Many observers, both internationally and within Israel, were surprised at the impact of this Monday's Palestinian general strike on the Israeli economy, which hit sectors such as construction and food production and delivery particularly hard. They should not have been, though one can understand where the misperception of reality and the resulting surprise came from. Many people--myself included--have at times overstated the degree to which Palestinian workers have been excluded from participation in the economy, which is overwhelmingly controlled by Israeli employers in portions of the land under the direct military control of Israel. Palestinians suffer greatly from this exclusion, and therefore it is important to emphasize it, but one runs the risk thereby of overemphasizing it. Thus, for example, I once wrote something characterizing the response of the Israeli state and capital to the last time that Palestinians made extensive use of the strike, the first Intifada, as a "general lockout," in which the State sped up Jewish immigration from Ethiopia and the ex-USSR, while capital shoved the new migrants into the types of jobs that had hitherto been stigmatized as avodah aravit (Arab work). This was accurate, but only for a limited span of time. Thanks to the internationalization of racial-caste barriers the Ethiopian Jews are still largely stuck at that economic stratum, but most of the "Russians" have moved on. Internationally, Israel is running out of marginalized communities of Jews which it can import and exploit.
This is a problem, then, both for the Israeli state and for Israeli capital. Through dispossession of Palestinians, Israeli capital took possession, with the state as an active intermediary, of land and natural resources which were preconditions to accumulation. However land and resources are merely necessary conditions to accumulation, not sufficient. Capital requires labor, and it accumulates especially rapidly when the labor force is sharply segmented and therefore politically weakened in its resistance to accumulation. The degree and modality of this segmentation varies according to historical conditions. Israel is part of the subtype of colonial-settler states and societies. There is, however, no pure, Platonic form of colonial-settler society, and Israel is a particularly messy blend. At one end of the spectrum, one finds societies such as North America and Australia, where the native population is so thoroughly subordinated, so extensively expelled and destroyed, that the survivors of the resulting genocide can play only a relatively small role in the composition of the labor force. The extent to which the working-class of the settler population can be exploited is limited therefore by the material concessions which capital has to make in order to assure that they place their loyalty to the "white race" ahead of their loyalty to the international working class. These concessions did measurably slow the accumulation of capital in Canada and Australia at key moments in history, relative to their imperialist peers. It was less of a brake on the accumulation of capital in the U.S., for two reasons: First, the existence of an enslaved portion of the proletariat, and its demographic and temporal extension through the enforcement of a racial-caste barrier against all Black Americans, enslaved or free, which provided a model for the prolongation of superexploitation following slavery's formal abolition. Then secondly, in part through the operationalization of the racial-caste boundary, the staged and partial admittance of immigrant groups into the contingent and limited benefits of whiteness. The history of immigration and the formation of the U.S. working class is the history of the successive (but sometimes partial or revocable) admission of meticulously defined and re-defined groupings into hegemonic whiteness.
At the other extreme, we find the Apartheid model, exemplified, but never exclusive to, South Africa in the period from 1948-1994. That is, a state in which the native population is classified, segregated, and subjected to innumerable restrictions on where and how they may work, live, and even die and be laid to rest. Every colonial-settler society is, potentially and in reality, at certain moments of its history, an Apartheid state, even in the historical epoch before the Afrikaans word was coined and disseminated world-wide. For example, it can be argued that colonial society in what is now the United States pioneered Apartheid well before that name, with the establishment first of all of a category of hereditary chattel slavery to which laborers both of indigenous and African descent were subjected. It was only after indigenous labor was, in most areas of the emergent polity, genocidally destroyed that the mark of hereditary chattel slavery came to be confounded with the racial-caste mark of Blackness. Through the subsequent elaboration of an global discourse of "race," the indigenous labor of Africa came into the circuits of world capital already branded by irons that had been forged for their enslaved cousins in the Americas.
