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THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE FOR LABOR RIGHTS IN ISRAEL  
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Jaclynn Ashly
April 2, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Palestinian workers whose underpaid labor provides part of
Israel’s low-cost workforce. Their stories of organizing amid ethnic
cleansing shed light on how this work is a crucial lifeline for
Palestinians — now severed by the devastation of war. _

Photo ccredit: Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // Jacobin,

 

Hatem Abu Ziadeh’s face beams with pride as he recounts how several
years ago his Israeli employer in one of Israel’s illegal
settlements was forced to give him his job back after he was fired for
organizing a union among the Palestinian workers.

Ziadeh, a fifty-four-year-old who lives in the Ramallah-area town of
Birzeit in the occupied West Bank, has worked as a car mechanic for
more than two decades at the Zarfaty garage, an auto repair shop
located in Mishor Adumim, the industrial zone of Israel’s
megasettlement Ma’ale Adumim. Like all of Israel’s 279
settlements
[[link removed]] built
in the Palestinian territory, Ma’ale Adumim is considered 
[[link removed]]illegal
under international law.

In 2013, Ziadeh stood up to his Israeli employer, insisting on minimum
wage and basic labor rights to which Palestinian workers inside Israel
and its settlements are entitled, but are rarely granted. With the
assistance of the labor organization Workers Advice Center (WAC-MAAN),
which helps organize Palestinian and Israeli workers, Ziadeh and about
thirty other workers from the West Bank established a union and
demanded collective bargaining rights.

Organizing Labor in the Occupied Territories

In response, Ziadeh’s Israeli employer fired him and revoked his
work permit, alleging that he was a “security threat.” But after a
prolonged legal battle between the employer and workers in the Israeli
courts — along with a strike
[[link removed]] staged
by the workers — the judge ruled that the employer was obligated to
reinstate Ziadeh’s permit, allow him to return to work, and
compensate him for two years of missed pay. Along with this, the court
ruled that the Palestinian workers had the right to organize a union.

In 2017, soon after Ziadeh returned to work, the workers at the
Zarfaty garage became the first Palestinian workers from the West Bank
to ever sign a collective bargaining agreement with an Israeli
employer. Since then, Palestinian workers in other shops and factories
in the settlements have also successfully unionized.

 
Hatem Abu Ziadeh sits at a table. (Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly  //
 Jacobin)
“It was a very proud day,” Ziadeh remembered, sitting at a cafe
outside Mishor Adumim shortly before October 7. Palestinian men were
lined up at the checkpoint of the settlement’s entrance, each one
checked by private security guards. “It felt like I had won the
battle. And I beat my Israeli boss through his own courts.” Ziadeh
chuckled at this thought as he sipped a paper cup of bitter coffee.

Now, however, life for Palestinians who worked in Israel and its
settlements has turned upside down — with their hopes of better pay
and working conditions crushed over the last few months. Since October
7, when Hamas carried out a complex assault against Israel, the
Israeli army has obliterated the besieged Gaza Strip, killing more
than thirty thousand Palestinians in what many observers say
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amount to genocide.

Following Hamas’s unprecedented attack, which resulted in the deaths
of hundreds and the capture of approximately 240 Israelis, as well as
some foreigners, Israel closed all checkpoints in and out of the West
Bank. It barred Palestinian workers from their jobs in Israel and its
settlements, leaving many destitute, with no money for rent, loan
payments, or their children’s tuition.

As the war drags on into its sixth month, the situation for workers is
becoming more and more desperate. Thousands of workers from Gaza who
had received permission to work inside Israel shortly before October 7
were detained and held 
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for weeks. Some endured humiliating ill-treatment and torture
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Israeli forces before being either returned to Gaza or released in the
West Bank. Others fled
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the West Bank from Israel out of fear for their safety.

I interviewed several Palestinian academics for this story, and they
unanimously emphasized that the realities faced by these workers were
shaped over half a century ago, when Israel occupied the West Bank and
Gaza. They highlighted how Israel’s actions strangled the
Palestinian economy, leading to a heavy reliance on Israeli wages for
a large portion of the Palestinian workforce. According to them,
subjecting Palestinians to exploitative and abusive conditions in
Israel and its settlements was a deliberate strategy employed by
Israel to establish colonial domination over Palestinians.

