For Palestinian Tech Worker in Israel, Pride, Frustration and 4-Hour Commute

When hundreds of Palestinians applied through an Israeli checkpoint on a recent Monday morning, most were dressed for a day of manual labor. But there is at least one notable exception.

Moha Alshahamreh, 31, wears a button-down shirt and carries a computer. While many of his relatives and neighbors, mostly men, are heading to construction sites in southern Israel – providing cheap Palestinian labor for some of the lowest paying jobs in Israel. – then Mr. Alshahamreh was on his way to a technology company in Tel Aviv.

“Look at all these people,” Alshahamreh said that January day, with a mixture of sadness and sympathy. “You don’t see any of them with laptops or going to the office.”

Alshahamreh, the son of a laborer and a stay-at-home mother, is an engineer for a company that uses artificial intelligence to improve retail websites — and is one of a very few Palestinians. work in the Israeli technology industry, considered one of the most innovative in the world.

He ends up there after a remarkable series of circumstances, including encountering a book about the Holocaust, a university halfway around the world, and an Israeli pop star.

His commute to work – through the turnstiles and security scanners of Israeli checkpoints – highlights the inequality between Palestinians and Israelis living in the West Bank, which is now experiencing some bloodiest violence in two decades. His journey through life — from an occupied village to a skyscraper in Tel Aviv — highlights a rare exception to that imbalance.

Mr Alshaamreh said Israelis should know that his years-long adventure is “mentally and emotionally exhausting to the point of tears.” Palestinians should see that “what I have done proves that it is possible,” he added.

Alshahamreh’s work week began in the village where he grew up, Deir al-Asal al-Fauqa, a peaceful hilltop community of about 2,000 Palestinians in the southern West Bank. The village lies just east of the hundred-mile-long gray wall, which Israel built to deter Palestinian attacks from the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli War in 2014. 1967.

To get over that wall and get to Tel Aviv, Israelis living in the nearest Jewish settlement – built in 1982 and considered illegal by most countries under international law – can drive north through a nearby checkpoint that Palestinians are banned from using. By that road, settlers could reach Tel Aviv in 75 minutes.

But Mr Alshahamreh had to enter Israel on foot, through a separate checkpoint at Meitar, 10 miles by road to the south. That restriction doubled his travel distance and more than tripled its time.

To reach the intersection, Mr. Alshahamreh woke up at 5 a.m. and waited in the dark for a convoy heading south.

As the sun rose, he was among hundreds of Palestinians in Meitar who applied through an airport-style security system to keep gunmen from entering Israel. On the Israeli side, another group of vehicles took him to Beersheba, the nearest major city in southern Israel.

“It was like moving from third world to second world to first world,” he says of his commute.

An accidental discovery in Beersheba long ago placed Mr. Alshahamreh in his current orbit.

Mr. Alshahamreh’s father, Mr. Meshref, 63, worked as a day worker in Beersheba for many years. One day about 15 years ago, Meshref brought home a book he found in the city. It is “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Viktor E. Frankl — narrative of the author’s experience in the Nazi concentration camps.

Mr. Alshahamreh, then a teenager, picked it up. He found more than he expected – a book about the Holocaust, a theme sometimes dropped or minimized in Palestinian discourse, and a lesson in resilience.

Through Mr. Frankl’s writing, Mr. Alshahamreh concludes that “do we want to die from our trauma — or do we want to put meaning in it and grow from it.”

Suddenly, Alshahamreh’s vision broadened, he said. Before, he simply wished to follow in his father’s footsteps. Now, he imagines something bigger.

He won a scholarship to a university in Malaysia, earning his first degree in computer science. He later earned another scholarship in Korea, fluent in Korean and a master’s degree in behavioral economics.

Despite that resume, it is difficult to find a job in Palestine’s tiny tech industry.

According to estimates by the Palestine Internship Program, which is based in Israel and trains Palestinian entrepreneurs, more than half of West Bank university-level technology graduates do not find employment in this field. The overall unemployment rate in the territory is around 13%, as opposed to 4% in Israel and 46% in the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Alshahamreh started thinking about working in Israel. Despite growing up a few hundred yards from Israel, the first time he heard about its reputation was “start-up country“When studying abroad in Korea. An idea took root: Can he find a job in Tel Aviv?

“Then I went home,” said Mr. Alshahamreh, “and reality hit.”

An Israeli settled in the West Bank has no legal obstacles to working in Tel Aviv, but Mr Alshahamreh needs a work permit to enter Israel as well as an employer willing to go through the necessary administrative procedures. to hire a Palestinian.

Experts say there are only a few dozen Palestinians among Israel’s 360,000 workers in the tech sector, with several hundred remote workers in the West Bank.

Then, in 2018, a breakthrough happened: Alshahamreh landed a three-month internship at an Israeli company building cancer-screening technology — and with it a work permit. .

The full-time job proved elusive. So, with his license still in force, he instead became the rare Palestinian student at Tel Aviv University. He’s pursuing his third degree – a master’s degree in business administration, half a university-sponsored degree, and lives in Tel Aviv.

But without a job, Mr Alshahamreh struggled to pay his share of the dues and was suspended midway. He has emailed dozens of prominent Israelis and Palestinians, asking for help.

One of Israel’s most famous pop stars, david broza, unexpectedly rewritten. Touched by Mr. Alshahamreh’s plight, Mr. Broza allowed him to stay at his home and helped raise his college tuition.

Recently, Mr. Broza recalled: “I don’t know what happened. “But the next thing I knew, I gave him the keys to my house.”

Soon after, the suspension was lifted, allowing Mr. Alshahamreh to obtain an MBA. But even with three degrees, jobs are scarce.

It took another two years, dozens of rejected job applications and a bout of depression before Mr Alshahamreh finally landed a full-time engineering job at the Israeli company Syte.

His role involves talking to customers and fixing problems with their websites. He has bigger ambitions; he hopes to one day find a Palestinian version of Uber. But this work is a start.

Alshahamreh’s willingness to engage with the Israelis has at times drawn criticism from fellow Palestinians.

To critics, working in the construction industry in Israel is acceptable, given the high unemployment rate in the West Bank. However, reaping the benefits of office life in Tel Aviv is a step too far, in their view. They argue that such workers normalize occupations by interacting too closely with Israelis.

But for Alshahamreh, there will be little progress towards peace unless Palestinians and Israelis see each other as partners.

“My message is that we should get to know each other more,” he said. “Tear down the walls, talk — and put yourself in each other’s shoes and see each other as two vulnerable people.”

His own journey enlightened his Israeli colleagues.

After catching a bus from Beersheba, Mr. Alshahamreh finally arrived in Tel Aviv just before 10 a.m., about four hours after leaving home.

“It’s not just commuting,” says one of his Israeli colleagues, Linda Levy. She added, “He told me about things that I didn’t know existed in Israel.”

Hiba Yazbek Report donations from Jerusalem.