East Jerusalem is changing profoundly, led by Palestinian women
Jaffa street in Jerusalem, May 2025
Nir Hasson reports in Haaretz on 27 May 2025:
When Sireen Nijem graduated in 2010 from her neighborhood private school, she didn’t plan to study at an Israeli university. “I planned to register for a degree at Birzeit University [in the West Bank], but I traveled there, and it took three to four hours with all the checkpoints,” the East Jerusalem resident says. “I decided that it’s not what I want to do for four years.”
A trip to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from her neighborhood of Beit Hanina changed her trajectory. “It’s 15 minutes from my home, a very different place from what I knew, but I saw the huge library – and I love to read,” she says. “At the time, people thought that my dad was crazy for sending me to study there.”
What was unusual 15 years ago is now routine. About half of East Jerusalem students study in Israeli institutions, 70 percent of them women. That’s part of a dramatic change for the Palestinian community in Jerusalem, one which Israeli society barely notices. It has become more modern, less poor and more involved in the West Jerusalem economy. The percentage of working women is growing, the number of children per family is declining and experts expect that in the coming years, poverty rates will also fall.
‘Go out to work’
Monday marked the 58th anniversary of Jerusalem Day. It usually serves as an opportunity for ultranationalist displays. The government holds a festive meeting, where politicians take oaths in the name of Jerusalem’s unification and the city’s eternal status. Tens of thousands of religious Zionist youth march in a flag march, which has become a tradition of violence and racism. Monday was no exception, with hundreds of marchers chanting “May your village burn” and clashing with journalists, peace activists and Palestinian residents.
But this day is also a good opportunity to examine the status of the various communities in Israel’s largest city. Every 10th Israeli lives in Jerusalem, and it can fit 2.5 Tel Avivs, both in size and population. Jerusalem is Israel’s largest ultra-Orthodox city, its largest Orthodox city and the largest Palestinian city between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Jerusalem’s Arabs, concentrated in East Jerusalem, constitute 40 percent of the city’s residents. However, the average Israel knows very little about them beyond the prevailing image of East Jerusalem as a place suffering from poverty and violence. While the population of East Jerusalem remains one of the poorest in Israel, the percentage of families there living below the poverty line has dropped from 59 percent in 2018 to 56 percent last year.
A clearer change is taking place in the area of women’s employment. Just a decade ago, only about 18 percent of Palestinian women in Jerusalem worked outside the home. Going to the western part of the city, where most of the places of work are concentrated, was seen as dangerous or socially unacceptable. The public transportation system, which hinders east-west travel in the city, didn’t help.
‘Once one salary was enough, because it was also easy to go to the [Palestinian] territories for shopping. But today, with all the checkpoints, it’s harder. Even in East Jerusalem, prices are rising.’
Another significant factor was the language barrier, more prevalent among women than among men, who heard Hebrew at work. The East Jerusalem school system, which teaches mostly for the Palestinian Tawjihi (the secondary school exam in Palestinian and Jordanian schools), disdained Hebrew studies. Even today, the level of Hebrew among female graduates of East Jerusalem high schools is mostly very low.
But a new generation of Palestinian women has grown up in Jerusalem over the past decade. They are fighting against the barriers within their society and in Israeli society to enter the job market. In 2024, the rate of working women crossed the 30-percent threshold for the first time. One of them is Razan Mashahrh, a resident of the Jabel Mukaber neighborhood, who says she finished high school with almost no knowledge of Hebrew. “I was familiar only with a few letters and a few small words. Not enough for speaking,” she says.
Mashahrh decided to do something about it. She registered for a year of Hebrew studies in an ulpan, or intensive language school, in the Beit Safafa neighborhood, for which she paid 12,000 shekels ($3,370) of her own money. Immediately afterward, she started working as a teller in Bank Leumi – a job she found through a personnel agency.”They sent me to work in Modi’in and Beit Shemesh,” she says.
“I had never left Jerusalem alone before that. I’m not saying that it wasn’t scary, but I managed.” Mashahrh now works for the Maan Workers Association, helping other women join the workforce. “There’s a change,” she says, “but it’s happening slowly.”