Occupied Economy

Approximately ten thousand Palestinian workers have been allowed
to return
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their jobs in Israel’s settlements, albeit under tighter security
measures. However, many others have been left with no income, and the
unions, which some workers fought tirelessly to establish, have done
little to help them.

Before October 7, around 150,000 to 200,000 Palestinians held permits
to work inside Israel or its settlements, with the majority employed
by the construction industry. However, many Palestinians also work
informally, without a permit.

Many Palestinian workers have been left with no income, and the
unions, which some workers fought tirelessly to establish, have done
little to help them.

Ziadeh was allowed to return to his work at Zarfaty after about a
month, but the Israeli army erected a checkpoint near the Palestinian
village of Khan al-Ahmar, located about three miles away from Mishor
Adumim. Palestinians are currently prohibited from crossing this
checkpoint. As a result, Ziadeh’s Israeli employer, who is now
always carrying a gun, must come to pick the workers up and transport
them to the garage.

“The Israelis are treating us very badly,” Ziadeh tells me. “It
has become scary. If one of them sees you even smile or laugh, they
will threaten to get you fired. We are always feeling unsafe, and we
have to be very careful.” All the Israeli employers are now strapped
with machine guns, and the Palestinian workers are not allowed to walk
around inside the industrial zone.

The fate of Ziadeh, and the tens of thousands of other Palestinians
dependent on work in Israel and its settlements, was sealed in 1967,
when Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the
Gaza Strip. This occupation subjected the territories to harsh
military control.

Land Grabs and Tariffs

According to Leila Farsakh, a Palestinian political economist and
professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts
Boston, at the end of the Third Arab-Israeli War in June 1967, Israel
faced a significant demographic and economic challenge posed by the
large Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This
challenge conflicted with Israel’s Zionist goals of establishing a
Jewish majority in the lands of historic Palestine.

“Israel found itself in control of nearly a million Palestinians
living between the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem,”
Farsakh tells me. “These Palestinians formed the equivalent of 30
percent of Israel’s population at the time.”

 

In contrast to the events of 1948, when around 80 percent of
Palestinians who lived on lands that became part of the Israeli state
either fled or were expelled from their homes, numbering about 750,000
people, a smaller number of Palestinians in the West Bank fled during
the 1967 war. By that time, two-thirds of the Gaza Strip’s
population was made up of refugees who lost their land in 1948,
resulting in densely populated areas. Comparatively, the West Bank,
with its more rural landscape, possessed more land and freshwater
resources than the Gaza Strip.

“Israel did not wish to incorporate them into the Israeli polity for
fear of jeopardizing the Jewish character of the state,” Farsakh
tells me. “The question of what to do with these people, both
politically and economically, was central to the cost of occupation,
to labor migration, and to the ability of Israel to assert its
territorial claim over the area.”

The first thing Israel did was put the West Bank and Gaza Strip under
the military’s control, confiscating huge swathes of Palestinian
public and private lands for security and firing zones, and later for
settlement construction and nature reserves. By the mid-1980s, 39
percent of the West Bank and about 31 percent of the Gaza Strip had
been mapped as Israeli state land.

According to Israeli rights group B’Tselem, during the first
thirty-six years of occupation, Israel seized
[[link removed]] almost two million
dunums of Palestinian lands — 200,000 hectares — leasing it out to
official representatives, such as the Jewish Fund or the Israel Land
Administration, or to private citizens for settlement construction.
Various restrictions on Palestinian trade and economic development
accompanied the mass confiscation of land.

The West Bank and Gaza Strip were forcibly incorporated into a customs
union with Israel, Farsakh says, with Israel imposing restrictions on
the kinds of commodities that can be imported or exported from the
territories, protecting Israeli agriculture. Additionally, Israeli
officials unilaterally set an external tariff structure. Farsakh
explains that any trade with the rest of the world had to go through
Israel and be handled by Israeli agents.

Israel enforced a monetary union with the Palestinian territories,
adopting Israeli currency as official tender and shutting down all but
two banks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were under Israeli
supervision. Israeli authorities prohibited investments from Israel
— or abroad — in the Palestinian economy. The Israeli military
exercised full control over the budgets in the West Bank and Gaza,
including taxation and collection.

During the early years of the occupation, some Israeli officials
opposed Palestinian employment in Israel, fearing it would displace
Jewish workers.

Palestinians were forced to pay income taxes 3 to 10 percent higher
than those levied on Israelis for the same range of income. Farsakh
notes that, between 1967 and 1971, the Israeli military establishment
issued over two hundred orders regulating Palestinian economic life
and tied investment to military approvals.

