The Mossawa Center, Haifa. Monday 30th of June 2014. The Mossawa Center has released two economic reports recently. One report is on poverty in the Arab community in Israel and the other on the Israeli government implementation of the law to insure equal representation of Arab citizens as employees in governmental offices. The poverty report found major socioeconomic gaps between the Arab minority and the Jewish population in Israel. The Employment report found that the government has not taken action to implement the Equal employment law for the Arab minority.

Currently the Arab minority makes up 38.9% of the total population in Israel living in poverty, even though they are only 20% of the population in total, and 60% of Arab children are living in poverty. Eli Alalouf, head of the Government appointed Committee to Fight Poverty presented the committee's report on June 23rd at the Mikveh Israel School in Holon. At the press conference he said, "Reducing poverty of such magnitude and depth is the absolute responsibility of the government" The recommendations of the Alalouf committee will be discussed in the Knesset this week. Mossawa's Economic department is planning to take part in this debate and will demand financial investment including employment in poor communities.

Mossawa has consistently urged the government to take steps to increase the rate of employment in the Arab minority but it has yet to even fully implement its decision to increase Arab representation in government jobs. In a conference in the Knesset where Mossawa presented the findings of their report, Civil Service Commissioner Moshe Dayan indicated that he would like to increase Arab representation to 10% by the end of 2014. He stated at the conference that he is working to increase the number of Arabs in the public service. He said, "Today's percentage is 9.25%. Since I have been in this role, the proportion of Arabs in the civil service has increased by 1% each year."

This statement comes eleven years after the Equal representation in employment law was approved in the Knesset and the government has failed to implement even its initial decision to increase Arab representation in government jobs to 11% by 2012. Currently in 2014 Arabs make up only 9.25% of government employees and there are still entire government departments and bodies that contain no Arab employees, including for example the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the Government Publications Office and Port Hadera, part of the Department of Transportation, and the Knesset Television station.

The Mossawa center recently released a paper about the needs of the Arab community from the 2015 state budget. In cooperation with Knesset members, weekly debates are taking place about the governmental allocations to the Arab community in the different fields. Director of the Mossawa center, Jafar Farah said, "We are in a struggle against the economic discrimination that the community faces, poverty is a result of discrimination in employment and services and we are holding the Israeli government responsible to find and implement the solution"