Israeli financial daily Globes has selected Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha as one its “Forty under Forty” promising young people in 2016. The prestigious group includes high-tech entrepreneurs, CEOs of financial firms, lawyers and trailblazing researchers, all under the age of 40. The newspaper believes that they will have a decisive impact on the Israeli market and will emerge as leaders in their fields over the next few decades.
But Abu Fraiha’s story is not just the story of another successful young Israeli woman. What distinguishes her is that she is a Bedouin who grew up in a family that decided to swim against the stream, shatter the rigid conventions of Bedouin society and overcome obstacles in order to integrate into Israeli society. Her family was the first Bedouin family to relocate from the southern Bedouin village of Tel Sheva to the prosperous Jewish neighboring town of Omer.
“Tel Sheva and Omer are just a five-minute drive from each other, but they are a hundred years apart,” Abu Fraiha told Al-Monitor. “When I was a girl, we faced a lot of criticism [from the Bedouin society]. We were considered outsiders. I’m received very well there these days; there are even people who are proud of me.”
It all began two decades ago when family patriarch Aoudeh Abu Fraiha realized that if he wanted to provide his children with a higher quality education, he would have to cross the physical and psychological boundaries separating Tel Sheva from Omer. This, he believed, would ensure his children a brighter future in Israeli society. Twenty years later, the transition proved itself. His daughter Yasmeen, now 27, has already completed her medical studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During her internship, Abu Fraiha founded the organization Genesis, with the goal of diagnosing and preventing genetic diseases common in Bedouin society due to the frequency of marriages within the extended family. Her initiative to convince young Bedouin to be tested before they get married, to ensure that their children do not suffer from genetic diseases, got Globes to include her in this prestigious group of Israel’s most promising young people.
AL-MONITOR All-Access gives you unlimited access to all our journalism, the full Daily Briefing, exclusive interviews, premium newsletters, and live events — for less than $2/week.