Land confiscations and restrictions on trade and investment caused the
agricultural sector, which had once employed a large portion of the
Palestinian labor force, to collapse. According to Farsakh, the
commercialized agrarian economy in the Palestinian territories
absorbed nearly 40 percent of the total labor force in 1967. By 1993,
when the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), agriculture employed less than 20
percent of the Palestinian labor force.

“The result of this specific form of integration was to insert a
small, mainly agrarian Palestinian economy into an occupying
industrial economy,” Farsakh explains. “Labor flows were the first
element in binding the Palestinian economy to Israel.”

During the early years of the occupation, some Israeli officials
opposed Palestinian employment in Israel, fearing it would displace
Jewish workers. Over time, however, most recognized that reducing
unemployment in the Palestinian territories could pacify political
unrest.

 
A WAC-MAAN organizer discusses unionization with Palestinian workers
at Mishor Adumim. (Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly  //  Jacobin)
The resulting economic arrangement, which allows Palestinians to seek
jobs in Israel in sectors that lack sufficient Jewish labor, such as
construction, agriculture, and the service industry, was beneficial to
Israeli employers in various ways, but ultimately damaging to the
Palestinian national economy.

A Tale of Two Economies

For the first two decades of Israel’s occupation, during which
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were permitted relative freedom
to move between territories, the portion of individuals seeking work
inside Israel or its settlements surged, skyrocketing from virtually
zero before 1967 to about 40 percent in 1987, when the first
Palestinian intifada erupted.

Palestinians receive much higher wages in Israel than in Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, they are, according to Ibrahim Shikaki, assistant
professor of economics at Trinity College, “a significant part of
the labor force.”

“There was a sweet spot for the Israeli firms because, on one hand,
they were paying Palestinians more than what they were being paid in
their domestic economy, and, on the other hand, they were paying them
less than what they would need to pay the Israeli Jewish workers,”
Shikaki tells me. “One of the main ways of increasing profit is by
limiting labor costs — and what better way than by having a reserve
army of unemployed that you can tap into whenever you want.”

This abundant supply of cheap labor enabled Israeli firms to lower
production costs and generate high profits at low prices, often
underselling Palestinian and imported goods. Shikaki explains that
this arrangement further benefitted Israel by “pacifying the normal
tension between capital and labor, between employer and employees.”

“The Israeli employer can pay that Israeli worker a little bit more
and they can have more opportunities for promotion. And the employer
can do that only because he is exploiting that other segment of labor,
which is Palestinian,” Shikaki says.

‘The Israeli employer can pay that Israeli worker a little bit more.
And the employer can do that only because he is exploiting that other
segment of labor, which is Palestinian.’

As Israel confiscated huge areas of Palestinian land, previously
self-sufficient communities saw their livelihoods vanish, leading to a
dramatic shift in class. Many self-employed Palestinians who once
worked in agriculture became wageworkers in the Israeli economy.

According to Farsakh, throughout the 1980s, Palestinian workers from
the West Bank and Gaza made up nearly 40 percent of all workers in
Israeli construction. Palestinian citizens of Israel, who were
absorbed into the state in 1948, represented another 20 percent. This
meant that 60 percent of workers in Israel who were building homes for
Israelis — including in the illegal settlements — were
Palestinian.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Israeli labor market was much more
important to the Gaza Strip than the West Bank, Farsakh notes.
Palestinian labor flows to Israel represented more than 40 percent of
the employed workforce in Gaza and 30 percent in the West Bank.

“Once you take away 40 percent of the labor in the Palestinian
economy that means that Palestinians are producing very little,”
Shikaki tells me. “And with the income that Palestinians take back
home, they end up buying Israeli goods.” This means that the value
that is added to the Palestinian economy — through higher wages —
is, as Shikaki explains, “being recycled back into the Israeli
economy.”

Checkpoint Work Queues

Following the First Intifada, Israel imposed a new system of closure
for Palestinians seeking work in the Israeli economy. “Palestinian
labor in Israel became a way of control and domination over the
Palestinian people, in general, and specifically the workers,”
explains Tareq Sadeq, assistant professor in the department of
economics at Birzeit University.

