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There's Wealth in Poverty

(Jerusalem Post) Larry Derfner - One thing about writing stories about Arabs and their problems - you find yourself interviewing the solution-seekers in some of Israel's finest restaurants. I've been trying to work up a story about Israeli Beduin - about life at the bottom of Israel's socioeconomic ladder - and every Beduin activist I'm put together with seems to be living better than the last one. At one point I joined up with a party of Beduin school teachers and parents who were going down into the Ramon crater in a convoy of late-model 4X4s that cost $50,000 or more. The last Beduin activist I met lives in a shack and he told me how he hasn't worked in years. Then I saw this huge tractor-trailer worth hundreds of thousands of dollars parked in his yard. "Yeah, that's mine," he said. "I don't drive it now, though. I just lease it to drivers." Of course he doesn't work; people work for him.
2004-07-23 00:00:00
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