Spatial and Racial Health Inequalities: Health and Mortality Gaps between Palestinians and Jews in Israel

Ameed Saabneh , University of Haifa

This research presents an analytical spatial perspective for explaining racial health inequality that has been largely overlooked in studies of health gaps between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. The work entails a comprehensive examination of spatial policies and practices, identifies the forces that instigated and maintained the spatial segregation of Palestinians, and elaborates the role of segregation in generating health gaps between Palestinians and Jews. The work suggests a novel operationalization of the impact of segregation on health outcomes by proposing a model of two types of spatial inequality and devising a decomposition method to evaluate the relative contribution of each type of segregation to the total health gap. The findings indicate that the segregation of Palestinians from the center and their confinement to peripheral regions are crucial determinants of their poor health outcomes, while the segregation of the Palestinian community within the geographic periphery also contributes to lower levels of health. We conclude that this two-pronged segregation of Palestinians, as well as the forces and powers that instigated the segregation, are fundamental determinants of health.

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 Presented in Session 110. Social Inequalities in Health, Wellbeing and Morbidity