Outsourced Colonization

Matan Kaminer

Translation: Naomi Sussman

One morning in April 1956, several Palestinian refugees crossed the border from the Gaza Strip into the fields of Kibbutz Nahal Oz and began harvesting sorghum. This was just one incident in a long series documented in the diary of the kibbutz’s security officer, Ro’i Rothberg. The diary makes it clear that Rotberg was accustomed to chasing off these “stinking” women and “wretched Arab men”; but that morning, as he rode his horse toward the harvesters, he was shot dead in an ambush. At his funeral, held the next day, Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan summed up Rothberg’s work, life, and death in words that have since become famous:

“Yesterday at dawn, Ro‘i was murdered. The tranquility of the spring morning blinded him, and he failed to see those who had come to take his life hiding behind the furrow. But let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What cause have we to protest their terrible hatred of us? For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and have watched us, before their very eyes, turn the lands and villages where they and their forefathers previously dwelled into our home.[…] Let us not recoil from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit around us and await the moment when their hand can claim our blood. We must not avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened. This is the fate of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed, strong and unyielding, lest the sword slip from our fists, and our lives severed.”

Army Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan delivering a eulogy over Ro‘i Rothberg’s grave in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, 1956. Photo: IDF Spokesperson Unit

As historian Seraj Assi argues, from a historical perspective, both the Zionist colonial movement and its rival, the Palestinian national movement, are forms of “agro-nationalism, an ideology which links the cultivation of land to territorial sovereignty. “Where the plow makes its last furrow – there the border shall pass,” as the saying attributed to Yosef Trumpeldor puts it. The implications of agro-nationalism are very visible in the hinterland of Gaza which became part of Israel after the Nakba. Israeli agricultural settlements took root on the ruined villages, fields, and grazing lands of the former Gaza Subdistrict, even as the area’s native inhabitants were crammed into the tiny, newly formed Gaza Strip. 

But when Nahal Oz was attacked at dawn once more, on October 7, 2023, its field workers were no longer ideological settlers claiming Palestinian land as their own; nor were they the Gazan Palestinians who had worked those Israeli settlement’s lands since 1967. Beginning in the 1990s, the agricultural labour sustaining Israeli sovereignty in the area had mostly been outsourced to non-Israeli migrant workers, for whom it would never become home.  Two such workers were killed in Nahal Oz as part of the “Al-Aqsa Flood”; in other communities bordering Gaza, 43 workers were murdered, and 46 were abducted into the Strip. 

Agricultural workers in the settlement Moshav Sadot, just south of the Gaza Strip. September 17, 1973. Photo: IPPA. Dan Hadani Collection, National Library of Israel

We do not know why Hamas targeted Thai migrant workers. They are not mentioned in the organization’s official statements beyond its sweeping (and highly dubious) claim that all harm to civilians was unintentional. Deliberate or not, the targeting of migrants certainly damaged the Israeli settlement project in the Gaza border area. As one representative of agricultural employers told a journalist in the first days after the attack, “this is a region where the main source of livelihood is agriculture. If there are no foreign workers, there won’t be any agriculture. And if there is no agriculture, there won’t be a region.” As he spoke, thousands of migrants were fleeing the area by any means they could, receiving no assistance from the state, unlike their Israeli-citizen neighbors and employers. In the weeks that followed, around ten thousand Thais working across the country took up their government’s offer of free flights home. Meanwhile, the entry of workers from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) was barred; thus, the agricultural sector was immediately plunged into a deep crisis. Despite talk of reviving “Hebrew labor” and mass importation of workers from other countries, over the past two years Israel’s economy has grown still more dependent on Thai workers, who are now employed not only in agriculture but also in industry, auto repair, construction, and even retail trade.

Thai migrant workers entered Israel’s agricultural sector as a result of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, which exposed Israeli producers to global competition from foreign producers benefiting from cheap labour. In the years after the 1967 occupation of the Gaza Strip, many Palestinians had been employed on Israeli farms — including in the western Negev and in the settlements in the Strip. Their numbers fell in the late 1970s and early 1980s but then rose steadily, peaking on the eve of the First Intifada in 1987.

With the outbreak of the Intifada, employers and the Israeli public at large began viewing the work of OPT Palestinians in Israel as increasingly dangerous, despite its low cost. The closure policies adopted by Israel beginning in 1991 intensified after the Oslo Accords, sharply restricting Palestinians’ access to jobs in Israel and driving up their employment costs. Farmers’ representatives in state institutions pushed to import workers from Thailand, a friendly country with long-standing security ties to Israel. After Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the communities in the area, now rebranded “the Gaza Envelope”, greatly increased their reliance on Thai migrant labor, much like their counterparts in the country’s other agricultural regions.

Thai migrants in Israel suffer from multiple, layered forms of isolation: linguistic, as they do not speak local languages and are denied opportunities to learn them; social, since they are barred from forming families and from embedding themselves in community institutions; and geographic, due to their concentration in the country’s remotest areas. Their isolation contributes to their political weakness, leaving them vulnerable to extreme exploitation. Their wages average about 30% lower than the legal minimum (which ostensibly applies to them); they toil in dangerous conditions amid toxic materials; and their housing conditions are often very poor. Long before October 7, workers in frontier zones like the Gaza envelope, the Jordan Valley, and the Lebanese border region faced conflict-related violence, with fatalities both before and during the war. Unlike Israelis living in these “national priority” areas, who enjoy various benefits, migrant laborers are bound to their workplaces and cannot choose where to live. The shoddiness of their dormitories, their peripheral locations, their exposure in open fields uncovered by air defenses, and their lack of access to real-time local news all heighten their vulnerability.

A migrant worker from Thailand in a field near Nahal Oz. In the background, the border fence with the Gaza Strip and the city of Jabalia. 2022. Photo: Jonathan om

Fundamentally, Israel seems to have decided to “outsource” the work of agricultural colonization, turning it over to people who have no choice but to accept its risks while denying them the material and social benefits it once conferred on Israeli farmers. To the extent that these workers view themselves as heroes sacrificing for their families, as anthropologist Shahar Shoham demonstrates, this remains a hidden discourse of the oppressed, officially recognized in neither Thailand nor Israel. At the funerals of those killed on October 7, held in humble villages thousands of kilometres from where they met their horrific deaths, no generals appeared to deliver Shakespearean speeches on the tragic significance of their sacrifice. The burden of picking up the pieces and finding meaning in life without their loved ones fell to their kin, bearing the cost of a colonial conflict in which they hold no stake.

Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist, a Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, and an activist in Academia for Equality. His book Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture was published by Stanford University Press in 2024.