As hundreds of Palestinians filed through an Israeli checkpoint on a recent Monday morning, most were dressed for a day of manual labor. But there was at least one striking exception.
Moha Alshawamreh, 31, was wearing a button-down shirt and carrying a computer. As many of his mostly male relatives and neighbors headed to construction sites in southern Israel, providing cheap Palestinian labor for some of the lowest-paying jobs in Israel, Mr. Alshawamreh was on his way to a tech company in Tel Aviv. .
“Look at all these people,” Alshawamreh said that January day, with a mixture of sadness and empathy. “You don’t see any of them with a laptop or going to an office.”
The son of a worker and a stay-at-home mother, Mr. Alshawamreh is an engineer for a company that uses artificial intelligence to improve retail websites, and one of the few Palestinians working in the Israeli tech industry, considered a of the most important. the most innovative in the world.
He ended up there after a remarkable set of circumstances, including encounters with a book on the Holocaust, the university half a world away, and an Israeli pop star.
Their commute to work, through the turnstiles and security scanners of Israeli checkpoints, highlights the inequalities between Palestinians and Israelis living in the West Bank, which is currently experiencing some of its deadliest violence in two decades. His journey through life, from a busy town to a Tel Aviv skyscraper, highlights a rare exception to that imbalance.
Mr. Alshawamreh said Israelis should know that their year-long odyssey was “emotionally and mentally draining to the point of tears.” The Palestinians should see that “what I did shows that it is possible,” he added.
Alshawamreh’s work week began in the town where he grew up, Deir al-Asal al-Fauqa, a quiet hilltop community of about 2,000 Palestinians in the southern West Bank. The town lies just east of a gray wall, hundreds of miles long, that Israel built to stop Palestinian attacks from the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
To cross that wall and head to Tel Aviv, Israelis living in the nearest Jewish settlement, built in 1982 and considered illegal under international law by most countries, can drive north through a checkpoint. nearby that Palestinians are forbidden to use. By this route, settlers can reach Tel Aviv in 75 minutes.
But Mr. Alshawamreh must enter Israel on foot, through a separate checkpoint at Meitar, 10 miles by road to the south. That restriction doubles the distance of your trip and more than triples its duration.
To get to the junction, Mr. Alshawamreh got up at 5 am and waited in the dark for a group of cars heading south.
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At dawn, he was among hundreds of Palestinians in Meitar entering through an airport-like security system that is meant to prevent gunmen from entering Israel. On the Israeli side, another shared vehicle took him to Beersheba, the nearest large city in southern Israel.
“It’s like going from the third world to the second world to the first world,” he said of his trip.
A chance discovery in Beersheba long ago set Mr. Alshawamreh on his present trajectory.
Mr. Alshawamreh’s father, Meshref, 63, has worked as a day laborer in Beersheba for years. One day about 15 years ago, Meshref brought home a book that he had found in the city. It was “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl, an account of the author’s experience in Nazi concentration camps.
Mr. Alshawamreh, then a teenager, picked it up. He found more than he bargained for: a primer on the Holocaust, a topic sometimes dismissed or downplayed in Palestinian discourse, and a lesson in resilience.
Through Mr. Frankl’s writings, Mr. Alshawamreh concluded that “it is up to us whether we want to perish because of our trauma, or whether we want to give it meaning and thrive because of it.”
Suddenly, Mr. Alshawamreh’s horizons expanded, he said. Before, he simply hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps. Now, he envisioned something bigger.
He won a scholarship to a university in Malaysia and got his first degree in computer science. She later obtained another scholarship in South Korea, acquiring fluent Korean and a master’s degree in behavioral economics.
Despite that resume, it was hard to find a job in the small Palestinian tech industry.
More than half of university-level tech graduates in the West Bank fail to find jobs in the field, according to estimates by the Palestinian Internship Program, which is based in Israel and trains potential Palestinian entrepreneurs. Overall unemployment in the territory is around 13 percent, in contrast to 4 percent in Israel and 46 percent in the Gaza Strip.
Mr. Alshawamreh began to consider working in Israel. Although he grew up a few hundred meters from Israel, he first heard of its reputation as the “Startup Nation” while studying in South Korea. An idea took root: Could I find work in Tel Aviv?
“Then I got home,” Alshawamreh said, “and reality hit me.”
An Israeli settler in the West Bank has no legal bar to working in Tel Aviv, but Mr. Alshawamreh needed a work permit to enter Israel, as well as an employer willing to go through the many bureaucratic contortions required to hire a Palestinian.
Experts estimate that there are only a few dozen Palestinians among the 360,000 workers in the Israeli tech sector, plus a few hundred who work remotely from the West Bank.
Then, in 2018, a breakthrough: Mr. Alshawamreh won a three-month internship at an Israeli company developing cancer detection technology, and with it, a work permit.
Full-time work proved elusive. So, with his still valid permission, he became a weird Palestinian student at Tel Aviv University. He earned a third degree: an MBA, half funded by the university, and lived in Tel Aviv.
But without a job, Mr. Alshawamreh struggled to pay his share of the fees and was suspended halfway through. He sent emails to dozens of prominent Israelis and Palestinians, asking for help.
One of Israel’s best-known pop stars, david brozahe answered unexpectedly. Touched by Mr. Alshawamreh’s plight, Mr. Broza let him stay at his home and helped raise his college fees.
“I have no idea what took over,” Broza recalled recently. “But the next thing I know, I’m giving him the key to my house.”
Shortly thereafter, the suspension was lifted, allowing Mr. Alshawamreh to earn his MBA. But even with three degrees, work was scarce.
It took another two years, dozens of rejected job applications and a bout of depression before Alshawamreh finally found a full-time tech job at Israeli firm Syte.
Their role is to talk to customers and fix problems with their websites. He has bigger ambitions; he hopes to one day found a Palestinian version of Uber. But this work is a start.
Mr. Alshawamreh’s willingness to engage with the Israelis has sometimes drawn criticism from his fellow Palestinians.
For critics, working in construction in Israel is acceptable, given high unemployment in the West Bank. Reaping the benefits of Tel Aviv office life, however, is a step too far, in his opinion. They think these workers normalize the occupation by over-compromising with the Israelis.
But for Mr. Alshawamreh, there will be little progress towards peace unless both the Palestinians and the Israelis treat each other as partners.
“My message is that we need to learn more from each other,” he said. “Break down the walls, speak up and put ourselves in each other’s shoes and see each other as two traumatized peoples.”
His own journey has already enlightened his Israeli colleagues.
After taking a bus from Beersheba, Mr. Alshawamreh finally arrived in Tel Aviv shortly before 10 am, some four hours after leaving home.
“It’s more than just going to work,” said one of his Israeli colleagues, Linda Levy. She added: “He has made me aware of things that he had no idea existed in Israel.”
Mistake Yazbek contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
