The Israeli Employment Bureau published a new report June 27 on the Arab population’s job situation during the coronavirus crisis, revealing what has been clear to anyone watching the issue — that the coronavirus crisis has affected the Arab population more greatly than the Jewish population. As of April 2021, the employment rate among the Arab public — men and women — was only 36.6%, 11.7% lower than before the pandemic. There was a smaller decline in employment of about 8.4% and 7.2% among ultra-Orthodox and non-ultra-Orthodox Jews, respectively. 

Some observers say that COVID-19 will not go away and we must learn to live with it. Only last week, the head of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University, Nadav Davidovitch, argued, “We are entering a new stage of the pandemic: learning to live alongside the coronavirus.”

With the outbreak of the pandemic, vital restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the virus led to the firing and furlough of hundreds of thousands of workers in Israel. According to reports prepared by the research department of the Knesset and presented to the special committee on Arab community affairs that convened June 30, during the first lockdown Arab and Jewish workers were fired or furloughed at similar rate: about 23% of workers from each group. But afterward, Jewish workers returned to work at higher rates than Arabs. 

Jewish unemployment rates decreased 22% between the first to the third lockdown, while the rate among Arabs went down only 14%. Between the second and third lockdown, the number of Arabs receiving unemployment benefits hardly changed.