With this historical understanding of the range of colonial-settler societies, it becomes possible to recognize the degree to which Israel, in its treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population, has heterogeneously mixed and matched elements from both the Apartheid model of settler-colonialism (segregate and exploit) and the American/Australian model (expel, expropriate and destroy). The dynamic tension between these models has enabled Israeli capital to accumulate over the last 73 years with almost unmatched rapidity. (The document in which I argue for this is about 10 years out of date, and I would likely want to revise some of its subordinate conclusions before publishing it, but I do have back-up for these assertions.) The current working class of historic Palestine is complexly and multiply segmented. The most important division has been and remains that between Jews, on the one hand, and Palestinians, on the other, which is at least partly comparable to the Black/white division in the United States, or the African/European division in South Africa. However within each of these two major groupings there are multiple subdivisions that are at least partially recognized and reinforced by state policy, along lines of "race," ethnicity, religion, migration status, and geography. In this respect it is also comparable to both the United States and South Africa, inasmuch as both those countries were always also complex, and complexified, in ways that have been expertly turned into modalities of power. As in these predecessors, however, the complexities ought not to obscure the stark moral difference between those who are oppressed and excluded, and those whose identity depends upon participation in the mechanisms of oppression and exclusion.
And there are also, it must be added, groups that do not fit into the core dichotomy. These groups have proliferated especially in the thirty years since the first Intifada. I refer here primarily to groups of non-Jewish migrants, who can be put to use by Israeli capital as a source of labor comparable to Palestinian workers' in their precarity, but without the risk to profits that arise whenever Palestinians attempt to assert and defend their rights as indigenous people.
There have been two major categories of such migrants. The first consists of refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from various parts of Subsaharan Africa. For these migrants, Israel is more a destination of convenience than a preferred destination, because, unlike EU member states (with the partial exception of Spain, with its colonial enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the coast of Morocco), Israel has a land border with an African country, Egypt. The second consists of economic migrants, who are usually employer-sponsored--in other words, guest workers--and who mostly from non-Muslim countries and ethnicities in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The first flow is irregular and subject to militarized interdiction by both Israeli and Egyptian state forces. It was not even possible until after the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian control under the Camp David Accords and the Taba Agreement of 1989 (which coincided, helpfully for Israel, with the beginning of the subsidence of the first Intifada). The second flow is subject to tight bureaucratic supervision. This is not to say that migrants who enter via this route do not sometimes remain in irregular visa status, of course, as is the case with state-supervised economic migrants throughout the world. With both these groups of migrants--the refugees/asylum seekers and the guest workers--recruited for similar jobs to those available to Palestinian workers, there is of course some element of labor competition among these groups, and between these groups and Palestinians.
However, the same fact that keeps Palestinians in "48" (the original boundaries of the State of Israel) in a subordinate social position despite their Israeli citizenship, and that utterly dispossesses the Palestinians in "67" (Gaza & the West Bank)--namely, the avowedly "Jewish" nature of the state--also keeps both these categories of migrants in a very precarious position.
Let us consider, for example, how difficult it would be for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen, either for love or for convenience. There is no civil marriage in Israel, due to a political power-sharing agreement with the Orthodox Jewish Rabbinate dating back to 1948, under David Ben-Gurion. Marriage must therefore be carried out by a state-recognized officiant of a state-recognized religion--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Druze. Each of these religions have limitations or prohibitions on marriage to someone of another religion. And perhaps the most stringest such prohibitions are those observed by the Jewish authorities in Israel. I don't know the details of what it would take for a migrant to marry an Israeli citizen of Christian, Muslim, or Druze faith, but I do know this: None of those marriages will qualify that migrant for permanent residency or citizenship in Israel. They will remain precarious. To become a citizen, only marriage to a Jew will do, and that is only possible following a conversion to Judaism that has been administered according to Jewish law in its most stringently Orthodox interpretation, as rendered by the Rabbinate. This sort of conversion is no easy matter.
