Palestinian refugees left their whole life behind. Here’s how Australia is helping them build a new one
The sound of chatter and the smell of flowers drifts out the door of a small studio in Brunswick East in Melbourne. Inside, a world away from war-torn Gaza, five Palestinian women work arranging fresh blooms from the Thursday morning market into bunches.
Each bouquet is sold via a subscription service that directly pays their wage. It’s part of a training initiative by social enterprise florist the Beautiful Bunch to help women fleeing Gaza access the Australian workforce.
The training program was launched in June after a long process of back and forth with community groups and people working on the ground. The aim is to support new arrivals with a sense of community, work skills development and – crucially – a wage, according to its founder, Jane Marx.
Sara, a Palestinian woman, says working at the Beautiful Bunch is a welcome relief after she arrived in Australia in January.
“I was happy, it was a new thing for me [where] I am learning something new,” Sara says. She arrived in Australia on a visitor visa and was able to move on to a bridging visa with work rights with the help of a local charity.
Work involves unloading the flowers, preparing stems by removing leaves and organising them in fresh water before arranging them into bouquets for the Girls from Gaza subscribers.
The response has been overwhelming – and more Palestinian women want to join the program. “Mostly it is referrals from the existing women who work here putting us in touch with those within their broader network who also really need the opportunity,” Marx says.
She is receiving “a far greater number of subscriptions than we planned for”. The service needed 22 customers a week to be sustainable. Just two months after launching, they are at over 100 subscribers.
“People write in every single week. They write notes to the girls and they read all of them,” Marx says. “We’ve had people come in and drop off things for us, little cakes and food.”
Sara says: “You know the circumstances that we’ve been through and how it was hard to get out of Gaza. The Australian people here are so kindhearted. I’d really like to thank them.”
It is not the only community effort being directed to support Palestinian arrivals in finding work. Foundations, including Palestine Australia Relief and Action, have sent callouts to connect employers to arrivals and local groups are holding expos to offer information on overseas qualification recognition, training pathways and work opportunities.
Australia issued 2,922 visas to people from the Palestinian territories between 7 October last year and 12 August. Of those, only 1,300 people have been able to reach Australia to date. Those who did so arrived on visitor visas – meaning they were not entitled to healthcare, income support or employment.
The chief executive of Settlement Services International, Violet Roumeliotis, says Palestinian arrivals are “highly educated professionals and business owners”.
“Some were working in medicine and allied health, in engineering, in finance, social work.”
Of the Palestinians who have arrived in Australia, 80% hold at least one educational qualification beyond primary/secondary school and 73% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to data from the general delegation of Palestine to Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.
Engineering, science and technical professionals, as well as medical and health professionals, are the most common occupational categories for arrivals. “The issue for them, of course, is they have no work rights [in Australia],” Roumeliotis says.
Only when an arrival has moved on to a bridging visa do they have access to work rights. But even then “the process is not easy”, Roumeliotis says. “You have to apply, it is a case-by-case basis, so it is really inadequate.”
In New South Wales, 75% of Palestinian arrivals have moved on to a bridging visa, 2% to a class C bridging visa and 23% are still on a visitor visa. This month the federal government extended entitlements to some visa-holders, granting Medicare access to people holding two subclasses of bridging visa E who have been granted work rights.
Then comes the task of finding a job. Organisations and charities, diaspora community groups and individuals have stepped up to assist in helping arrivals settle – and connecting them with work opportunities has been one of the top priorities.
Hope a career path is not lost
In Sydney, dentists Dr Ibrahim Al-Salti and Dr Muhannad Al-wehwah have been inundated with questions about where arrivals can find work “asking if we know someone who is looking for a forklift driver, or someone who is looking for a labourer”, Al-Salti says.
The Palestinian-Australian dentists started offering free care to Palestinian arrivals at their practice in Belmore in January. They see “a lot of highly skilled people that come in from Gaza”.
But due to visa issues, or skill equivalency issues, they cannot find work in their fields – or jobs at all. That takes a toll.
“A lack of a stable job leads to mental health issues, a feeling of inadequacy,” Al-Salti says. “An inability to support one’s family, having to rely on charities or the goodwill of people in the community.”
He and Al-wehwah welcomed two young Palestinian women into the practice as trainee dental assistants. Batoul Hashem, 22, is one of them.
She was one week into her final year of studying dentistry at Al-Azhar university in Gaza when “everything shut down,” she says. All of Gaza’s 12 universities were damaged or destroyed in the first four months of Israel’s campaign after the Hamas attacks of 7 October.
Hashem’s brother, who has lived in Sydney for 10 years, was able to organise a three-month visitor visa for Hashem, her siblings and mother who all arrived in Australia in November. Her father was unable to get out until February.
Before fleeing, Hashem planned to finish studies at her university – in an area struck by Israel – and live and work as a dentist in Gaza. Finding training as a dental assistant in Sydney “was all really a coincidence,” she says.
Hashem’s brother visited Al-Salti and Al-wehwah’s practice with a painful tooth and she joined him. “It had been a long time since I last went to a dental clinic,” she says. There, Hashem started speaking with Al-wehwah about missing her studies.
“It was like a lightbulb moment,” he says. “We just thought maybe having this on her CV, when she is going for scholarships or positions, hopefully this helps.”
She wakes up early to get to the office for a day of sterilising equipment, setting up chairs, preparing treatment rooms for the doctors and keeping up with patients as they come and go.
At the start the language barrier was hard. “I didn’t know how to deal with people,” Hashem says.
“Everyone is talking in English, they are really fast. It is really tiring, but it is really rewarding in the same way. It builds up my confidence to adapt to everything here.”
Hashem now has a bridging visa, meaning Al-Salti and Al-wehwah can take her on as a paid dental assistant once she completes her training.
The dentists do not have external funding to support Hashem’s training or job – or the free dental care they offer recent Palestinian arrivals.
“Whatever support we can offer in our limited capacity is going to be done, regardless of the costs to us,” Al-Salti says. “We are both migrants, and we also were both refugees. We saw ourselves in her.”
Al-wehwah says: “I wanted her to just not lose hope in her career path. Hope is important. She still has family and friends back home and her thoughts are constantly with them. Being at work, I have found over time I can see her getting happier. To us, honestly, that is as good as it gets.”
