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Friday April 16, 1999

Agency seeks better business climate for Israeli Arabs

JOSHUA SCHUSTER
Bulletin Staff

Helmi Kittani, co-director of the Center for Jewish Arab Economic Development, says workplace discrimination stories like his are a dime a dozen in Israel.

Kittani, who has a degree in banking from Tel Aviv University, served for several years as a branch manager of Bank Hapoalim. He sought a promotion to head the Arab division of the bank.

Management rewarded him nicely with the new job. A week later, the offer was pulled out from under his feet -- management regretfully said Kittani could not be promoted because he's an Arab.

So Kittani quit and joined forces with the Center for Jewish Arab Economic Development, now in its 11th year. The Herzliya-based agency promotes better business between Jews and Arabs by offering technical assistance and access to capital to advance Israel's Arab population. It also fosters Jewish-Arab business co-ownership.

Concerning his career switch, "I wanted to be more active in building a different environment not for me, but for my children and my neighbors' children," Kittani said in a recent interview.

He and co-director Sarah Kreimer, an American who immigrated to Israel in 1984, were in Oakland paying a thank-you visit to the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay and the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. Both agencies have contributed to the Israeli nonprofit.

In seven years of working together, Kittani and Kreimer have seen their cause rise and fall with the tides of government coalitions. In 1992, under the Labor government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli government put closing the socioeconomic gap between Jews and Arabs high on the national agenda. With the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, the policy ended.

Israeli Arabs are hindered by many economic problems, Kreimer said. For one, Arab development towns, riddled with basic municipal problems, have only one-third the budget of Jewish towns. It's better than 10 years ago, however, when the budget was one-twelfth.

In addition, she said, "Arabs are employed in jobs that earn less than Jews. Arabs have larger families and Arab women don't tend to work. Also there is little local means of employment for Arabs and 70 percent commute to jobs in Jewish cities."

Those disparities cause problems for Israel, according to Kreimer, fanning discontent among Arabs.

"The greater the economic cooperation between the two groups, the stronger both societies will be," Kittani said. "Otherwise, people are bitter."

For its part, the center helped 230 businesses open last year, creating 500 new jobs.

It also recently won a battle over the inflated value of government land that Arabs were seeking to incorporate into their towns. Arabs decried paying three times more than Jews in some cases for land in approximately the same vicinity, due to restrictive zoning.

Since the Jews had more land available to purchase and the plots in the crowded Arab towns were smaller, the Israeli government said pricing was a matter of supply and demand.

"The government was systematically limiting the ability of Arab towns to grow," Kreimer said. "It was discrimination. We helped to get the government to do pricing on a regional basis. It was a big success."

The center is also trying to get Jewish industry to erect plants in Arab neighborhoods, where labor is cheap. Another focus is to place Arab technologists in Israeli software companies. Kreimer said a bias remains against hiring Arabs in the high-tech sector because of past links to defense programs.

"We're very pragmatic," Kreimer said. "We don't just speak about Jewish-Arab relations; we do something."

Her agency takes on large- and small-scale projects.

She cited the case of helping an Arab family secure a contract with El Al Airlines to serve the family's baklava on its flights. "We create a reality that didn't exist before," Kreimer said.

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