Nijem says the main reason that women from East Jerusalem are going out to work is the family’s economic situation. “Once one salary was enough, because it was also easy to go to the [Palestinian] territories for shopping,” she says. “But today, with all the checkpoints, it’s harder. Even in East Jerusalem, prices are rising.”
“Once a man would say to his wife, ‘Stay home,’ but today he has started to say, ‘Go out to work, even for 3,000 or 4,000 shekels,” adds Wasim Alhaj, the head of the community administration in Beit Hanina. He says that the blow that the coronavirus pandemic caused to the East Jerusalem economy, which relied mainly on tourism and the restaurant business, was an accelerator for the change in thinking. “When all the hotels and restaurants suffered, the women had more ‘permission,'” he says, using air quotes, “to go out to work. It continued from there.”
A ‘demographic dividend’
Women’s work is one of the clear features of the growth of the middle class. Another is the opening of day care centers, which enable mothers to work. A significant part of the East Jerusalem middle class lives in Beit Hanina. Alhaj estimates that 75 percent of East Jerusalem day care centers operate in that neighborhood. He says the number of children in these centers has quintupled over the past 15 years, from 70 to 350.
But the number of day care centers is far from enough. Most women in East Jerusalem don’t have an option of registering their children for day care. “The loss of women who can’t work outside the home is a loss for the entire society,” says Jerusalem City Council member Dr. Laura Wharton. “In East Jerusalem too, parents have to receive child services that will enable them to make a living, to make a contribution and to develop. Providing opportunities to work and assistance to exploit such opportunities are the most important components for escaping poverty.”
At the same time, the clearest sign of the change taking place in East Jerusalem society is a sharp decline in the number of children per family – from an average of 4.5 in 2004 to 2.7 in 2023.
Yair Assaf-Shapira, a researcher at the Jerusalem Policy Research Institute, says that a decrease in births is also a one-time economic opportunity for society. “When there’s a sharp decline in the number of children, we get a situation where families with many working-age siblings are supporting a small number of parents and a small number of children,” he explains.
“That’s called a ‘demographic dividend’ and it has potential for a very big leap in the economy. There is an argument that all the ‘East Asian tigers’ – Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea – grew thanks to the demographic dividend.”
But the window of opportunity, stresses Assaf-Shapira, is short. In the next generation there will be a large number of older people – some without an organized pension due to the nature of employment for East Jerusalem residents – relative to the small number of children who will support them. “We’re now in a generation of opportunity, we must exploit it,” he says.
The separation barrier in the Palestinian village of Abu Dis, separating Jerusalem and the West Bank .Credit: Emil Salman
Experts point to the construction of the separation barrier between Jerusalem and the West Bank about 20 years ago as the central cause of the change being seen today. Until then, Israel encouraged the Palestinians to study at universities in the West Bank and the Arab world, and to integrate into the economy of the Palestinian territories.
This understanding is mentioned in a letter by Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek in 1976, which was found by Dr. Amnon Ramon of the Jerusalem Institute: “We’ll find it difficult to find suitable places of work for the Arab youth from East Jerusalem,” wrote Kollek, “and that’s why we must now enable them to continue their studies in neighboring Arab countries, so that they’ll be absorbed in the places of work that suit their education and their ability.”
But the barrier and the checkpoints have made studies in the West Bank more complicated, and the gap between the Israeli and Palestinian economies has also made them far less worthwhile. “East Jerusalem absorbed the blow of the separation barrier and then began a process of switching to an economy based much more on the west of the city and less on the West Bank,” says Dr. Marik Shtern, a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute.
“Building the barrier pushed people to integrate into the Israeli economy and caused the expansion of the middle class. But it took 15 years until this effect became visible,” says Ramon.
“It’s a process that takes time,” sums up Shtern. “Probably a decade after people entered a college or started working, the salaries begin to increase. Today, wherever you walk in the western part of the city, you see Palestinians. Public transportation drivers, salespeople in all the retail chains, bank tellers, lifeguards at the pools, even security guards. The entire array of services in Jerusalem.”
A grassroots change
The most dramatic change has probably taken place in the field of higher education. Up until 20 years ago there were almost no Jerusalemite Palestinian students in Jewish universities. But the construction of the barrier, and other factors, such as modernization and despair of a diplomatic process that would lead to an agreement to divide Jerusalem, changed the situation.
