Challenges Facing Social Work in the Indigenous Arab Minority in Israel: Voices from the Field
Abstract The article identifies challenges to social work practice voiced by 43 Arab social workers in Israel, aimed at clarifying whether there is a need to indigenise their practice in Israel's hegemonic Jewish society in view of four challenges to their interventions that they identified: inappropriate professional training; insufficient knowledge of English as the international language of social work; local Arab authorities failure to recognise many welfare needs and social work’s role in mitigating them; and the unique situation of the country's Arab minority, such as restrictions on its contacts with colleagues in the Arab world. These challenges, in contrast to those that social workers face in the Arab world and in other non-‘Western’ countries, suggest that Arab social workers in Israel see little need to indigenise their practice.