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Women from Israel’s minority communities are integrating into the high-tech sector while maintaining their cultural traditions through innovative tech hubs.
By FELICE FRIEDSON/THE MEDIA LINE FEBRUARY 7, 2025 17:05
Women working at the Samana office, December 17, 2024.
(photo credit: FELICE FRIEDSON/THE MEDIA LINE)
The untold story of a different side of Israel’s minorities, where religious women are paving a path that combines tradition and groundbreaking tech.
For more stories from The Media Line go to themedialine.org
When you enter the homey offices at the Lotus Women’s High-Tech Hub, you come across a scene that could be found in any office in the Jewish state. But in the heart of the northern Israeli town of Daliyat al-Karmel, where the Druze settled 400 years ago, is a space where modern tech meshes with ancient culture. It is a safe space that enables young women to be part of Israel’s workforce.
In one building nestled in a shopping complex, a group of professional women is steeped in the sound of clacking keyboards. The Media Line visited both the Bedouin and Druze tech hubs, both established in partnership with the Portland Trust to enable women to work according to the traditional codes of the religion while simultaneously breaking down barriers and rewriting assumptions of what women from the ancient religion are capable of.
Common among the women is a high degree of education and skill sets that Israeli companies need.
Reem Kadmani, 24, grew up in a typical Druze home. Her father worked as a businessman, and her mother didn’t work—a common dynamic among Israel’s Druze community, where the women’s employment rate is only around 40%. She received a degree in software engineering at Braude College of Engineering in Karmiel.
“After I graduated, I wanted to learn new skills and to learn new techniques, so I decided to join Lotus,” Kadmani told The Media Line. The job is challenging but rewarding, she said, noting that one of the most meaningful parts is getting to see other women working in tech.
The impetus for forming an all-women’s Druze tech hub wasn’t just the lack of female role models in the community. Among traditional practitioners of the Druze religion, there are structural forces making it difficult for women to integrate into high tech: Religious women are not allowed to drive or to work in mixed-gender workplaces. That’s why Maysa Halabi Alshiekh, founder and CEO of Lotus, set out to build a tech hub combining traditional Druze values with cutting-edge technology.
Halabi Alshiekh, 37, a mother of three, founded Lotus six years ago after identifying a problem facing women in Israel’s Druze community. While many Druze women graduate from high school with excellent grades in advanced math, physics, English, and Hebrew, the group’s traditional religious values often prevent Druze women from finding their place in the Israeli economy. “What I wanted to do is to make a tech hub for women that they can have the training, and they can work remotely, and to dream and to fulfill themselves, and to also be a great mom and have a great future for our children,” she told The Media Line.
Because of the tight-knit nature of the community and previous negative experiences with the media, Halabi Alshiekh asked for her face to be concealed in the interview.
A photo of the 12 Druze children killed by Hezbollah in Majdal Shams in July sits on a table, calling attention to the freshness of the attack for the 150,000 or so members of Israel’s Druze population.
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A back wall in the conference room features a drawing of a large pink flower in bloom, representing the name Lotus and the ability to thrive even in difficult conditions—just like the Druze women of Israel, Alshiekh explained.
Lotus is funded by the Portland Trust, an organization that promotes high-quality employment within the underrepresented communities in Israel.
Dressed in black and veiled, Alshiekh tells The Media Line that she wanted to be a journalist. But when she turned 15, she decided to become more religious. “I knew then that my dreams would be changed because my reality changed,” she said.
Why establish the all-women's tech hub?
Establishing the all-women’s tech hub was a way of harmonizing her big dreams with the strictures of the Druze religion.
Six years since its founding, Lotus now employs 105 Druze women across 14 companies. “Every one of them is spreading a new change,” Halabi Alshiekh said. “It’s like proof that they can dream and also be part of big things and that we are also a real part of Israeli society.”
