Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 28.07.2025
1. The racist ideology to justify discrimination in Israel.
2. The state of the white Ashkenazim
3. The Role of the Histadrut in a Settler Colonialist Society.
A Zionist conquest of labor
B The collective agreement in construction
C The reality
D. Palestinian workers in the labor market
E. The benefits for the Histadrut
4. The Israeli Construction Industry Today
5. The migrant workers
6. The change in the condition of the Mizrahim
7.The New Structure of Israel -Bonapartism.
8. conclusion
1.The racist ideology to justify discrimination in Israel
On the face of it, the picture of inequality that emerges from the public discourse in Israel is relatively straightforward and quite agreed: in rough lines, the Ashkenazim at the top, the Mizrahim below them, and the Arabs below the Mizrahim.
How did this happen? It seems that in the public discourse, this is also quite clear and widely agreed upon: culture, of course. “The Mizrahim, and even more so the Arabs, have a hard time functioning in modern Israel because they came from backward countries with non-modern cultures.” One of the sharpest formulations of such an answer was given in the 1960s by the sociologist Rivka Bar Yoseph, who wrote that immigrants from Arab countries should undergo desocialization, that is, the erasure of their Eastern-Arab culture and re-socialization, i.e., its replacement by Western-European culture. Explanations based on similar civilizational differences were offered to her by the educator Carl Frankenstein. These cultural differences were applied to Jews of Arab origin, and indeed to Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel.
The problem is that this explanation is based on racism and pseudo-science typical to colonialism, and Israel is a society of settler colonialists.
2. The state of the whites
The Israeli Ashkenazim – for the generation of the establishment of the Zionist state – were not born into the upper stages of the Modern Socio-Economic Ladder in a capitalist society: They came to Palestine from Excluded Eastern European Minority Communities and Until 1948, Palestine had a minority Jewish community of settler colonialists living alongside a Palestinian majority and under imperial rule – first Ottoman and later British. The victory in the war in 1948 gave the veteran Jews of European descent tools and abilities beyond those they had until then, and they were now helping to establish themselves as the ruler of Israel, having their own state.
The new Zionist society developed a mechanism to discriminate against the Arab Jews and the Arab Palestinians. After the Zionist monster expelled most Palestinians in the Nakba in 1947-8, the Zionist ruling class, mostly Ashkenazim, brought in as cheap labor the Mizrahim.
3.The Role of the Histadrut in a Settler Colonialist Society
A. Zionist conquest of labor
For the centrists who believe they understand the nature of Israel and how to defeat Netanyahu, I offer a modest suggestion: to study the Journal of Palestine Studies, Volume 52, Issue 3, 2023. I summarize it below. It deals with a significant industry in Israel-Construction and the role of the Histadrut:
The largest Trade Union in Israel is the Histadrut. The Histadrut was founded in 1920 to organize the Zionist conquest of labor, which aimed to exclude Palestinian workers from the economy. This ideology was central to the Yishuv. Labor shortages and settler-colonial expansion following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 led to the integration of Palestinian workers into the workforce. Focusing on the construction industry, we can study the Histadrut’s contemporary membership structure, collective agreements, and relationship to the Israeli state, which serves a highly racialized and segregated sector. Palestinian and migrant construction workers toil in dangerous circumstances for low pay, without union protection, and under the supervision of unionized Jewish managers and engineers.
B. The collective agreement in construction
In 2010, the Construction Workers Union (CWU) of the Histadrut—Israel’s largest trade union federation and a historic institution of the Zionist movement—signed a collective agreement with employers in the construction industry. Union officials celebrated it as a groundbreaking achievement. The 2010 agreement covered roughly 300,000 workers thanks to an extension order issued by the Israeli government, which imposed the agreement’s provisions on the entirety of the construction and related industries across the country. The 2010 agreement, as well as subsequent iterations signed in 2015 and 2018, highlighted the development of an internal disputes procedure to address worker complaints and resolve failures to implement the provisions of the agreements. The CWU and employer organizations also established joint arbitration committees, comprising representatives from both parties, with the stated purpose of resolving disputes before they reached the labor courts.
Not only did CWU officials in Israel celebrate what they claimed was a major achievement, but they also touted the agreement internationally as a demonstration of the supposedly equal treatment that Palestinian and migrant workers are afforded in Israel. This focus on the international sphere appears to have been meant as a challenge to the growing popularity of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which is gaining increased traction across the world, including within the labor movement. In the CWU’s thirteenth congress report, for example, Itzhak Moyal, the union’s general secretary, stated that many European countries view Israel negatively due to a “misguided view.” He continued: “We provide proper care and true concern for the rights of Palestinian workers insofar as possible. ”Moyal then lauded the 2010 collective agreement, saying that “the equalization in status among construction workers … aroused wonder among trade unions around the world.” And to highlight his main concern, Moyal added: “The acknowledgement that Israel, for all its political complexity, does not discriminate against Palestinian workers attracts special interest and a point in its favor in many countries in Europe”. This attempt at Israeli ‘labor diplomacy’ is certainly not an isolated instance. In 2022, for example, Moyal supported a deal to include Moroccan workers in the Israeli construction industry as part of the normalization agreement signed between the two countries.
