Earlier this month, shortly after the Israel National Insurance Institute (INII) issued a report that grabbed headlines with its cold statistics pointing indisputably to a huge - and growing - socio-economic gap between Jewish and Israeli citizens of Israel. The report's sobering conclusion: while 14 percent of Israel's Jewish population is classified as 'impoverished,' more than half of all Arab families fall into the same category.

In response, Finance Minister Yuval Steinetz claimed that the fault lay with the Arab community. Their women don't want to work, he complained. Unlike Jewish women, more than half of whom are employed at least part-time outside the home, only 18 percent of Arab women having paying jobs.

But the truth, as freelance reporter Jonathan Cook reports for The National, is that Arab women can't find jobs - because Jewish employers don't want to hire them. This is particularly true of female Arab university graduates.

"Most Arab women want to work, including a large number of female graduates, but the government has refused to tackle the many and severe obstacles that have been put in their way," said Sawsan Shukha of Women Against Violence, a Nazareth-based organisation.

That assessment was supported by a survey this month revealing that 83 per cent of Israeli businesses in the main professions - including advertising, law, banking, accountancy and the media - admitted being opposed to hiring Arab graduates, whether men or women.

Yousef Jabareen, an urban planner at the Technion technical university in Haifa, who has conducted one of the largest surveys on Arab women's employment in Israel, said the problems Arab women faced were unique.

"In Israel they face a double discrimination, both because they are women and because they are Arabs," he said.

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