Despite the obscurantist idea that what we are seeing in Palestine is a millenary, if not eternal, conflict, an irrational cycle of violence, we are, in reality, witnessing the darkest face of modernity. We are seeing the reproduction and development of a state through the colonization of a territory that, before being occupied, needs to be desolated and that can be desolated because it is already treated as desolate. Yet, merely conceiving of Palestine as terra nullius could not have made the Palestinians intruders in their own country, any more than the simple declaration of their indigeneship would free them.
Capital Accumulation
In some respects, the colonization of Palestine summarizes the phases of other colonization projects, such as those that have occurred in the USA or in Australia. The Zionist project grew out of European anti-Semitism in the second half of the 19th century. While the population it took place on was inhabited, its population was not organized in the form of a modern bourgeois state that could integrate territorial sovereignty with the administration of the populations and resources in that territory. Being a region of the Ottoman Empire with loose administrative centralization, Palestine was, in some sense, free in terms of liberal law. The first great wave of settlers came from Eastern Europe and was made up of people driven away by the recurring pogroms organized in the Tsarist Empire and by the widespread persecution in the region. Among the pioneers were members of the Bilu movement, who sought the establishment of cooperative agricultural settlements as the foundation of new, autonomous, and independent Jewish communities. As with most utopian settlement projects throughout history, technical incompetence and a misunderstanding of the role of the social division of labor led to the experiment’s doom. Most of the colonies were soon forced to accept the help of investors such as Edmond de Rothschild, who, in order to ensure the profitability of their enterprises, steered the settlements towards profit by accepting the use of the cheapest available labor force, i.e., Arab labor.
Although unsuccessful, these early settlements anticipated the emergence of the kibbutz several decades later. Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, and Aaron David Gordon infuse the lessons of scientific socialism into the withering utopian project, giving it new life. From that point on, the colonization of Palestine turned atypical. The fathers of socialist Zionism understood that in order to live, people must produce, but the production process cannot take place in the absence of objective conditions. This is why, starting with the second wave of colonization, structures aiming to meet these conditions emerged. The first such structure is the kibbutz.
Kibbutzes are egalitarian farming settlements, where the land and means of labor are owned collectively by community members, with decisions on settlement development and distribution of produce being made through participatory democracy, and in some cases even child-rearing being done in common. Their less famous but more numerous counterparts are the moshavs. While in appearance just as egalitarian, moshavs are organized around the family as a unit of production and consumption, bearing a stark resemblance to a traditional village, which explains their succeess in attracting immigrants who did not share any egalitarian ideals but were simply in search of a better life, denied to them in their countries of origin. Both moshavs and kibbutzes served a threefold purpose. Their economic purpose was accumulating productive capital by absorbing immigrant labor. They also had a political purpose since, unlike their preceding settlements, the kibbutzes and moshavs were organized in federations, which slowly started to map out the arteries of a society over the Palestinian territory. Finally, they had a military purpose in defining and demarcating the territory of the future state of Israel.
The second important structure is the Histadrut. Founded in 1920 as a trade union federation, the Histadrut organized workers not in opposition to the bourgeoisie but for the aim of forming a Zionist nation-state. The organization discouraged the use of Arab labor, thus keeping wages high for Jewish workers, which in turn encouraged new waves of immigrants. aving been positioned at the level of production, the Histadrut was in one of the best positions to absorb international donations and investment, which it was directed either towards new productive activities or the reproduction of labor. The federation ended up managing large-scale agriculture, construction firms, and workers’ banks, as well as setting up training centers for new immigrants and introducing them into the workforce. On a superficial level, the Histadrut seems to defeat market logic in favor of ideology. However, ideology has no such power. The historic role of Labor Zionism, as was well understood by David Ben-Gurion, was to dominate the weak bourgeoisie still under the constraints of a semi-feudal society in order to produce the conditions where small or even large international treasuries could be transformed into capital. The Histadrut enabled the rural and peripheral federative economy of the colonies to centralize around urban centers, which, long before being militarily conquered in 1048-9, were conquered through labour. The managerial structures created by the Zionist socialists and the labor bureaucracy formed the collective capitalist that was suited much better to the conditions of the moment than any of the individual capitalists of the Zionist bourgeoisie who would be willing to move their activities to the territory of Palestine.
