TEL AVIV, Israel (Haaretz), June 12, 2008:By Yoav Stern
When Salim Damush was young, he helped his father take care of his sick grandfather in their home. He stayed at his side for nine months, during the difficult moments of his illness and of caring for him and, he says, had an experience he would not have wanted to miss.
Photo courtesy GAA
Now, at 50, he is an electronics engineer who spends most of his day at work. His mother is cared for not by her children but at an assisted living facility, Atzulat Hamontfort, in their Western Galilee village, Me'ilya.
In a conversation held a few weeks ago, Damush said that he has mixed feelings about the situation.
"The experience I had with my grandfather was one that children cannot have in any other way - the humaneness, the connection, the escape from the reality around us.
But I wasn't able to give my daughters an experience of this kind.
We have a different religion today, which has destroyed the world:
We have become slaves to our jobs.
We have to work, to run, to bring things, and we have no time, so we have to find another solution for our parents," Damush says.
More and more Arab families have begun placing their elderly parents in assisted living facilities. Members of the "sandwich" generation, who are caring for both elderly parents and young children, argue among themselves whether this is merely another inevitable result of modernization, welcome or otherwise, or part of a general trend of a loss of traditional values.
Kamel Abed is the owner and manager of Atzulat Hamontfort. As a young man he went to Australia, where he worked for 11 years. In 1994, just as he was about to settle there permanently, he decided to take his family back to the village. After his return he resolved to establish a retirement home like the ones he saw in Australia.
"At that time, there was hardly any solution to the population's growing need," Abed told Haaretz. Today, however, the picture is different. In addition to a government facility in the village of Daburiya there are several private facilities in the Galilee. Additional ones are in the planning or construction stage, for the Triangle area.
"In the past, the daughters or daughters-in-law took care of their elderly parents or in-laws," Abed explains. "Today, with the increased numbers of people with higher education, the option of staying at home no longer exists for the women and there is a need for an alternative," he says.
In addition, there has been a decisive change in the economic structure of the Arab family. The father of the family once had control of events, since he provided the livelihood through farming and use of the family's lands, but in the past few decades this has changed drastically. Widespread land expropriation and other occurrences has led to the industrialization of Arab society, which has driven the younger generation toward education and skilled employment.
In addition, people were much more committed to family values in the past; it was much more difficult for them to take action without getting the approval of the extended family. "The position of the elderly has changed," Abed says. "He was once the one who employed everyone and he had the power, even if his health was poor. He would pass on his knowledge and his experience to the younger generations. Now everything is different."
Needless to say, this pattern is very similar to that of Israel's Jewish population. By comparison, in the Palestinian territories and in the Arab countries there are very few large residential institutions for the elderly; there are only shelters, which can accommodate only 10 to 20 people at a time.
Israel's Arab population is still similar in structure to that of developing countries. Only 2 to 3 percent of the population is over age 65, compared to 11.5 percent of the Jewish public. But if the recent drop in Arab fertility rates continues the proportion of old people in Israel's Arab community will rise significantly in the future.
Dr. Khalid Suleiman, a cardiologist at Afula's Haemek Hospital who is also the medical director of the Daburiya retirement home, explains that dramatic changes have taken place in the Israeli Arab public because of its contacts with the general Israeli public, considered to be Western. "All the societies of the Middle East have changed, but our change, as a result of the friction with Jewish society, has been accelerated, and there has been no transition period," he says.
Suleiman points to a number of factors: the change in the economic structure of the family, the considerable improvement in the status of women as well as the drop in birth rates and the rise in life expectancy. The Daburiya facility, which is part of JDC-Eshel, began over 15 years ago to admit Christian and Muslim Arabs from throughout Israel as well as Druze, Negev Bedouin and Circassians from nearby Kafr Kama.
"This causes many problems," Abed says, "such as the loss of values and changes in intergenerational relations inside the family. We have to find the right way - not to regress but to find a way that will blend values that are suitable for us with modernization."
© Copyright 2008 Haaretz