“It really contributed to me both personally and professionally,” she said. “I saw that I have skills that I didn’t know I had before. I saw that I was connected to this world. I love code. I love writing code. And I just didn’t know that I had these skills before. Not at all,” Sally Hamdan, a 30-year-old mother of two who has worked at the hub for almost five years, told The Media Line.
She said that new generations of Druze girls are now opening their eyes to their potential.
“There is a lot of awareness about it [coding], also in terms of schools,” she said. “Now they’re exposing kids at a very young age to this world. It will help and lead them.”
Although she studied electronics in high school, she did not pursue a university degree.
“I just heard about Lotus from a friend and I wanted to try,” Hamdan told The Media Line. “I didn’t have a background in this.”
With her family’s full support, she went through training.
Writing code isn’t easy, Hamdan said. “It’s a challenge. But if you want to, it’s something that’s possible.”
Lotus’ success led Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, the spiritual leader of the Druze in Israel and a partner in the initiative, to request that a counterpart be founded for men, 5-Tech, which offers a similar opportunity to integrate into high tech while maintaining their traditional values.
Despite Sheikh Tarif’s approval, some older community members have found it difficult to accept the idea of Druze women working in tech. When Noor Aboreesh, 27, started working at the tech hub, her parents were initially scared.
“They thought to themselves, a religious Druze woman, what are her chances in high tech, in Israeli high tech? Because the numbers are very little. Also, I think there wasn’t enough exposure to high tech in our community,” she told The Media Line.
Eventually, her parents gained “more of a sense of trust.” Aboreesh now works as a quality assurance tester at TestNet on a project for Zim, the Israeli shipping company.
“It has to do a lot with changing perceptions and believing that nothing is impossible,” Aboreesh said. “You can still be yourself and guard your beliefs and your image and the way you portray yourself to the community—and also be up to date with what’s modern.”
Alshiekh envisions expansion, especially given the geopolitical developments on Israel’s borders. “I want to have three hubs like this: one in the Galil and one in the Golan Heights. If we have peace, I also want to have hubs in Lebanon and Syria,” she said.
“I want high tech to be more diverse and to be equal for all the women, the Arab women in Israel.”
Shaping a new future for Israel’s Bedouin women
A half-hour drive west of Daliyat al-Karmel, near streets filled with olive trees and beautiful homes, is a newer hub with a similar vision of empowering Israel’s minority women.
In 2022, Bushra Mazreeb established Samana, a tech hub for northern Israeli Bedouin women, in the village of Zarzir.
The Bedouins of northern Israel tend to be less impoverished and better educated than their counterparts in the country’s south, but northern Bedouin towns are still significantly less developed than towns in other Israeli sectors. “The socioeconomic rating of the Bedouin sector is 1 on a scale from 1 to 10,” Mazreeb told The Media Line. “It’s really the lowest one.” Mazreeb, who grew up in the city and is a mother of three, told The Media Line.
Although Mazreeb ’s parents were uneducated, they encouraged her to build a better future for herself. “My father and my grandfather and my mother said, you must be better. So I always want to learn new things, and I want to do good things in the world,” she said.
Mazreeb ’s uncle taught her computers, and she pursued a degree at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. She then received a doctorate from Bar-Ilan University and returned to Zarzir.
With a doctorate in hand, Mazreeb began working as a school principal in the town. There, she was struck by the oversupply of Bedouin women in the field of education. “We don’t need more teachers in the schools,” she said.
When she heard about Lotus, she was inspired to create a similar project for the Bedouins of northern Israel. “I say, if Maysa can, I can do it,” she said.
Mazreeb said Bedouin women live in a few predefined spheres, which is why forming the Samana hub was so necessary. Even Bedouin women who pursue degrees in academia necessarily return to their villages rather than work in the high-tech sector.
“So, in order to do good here, we need to build the hub, and also the capacity that is suitable for society, so that every population that lacks the skills that are suitable for in the modern age can integrate, and thus, really, improve excellence,” Mazreeb explained.