Israel erected dozens of army checkpoints throughout the Palestinian
territories and imposed a permit regime on Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza, severing their access to East Jerusalem. Palestinians
who received permits to work inside Israel lined up 
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hours each day to travel to their jobs inside Israel. While this
checkpoint and permit system was introduced soon after the First
Intifada, it was institutionalized
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the Oslo Accords in 1993 and perfected after the Second Intifada in
2000.

 
Palestinian workers enter the Mishor Adumim industrial zone.
(Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly)
Now, Palestinians obtain biometric ID cards from the civil
administration, a branch of the Israeli army. Work permits are only
issued when an Israeli employer files a permit request with the
interior ministry and only after Palestinians pass an army security
clearance. A lucrative black market trade
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permits has subsequently developed, in which brokers extract money
from workers in exchange for access to work.

Palestinians are only permitted to work for the employer listed on
their permit, which contains both the worker’s details and their
employer’s. They are only allowed to travel to the area of their
work and must return to the West Bank before a certain hour or risk
arrest.

These biometric cards are needed to cross overcrowded checkpoints,
some of which were renovated
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few years ago to include automatic gates. At some checkpoints, Israel
has implemented
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AI-powered facial recognition for Palestinians.

Palestinians are only allowed to travel to the area of their work and
must return to the West Bank before a certain hour or risk arrest.

Due to the restrictions on entering Israel, an increasing number of
Palestinians in the West Bank sought work in the illegal settlements.
“For many workers, it became easier for them to work in the
settlements because they are closer to their places of residence —
sometimes working in the settlement that was established near their
village or refugee camp,” Sadeq tells me.

The many limitations on Palestinian economic growth, particularly in
the agricultural industrial sector, left Palestinians with limited
options, leading many to choose work in the settlements for survival,
Farsakh says.

“Bantustanization”

After Oslo, Palestinians in Gaza were completely barred from working
in Israel, despite its population having been more dependent on work
in Israel than those in the West Bank. According to Farsakh,
Israel’s labor policies aligned with its political plans of
relinquishing its responsibilities over the Gaza Strip.

Unlike the West Bank, which contains many important religious sites
for Judaism, the Zionist movement did not have much religious and
ideological interest in the Gaza Strip, leading Israeli leaders to
view the territory as a mere nuisance.

“Israel’s plan has always been to use Palestinian labor to build
its settlements and then eventually get rid of them,” Farsakh tells
me. “It was able to do this with the Gaza Strip but not the West
Bank because Israel wants to continue controlling it.”

As unemployment in Gaza rose sharply — reaching devastating levels
after Israel implemented a siege on the territory in 2007 —
Palestinians in the West Bank continued to work inside Israel and its
settlements, thereby reducing the overall unemployment in the
territory. “These changes suggest that the Gaza Strip was being
separated from the Israeli economy, while the West Bank continues to
be integrated,” Farsakh explains.

Following the Oslo Accords, the establishment of the Palestinian
Authority brought new job opportunities in the public sector,
employing about 20 percent of Palestinians. However, this sector
remains dependent on external dynamics. “It is very difficult to
create employment in the Palestinian economy, so you have continued
dependency on both international aid that feeds the public sector and
Israel that controls the Palestinian workers in Israel,” Shikaki
says.

Israel also often withholds taxes
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on behalf of the Palestinians as a punitive measure. Several public
workers in the West Bank tell me they have not been paid since the
conflict in Gaza erupted six months ago.

‘The situation now is very dire, and most of the West Bank economy
is on the brink of collapse because there is no money coming in at all
and workers are not working.’

Israel maintains strict control over more than 60 percent of the West
Bank, known as “Area C,” prohibiting
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development while Israeli settlements continue to grow. “The
Palestinian economy is an economy of survival,” Farsakh says. “It
is not one of independence that has the opportunity to grow and
thrive. It is one that allows individual prosperity [from higher wages
in the Israeli economy] often at the expense of national growth.”

This reality has created what Farsakh has termed the
“Bantustanization” of the West Bank. “Israel inadvertently
created an apartheid reality by trying to incorporate the maximum
amount of Palestinian land in the West Bank without the Palestinian
population, while relying on Palestinian labor,” Farsakh explains.
“What this did was turn the Palestinian areas — encircled by
checkpoints and settlements — into population reserves.”

