The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.
-Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
They were five,
In their right hand was a sickle,
In their left hand was a cement scuttle,
They left the peaches green and said:
“A day or two, no more.”
O’ workers of my homeland,
The thyme forests have grown old,
The [olive] oil has spilled and the olive branch has broken
-Fathi al-Shiqaqi, Kanu Khamsa: a tribute poem after the killing of five Palestinian workers by an Israeli settler in 1979
Palestinian workers – dispossessed, displaced, and disciplined – form one of the clearest examples of how capitalism and settler colonialism join efforts to waste life and accumulate waste. They are metabolized within that system of use, disuse, and waste, and how Israeli occupation absorbs, exploits, and then discards. Drawing upon Ali Kadri’s analysis of Palestinian labor migration to Israeli settlements in lands occupied in 1948 Palestine, we can explore the logic of settler colonialism, how it subdues laborers, and how it eventually wastes them via curfews, carpet bombings, and social engineering mechanisms.
The political economy of the West Bank
To understand Palestinian forced labor migration, it is important to situate it within the political economy of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 – namely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Two frameworks illuminate this landscape: dependency theory and the concept of de-development.
Dependency theory, for its part, was constructed to analyze the Latin American political economy, and was later expanded to include different socioeconomic contexts in Asia and Africa, through the lens of the center and the periphery. The center enjoys the productive capacity, ideological hegemony, as well as the geopolitical dominance to extract raw materials from the periphery. This cycle of trade is then reoriented when the center produces the final product for the markets of the periphery. The periphery, for its part, is trapped in a cycle of trade deficit and productive inertia imposed by the center.
Yet Sara Roy offers a crucial critique: Dependency theory, in her view, overemphasizes trade at the expense of production and “elucidates the significance of the structural relationship between a dominant and a subordinate economy and exposes the process by which the latter is exploited to serve the needs of the former. It also reveals that underdevelopment is shaped far more by relations of trade than by relations of production. It is the consequences of markets and trade rather than production patterns in peripheral economies that are the catalysts of underdevelopment.” Roy’s criticism of dependency theory hinges on the theory’s supposed separation between the commodity and the production processes involved in its creation.
A cursory look at Arghiri Emmanuel’s writing on unequal exchange, widely considered the backbone of dependency theory, reveals that he paid close attention to production patterns and the social processes inherent in wage differentials between the center and periphery which impact the unequal trade relations existing between the center and the periphery. This is not to say that there is not a minute focus on relations of trade by Emmanuel, but to state that he nonetheless situates the development processes occurring in the center and periphery as central to his thesis. Trade, after all, results from means of production or lack thereof.
Even so, both perspectives help explain the contours of Palestinian economic life under occupation. Advocates of dependency theory would point to the low productive capacity of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and their economic linkages to Israel as proof that such a theory could be viable in the context of Palestine. De-development, meanwhile, would point to the pre- and post-Oslo erosion of agriculture and small and medium-scale industry as part and parcel of Israeli policy in its occupation of Palestinian territories. In addition, de-development would highlight the “economic integration” of Palestinians into Israel as a systemic issue pushed by Israel through employing Palestinians in the lowest occupational rungs inside the Green Line and undermining native productive capacities through employing cheap labor and outsourcing certain small-scale industries.
The de-institutionalization of the West Bank and Gaza are also linked to de-development, often undermining Palestinian socio economic institutions, native decision-making processes and the like. De-development assesses the occupation as a process of undermining any native developmental strategies through the colonially-imposed imbalances of labor and trade markets, namely the erosion of Palestinian agriculture and small industry–imbalances that are directly skewed to favor Israel rather than the Palestinians.
The de-institutionalization of the West Bank and Gaza are also linked to de-development, often undermining Palestinian socio economic institutions, native decision-making processes and the like.
A cursory look at the West Bank’s sectoral composition of GDP from 1974 to 1989 reveals a reality where de-development and unequal exchanges of resources via settler-colonialism occurred–the farmer became a laborer in an Israeli settlement, hence the relevance of the poem in the introduction. The sectoral composition of the West Bank from 1994 to 2022 reveals an inflation of the service sector, sidelining both agriculture and industry, despite marginal increases in the latter from the 1980s. It is important to situate such analysis of GDP composition while taking into account that it does not concern forced labor migration in Palestine, but rather the settler-colonial diktats imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank and Post-Oslo developmental framework of the Palestinian Authority.
