor.
The commenters at Al Arabiya go beyond that. Charles from Saudi Arabia writes:
Why are you writing nice things about an Israeli company and the hiring of Bedouins. This must be a zionist plot to capture and enslave these women, perhaps to trade them for future israeli hostages
And Ram Jam, also from Saudi Arabia, wrote:
Women who work have higher chances of being promiscuous and unfaithful. Pick the good cherries and dump the brusied [sic] ones....
There ya go.
(h/t Zvi)