Ibrahim Mahajne

• PhD
• Associate Professor at Independent Researcher

In the Bedouin society in Israel, Child Protection Officers (CPOs) are exposed to the risk of secondary traumatization due to their work’s challenging character. They navigate through a complicated, complex field of cultural traditions and institutional structures. Protecting children at risk becomes a daunting task and often puts CPOs at high risk...

The article investigates Arab social workers’ development of intervention practices to cope with Arab service-users’ challenges in Israel, while the 7 October 2023 war ensued between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. A qualitative study conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with fifteen Arab social workers working in Arab welf...

This article investigates the challenges faced by Palestinian minority social work students in Jewish practicum settings and the coping strategies they employ for those challenges. Qualitative research derived data from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 Palestinian students. Two main challenges were described: (1) insensitivity to the stu...

he research describes and explains the critical practices of Arab minority group social workers, who were themselves, or whose nuclear family members were welfare services users in the past. The research derived data from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 Arab social workers employed in welfare bureaus in Israel. It was found that most of...

The research highlights challenges involved in ensuring professional authentication faced by social workers working in cultural minorities. The findings contribute to the knowledge corpus that discusses authentication. They describe and explain possible consequences of linguistic difficulties arising in Arab minority social workers’ work in Israel....

The gap between fieldwork demands and academic knowledge necessitates the sharing of tacit knowledge to ensure continuity of context-appropriate professional knowledge. The research describes and explains patterns of minority social workers’ sharing of their previously tacit knowledge, the knowledge’s significance and the context where it was acqui...

Sparse professional literature on complaints against social workers, focuses on a few specific variables, discussing them from a universal/contextless viewpoint. This study considers such complaints as a holistic (integrative) issue which should be studied within particular contexts. The research traced service users’ complaints against social work...

The article investigates the scope, motivations, considerations for, and implications of minority group social workers’ professional success. Data was collected with primary and secondary documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 Arab welfare bureaus managers in Israel. The message of “success” has almost disappeared from the releva...

Welfare bureaus constitute a safety net for the dispos sessed Arab minority in Israel who are partially excluded from the state social services. The welfare bureau reforms discussed in this article are consequently crucial to improve welfare services for the underprivileged minority service users. This article partially fills a lacuna in the releva...

Mayors play a major role in determining their locality’s welfare policies and significantly influence the welfare bureaus’ work. This study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews with 19 mayors of local Arab governments in Israel to examine this issue. It found that the mayors fiercely criticize the welfare bureaus in four areas of concern, c...

Social workers’ professional failures are considered inevitable occurrences. However, virtually all research on professional failure management relates to the healthcare field. The scant literature on professional failure does not give much weight to the profound implications of context on professional functioning. This pioneer study illustrates ho...

The research investigated the scope, motivations and implications of Palestinian minority social workers permanently leaving the profession. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with ten former social workers. It was found that leaving their social work posts, either temporarily or permanently, was a rare occurrence in Palestinian soc...

Israel’s Youth Law (Care and Supervision), 1960 grants social workers power, authority and responsibility to intervene to protect minors at risk. But female social workers in Israel’s Arab population function in a traditional society in which women’s power is often labelled as negative and unfeminine, and power is primarily seen as indicating mascu...

The Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic) began in 1948 with the displacement and dispossession of many Palestinians, leaving a lasting impact on Palestinian society and individual identity. To this day Palestinian social workers must address the difficulties of Palestinians deriving from the Nakba whilst they themselves contend with its ramifications. T...

Minority groups tend to experience the academic campus as unpleasant and excluding. Relevant literature attempts to analyze the position of these groups, using terms such as ‘race’ and investigating how higher education institution mechanisms replicate the inequality between the minority group and the hegemonic majority population. In Israel, unres...

The research traces the adoption of critical practices by minority group social workers working in the third sector. A phenomenological approach was employed, drawing data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with social workers from two entities composing the third sector in Arab society in Israel: dozens of volunteers from the religious Zakat...

This article investigates the way in which disadvantaged minority social workers’ professional excellence is encouraged, drawing data from an analysis of primary documents and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 Palestinian welfare bureau managers in Israel. It finds that the Jewish voluntary sector is the sole player encouraging Palestinia...

Qualitative inductive phenomenological research investigated social workers forced to hold multiple jobs to ensure their income, tracing their motivations for employment in various jobs and the implications for social work. Purposive sampling was used to select research participants. Data were drawn from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 19...

This study reveals tensions between Jews and Arabs in the Israeli Social Workers’ Union, examining the characteristics, experiences and functioning of the Arab minority representatives over the years until the recent election of a new radical socialist-feminist leadership. Data were elicited from semi-structured in-depth interviews with Arab delega...

