Having reached the point where they could not take any more, the jobless went into the streets without them. In that month, however, they were transferred to the employment bureau of Upper Nazareth, a Jewish city. On the face of it, this might seem an insignificant bureaucratic adjustment. It is significant that the cases from Ein Mahel were not transferred to the general bureau that handles the workers of Upper Nazareth, almost all of whom are Jewish. Instead they are separated.
Registration is carried out in a small, stifling room, without a faucet or toilet facilities.
We have here a program that stems from high government quarters. This village in particular was picked on, because it has the highest unemployment in the country for 1999. The project amounts to nothing more than an attempt to aggravate relationships, wear down the endurance of the jobless, and promote such despair that they will stop applying, thus improving the village's official employment statistics. WAC has taken up the claims of the Ein Mahel jobless and opened a broad campaign to place their cases within the general employment bureau of Upper Nazareth, thus ending their segregation for discriminatory treatment. WAC also seeks an alternative solution, namely, to return them to the employment bureau of Arab Nazareth.