My Neighborhood is a documentary about settler expansion in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. The film is narrated by seventh-grader, Mohammed, who sagely and poetically describes the violent changes to his home and his neighborhood as a result of settler expansion. The film explores Mohammed's feelings towards the settlers and his evolving opinions about the Israeli people. It's short (about 25 minutes), yet extremely powerful.
Showing posts with label inequalities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inequalities. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Palestinian Child Labor in Israeli Settlements
Al-Jazeera published an article today about Palestinian children working in Israeli settlements. Israeli settlements have been deemed illegal according to international law. In the Jordan Valley, there are approximately 60,000 Palestinians and 9,500 Israelis living in 37 settlements.
Between 10000 to 20,000 Palestinians work inside Jordan Valley settlements, which varies according to the season. Five to ten percent of these numbers are child workers. These children often forgo school in order to make money for their families, who are often in or on the brink of poverty. There is a high drop out rate in the Jordan Valley because of the weak educational system, lack of adequate infrastructure, and Israeli restrictions on building new schools for Palestinians. According to a 2012 report from the Ma'an Development Centre, during the 2011/2012 school year, there were 10,000 children living in this area who started the school year in tents, caravans, or tin shacks. The report also notes that nearly one-third of schools here lack adequate water and sanitation facilities.
Children have been employed by settlers to clean, lift boxes, pick and package vegetables and fruit, working in extreme heat (up to 50-degrees Celcius) for eight to nine hour shifts. They earn approximately 50-90NIS ($14-$25) per shift, which is about 25-50 percent what they are entitled to under Israeli labor laws.
The short article is worth reading, as it touches upon the tough decisions children make in deciding to work in this context, including the push and pull factors hat influence their decisions.
[Photo: Ma'an Development Centre / Al Jazeera]
Between 10000 to 20,000 Palestinians work inside Jordan Valley settlements, which varies according to the season. Five to ten percent of these numbers are child workers. These children often forgo school in order to make money for their families, who are often in or on the brink of poverty. There is a high drop out rate in the Jordan Valley because of the weak educational system, lack of adequate infrastructure, and Israeli restrictions on building new schools for Palestinians. According to a 2012 report from the Ma'an Development Centre, during the 2011/2012 school year, there were 10,000 children living in this area who started the school year in tents, caravans, or tin shacks. The report also notes that nearly one-third of schools here lack adequate water and sanitation facilities.
Children have been employed by settlers to clean, lift boxes, pick and package vegetables and fruit, working in extreme heat (up to 50-degrees Celcius) for eight to nine hour shifts. They earn approximately 50-90NIS ($14-$25) per shift, which is about 25-50 percent what they are entitled to under Israeli labor laws.
The short article is worth reading, as it touches upon the tough decisions children make in deciding to work in this context, including the push and pull factors hat influence their decisions.
[Photo: Ma'an Development Centre / Al Jazeera]
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Land Day
Land Day is approaching tomorrow (Friday 30 March). It is an annual day of commemoration for Palestinians of an event in 1976. In response to the Israeli government's plan to expropriate thousands of acres of land for "security and settlement purposes", a strike and marches were organized in Palestinian towns throughout the West Bank. In the ensuing confrontations with the Israeli army and police, six Palestinians were killed, about one hundred were wounded, and hundreds of others arrested. For this year's Land Day, Palestinian activists are organizing a Global March to Jerusalem intended to bring attention to the situation here and to recognize Jerusalem as a vital and controversial site for both Palestinians and Israelis. The March will engage people from all over the world, who will show their support for Palestinians by marching as close to Jerusalem as they can get considering existing country borders and political barriers.Two days out of the past week, I have heard gunfire in the distance. I have not been able to pinpoint exactly where the gunfire is coming from. But, like the Israeli military jets continually flying over Nablus, it is a reminder that the occupation is ubiquitous. For example, the following happened in the past week in Nablus:
- last Friday, an 8-year-old boy was injured by an explosion in the village of Qaryut; apparently, the devise was set there by the Israeli army during training exercises.
- on Monday, the Israeli army detained three men for unknown reasons in the Nablus city center.
- on Tuesday, a 24-year-old farmer from the Nablus village of Iraq Burin sustained head injuries when settlers from the nearby Yizhar settlement threw rocks at him.
- and, yesterday, settlers blocked the entrance of the village of Beit Dajan, protesting the reopening of a road to Nablus city.
These events were tempered by a unity rally held in Nablus City center last week, which called for an end to the division between the political parties in the West Bank in Gaza, to more effectively resist the occupation. Of course, this is controversial, because the Palestinian division is between Fatah and Hamas, the latter which has been recognized as a terrorist organization by the EU, US, Canada, Israel, and Japan.