However, territorial colonization and the sublimation of the workers’ struggle into a national struggle, instead of a class struggle, would not have been enough for the emergence of the Zionist state of Israel. Ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the formation of Mandatory Palestine in 1920, the state of Israel owes its existence, at least in part, to Western imperialism. Through the lens of antisemitism, the leaders of Western countries saw in the Zionist project an advantageous solution to the “Jewish Question” of the European continent. Initially, the support provided by the Western powers was diplomatic, with military and economic support added later. The organizations from which the State of Israel would emerge balanced on the imperial conflicts in the region and on the tensions between the Arab population and the Mandate administration to avoid turning the businessmen and industrialists who had contributed to the industrial and infrastructural projects initiated by the British into comprador. This period saw the development of the petrochemical complex in Haifa, the opening of power plants, and the setting up of the Dead Sea chemical salts industry. Many enterprises would be nationalized or bought by Israel after 1948. Although not having the most important economic outcome, the relationship between Western imperialism and Labor Zionism can be clearly seen during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The initial military uprising was accompanied by a general strike. The Histadrut did not participate, instead replacing the Palestinian labor force in Yaffa, as well as erecting fortifications for the British army in exchange for millions of pounds.
Colonization and the State
The state is an instrument of repression. In general, it exists primarily for the repression of the working class in the interests of the bourgeoisie, but also for the partial repression of individual capitalists if their activity harms the circulation of capital or the reproduction of labor power. As a result of class struggle and competition between capitals, the state represents the rational consciousness of the bourgeoisie, which is alienated from the bourgeoisie itself. The character of a state is therefore determined by the composition of the capitals concentrated and centralized within it, their position on the world market, their historical development, and the labour power they employ.
After the declaration of the State of Israel, the Israeli Army was set up and became the most important institution for consolidating the new state. In addition to its prominent defense role, Israel uses the IDF to support British, French, and later, US economic interests in the region while also pursuing its own military adventures. The relationship between Israel, the US, Britain, and France should be understood not as mercenary but as a dynamic one, full of negotiation and trial and error. Among the first activities of the Israeli Army was the seizure of territory declared abandoned by the Arabs and its transfer to new kibbutzes or moshavs, thus establishing hundreds of settlements. The role of the Israeli Army is also to act as a melting pot that transforms immigrants into Israeli citizens engaged in the Zionist project who are ready to defend it.
Thanks to international imperialist support, but also through its own capacity, the State of Israel destroyed Palestinian agricultural and industrial capital throughout the 20th century, especially after 1948-9, and prevented the formation of new Palestinian capital. This destruction occurred directly through the occupation of agricultural land and orchards, and cities, as well as the nationalization of developing industry. It also occurred indirectly, through boycotts of Palestinian businesses, the fragmentation of Palestinian territory, and the blocking of trade routes. As a result, large numbers of Palestinians emigrated, especially those who were educated, trained, and capable of skilled work. The ones who stayed behind in the Palestinian territories either become refugees dependent on foreign aid for survival or began working in low-productivity, uncompetitive enterprises and practiced subsistence farming on less fertile land.
With the sufficient development of Israeli productive capital, the identity between the Israeli worker and Labor Zionism fades, but the latter’s fixed premises strengthen the position of the working class against capital. The high employment rate, especially among a well-paid labor force, hindered the continual accumulation of capital, making it vulnerable to market fluctuations. Throughout the 1960s, strikes and labor conflicts escalated, as it seemed that Israeli labor had created in the State of Israel the instrument of its own domination. However, the war of 1967, which saw Israel take the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria, opened new frontiers and restored Israeli society’s orientation around Zionism. This new colonization project could not save Labor Zionism. Instead, it created precisely the framework for its unobtrusive disappearance. The State of Israel has entered the neoliberal era together with the entire industrial world by applying the same policies of privatization and weakening of the social safety nets, forfeiting its role as a collective capitalist and ceding it to bourgeois capitalist unions.
