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`I DON'T WANT to live this life," says Doodi, nineteen, as he smokes a cigarette and looks out onto Nachalat Binyamin Street in Tel Aviv. "If I could get a real job, I would. I don't want to be a prostitute."
Israeli society once thrived on the employment of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, the territories Israel has occupied since the 1967 War. A "real job" has not been a possibility for Doodi or others like him since the onset of the Al Aqsa Intifada in October of 2000. According to the Palestinian National Authority State Information Service, more than 130,000 Palestinians per day crossed legally and illegally into Israel to work before the Intifada. The Israeli government's crackdown on Palestinians from the occupied territories -- including incursions that have killed or maimed more than 24,000 Palestinians -- now threatens employers and workers alike with heavy fines and jail time, reducing the number of Palestinian workers in Israel to fewer than 40,000. Meanwhile, following Israel's attacks on the Palestinian infrastructure, its continuing policy of curfews and closures, and its periodic demolition of government and economic centers in the occupied territories, unemployment looms at more than sixty percent in the West Bank and nearly eighty percent in Gaza.
Doodi repeatedly looks at his cellphone, anticipating a call from one of his regular clients. He prefers solicitations from his regular clients so that he does not have to spend most of the day walking through one of several public cruising areas in Tel Aviv where Israeli men know they can find male prostitutes, including young Palestinian men like Doodi.
Doodi has plenty of clients these days. Israel's demand for commercial sex is brisk even as access to legitimate employment for Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories declines. Human rights groups throughout Israel report that solicitation of prostitutes -- including male prostitutes -- has become relatively normalized within general Israeli society in the last decade, and demand for prostitutes has increased correspondingly. In a seminar on the trafficking of women held by the Ministry of Security on July 31, 2001, one Knesset member estimated that Israelis made more than one million visits to prostitutes in the year 2000; current estimates by anti-trafficking groups indicate...