Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation (AJEEC)
National Council of Arab Women in Israel (NCAWiI)
Negev Forum of Bedouin Arab Women’s Organizations (NFBAWOs)

 

Amal Elsana Alh'jooj has dedicated her life to improving the living conditions of her people, the Bedouin Arab community of the Negev. Over the past 15 years she has developed strategies of community work that operate on community and political levels, aiding thousands of Bedouin women and children in Israel. Since October 2000, Amal has served as the director of the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation (AJEEC), a division of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development. Amal is an outspoken advocate of Arab-Jewish cooperation and coexistence.

 

Amal Elsana Alh’jooj was born in the temporary Bedouin settlement of Tel Arad near the Dead Sea as the fifth daughter of a traditional family. She is married to Anwar Al Hajooj, a civil rights lawyer, and is the mother of one-year old twins. When she was three years old, the Israeli State finally allowed her tribe to return to its lands in the village of Laqiya from which it had been expelled, and it was there that she has grown up. From the age of five onwards, Amal helped her family to subsist by herding sheep, rising at 6 A.M. to herd the flock before school and to continue after returning home in the afternoon. In order to reach the village primary school, which was housed in a ramshackle corrugated tin hut, without water and electricity, Amal would have to walk three kilometers.

While still in high school, she began to work for women’s rights, organizing literacy classes for the women of her tribe, as well as help with homework, enrichment groups and summer camp for children. At age seventeen, she played an instrumental role in the establishment of the Women's Committee of Lakyia which later became the non-profit association of Bedouin women in Israel, the Laqiya Women’s Association, with the aim of improving the status of Bedouin Arab women.

In 1992 Amal began her academic studies at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, as one of the first Bedouin women to study there. That year she also headed the "Community Initiatives Project", through which she initiated a network of informal educational frameworks in Bedouin villages. During her university studies, she was chairperson of the Arab Students’ Committee. During this period, she became actively involved in the struggle of the Bedouin community for their rights, organizing demonstrations against the demolition of buildings and the uprooting of olive trees by the Israeli government, which maintained that the buildings were constructed without permits on state-owned land on which building and even the planting of trees is forbidden.

After completing her BA in Social Work with honors, Amal received a postgraduate scholarship from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she was a member of the "Project of Human Rights and Building Peace Through Social Work". On her return to Israel she worked with the Community Advocacy Association as Coordinator of Bedouin Rights in the Negev, focusing on government policy discriminating against single-parent Bedouin women, who did not receive the same benefits as Jewish women.
She directed the headquarters of the Negev Bedouin Arab Campaign for Rights in the framework of Shatil (an NGO), which put pressure on decision-makers to allocate resources for Bedouin education and allow the Bedouin Arab community to direct its own educational system.

Since 2000, Amal has served as the director of the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation (AJEEC), a division of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development. She is a founding member of the National Council of Arab Women in Israel and of the Negev Forum of Bedouin Arab Women’s Organizations, and is a member of many human rights organizations, and women’s organizations. She is regularly invited to lecture on the topics of the Arab minority’s rights in Israel, the status of women and community organization and serves on the advisory committees of a number of foundations supporting projects in the Arab community.

Amal focuses on three major issues that are of central concern in her activities. First, she addresses women’s issues, both at the level of the status of women in the traditional Bedouin Arab community and at the policy level and the lack of resource allocations. Born as the fifth daughter to a traditional Bedouin family in which the birth of daughters is viewed as problematic, she has since her teens struggled with the traditions and customs that prevent women from accessing and realizing their rights and entitlements.

The Bedouin women of her mother’s generation had lost their prior role as producers and full partner in the economy of the household and were deprived of their source of employment and income (the land and the herd). They found themselves imprisoned amidst four walls in the modern world that was forced upon them. The younger generation of Bedouin women is caught up in the conflict between tradition and the modern world. It is in this area that Amal invests a lot of time and energy, working with young women in order to help them find their way to living within the traditions while also integrating into modern society (university, career, etc.). In her capacity as director of AJEEC, Amal has organized training courses for women that combine self-empowerment, entrepreneurship and business management and vocational training that enables women to set up small businesses of their own as photographers, D.Js at family wedding celebrations, hairdressers and other similar occupations that can be conducted in their own communities.

The second major issue Amal focuses on is social rights and services. At one level, she applies her efforts to advocacy, focusing on government policy discriminating against Bedouin Arabs, who do not receive equal rights and services. Some 45 Bedouin villages are outside the government development plans and lack such basic infrastructures, such as water, electricity and basic social and health services. Through her work in AJEEC Amal has been instrumental in constructive efforts, developing and fielding projects that help people to access their rights effectively. As a major innovation, Amal was instrumental in establishing the Bedouin Volunteer Center, which mobilizes, trains and deploys Bedouin students as volunteers in their communities, under the motto of “development through self-help and mutual aid”.