Ironically, the traditional difficulty of conversion to Judaism evolved, not as an exercise in ethnoreligious chauvinism in service to a powerful state, but as a method of Jewish communal self-defense over centuries in "exile." So long as most Jews lived in the power of state authorities that were avowedly Christian or Muslim, and those authorities defined "apostasy" (e.g. conversion to Judaism) as a crime, any desire of non-Jews to become Jews was implicitly dangerous for the community as a whole. To reassure state authorities that Judaism was not a proselytizing religion, a whole host of restrictions proliferated--based of course on Talmudic precedent, but driven largely by matters of political convenience. Since "Jewish Emancipation" (dating, in North America, largely to the American Revolution), and in Europe, to the French Revolution and the partial spread of its juridical accomplishments through the Napoleonic conquests), there have been debates among Jews about whether such stringency is even needed any more. The Reform and Conservative movements have loosened up significantly. But remember, Reform and Conservative Judaism have little legal standing in Israel.
Consider the case of the Lemba people. They are an ethnic group found in parts of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi, who have traditions claiming patrilineal descent from Jews. Because Orthodox Judaism, and therefore Israel's immigration laws, does not recognize the validity of patrilineal descent, a group of Lemba who had formally converted to Judaism petitioned recently for permission to migrate to Israel. They were denied, however, because their conversion had been performed by a Conservative Rabbi. That stated, the authority of the Rabbinate is not absolute, due to the complexity of the power-sharing agreement with the state and the so-called "Law of Return". There have been other groups of migrants to Israel whose Jewishness, by the terms set by the Orthodox Rabbinate, was dubious--e.g. many former Soviet Jews--but for whom the State found ways of bringing them in as citizens. Comparing the Lemba to the cases of Soviet Jews, some of whom only had patrilineal descent--and some of whom were even practicing Christians!--suggests strongly that Anti-Blackness is a factor in their treatment.
That stated, if this happens with a coherent grouping of people with cultural traditions linking them to Judaism, imagine then how much more difficult it would be for individual migrants, of African or Asian origins, to become Jews, either sincerely or for opportunistic reasons. The traditional religious restrictions on conversion, therefore, serve the Israeli state and Israeli capital, then, as a means of conserving and enforcing the precarity of migrant workers. Therefore, while migrants are in daily competition with Palestinian workers for labor and pay, both groups are oppressed by the same mechanisms of chauvinist exclusion. Another glaring example on this point: It is commonplace, on the part of Netanyahu, other right-wing Israeli politicians, and the media, to refer to refugees and asylum seekers from Africa as "infiltrators". The same Hebrew word, mistanenim, was used after 1948 to refer to Palestinian refugees who attempted to cross the "Green Line" armistice border, in most cases for reasons as innocuous as trying to return home or trying to tend the crops they had planted.
This chauvinist maltreatment, which treats all non-Jews a priori as "infiltrators" is not qualitatively different from what migrants face in most of the world's wealthy nations. But there are many ways in which migrant life in Israel is worse than in many other countries, and migrants have a grapevine of sorts.
Meanwhile, among the Jews of Israel, the Orthodox population is growing faster than the population as a whole. If there was ever a window of opportunity for undoing Ben Gurion's compromise with the Rabbinate, it closed long ago. Thus, so as long as Israel defines itself exclusively and primarily as a Jewish state, the Rabbinate's hold on matters such as marriage & migration is irrevocable. Thus migrant workers, Palestinians of all classes, and any Israeli Jew who chafes under the ingrained conservatism and violence of their society, has grounds to be opposed the Zionist (Jewish-chauvinist) nature of the State of Israel.
The comparative unpopularity of Israel as a destination country, and its internal political reasons for making itself hostile to migrants, means that migrants will never fully supplant Palestinian workers' important economic role. And this is a source of hope, because it means that Palestinian workers still have a great deal of power that has yet to be fully unleashed against the Israeli state and capital, as was shown by the one-day general strike earlier this week. I will not end this essay by pretending to have the answers to how that power can be unleashed or what those workers should fight for. But I don't see anything compatible with human dignity short of a single, democratic state, from the river to the sea. (I'd prefer no state at all, anywhere, but that's my inner Emma Goldman speaking.)
