5 - Settlement houses and the emergence of social work in Mandatory Palestine

Summary

In historical accounts of social work, it is commonplace to identify two competing approaches within the profession. Casework, with its focus on individual change and psychosocial treatment, emerged from the Charity Organisation Society, while the social reform movement, with its emphasis on social change and the use of community social work methods, was anchored in the Settlement House Movement (Abramovitz and Sherraden, 2016). However, this dichotomous divide between ‘case’ and ‘cause’ was, and perhaps remains, far from clear-cut (Jarvis, 2006). This was certainly the case in the settlement houses established in Mandatory Palestine.

The founders of the Palestine settlements integrated casework fully into the daily activities of the institutions they founded and, in one of the cases described in this chapter, the settlement itself was established by the social services department and functioned as an extension of it, thereby blurring even more the distinction between the two approaches in social work.

Moreover, the tendency to identify the Settlement House Movement with social reform is also questioned in the cases described here. Despite their evident efforts to address poverty and exclusion at the community and individual levels, the settlement houses in Mandatory Palestine were generally not perceived by their founders as vehicles for bringing about social change. Rather, the change that was sought was anchored in an explicitly nation-building agenda that reflected the aspirations of the Jewish community to create the conditions for establishing a Jewish state in that country. The settlements were established in poor neighbourhoods populated by religious Jews with origins in Arab countries who were not party to the dominant Western, secular, Zionist vision of the primarily European-born elite. The professionals and volunteers, Jews who predominantly originated from Central or Eastern Europe, sought to instill in the residents of the neighbourhoods in which the settlement houses existed, the values, norms and cultural artifacts central to the dominant Zionist narrative and in doing so, incorporate them into the state-building project.

The point of departure for the historiography of the emergence of social work in the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine (1920–48), which preceded the State of Israel, has been traditionally the formal establishment of the Department of Social Work by the Jewish National Council in 1931 (Loewenberg, 1991; Weiss et al, 2004).