Hope and Despair

“Sometimes we would be forced to work until late at night,”
recounts fifty-three-year-old Adle Ayad, one of more than a dozen
Palestinian women who, in 2019, formed a union at Mevashlim Bishvilec,
a factory in the Mishor Adumim industrial zone that produces stuffed
vegetables. “Our employer paid us way below minimum wage, fired us
whenever he felt like it, and would cut our wages.” For years,
employees were paid by the number of pots they filled with vegetables,
and not according to the hours they worked.

 
Adle Ayad with other Palestinian women who helped organize a union at
their work in Mishor Adumim. (Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly  //
 Jacobin)
The mistreatment of Palestinian workers in Israel and its settlements
has long been well-documented, with those in settlements often facing
the worst violations
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their rights.

 

Ayad, a mother of six children from Ramallah, tells me she has “no
choice” but to seek work in the settlements, despite the abusive and
exploitative work environment. Her husband is a farmer and cannot
support the family all year round. “I just keep my head down and do
the work so I can bring home some money to my family,” Ayad says.

Following a two-day strike
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Ayad’s employer finally acquiesced to a collective bargaining
agreement. The agreement ensured the Palestinian workers the minimum
hourly wage, holidays, paid sick days, and workplace accident
insurance. While Ayad tells me she was initially hopeful about the
union and its role in harnessing the collective power of the workers,
since October 7 that hope has been shattered.

Ayad was allowed to return to her work three weeks after October 7,
but she tells me her employer has not honored previous agreements,
taking advantage of the current vulnerability of the Palestinian
workers. “Our salaries have decreased since the war,” Ayad says,
adding that they have returned to piece-rate pay — they are paid by
the pots filled instead of hours worked. She also notes that her
bosses “even calculate the boxes wrong and pay us less than what we
did. When we complain, our boss tells us to go find another job if we
don’t like it.”

According to Yoav Tamir, a workers’ advice center representative,
tens of thousands of Palestinian workers, now left with no employment,
have little recourse to change their situation. Despite all of them
having a pension fund in Israel, they face a significant obstacle:
they were not fired and did not quit but are now stuck behind closed
army checkpoints, which prevents them from accessing the funds. “In
order to get money from the pension fund, they need to stop
working,” Tamir tells me. “But if they stop working then they
forfeit their work permit.”

“The situation now is very dire, and most of the West Bank economy
is on the brink of collapse because there is no money coming in at all
and workers are not working,” Tamir says. “People have children
they can’t feed, and the situation is on the verge of exploding.”

As construction has almost completely stalled
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Israel and its settlements since October 7, Israeli authorities have
verbalized their intention to replace
[[link removed](Reuters,attack%2520on%2520Israel%2520by%2520Hamas.] the
Palestinians with foreign workers from various countries. However,
Palestinian analysts tell me this scenario of successfully replacing
Palestinians with foreign labor is highly unlikely. Tamir has also
stated that such a plan is “not possible.”

“One reason that makes Palestinian workers desirable for Israelis is
that these work permits allow Palestinians to work — but not sleep
— in Israel,” Shikaki explains. “And that for Israel means the
employers do not need to pay the public and service needs it would
need to with foreign labor that must move their lives to Israel.”
Foreign workers have encountered widespread abuse
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Israel.

“The other reason pertains to the ideology of the Israeli state,”
Shikaki continues. “Israel wants to be a homogenous Jewish state.
But bringing more and more people from places like India, Thailand,
Moldova, Sri Lanka, is going to threaten and undermine that.” Most
likely, Palestinians will eventually be allowed back into Israel and
the rest of the settlements, but with much tighter restrictions and
more security checks. “Slowly they are going to allow the workers to
go back because [Israel] can’t survive without them,” Shikaki
says.

Ayad says she now has “no confidence” in the union for which she
and the other women at her job fought. However, Ziadeh tells me he is
still proud of the workers’ achievements. At his garage, their
Israeli employer has continued to respect their signed labor
agreement. “I still believe we did a good thing for all the
workers,” Ziadeh says.

Others, however, have little optimism. One worker, who requested
anonymity, said simply: “What’s the point of a union if Israel can
just close the checkpoints and not allow you to go to your job?”

_[JACLYNN ASHLY is an independent journalist currently based in the
United States.]_

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* Palestinians
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* Palestinian workers
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* West Bank
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* Occupied Territories
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* Gaza
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* apartheid
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* Genocide
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Hostages
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* Hamas
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* imperialism
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* colonialism
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* Extractivism
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* Israeli Occupation
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* ethnic cleansing
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* Green Line
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* gaza strip
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