“The Beduin woman is like a bee,” says Najala Suleimani, a social worker from the Zarzir Bedouin settlement in the Galilee. “All day long she walks around cleaning and at the end of the day she falls asleep half dead. Then she is asked ‘What have you done all day?’ She is just like the bee, who produces half a teaspoon of honey in a lifetime.”
Not every day do you have a cosmic experience — but that’s what happened to the women at the biodynamic beekeeping course on April 7th at the Bee Freedom Farm near Jerusalem.
With no work, and no Israeli or Palestinian social safety net, 200,000 Palestinian workers in the West Bank paid a heavy price for the October 7 war.
Hadaya, 58, a woman from East Jerusalem, is the sole provider for her family. Her six children depend on her. She did not want to leave her job, but due to her deteriorating health she could not continue working. With the help of MAAN – Workers Association, she received the full severance pay that is due to someone who resigns due to a medical condition, and secured her entitlement to unemployment benefits from day one.
Executive Director of MAAN, Assaf Adiv, met on Thursday, December 12, with Mr. Roderick van Schreven, a senior official at the Dutch Foreign Ministry, and his team at the Dutch Embassy in Israel.
The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, which came into effect on Wednesday, November 27, marks the end of the war in Lebanon. If it holds, a period of reconstruction will begin, bringing a dramatic increase in the need for workers in the construction sector. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Palestinians are waiting for the government to allow them back into construction sites in Israel. Thousands of contractors are also desperate for skilled labor, reporting that the foreign workers they have managed to recruit are too few and insufficiently trained.