The State, Between Managing the Economy and the Population
Following the signing of the Oslo Accords and the Paris Protocol between 1993-5, the Palestinian Authority was recognized as a parastatal institution, the role of which was to administer the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories. Since 2007, Gaza has been de facto administered by Hamas. The national government formed after the 2006 elections, won by Hamas, was not recognized by Israel and the international community. As a result, there are now three administrative formations in Palestine, each with a different character.
The State of Israel is now a nation-state with a developed, diverse economy integrated into the world market, with a GDP estimated in 2022 at 525 billion dollars. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank administers a territory with a dependent and underdeveloped economy, with a GDP estimated at just over 3.5% of Israel’s. There is no doubt that GDP is a rather imprecise indicator. Still, the difference in the order of magnitude between geographically contiguous territories is in itself illustrative and may help us understand the outcomes of the policies and histories we have discussed and will describe below.
The Palestinian Authority does not control the external borders of the territory. Israel also manages its trade and can arbitrarily delay the movement of goods. Israel also collects customs duties and VAT on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, being able to punitively delay the transfer of funds it needs to pay civil servants and law enforcement agencies. Although the Paris Protocol describes the formation of an economic union, Palestinians cannot move freely within Israel. Nor does the Palestinian Authority have complete control over the West Bank regarding internal administration. The West Bank is divided into Areas A, B, and C. Area C, about 60% of the territory, is under the administration of Israel, which controls the construction regime and allows the Israeli army to set aside plots of land or confiscate equipment in the interests of national security. Additionally, rather than being contiguous, Areas A and B are fragmented by Area C in a topology that has been compared to the Bantustans of South Africa. These are just some of the aspects that lead organizations like Amnesty International and B’Tselem to describe the regime in the occupied territories as apartheid.
From a certain point of view, the Palestinian Authority is a state reduced to its basic function of suppressing a population. However, it does not do so in the interests of a national bourgeoisie. International support and consumption taxes fund a bureaucratic apparatus along with a military-police apparatus of repression, responsible for keeping the peace within parameters favorable to Israel and the international community. In the context of these bureaucratic apparatuses, Palestinian elites do indeed arise. However, their power does not come from their control over the means of production but from their brokering and distributing external funds. This does not mean that capitalists of Palestinian ethnicity do not exist. Most of them are part of the diaspora elites and do not control capital in the Palestinian territory; their capitalist status does not depend on the exploitation of Palestinian workers.
To the extent that it can be estimated, Gaza’s economy is also diminutive – around 1% of Israel’s. In 2005, Israel withdrew its settlements from the Gaza Strip, demolishing thousands of houses and dozens of synagogues and moving factories and workshops. Many of the plots were dismantled or vandalized by the settlers before being evacuated. During the year, movement in and out of the region was severely hampered, but Gaza remained dependent on Israel for running water and electricity. The isolation intensified after Hamas gained control of the area, with Israel applying sanctions and imposing a naval blockade. This economic isolation has led to mass unemployment and put the vast majority of the population at risk of starvation, making them increasingly dependent on international humanitarian aid. These were the autarkic conditions for the emergence of the tunnel economy managed by Hamas from 2009 until their sealing off by Egypt in 2012, tunnels that would become particularly important tactically and logistically. By controlling, albeit briefly, Gaza’s imports and exports, Hamas has displaced traditional commercial capital, directing at least some of the profits from contraband towards retaining civil servants, developing agriculture, and financing construction projects. The main goal of Hamas is the struggle against the state of Israel, and to wage it, it must ensure, to the extent it can, the reproduction of the population in the administered territory while cultivating military capability. One can argue about the political objectives of Hamas and assess its management of the economy, the efficiency of investments, and military tactics. Still, the conception that the Hamas administration in Gaza prioritizes in any way the accumulation of capital in the hands of bourgeois elites would be a proof of pure formalism.