Pre-October 7th figures show a significant increase in labor flows from the West Bank to Israeli settlements, both inside and outside the Green Line. It is important to situate this jump in laborers commuting to settlements in both the West Bank and inside the Green Line as contributing to the processes of dependency and de-development. As such, Sara Roy’s criticism of dependency theory is rendered irrelevant to the discussion of the political economy of the occupied territories when taking into account the above factors as well as the ever-increasing trade deficits between Israel and Palestinian territories since 1967 .
Forced labor migration as a pillar of settler-colonialism
The above indicators suggest a model of “mangled” development in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whereby labor only exists within certain circumscribed sectors that are inherently unproductive. The erosion of the productive capacity is a direct outcome of the settler-colonial processes that are inherent in Israel: land confiscations, immiseration, sieges, and systematic erosion of Palestinian autonomy for 76 years.
In this regard, Ali Kadri notes that forced labor migration in Palestine “is a stark example of the law of value manifest in colonial settler practice,” defining it as an impersonal rule of thumb in settler-colonial formations rather than an issue of the Palestinian being “cheaper” to hire. Under Oslo, Israel outsourced administrative control to the Palestinian Authority while evading responsibility for labor reproduction. The bare minimum is provided – creating conditions for genocide to emerge within the capitalist calculus. In this manner, the value outlays occurring from the reproduction of labor are reduced to the barest of minimums – allowing for forms of genocide to take place.
In the West Bank, alienation manifests viscerally: Palestinian laborers build the very settlements that encroach on their land. Here, Marx’s dictum at the beginning becomes concrete reality. In Gaza, calorie counts and the leveling of neighborhoods occur precisely because of the fact that Gazans are surplus labor – social waste, Israel simply does not need their labor power and in fact views the geography of Gaza in general as a hostile terrain threatening its very existence as a settler-colonial entity.
In the West Bank, alienation manifests viscerally: Palestinian laborers build the very settlements that encroach on their land.
In contrast, the West Bank has not witnessed the same form of colonial violence due to the fact that the Palestinians in the West Bank still form an important backbone of the Israeli economy, despite the post-October closures. Large amounts of Palestinian laborers now work in West Bank settlements instead of ‘48 settlements. This shift allows Israel to reconcile its contradictory needs: Exploiting Palestinian labor while pursuing an exterminationist desire to waste productive labor power. As Kadri notes, a surplus army of labor can be immiserated – or even incinerated in tents – because reducing value outlays is the overriding imperative.
As such, Kadri stresses that forced labor migration is inherently tied to militarism and to the question of Israel acting as the physical manifestation of “[c]oncentrated capital qua imperialism”. Waste, and how zio-imperialism determines it, governs whether Palestinians need to be bombed or starved slowly or for them to live under the mercy of Israeli authority as is in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and inside the Green Line.
The permit system as counter insurgency
In the case of forced labor migration acting as a tool of counter insurgency, the permit system in Palestine acts as the arbiter of a “decent” livelihood. Israel uses this system as a material and ideological tool of domination to kill resistance in the West Bank: entire families and villages get their permits revoked and/or rejected based on the action of one resistance fighter belonging to said family or village. In this way, Israel can ensure that any resistance to it – however minute – is technocratically managed through stripping the population of their few sources of livelihood.
This has been especially clear since October 7th, where workers were laid off en-masse due to “security concerns” surrounding them, causing them to open up sandwich stands throughout the cities of the West Bank–certainly unproductive labor. Israel in this manner delegitimizes resistance to it through painting it as detrimental to the very collective existence of the colonized. Bombings, incursions, and permits make sure the colonized “play ball” with the status quo.
It is through the lens of viewing Israel as imperialism condensed that one can begin to understand the importance of the concept of social waste and how Palestine is the microcosm of struggles that are occurring throughout the entire world. Immiseration, genocide, colonization, and counter insurgency render Palestine not only as a laboratory for imperialism but also as a crucial link in the global value chain that sustains capitalism globally, a value chain that is inherently built on death and militarism.
This article was first published on Al Akhbar English.
