Start-up Nation

This underutilization brings us to what we believe is the biggest threat to Israel’s continued economic growth: low participation in the economy. A little over half of Israel’s workforce contributes to the economy in a productive way, compared to a 65 percent rate in the United States. The low Israeli workforce participation rate is chiefly attributable to two minority communities: haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Israeli Arabs.⁶

Among mainstream Israeli Jewish civilians aged twenty-five to sixty-four, to take one metric, 84 percent of men and 75 percent of women are employed. Among Arab women and haredi men, these percentages are almost flipped: 79 percent and 73 percent, respectively, are not employed.⁷

The ultra-Orthodox, or haredim, generally do not serve in the military. Indeed, to qualify for the exemption from military service, haredim have to show that they are engaged in full-time study in Jewish seminaries (yeshivot). This arrangement was created by David Ben-Gurion to obtain haredi political support at the time of Israel’s founding. But while the “yeshiva exemption” first applied to just four hundred students, it has since ballooned to tens of thousands who go to yeshiva instead of the army.

The result of this has been triply harmful to the economy. Haredim are socially isolated from the workforce because of their lack of army experience; plus, since they are not allowed to work if they want a military exemption—they have to be studying—as young adults they receive neither private-sector nor military (entrepreneurial) experience; and thus haredi society becomes increasingly dependent on government welfare payments for survival.

There are two primary reasons why Israeli Arabs have low participation rates in the economy. First, because they are not drafted into the army, they, like the haredim, are less likely to develop the entrepreneurial and improvisational skills that the IDF inculcates. Second, they also do not develop the business networks that young Israeli Jews build while serving in the military, a disparity that exacerbates an already long-standing cultural divide between the country’s Jewish and Arab communities.

Each year, thousands of Arab students graduate from Israel’s technology and engineering schools. Yet, according to Helmi Kittani and Hanoch Marmari, who codirect the Center for Jewish-Arab Economic Development, “only a few manage to find jobs which reflect their training and skills. . . . Israel’s Arab graduates need to be equipped with a crucial resource which the government cannot supply: a network of friends in the right places.”⁸ And in the absence of those personal connections, Israeli Jews’ mistrust of Israeli Arabs is more likely to hold sway.

Another problem is the bias within the Israeli Arab community against women in the workplace. A 2008 study by Women Against Violence, an Israeli Arab organization, found that public opinion among local Arabs may be slowly changing, but traditional attitudes are still entrenched. In a survey, even participants who “opposed older attitudes” still agreed with the statement “Arab society is predominantly patriarchal, where men are perceived as the decision-makers and women as inferior and ideally subservient. . . . A man who treats his partner other than [according to] the acceptable norm endangers his social standing.”

Despite this paradox, Women Against Violence director Aida Touma-Suleiman said that she sees men as partners for change, including a new acceptance of women who work outside the home. “There are Arab men who are unhappy with this balance of power, and wish to improve the relations between the genders. They see it as in their interest as much as anyone else’s,” she said.⁹

Yet because of the high birth rates in both the haredi and the Arab sectors, efforts to increase workforce participation in these sectors are racing against the demographic clock. According to Israel 2028, the report issued by an official blue-ribbon commission, the haredi and Arab sectors are projected to increase from 29 percent of Israel’s total population in 2007 to 39 percent by 2028. Without dramatic changes in workforce patterns, this shift will reduce labor-force participation rates even further. “The existing trends are working in stark opposition to the desired development,” the report warns.¹⁰