In Arabic, the word Samana means “our sky.” The name is meant to suggest “a special sky for us, a place of the sky that can respect our tradition,” Mazreeb said.
Bedouin women in tech
For high tech to fit Bedouin women, work needs to take place in the village, in all-women spaces that respect Bedouin traditions. At first, Mazreeb said, community members thought that the idea of Bedouin-appropriate tech jobs for women sounded too good to be true and told the women they tried to recruit not to trust them. “But when they see the women become stars in their village, everybody wants to be like these women,” she said.
In early 2022, Mazreeb, who is Samana’s CEO, reached out to the Portland Trust and scheduled a roundtable to show them the potential talent among northern Bedouin women. “In the roundtable, Portland came out and said, OK, there is good talent here. How do we start to scout?” she said.
Unlike other funders, Mazreeb said, Portland Trust saw Bedouin women as equal and respected their traditions. “They learn our community, not like all the programs that come in,” she said.
Other programs, including ones funded by the government, don’t respect the role of family and tradition in Bedouin life, she explained.
Samana received more than 120 résumés before the first training course. Applicants were screened for technical abilities and Hebrew and English skills.
Eventually, the participants were chosen, and the first course kicked off in December 2022. Since there was no set place to hold the training, they met at a youth club in Timrat until the afternoon, when they had to leave to make room for after-school activities.
By the time they finished the course, the hub still wasn’t ready for them to move into. “As we said, Bedouins are wanderers,” Mazreeb said. They left the temporary Timrat location for the offices of SolarEdge in Yokneam for another few weeks before the hub in Zarzir was open for business.
SolarEdge, an Israeli sustainable energy company, had originally committed to hiring seven or eight women, but it ended up accepting all 14 women. “Slowly they started to discover the potential, to see the capabilities, and the entire class was accepted,” Mazreeb said.
Women who work in Samana are from all parts of Bedouin society—some who were in academia, some who used to be teachers, and some who weren’t able to study at all because of their financial situation. “There are also women who were engineers but they didn’t have a job,” Mazreeb said. “There are women who have studied science, like statistics, that didn’t have a job. Some could only work at supermarkets or as saleswomen.”
“All this potential needs to be somehow brought to high tech,” she continued. “How do we bring it to high tech? We need to convince society to take women like that, who have potential.”
Mazreeb described one worker who had been accepted to the Technion, Israel’s most prestigious university of science and technology, who had been able to study there for only a month before being forced to drop out because of economic hardship.
“She really wanted to be an engineer, but she was not in the economic situation [to be able to afford this],” Mazreeb said. “She was 19. She heard about Samana’s program. She joined us. She did her training. Today, she is running a household with her mother and grandmother, and she is the earner. She plans to finish her degree alongside her work.”
Women in junior positions in Samana can earn monthly salaries of around 11,000 to 13,000 shekels ($3,100 to $3,600).
Changing Mindsets
As with Lotus, it hasn’t been easy to introduce Samana into a conservative society, and some parents have been concerned about their daughters joining the program. Samana has tried to address that by reaching out to the workers’ families. “We create a relationship with the family to gain confidence that they will check out our tech hub here in Samana,” Mazreeb said. “There are all the conditions that allow a woman to succeed. On the other hand, we maintain all the social boundaries all the social rules. Everything they want. Please, come and ask.”
“It’s also about doing it smart, not threatening the men,” Mazreeb l continued. “We want to move from tradition to modernity, without all the conflicts, with a lot of wisdom. And we don’t want all the women in Samana to be divorced. We’ll run a house, we’ll have children, we’ll have a family, we’ll have everything, and with that, we’ll also succeed.”
