New Yorker - The Israeli Employers Who Want to Bring Palestinian Workers Back

Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Abu Naeem, a forty-two-year-old from Ramallah, in the West Bank, finished an overnight shift at a large produce-distribution center in Israel. He showered and went to sleep in a small private room that his employer had built for him. Then he woke to sirens and distant explosions. Somewhere above him, he could hear the cracks of interceptor missiles colliding with incoming rockets. Abu Naeem felt as if he were in a movie. He soon learned that Hamas and other militant groups had attacked Israel, killing about twelve hundred people.

For the next six weeks, as the Israeli military bombarded and then invaded Gaza, Abu Naeem’s employer persuaded him to stay in Israel, afraid of what might happen if he crossed back to the West Bank. Israel soon barred nearly two hundred thousand Palestinian laborers from its workforce. “The economic Cabinet decided that Palestinian workers should not return to Israel,” Nir Barkat, Israel’s economy minister, declared in late 2023. Abu Naeem was able to avoid detection by Israeli authorities only because he spoke fluent Hebrew. He learned how to make himself small, invisible, and useful.

Before October 7th, a fifth of the West Bank’s labor force was employed in Israel, earning more than double the prevailing wage at home. Palestinian workers were required to obtain permits, but a 2007 ruling by Israel’s High Court awarded them the same labor rights as Israelis. After October 7th, however, the number of Palestinian workers entering Israel each day fell from more than a hundred thousand to well under ten thousand. (Another thirty-four thousand maintain permits to work around Israeli settlements in the West Bank.) Unemployment in the West Bank surged to twenty-nine per cent. A World Bank report on the state of the Palestinian economy described what amounted to an economic collapse.

The decision to ban Palestinian workers was originally presented as an emergency measure, but as it continued, many business leaders and economists came to oppose it. According to the Times of Israel, a proposal to allow some Palestinian workers back into Israel, in late 2023, was supported by representatives from the Israeli military; from Israel’s security agency, the Shin Bet; and from COGAT, the agency responsible for implementing Israeli policies in Palestinian territories. Senior figures argued that job opportunities in Israel helped stabilize the West Bank, reducing tensions by providing income and a sense of economic mobility. But some Israeli politicians argued for a permanent shift. “Israel can and must advance alternatives that will provide a different solution to the economy,” Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, said. “We are leaving the old conception behind: stop employing Palestinian workers,” Barkat said, in 2024. More than two and a half years after October 7th, the ban is still in effect, and it no longer reads as temporary.