The Colonial System as a System of Population Management
Now that we have roughly mapped out the character of the territorial institutions in Israel and Palestine and the relationship of the elites to them, we can now turn to the most significant segments of the populations in those territories. In 2019, 25% of Palestinians were unemployed, with incredible polarization: 54% in the Gaza Strip and 15% in the West Bank. The expected minimum wage that Palestinian workers from the occupied territories in 2019 was less than $450 per month, with an average salary of just over $850. In Israel and the illegal settlements, they should receive the same minimum wage as Israeli workers, namely $1,567.31. However, the average salary of a Palestinian worker in Israel and the illegal settlements rises only slightly, to $1,787.78. In contrast, the average salary of an Israeli worker is $3,198.02, double the minimum wage. The pay gap already illustrates a stratification between workers on the basis of nationality, a stratification that we need to probe in order to go beyond a simple sociological observation.
The access of Palestinians to the Israeli labor market is officially regulated through the use of work permits, generally issued for hard construction work. In 2019, 133,000 Palestinians worked in Israel and the settlements, 39,000 of whom doing so illegally without a permit. Even those who were employed legally in Israel and the illegal settlements barely received the social benefits they were entitled to, such as days off or pensions. Palestinians are routinely forced to work unpaid overtime, night shifts, or in dangerous conditions. By 2023, the figures have improved only marginally, and the available sources hardly present them in a form readily accessible to the international public. In any case, this marginal improvement is irrelevant after 9 months of war and bombardments.
The statistics, which we must complement with reports and interviews, clarify that, in terms of economic activity, the Israeli economy forms the center for both Palestinians and Israelis. As such, Palestinian and Israeli workers are not part of two working classes but one working class, managed by the state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority for the benefit of concentrated and centralized capital in Israel. Despite the three states or pseudo-states in the region, what may appear to be two working classes divided by nationality are different layers of the same working class, segregated on the basis of nationality.
For the most part, Palestinian workers from the West Bank swell the ranks of the relative surplus population, also known as the industrial reserve army, especially in its floating and latent layers. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, on the other hand, make up to a large extent the strata of the poor (a forced pauperization, caused by their refugee status or simply by the lack of available jobs) and even of absolute surplus population – as evidenced by the hunger and impoverishment caused in large part by the State of Israel long before the October 7 attack and by especially the indiscriminate bombing that followed. This is not to say, of course, that there are no Jewish paupers or even Israeli citizens considered absolute surplus, nor that there are no petty-bourgeois, capitalist, or privileged working class Palestinians. However, the trend is obvious, as is the way these two groups broadly react to their situation.
Between the Israeli capital, shepherded by the State of Israel, and the Jewish workers, there is a compromise whereby the latter are much less likely to fall into the reserve army as long as they support the Zionist project. The International Labor Organization estimated that the unionization rate in the Gaza Strip between 2021 and 2022 was about 37.1%. That is a bitter consolation, as there is little capital to challenge it, but it suggests a militant and organized workforce. By comparison, only 13.2% of West Bank workers are union members. There are many possible causes, which certainly add to each other. Still, such a discrepancy cannot be explained without considering the concerted efforts of the Israeli military and business to prevent Arab workers from organizing in the workplace. We can see examples of such practices in “passive” disincentives such as the poor working conditions, work placements which are distributed on a daily basis, the intrusive and intimidating checkpoint system, or the use of a labor force of which about one-third is “illegal”. Add to this active measures such as the dismissal of Palestinian trade union leaders or the disciplinary revocation of work permits, and the use of workers brought in from the Philippines, Thailand, or even Romania, forcing the impoverishment of Palestinian workers rather than their entry into competition with Israeli workers on the labor market. These are just some of the efforts by which the Israeli state is tipping the balance and disproportionately forcing the Palestinian people to become its surplus population, whether relative or absolute.
