Apartheid

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during the crucial early years of the so-called ‘peace process’ (better referred to as the
‘apartheid process’), Palestinian labor in Israel was reduced from 116,000 to 29,500 jobs,
causing the unemployment rates to surge to 50 per cent in the West Bank and to 74 per cent in
Gaza. In 2002, almost two years into the Second Intifada, unemployment had again risen to 50
per cent in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and 85 percent of people in the Gaza Strip and
58 percent in the West Bank, according to the World Bank, were living in poverty on two
dollars or less a day. According to the United Nations, these were direct causes behind the
chronic violence in the region, and it (the UN) referred to Israeli targeting of the Palestinian
economy as unnecessary, and, benevolently assuming that Israel really wants peace, indeed
counter-productive, ‘collective punishment’. Israel imposes constant border closures,
preventing workers (who do have employment in Israel) from reaching their job locations.
Moreover, security checks hold up workers and goods deliveries for hours or days at a time.
Gradually, Israel is becoming less dependent on Palestinian workers, but at the same time, it
limits Palestinian economic development. ‘Palestinians provide an emergency labor force, to
be exploited by Israel, but [they are] not entitled to rights or employment stability’. 460
By October 2002 Israel’s foreign workforce, excluding Palestinians, had grown to
almost 300,000. More than half of them, 150,000 people, were officially classified as illegal.
According to unofficial estimates, however, as many as two-thirds of them were in the
country illegally. The Israeli economy was ailing with the lowest gross domestic product
figure since 1953. Many of the foreigners were unemployed, not least due to mistreatment by
their former employers, who have, for example, been known to confiscate passports on arrival
in Israel to prevent their new employees from leaving. Employers have also avoided paying
the legal minimum wage or reneged on agreements made in home countries of the laborers.
The migrant workers have on occasion been fined or beaten for leaving their residential areas
without permission or for refusing to work on the Sabbath. Most immigrants are forced to pay
several thousand dollars to an agency to gain access to the Israeli job market. As with its
nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs and many other international
conventions, Israel is not necessarily hypocritical about these abuses, but it is brutally cynical.
The country refuses to sign the United Nations convention on migrant worker rights. Human
rights groups say foreign workers today sometimes work under conditions ‘equivalent to
slavery’. One may safely assume that at least some of these ‘skills’ on the part of the
employers were first honed on Palestinian victims.
In 2002 a government clampdown was announced, introducing a freeze on foreign
workers and a deportation program aimed at expelling a thousand ‘illegals’ every month.
Despite an unemployment rate of 10.3 per cent in Israel, industries that rely on the work of the
foreigner work force, such as agriculture and construction, protested the government
clampdown. There are obviously many jobs that Israelis refuse to do, preferring
unemployment and leaving them to foreigners and to Palestinians. Xenophobia is spreading
among Israeli Jews, but has yet to reach EU or North American proportions, except when
targeting Palestinians and other Arabs. The reason behind the acceptance of other foreigners is
of course the ethnicism targeting Palestinians. ‘Many negative feelings are caught up in the
political situation here and are channelled against the Palestinians, probably to the benefit of
the foreign workers’, according to Zeev Rosenhek, a Jerusalem Hebrew University
sociologist. 461
We encountered ‘neo-apartheid’ early on in the first part of this investigation, both on
a global scale and in the relatively quiet invasions of developing countries by ruthless
460
Olmsted 1996: 11f; Brough: Hunger Among Palestinians Alarming - UN Official, 2002; Heinrich: Palestinian
Economic Meltdown Prolongs Violence-UN, 2002
461
Ridberg: Israel Bans Entry of New Foreign Workers, 2002; Haas, D.: Israel’s Illegal Foreign Workers Feel
the Heat, 2002; N.N.: Israeli Firms Abuse Migrant Workers – Rights Group, August 28, 2003; Robinson, A.:
Israel Fence May Be Final Palestinian Economy Blow, 2002