If there is any hope for the Israeli Left, it does not lie with the likes of Peace Now, as well-meaning as they are. It lies with Israelis like Aliza Yadey, a 63-year-old self-described “poor” and “rightwing” day-care provider living in a crumbling apartment block outside of Tel Aviv– a labor organizer for a union called Koach la Ovdim (Power to the Workers), which has organized 2,700 home day-care providers, both Jewish and Arab, and succeeded in raising wages by 40 percent.
One day she happened to speak to a worker renovating an apartment in her building, got a phone number, called the man’s mother-in-law in the Arab town of Ar’ara, and arranged a meeting at the town’s community center. [Her husband] Shlomo drove her there, leaving his knitted skullcap and police-issue handgun at home. [Friends] called her cellphone a few times to make sure she had not been harmed—Ar’ara is not a place where many Israeli Jews make casual visits.
She arrived to find 300 women assembled to hear her union pitch. They were “the loveliest women you will ever meet,” she says. “You say, come fight—and they come.”
Read it all. It’s by Matti Friedman, who wrote an excellent article about the bad and unbalanced foreign reporting on Israel, and who demonstrates here how to cover one of the important under-the-radar stories that almost all foreign journalists miss.
