Diversity, Palestinian style ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, February 16, 2026

Diversity, Palestinian style

It is amusing when people try to import progressive cultural mores into the space of decidedly non-progressive Palestinian contexts.

Here's an academic paper published last year, "Boardroom diversity and financial performance in Palestinian banks and insurers." It looks to see if there is any relationship between diversity in the members of the boards of Palestinian financial institutions and their performance.

This is the sort of topic one would expect to be written in any Western nation - does a diverse board result in better performance? This has been a major topic in Fortune 500 companies for at least three decades.

But something about the abstract is a little off:

This study examines the impact of board diversity—precisely age, nationality, and experience—on the financial performance of 13 Palestinian banks and insurance companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange (PEX) from 2011 to 2022. Using a comprehensive panel data approach and controlling for endogeneity with a two-step system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator, the analysis explores how diverse board characteristics influence financial outcomes measured by ROA and ROE. Unlike previous studies focused mainly on developed markets or gender diversity, this research offers new insights into the role of board diversity in emerging economies, particularly in the Middle Eastern context. The results reveal that while age diversity negatively impacts firm performance, experience diversity positively correlates, underscoring the importance of industry-specific expertise in financial governance. Nationality diversity, however, exhibits no significant effect, suggesting that foreign representation may introduce complexity without necessarily enhancing performance.

The markers of "diversity" in Palestinian institutions isn't gender or disability or race. They are age, nationality and experience.

Which indicates that the amount of real diversity in these boardrooms, in the Western sense, is practically zero.

I went through the names I could find of the board members of these banks and insurance companies. Every one is an Arabic name. There are very few that can be identified as Christian based on their names, and very few that are women. Obviously the the Arab Islamic Bank and the Palestine Islamic Bank have zero women and non-Muslims, but the other institutions also had very few.

(There is one notable exception - Bank of Palestine had, as of 2022, 5 female board members out of 11.)

And as far as "nationality" is concerned, they are all 100% Arab. The amount of viewpoint diversity between Palestinians and Saudis and Iraqis from the boardroom is probably close to zero - it isn't like there are any Dutch board members.

So the paper uses excellent data science to prove essentially nothing about the value of what Westerners would call "diversity." And, in a way, it covers up the lack of diversity in these institutions by not calling out the obvious homogeneity that each of these boards have.

In short, there is no real diversity in Palestinian banks and insurance companies. That is the real story. Doing fancy math to show whether banks dominated by Arab Muslim men have some small differences correlated with their age or experience is almost comic - the differences in their performance will be much more reliant on other factors like loan policies, amount of corruption, and marketing instead of whether two board members came from Jordan.

Where are the feminists, the anti-racists, the DEI leaders denouncing the fact that most Palestinian boardrooms don't have any diversity to speak of?

They are writing letters denouncing Israel, of course.