Report reveals heavy impact of COVID-19 on Israeli Arabs
A new report quantifies disparities in how the coronavirus crisis has affected Israel's Arab population.
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.”