This is not to say that, through these efforts, the Israeli state has achieved total segregation of its working class based on nationality and that it fully protects Israeli workers from economic downturns, crises, and other contradictions of capitalism. However, the Israeli workers’ response to the pressure exerted on them by such contradictions often takes a very different form from organizing as a class. The current West Bank settlement project is partly the result of the 1973 global recession, which also affected Israel. This is when modern militarized settlements emerged as a reinvention of the colonization project. Unlike the kibbutzes, modern settlements are no longer part of any collective or communal project, often not even an assumed Zionist project. To this day, in the face of a neoliberalized economy and rising living costs, especially in terms of housing, many Israeli workers, instead of redoubling their organizing efforts, prefer to move further and further into the West Bank in search of affordable and spacious housing. Because of the way the State of Israel is organized, together with the Israeli construction industry and the financial sector, the Zionist project no longer needs to be consciously adopted by Israelis, as colonization has become the rational economic choice for many of them.
In such moments, it becomes obvious why Karl Marx ended the first volume of Capital with the chapter The Modern Theory of Colonisation. In trying to escape from the clutches of capitalism, the isolated worker only succeeds in pushing the frontier of capital further, dragging it along behind oneself. In the end, however, the colonist must become a worker again, for one can only escape his condition individually by becoming a capitalist themself.
If, in the past, the process of colonization involved the formation and production of Zionist society within collectivities, without a doubt involving a group ideological effort, nowadays, the act of colonization is an individual one, with the state taking upon itself what in the past had to be actively supported by the participants. Thus, Israel encourages colonization by subsidizing an entire logistical and security infrastructure through roads, sewers, power lines, military checkpoints and military bases placed close to, or even incorporated into, the settlements, as well as social services such as schools. However, participation in the colonialist project can only be considered a simple rational decision if the absurd coordinates in which the Zionist state of Israel inscribes this rationality are accepted.
Since colonization cannot be merely an act of conscience, instead resulting from material processes, opposition to the Zionist project is not merely a symbolic or discursive act either. Israeli citizens can and must refuse compulsory military service. Israeli soldiers can desert and refuse orders. Jewish Israeli workers can and must fight for better living conditions against concentrated and centralized capital in Israel, and they must do so alongside Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Residents of illegal settlements can and must abandon them; they can demand compensation from the State of Israel based on the precedent of settlers being compensated after the Gaza withdrawal. Israeli citizens who question the legitimacy of Israel’s current rulers must sharpen their criticism and direct it not only against Benjamin Netanyahu but against the entire Israeli Zionist political apparatus. The list can go on, but the essence of every action, individual or collective, that can be taken is the refusal to alienate in the Zionist State of Israel one’s own political will, critical capacity, and potential for action.
While the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people may last as long as there are nation states and capitalists, it should not take the end of capitalism for it to be smoothed out to a point where the humanitarian crisis in Gaza ends. But for that to happen, members of the Israeli proletariat must organize themselves as workers of the world and refuse to be settlers for the Zionist project.
Sources
- The Class Nature of Israeli Society
- Israel: a country study, ed. Helen Chapin Metz
- Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Zachary Lockman
- Political Economy of Palestine: Critical, Interdisciplinary, and Decolonial Perspectives. Ed. Alaa Tartir, Tariq Dana, and Timothy Seidel
- What’s the matter with the Israeli working class?*
- Workers’ Rights in Crisis – Palestinian workers in Israel and the settlements
- The situation of workers of the occupied Arab territories
- Chartbook 245: Gaza, beyond de-development to disposability and destruction
- The economics at the heart of Israeli settlements
- This Is Ours – And This, Too: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank
- In West Bank Settlements, Israeli Jobs Are Double-Edged Sword
- Employee Unionization in Israel, 2014-2018
- Job Creation in Gaza and West Bank Essential to Success of Peace Process, Says the ILO
- Forced unemployment: Palestinian residents of Gaza who worked in Israel until 2000 describe how their lives came crashing down because of the unemployment forced upon them
- Neoliberal Settlement as Violent State Project
- Capital, vol. 1 ch. 25 and 33, Karl Marx
