The Nation Magazine

On October 7, Manee Jirachat, a Thai laborer who lived at Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel, was taken hostage by Hamas. Manee came to Israel from Thailand’s rural Isaan region, where poverty is almost double the Thai national average. For over three decades, Israel has been exporting cheap, largely agricultural laborers from Thailand to replace Palestinian labor. The fate of Thai workers “has been largely overlooked by Israeli and Western media during the past six months, rendering them as invisible now as they were when they were working in Israel,” writes reporter Timothy McLaughlin. Thai laborers in Israel often face “punishing” conditions on settlements. According to a 2015 Human Rights Watch report, several laborers said they were illegally “forced to work long hours,” and “live in squalid conditions.” On one farm, workers were forced to sleep in cardboard boxes. Five years later, a report found that 83 percent of migrant workers were paid less than minimum wage. Matan Kaminer, an anthropologist, has argued that importing low-wage workers is part of Israel’s long-term plan “to basically wean the Israeli economy off its dependence on Palestinian labor,” and separate Israelis and Palestinians from “one another, including all the economic interconnections.” Israel's leaders made no secret of this. Two years after sealing Gaza and the West Bank and restricting movement for millions of Palestinians in 1993, Thai workers were brought in by the thousands, followed by Romanians, Turkish and Filipino laborers in various sectors. Former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told a crowd at a fundraising event that within four months “there would be no need for any Palestinian workers at all” and that “the ultimate goal” was “separation between a Jewish state and the Palestinian entity.” This goal has never fully come to fruition, though 20,000 workers in Gaza have lost their jobs since October, and some 160,000 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank "have lost or are at risk of losing their employment." As Israel continues to expand its settlements, it must reckon with who—whether migrant laborer or Palestinian landowner—is rendered invisible?