Israel’s Arabs are citizens, but they are an ethnic minority and a national minority (Palestinians) in a Jewish-majority state. The decades-long Palestinian–Israeli conflict has erupted in recent years in violent outbursts between Arab and Jewish citizens. April–May 2021 saw severe violence against individuals and businesses on both sides and damag...

The article describes the types and strategies for dealing with professional regrets experienced by social workers. It draws data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 21 Arab welfare bureaus social workers in Israel. Two types of professional regrets were identified: most interviewees expressed their regrets concerning non-intervention in...

ישראל היא מדינה אתנית דמוקרטית, אולם אזרחיה היהודים והערבים אינם נהנים ממעמד אזרחי שווה. בין השאר משאביה הציבוריים אינם מחולקים באופן שוויוני על פי הצרכים של כל קבוצה. דוגמה להקצאה לא־שוויונית כזאת נמצאת בעבודה הסוציאלית בחברה הערבית במדינה. מאמר זה מתאר את התמורות בעבודה סוציאלית זו מסוף הממשל הצבאי במדינה ועד לתחילת הרפורמה האחרונה שנעשתה בלשכות...

The article traces the development of social work in Israel's Arab society at the turn of the millennium (1996-2006) based on semi-structured interviews with Arab social workers who worked in the profession at the time. The findings show that Arab social work developed under the shadow of an establishment that adhered to a long standing ‘politics o...

The research investigated expressions of, reasons, implications and coping strategies for burnout according to twenty-three Arab ethnic-national minority social workers in Arab welfare bureaus in Israel. Interview data indicated that burnout is expressed in somatisation and interpersonal behaviours with clients and colleagues. As in Arab culture, p...

Ethnic groups exist almost everywhere. Generally, each group is related to uniformly, although it may comprise several subgroups. An example is Israel’s Palestinian-Israeli population, which consists of three ethnic–religious subgroups: Muslims, Christians and Druze. They coexist in nearly all domains of life, but maintain separate schools and fami...

n recent decades, there has been an increased rate of higher education among Arab women in Israel that has been accompanied by an increase in their integration into various forms of employment. However, the employability options of academic Arab women graduates are limited due to the under-development of employment zones in Arab localities in the p...

In 2006, the Israeli Ministry of Welfare recognized the BSW degrees of two Palestinian and one Jordanian institutions, which enables their Israeli-Arab graduates to work in Israel’s social services and thus potentially assist in indigenizing social work in the country’s minority Arab society. Based on 38 interviews with some of these graduates, the...

This exploratory study of 34 religious, traditional, and secular Arab Muslim social workers in Israel traces the dilemmas caused by potential clashes between their professional and religious values. The findings suggest that although all the interviewees were aware of such clashes, only the religious ones adopted coping strategies to address them....

The article identifies challenges to social work practice voiced by 43 Arab social workers in Israel, aimed at clarifying whether there is a need to indigenise their practice in Israel's hegemonic Jewish society in view of four challenges to their interventions that they identified: inappropriate professional training; insufficient knowledge of Eng...

Based on primary and secondary sources and interviews with Arab social workers employed in welfare bureaus during the time under review, the article describes the development of Palestinian social work in Israel in its formative years (1968–1982). The primary finding is that this development took place under a "policy of contempt" towards the Pales...

Social work in Israel’s indigenous Arab society developed late relative to its Jewish counterpart. Based on primary and secondary sources and semi-structured interviews with Arab social workers who were employed in social welfare bureaus during the years under review, the article describes and explains the development of social work in Israel’s Ara...

This qualitative study presents the experiences of social workers whose clients are the inhabitants of unrecognized Bedouin Arab villages in Israel. Bedouin Arabs are an indigenous people, a minority population residing throughout Israel. Half of those in the south of the country inhabit villages that are not recognized by the authorities. In-depth...

This qualitative study presents the experiences of social workers whose clients are the inhabitants of unrecognised Bedouin Arab villages in Israel. It used in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with 25 participants, recruited by the snowball method. These social workers reported that they are caught between their personal and professional values, o...

The article traces social work’s development in Israel’s Palestinian society from 2007 until a reform of the welfare bureaus in 2018, based on primary and secondary written sources, interviews with Palestinian social workers employed at the time, and a survey of social workers throughout the country’s Palestinian local authorities. Despite gains, s...

This study attempted to identify the elements which might best minimize the negative consequences of restriction of inpatients and rebuild therapeutic alliance and trust. Through in depth interviews with 15 psychiatric patients who had experience restrained during the last involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Analysis of the data revealed three...