The third key issue on top of Amal’s agenda of social work is education. While lobbying against discrimination in the educational system and struggling to force the government to allocate adequate resources for Bedouin education and to grant the community the right to direct its own educational system, Amal has played a central role in developing non-formal educational enrichment programs for Bedouin school children and mentoring by students, as well as a unique early childhood education program for mothers and children from birth to age three.

Approximately 140,000 Bedouins live in the Negev region: about half in 7 towns established since the late 60's and the rest in 45 unrecognized villages in the Negev region. This population is, as a group, the poorest in the country and suffers from significant inequality in all spheres: economic, social, educational and cultural. In effect, these towns and villages exist as third-world communities within a relatively affluent society. The situation is especially severe in these disadvantaged communities, due to their unrecognized status by various government bodies. A broad set of basic services have not been extended to these communities, such as running water, electricity, road networks, telephone service, sewerage systems, building permits and educational, health and social services. Unemployment rates there are also the highest in the country. Long years of neglect and discrimination have led to the development of a ‘culture of poverty’ and extensive dependency on the already-limited available social service provisions. This situation leaves the Bedouin community in a daily struggle for survival in a constantly changing societal environment. Community development is almost by definition a slow and incremental process in which changes are not necessarily dramatic.

The main impact of Amal’s work has been that of precept and example: she is an effective role model for other young women, many of whom were encouraged to follow her path to higher education and community service. Similarly, her initial efforts to establish independent non-governmental community organizations have had a significant impact. She is today the most widely recognized and respected spokeswoman of the Bedouin community and an extremely effective advocate of that community’s demands for human and civil rights. In this capacity she has been instrumental in bringing about improvements, especially in the field of education. Through her work as director of AJEEC she has also succeeded in mobilizing the support of governmental and private institutions for a broad range of community development and community empowerment projects.

Amal has dedicated her life to improving the living conditions of her people, the Bedouin Arab community of the Negev. Over the past 15 years she has developed a strategy of community work that operates on two levels: First, on the internal community level, she encounters many challenges, such as inter-tribal divisions and tensions and the restriction on the life and freedom of women and girls. Second, on the political level, she coordinates work with the government in order to achieve equal rights for the Bedouin Arab citizens of the Negev.

Amal is not only a trained but an inspired community organizer, who leads by precept and example. Her message to the community is that through self-help and self empowerment, by return to traditional patterns of self-reliance and communal responsibility the community can and must lift itself out of the syndrome of apathy, despondency, and dependency that very often characterizes the community today. She is an innovative, creative and original thinker ,who is able to combine tradition with modern activism in community development. As an outspoken advocate of Arab-Jewish cooperation, Amal believes that both people have no choice but to live together in the country that each regards as its homeland, and that only through cooperation can true equality be attained. Her belief that tribal boundaries must be softened and that tribal rivalries work against the advancement of the Bedouin Arab community has made her unpopular in some circles, and as an outspoken advocate of women’s rights she must be careful to advance her cause without flying in the face of tradition.

However, her integrity and courage have so far fit her in good stead, and she is widely respected even by those who do not share her opinions – Arabs and Jews alike. In regard to the impact on her family, she finds herself in the same position as many women who struggle to combine the multiple roles and meet the conflicting demands of career, family (both nuclear and extended) and motherhood.

Amal's work inspired and influenced many women within the Bedouin Arab community and in worldwide. An outstanding example is the adoption and adaptation of her economic empowerment course for Bedouin Arab women, which, after identifying an unmet need in the community, trained women to become video and stills photographers working in the women’s tent at weddings and in other family celebrations. This model was adopted by an orthodox Jewish community organization, in which women and men are separated at such events. Amal is a staunch advocate of peaceful conflict resolution. In this belief, Amal, shortly after the Intifada (Palestinian Uprising), has established the AJEEC, which is dedicated to achieving equality in all aspects of life.

Through her work at the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, Amal has been and is actively involved in initiating and operating joint Palestinian-Israeli projects and training courses in Palestine and in Israel – which continue, despite extremely difficult circumstances working against such cooperation. Amal, a young woman of thirty, a woman of great integrity, courage and unstinting devotion to her community and an avowed feminist, is a shining exemplum to other young women in her own community and country as well as in other parts of the world where women face challenges to attain their rights.