In terms of my research with children and families, things are going slowly but surely. I have finished three interviews in Balata Refugee Camp. The interviews have been extremely interesting. Each interview was supposed to be the parent and two children (older and younger), but the whole family is there for the whole interview. So it's usually Mom and her 10 children, and maybe a sister-in-law or a bunch of young cousins as well. It's definitely a different kind of methodology (more like a family focus group) using a collaborative process, with every member of the household contributing a piece, which is more culturally representative of how families operate here. I can distract the kids with some mapping and drawing exercises and then talk to the adult. But I also try to spend more than half of the interview speaking with the children to get their views. Parents have commented on how great it is that the research cares about what children think.Some of the families' stories are difficult to hear. Two separate families told me about how the Israeli army has entered their homes and broken down the wall between their
wall and their neighbor in order to arrest their neighbors. (The image to the right is of one family's wall that was broken down and is now repaired with cement.) This practice, known in Israeli army parlance as "walking through walls", is the action in which soldiers create holes in the walls of Palestinian homes in order to avoid the streets, roads, alleys, and courtyards of the community, where they fear being attacked by militants. Though an effective military strategy, the “penetration of war into the private domain of the home” is described by Weizman (2007) as “ the most profound form of trauma and humiliation” (p. 194). My study participants have called it "insulting". In another house I went to, the 6-year-old son was asleep on a mat on the floor near where we were conducting the interview. The mother told me that the Israeli army had been in the refugee camp a few days ago, and when the boy saw them, he involuntarily urinated and has been incontinent since then. This is a common symptom in school-age children who have experienced traumatic stress. These cases are not the majority, though, and there are plenty of happy, bright, and energetic children who "seem" impervious to the effects of occupation.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Class Society and Structure
Marx and Engels’ (1952) most renowned statement – that which opens Manifesto of the Communist Party – reads, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (p. 473). The dawn of capitalism has greatly increased production, yet Marx and Engels argue that this increase of wealth has not been distributed evenly to the detriment of the working class poor. The system operates narrowly, with the only focus on increasing property and wealth trickling up to benefit the upper class. Marx and Engels assert that the more wealth the worker produces - “the more his production increases in power and scope” (p. 133) - the poorer he becomes.
This message resonates today. In many societies, the struggles of the poor and inequalities of power are a matter of life or death. The impoverished pregnant women who is unable to access health care, the worker who is not paid a living wage, the young girl who is denied access to education all provide examples of structural inequality, which have dire circumstances for life outcomes. This unequal distribution of “wealth” (e.g., health care access, wages, education) leads to decreases in quality of life and increases in morbidity and mortality.
Those who struggle are acutely aware of the injustices they experience, with struggle influencing each of their worldviews. Mills (1959) remarks that individuals are greatly influenced by the world around them: “What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bound by the private orbits in which they live” (p. 3). In other words, they work within structures, but are also at the mercy of these structures. Mills refers to “personal troubles of the mileau” (p. 8) related to internal mechanisms as opposed to “public issues of social structure” (Ibid). The latter can become a form of “structural violence” (Farmer, 2005), forces of poverty, racism, and socioeconomic inequality that impact impoverished populations. Structural violence represents existing constructions such as gender, religion, race, or class that may shape risk and influence an individual’s life outcome. This concept is often oversimplified as inequality, but it is actually a much stronger and prevalent force that persists day-to-day, transnationally. Structural violence includes the result of the inequality - marginalization, discrimination, stigma, restricted access, victimization - and the context in which inequalities develop and are addressed.
Structural violence is a helpful mechanism to view class society and structure because it focuses on the societal factors outside of the individual’s control. In order to overcome structural barriers, social work interventions must understand and address the complex social issues that keep individuals from utilizing their full resources, understanding that these social issues are weighed differently in different settings. Empowerment of individual agency, fortification of communities, and an increase in access to social services combined with an understanding of existing structural barriers add to our understanding and denouncement of systems, structures, and mechanisms that create conditions where the rich get richer and the poor get even poorer.
References:
Farmer, P. (2005). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1952). Alienation and social class. In. R.C. Tucker (Ed.) (1978), The Marx-Engels Reader. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, p. 133-135.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1952). Manifesto of the communist party. In. R.C. Tucker (Ed.) (1978), The Marx- Engels Reader. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, p. 473-500.
Mills, C.W. (1959). The promise. In C.W. Mills, Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
This message resonates today. In many societies, the struggles of the poor and inequalities of power are a matter of life or death. The impoverished pregnant women who is unable to access health care, the worker who is not paid a living wage, the young girl who is denied access to education all provide examples of structural inequality, which have dire circumstances for life outcomes. This unequal distribution of “wealth” (e.g., health care access, wages, education) leads to decreases in quality of life and increases in morbidity and mortality.
Those who struggle are acutely aware of the injustices they experience, with struggle influencing each of their worldviews. Mills (1959) remarks that individuals are greatly influenced by the world around them: “What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bound by the private orbits in which they live” (p. 3). In other words, they work within structures, but are also at the mercy of these structures. Mills refers to “personal troubles of the mileau” (p. 8) related to internal mechanisms as opposed to “public issues of social structure” (Ibid). The latter can become a form of “structural violence” (Farmer, 2005), forces of poverty, racism, and socioeconomic inequality that impact impoverished populations. Structural violence represents existing constructions such as gender, religion, race, or class that may shape risk and influence an individual’s life outcome. This concept is often oversimplified as inequality, but it is actually a much stronger and prevalent force that persists day-to-day, transnationally. Structural violence includes the result of the inequality - marginalization, discrimination, stigma, restricted access, victimization - and the context in which inequalities develop and are addressed.
Structural violence is a helpful mechanism to view class society and structure because it focuses on the societal factors outside of the individual’s control. In order to overcome structural barriers, social work interventions must understand and address the complex social issues that keep individuals from utilizing their full resources, understanding that these social issues are weighed differently in different settings. Empowerment of individual agency, fortification of communities, and an increase in access to social services combined with an understanding of existing structural barriers add to our understanding and denouncement of systems, structures, and mechanisms that create conditions where the rich get richer and the poor get even poorer.
References:
Farmer, P. (2005). Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1952). Alienation and social class. In. R.C. Tucker (Ed.) (1978), The Marx-Engels Reader. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, p. 133-135.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1952). Manifesto of the communist party. In. R.C. Tucker (Ed.) (1978), The Marx- Engels Reader. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, p. 473-500.
Mills, C.W. (1959). The promise. In C.W. Mills, Sociological Imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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