What began as a trickle, like in the case of Nijem, has turned into a tidal wave, and today, Palestinians studying in the Israeli academic sphere is routine. In 2017 the Hebrew University decided to recognize the Tawjihi certificates for university acceptance, and in the context of the government five-year plan for East Jerusalem, which was approved a year later, a budget was granted for fully subsidizing a pre-academic preparatory course for East Jerusalem students.
Nijem also has to take this course to improve her Hebrew. “In school we learned only reading and writing,” she says. “I didn’t know how to speak.” After the course she completed a bachelor’s degree, double majoring in English and Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, followed by a master’s degree in nonprofit administration from the School of Social Work.
She currently works at Lissan (Arabic for language), an nongovernmental organization that teaches Hebrew, mainly to women from East Jerusalem, to help them to break the language barrier and find a place in the job market. What began with “two female students who asked Jewish students to help them with the language,” as she puts it, turned into an organization that teaches 450 students, both men and women, and has about 50 volunteers. “It’s not only a language project, it’s also a positive encounter between Israelis and Palestinians in a situation where that’s almost impossible,” she says.
Most experts agree that the change happened mostly from the bottom up, from within Palestinian society. But part of it also took place from the top down – with the encouragement of the government, such as the 2018 five-year plan that channeled relatively large budgets to infrastructure, education and employment in East Jerusalem. One of the most important institutions in that field is the Rayan Center, which helps Palestinians enter the job market.
The center, which is funded through the five-year plan and operated by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Labor Ministry, provides courses in Hebrew and English, vocational training and employment guidance to residents of East Jerusalem. According to the center’s director, Wafa Ayoub, the demand exceeds the supply. “We open 50 Hebrew courses every year, 30 people in each course. This year there was a delay in opening for budgetary reasons. When I posted the announcement [that courses are open], within two days 900 people had signed up,” she says
Ayoub says that in the center’s courses, like at the university, 70 percent of the students are women. “My vision is that everyone will be able to find employment based on their abilities and talents. That they’ll earn a livelihood with dignity and enjoy coming to work, like me,” she says.
Rayan Center director Wafa Ayoub. ‘We open 50 Hebrew courses every year, 30 people in each course.’Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
The change taking place in East Jerusalem has slowed under the current government. During the approval of the new five-year plan in 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich refused to transfer the budget designated for the preparatory course for East Jerusalem residents. Although part of the budget was transferred in the end through a different clause, the institutions absorbed the blow and are continuing to pay for the courses. However, it’s unclear whether governmental funding will continue in the coming years.
The war has also been a hindering factor. The collapse of tourism led to mass dismissals; many workers, especially public transportation drivers, have reported verbal and physical violence from young Jews; and women who wanted to work as aides in preschools in west Jerusalem were met with racist objections from parents.
“Since the war, more than 10 women have told me that they don’t want to go to the west of the city because they’re afraid,” says Mashahrh. “I was also cursed at when I was in a mall in Talpiot, but I don’t silently take it.”
However, the perpetuation of the war is slowly but surely bringing back the status quo to Jerusalem. One of the reasons is the prolonged closure of the territories, which has created a huge demand for workers, especially in construction, and led to a significant salary increase in the industry. “I think that the construction boom in the west of the city and the doubling of wages for professional construction workers are the engine that is now pulling East Jerusalem society, instead of the hotel business,” says Ramon.
At the same time, it looks like the grassroots change is also continuing. “When the war began, we stopped the Hebrew studies,” says Najim. “But after three weeks we took a poll among the students, and 93 percent said that they’re interested in going back to studying.”
When Haaretz visited the Rayan Center this week, it was packed: Dozens of Palestinian women had come for the start of the new semester of Hebrew classes. The studies are very demanding – four days a week, three to four hours a day. Forty percent of the attendees are university students, and the vast majority is under the age of 35. According to the center’s figures, 59 percent will find work.
Ayoub, who started the center 11 years ago, says that the war presented new challenges, but it didn’t stop the demand for integration into the Israeli job market. “Many workers were dismissed or forced to quit after receiving comments like ‘Why are you wearing black? Are you sad about what’s happening in Gaza?’ Things like that. But even those who quit saw us as a place to turn to. During the first weeks, we taught on Zoom, and after two months we returned to the classrooms.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety