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207 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 207 TWELVE EMIGRATION PATTERNS AMONG PALESTINIAN WOMEN IN ISRAEL Ibtisam Ibrahim INTRODUCTION The growing phenomenon of women’s emigration from developing countries to developed countries has received wide attention in most recent studies of emigration movements (e.g., Martin, 2004; Staab, 2004; Zlotnik, 2003; ILO, 1998). Arab women’s emigration is the least-covered phenomenon in such studies despite the fact that 37 percent of the world’s skilled and expert worker migrants come from Arab and African countries (AIPU, 2003). This chapter presents a case of female emigration, that of educated Palestinian women from Israel to Western countries in pursuit of advancing their studies or careers. The study focuses on ethnographic evidence from in-depth interviews that I conducted with sixteen women, combined with personal observations and related scholarly literature. There is little published research about emigration from the Palestinian Occupied Territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. One study from 1991 focuses on emigration from Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip as a result of an UNRWA policy encouraging emigration (Elnajjar, 2003). An earlier study by Lafi Jaafari discussed the migration of educated and skilled Palestinians and Jordanians to North America based on a survey conducted in 1970 among students in American universities (Jaafari, 1973). Jaafari concluded that Palestinian emigration to the United States for young men (90 percent of the migrants) and women was short-term and closely linked to education and occupational training (Jaafari, 1973). In the scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel, studies on emigration are extremely rare.1 One possible explanation is that Palestinian citizens 208 DISPLACED AT HOME of Israel do not emigrate in substantial numbers because they strongly resist leaving. Palestinians who survived the 1948 war see their presence in Israel as protecting the remaining Palestinian lands now included within the borders of the State of Israel. This is particularly true of the Galilee and Triangle regions, where Palestinians have maintained a foothold in their traditional homes. Their state-enforced segregation from the Jewish population and the national homogeneity of the surviving Arab villages and towns, ghettoized as they may be, preserved their Palestinian Arab identity as a national indigenous population. This strong sense of belonging to the land enhanced resistance to emigration. Meanwhile, following the 1967 and 1973 wars, their compatriots in the West Bank and Gaza began to emigrate to join male family members who had left earlier to work in the Gulf or neighboring countries (Hilal, 1977). Hilal estimates that 1967 wartime émigrés number between 170,000 to 200,000 from the West Bank alone (Hilal, 1977). Initially, those male migrants had viewed their move for employment as temporary. But as economic pressures mounted and as the Israeli occupying authorities placed tremendous barriers on their mobility, both geographic and economic, within and outside the occupied area, the families of the earlier migrants felt forced to join their male members who had moved to work in oil-producing countries. Unsurprisingly, Israeli policy has facilitated “such moves—and [has tried] to make them irreversible” (AbuLughod , 1983). Israeli depopulation policies aimed at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip caused another estimated 141,000 persons to emigrate or be expelled by 1974, in addition to the wartime émigrés. The majority who were forced to leave were skilled men not able to find employment either in the Occupied Territories or in Israel (Hilal, 1977). A higher level of repression contributes to higher rates of family emigration from the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Since the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, there appears to have been a rise in the number of Palestinians, many of them highly educated young men and women, who have left the Occupied Territories to move to Western countries. The dehumanizing conditions of occupation and “the continuous confiscation of land, military roadblocks and the separation wall coupled with restrictions on mobility and access give the impression that people are living in a cage” and are primary factors for Palestinian emigration (Assad, 2007). There are, however, no exact figures concerning the number of people leaving. According to human rights activists, the “emigration phenomenon is a well-kept secret . . . [because] from a national point of view, that story shouldn’t be given publicity” (Shavit and Bana, 2001).2 THE MIGRATORY MOVEMENT OF PALESTINIANS FROM ISRAEL Migration trends among residents of the West Bank and Gaza contrast sharply with those among Palestinians in Israel. Although they have continuously [3.143.218.146] Project MUSE (2024...

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