In addition to making a change in Bedouin society, the program has also changed how wider Israeli society views the Bedouins. Those who had never heard of the northern Bedouin now appreciate the professionalism among the group’s women and can understand the group more: “All the guests who have been here have come to visit Zarzir, to get to know what is in Zarzir, to know that there is a population here that is close to the Israeli population, that wants to integrate, that wants to be part of the Israeli society, and not stay in the periphery, the poor,” Mazreeb said.
Mazreeb strongly believes that she is part of Israeli society, but she has sometimes found it frustrating to feel that Israeli society doesn’t necessarily share her views. After launching this project, she said, “Now, they see me.”
The company’s chief technology officer, Rihan Khutba, is Mazreeb ’s main partner. At 38, she is the mother of five girls and has been Samana’s CTO for the past two years. She’s worked in the high-tech field for 13 years and has a degree in medical science from the Technion.
Khutba knows from personal experience how difficult life can be for working women. Her own daily schedule starts with laundry and cooking at 5 a.m. and ends only around 10 p.m.
For Khutba, the rationale behind creating a space for women in tech is obvious. “I believe that women are much better than men,” she told The Media Line unequivocally. “At everything, especially in technology and science. They excel and will succeed with the right and tailored training programs.”
That women have it in them to succeed doesn’t necessarily mean they recognize their own abilities, though. Khutba said that it was difficult to recruit women for Samana’s first cohort. By the second cohort, though, talented women were flocking to Samana for training and help landing jobs.
Two years since the hub’s launch, two groups of women are now working at SolarEdge and one group at Nova, an Israeli producer of metrology devices, from Samana’s offices.
Many other companies are interested in being part of the program, but Samana is only interested in companies that will allow the women to work out of the hub in accordance with traditional Bedouin values, Khutba said. Their current location can hold up to 46 women.
Aya Kaabyia, a 28-year-old mother of four, came to Samana to work for SolarEdge after pursuing a degree in education and being unable to find enough work.
“I’m so happy now because I fulfilled my dream, and I now work in high tech,” Kaabyia told The Media Line. “And my children are proud of this.”
Kaabyia said that her husband, too, is proud of her and has helped support the children while she works.
Mazreeb said that Kaabyia was just one of many Bedouin women encouraged to pursue careers in fields that don’t really interest them. “In our culture, women are directed to either study as a teacher, or work in social work, or things like that. They directed her to be a teacher, but she didn’t want to be a teacher inside,” she said of Kaabyia.
“When we heard about Aya’s potential, we trained her here, and Aya is now one of the most leading women in the society,” she continued. “Aya’s influence on society is, everyone wants to be like Aya. In addition, Aya is already a star in her village. With all the success she has made, she also has a solid salary. She can invest in her children’s education. She took her children to a private school.”
Salma Eyadi, 28, also came to Samana after working as a teacher. Initially, her family didn’t understand her desire to work in tech. “It took them some time to just understand and to believe that this is also actually something that a woman can do,” Eyadi told The Media Line.
Eyadi recently returned to her job for SolarEdge after being home on maternity leave. Samana’s environment is supportive of working mothers, she said. “When my baby’s sick and I can’t send her to day care, I do bring her with me to work. And as we said before, we’re like a family, so if someone doesn’t have a meeting, they’re going to be holding my baby,” she said.
Still, being a new mother and a high-tech worker isn’t easy. “I’m trying to be devoted also to my life at home, being a wife, also being a mother, and also to my job,” Eyadi said. “Because I see my job as my second baby. It’s something that I worked really, really hard to get.”
Unlike when she worked as a teacher, Eyadi is excited to have opportunities for growth. “In high tech, I can develop,” she said. “There’s always a place for growth in this job. And the more you give, the more you get.”
Together with the other women in Samana and in Lotus, Eyadi is paving a new path for the women of Israel’s minority communities. “Women where I live in the neighborhood, they also started asking, ‘OK, so what you’re doing, how does it work, how can I also do that?’” she said. “I think it opened new doors also for other women to think about it and to consider the high-tech world.”
Giorgia Valente contributed to this report.
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