The plight of Middle Eastern migrant workers who are slain or kidnapped highlights Israel’s dependence on foreign labor

Hezbollah, an organization linked with Hamas, conducted a missile strike from Lebanon on March 4, 2024, injuring many migrant laborers and killing one Indian laborer in Israel.

They are hardly the first foreign laborers in Israel to get entangled in the protracted conflict. During the October 7 Hamas assault, dozens of additional farmworkers, agricultural apprentices, and caretakers from Thailand, Nepal, Tanzania, Cambodia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Moldova were killed or kidnapped.

Some observers were taken aback by the substantial number of non-Israeli workers impacted by the ongoing conflict, which also highlighted Israel’s dependence on temporary migrant labor.

However, as academics who investigate the globalization of migrant labor, we are aware of how labor migration policies have revolutionized almost every society, including Israel’s. The protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict has influenced Israel’s history of migrant laborers and played a role in the Middle East’s labor market’s globalization.

An international narrative

Beginning in the 1970s, Israel recruited foreign laborers in accordance with a post-World War II pattern in which wealthier nations, including the US, France, and West Germany, signed labor migration recruiting agreements with less developed ones. After initially being reluctant to lose a portion of their population, these poorer nations—which at the time included Mexico, Spain, and Turkey, among others—came to see emigration as a modernizing tactic. The concept was for immigrants to send money home to support development in their home towns while learning new agricultural or industrial skills abroad.

Many South and Southeast Asian nations started to encourage the export of migrant laborers in the 1970s and 1980s as a crucial component of their economic growth plans. Receiving nations simultaneously developed a strong obsession with the notion of a flexible, transient labor supply that would not exacerbate anti-immigrant sentiment to the same extent as more settled migrants seemed to.

Israel first became involved with Thai laborers as a result of US backing for the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. To assist in the construction of a new air force facility in Israel, the US government hired Thai laborers who had previously worked on US military outposts in northeastern Thailand during the Vietnam War.

According to research conducted by one of us, the entry of Thai migrant workers, together with Portuguese migrants, sparked considerable dispute among Israeli politicians, trade unions, and the media regarding the establishment of a divided labor market. Others, however, were concerned that the workers’ presence went against Zionist requirements to ensure a majority of Jews.

In an effort to reconcile these disparities, the Israeli government began experimenting with immigration laws meant for a new class of workers who were not to be integrated into Israeli culture and were neither Jewish nor Palestinian.

Ten years later, under a changed political climate, similar policy concepts would materialize in Israel as a new class of individuals known as “foreign workers.”

Increasing hiring

The “foreign worker” strategy was pushed forward by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite the fact that Israel was established on the principle of “avoda ivrit,” or Hebrew labor, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel since 1967 has resulted in the hiring of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian laborers, who have grown to be a desirable low-wage labor pool.

They quickly amounted to 7% of all workers in Israel, 24% of workers in the agricultural sector, and 60% of workers in the construction industry.

The Palestinian laborers who were not citizens traveled daily between Gaza and the West Bank, subject to a system of restrictions and permissions.

Upon the commencement of the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, many segments of the Israeli populace started to see these laborers as potential security threats.

Israel was under further pressure to reduce its reliance on non-citizen Palestinian laborers after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which aimed to promote “separation” between Israelis and Palestinians.

Employers in Israel persuaded the government to greatly increase the hiring of temporary workers to cover the shortage. Apart from Thailand, nations such as China, India, Nepal, the Philippines, Romania, and Turkey saw a chance and granted permission to Israeli companies to hire employees inside their borders. Ten percent of Israel’s labor force was comprised of migrant laborers by 2003.

Producing Marginal Workers

Like their counterparts elsewhere, migrant laborers in Israel have always been susceptible to exploitation.

Numerous countries of origin did not need a bilateral labor recruiting agreement to guarantee the rights of their residents. Additionally, workers who migrated via private recruiting channels started their trips heavily indebted since they were required to pay thousands of dollars in unlawful “sign-up” fees.

Israeli government policies, meanwhile, have made an effort to keep migrants apart from society by limiting their employment to particular industries, requiring them to depart the nation at the end of their work contract, keeping them out of the public health system, and forbidding them from getting married or having romantic relationships while they are in Israel.

Furthermore, authorities have given little consideration to labor regulations, leaving farmworkers, for instance, defenseless against pay fraud, subpar housing, and chemical exposure.

Israel started signing bilateral agreements with nations that send migrants during the last ten years as a result of pressure from the US government and Israeli civic society. Exorbitant recruiting fees were removed, even though labor conditions were not much improved.

Nevertheless, the migrant labor force has increased gradually but steadily. In addition to the approximately 50,000 migrants employed in the construction and agricultural industries combined, 73,000 migrants in Israel were employed as caretakers in 2022.

However, these migrants did not eliminate the need for Palestinian labor to be included in the mix. Approximately 100,000 Palestinian laborers were crossing the border from Gaza and the West Bank every day by October 7, 2023.

Dangerous

In an attempt to make up for the shortage, Israeli officials have been terminating the work licenses of those Palestinians since October 7 and have recruited hundreds of new laborers to the fields and construction sites.

Despite opposition from voices inside the African nation itself, Malawi, a country that became dependent on the economic remittances of migrants decades before Thailand did, has dispatched 700 farmworkers and pledges another 9,000 on the way.

Following the Oct. 7 incident, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, which had previously dispatched caretakers to Israel, disregarded internal opposition and sent additional workers—among them Pat Nibin Maxwell, the man slain in the Hezbollah strike on March 4—to Israel.

Employees such as Maxwell are now being sent to labor in agricultural areas that are susceptible to assaults by Hamas and Hezbollah, as a result of the evacuation of Israeli citizens, close to the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.

Thousands of foreign governments have lined up in their own countries seeking a contract, despite the fact that they can only provide their people with limited safeguards in Israel.

When they arrive in Israel, they join the great majority of migrant laborers who have chosen to stay in the nation in spite of the attack on October 7 and its aftermath.

They have determined, for the time being at least, that incurring major personal risks in order to earn greater earnings overseas is worth it, much like millions of migrant workers throughout the globe who are seeking economic advancement or survival.

As seen by Pat Nibin Maxwell’s death, these migrant laborers continue to be in the line of fire while supporting Israel’s economy throughout the conflict.

Shahar Shoham, a doctoral candidate in global and area studies at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, and Julie Weise, an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon

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