The 2010, 2015, and 2018 collective agreements were positively—if cautiously—received by some, within scholarly circles as well. In particular, some scholars emphasize that the reestablishment of more centralized labor relations, after years of state- and employer-led assaults on the power and influence of trade unions, has the potential for greater inclusion of Palestinian and migrant workers in the Israeli labor movement and its institutions. They also view the development of joint arbitration committees as especially important. For example, while recognizing that the collective agreements “kept the basic exclusionary principles of Israeli [industrial relations] intact, eschewing bottom-up inclusive strategies such as organizing among the sector’s most precarious workers”
C. The reality
Far from providing Palestinian and migrant workers with greater avenues for inclusion in the CWU, the Histadrut, and the Israeli labor movement more generally, the collective agreements further entrench discrimination within the construction industry.
The CWU, as part of the Histadrut, plays two important roles in the construction industry and within the Israeli settler-colonial project more generally. First, it participates in reproducing the racial segregation of the workforce, both through its membership structure and its implementation of the collective agreements. Indeed, its members are primarily composed of a minority of Jewish workers in construction who hold stable, often permanent jobs in managerial, supervisory, and skilled positions. The majority of the workforce is made up of Palestinian and migrant workers who are concentrated in often outsourced, temporary, dangerous, and badly paid so-called wet work jobs like cementing or plastering that require the use of water. While the 2010 agreement was imposed on the entirety of the construction industry through a governmental extension order, theoretically covering workers employed in wet works, in practice, its provisions are largely limited to the minority layer of privileged Jewish workers.
The CWU plays a crucial role in perpetuating the existing settler-colonial order by dominating labor organizing in a key strategic sector. That is, the construction industry is critical to sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project through the continued construction of settlements, separation walls, and other infrastructure of occupation. And since it is primarily composed of Palestinian and migrant workers, the workforce in the construction industry poses a potentially significant threat to the Israeli regime. These workers could strike, as they did briefly in 2021, bringing the sector to a halt and costing the Israeli economy a significant amount. In fact, due to the restrictions imposed on Palestinian workers during the COVID-19 pandemic alone, the Israeli Builders’ Association estimated that “the sector’s monthly loss due to the decline of Palestinian manual labor could reach NIS 4.56 billion and disrupt the employment of over 125,000 Israelis. The dominance of the CWU in the construction industry continually suppresses the potential of Palestinian and migrant workers to disrupt the Zionist settler-colonial project.
D. Palestinian workers in the labor market
After the formation of the Zionist state, while the Zionist policy of military government geographically segregated Palestinians within the new state, it did not fully exclude them from the labor market. In the period between 1948 and 1967, Palestinian workers made up “a quarter of the Israeli construction and agricultural workforce.” Instead, it turned them into a reserve army of labor that the Israeli state could dip into or close down, depending on the needs of the labor market. This system was regulated by a military government in which Histadrut representatives served. Palestinians were issued work permits in periods of labor shortages, allowing them to leave their areas to work in Israeli industries, but the permits were withdrawn when these workers competed for work with new Jewish arrivals. Histadrut officials even offered Palestinians work permits in exchange for votes for the Labor Party. In addition, the Histadrut set up the Israeli Labor League, which served as a sort of labor exchange for Palestinians, as well as a form of political control. Indeed, Palestinian union organizers or political activists could be excluded from the league and thereby from receiving permits.
In preparation for the occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian citizens of Israel were granted voting rights in the federation in 1965, and were released from military rule in 1966. Their membership, however, remained largely nominal; union representation was geographically organized around workplaces and, therefore, geared toward serving residents in the majority Jewish cities in the center of the country. Palestinians were thus integrated more fully within the Israeli economy than they had been before, but remained largely excluded from trade union representation.
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights in 1967 moved practices tried and tested on Palestinians with Israeli citizenship—such as geographic segregation, military rule, and labor flows regulated by work permits—into the newly occupied territories. By this time, however, the Histadrut’s role in managing the occupation was more limited, albeit not absent. For example, directly after the occupation began, the Histadrut set quotas for the number of Palestinian workers who would be allowed to work across the Green Line.
E. The benefits for the Histadrut
The Histadrut benefited from this process in two ways. First, as an employer, it profited from the downward pressure on wages in the private sector that the entry of workers from the occupied territories represented. This was especially the case through its ownership of Israel’s largest construction company, Solel Boneh, which became increasingly dependent on flows of Palestinian workers. This was no small matter. In fact, during World War II, Solel Boneh became the “largest contractor in the Middle East and by the end of the 1950s, it generated 8 percent of Israel’s national income. With the benefits it received as an employer, the Histadrut therefore presided over the growing racial segmentation of the workforce, and the rapid decline in union coverage and power in a key industry.”
Second, the Histadrut collected “organizing fees” to cover the cost of the alleged representation these workers received from the federation, as well as contributions for a “provident fund” deducted directly from the workers’ paychecks without their consent. It did so despite the fact that the workers from the occupied territories could not join the union and did not receive these benefits.
4. The Israeli Construction Industry Today
The Israeli construction industry is politically and strategically significant. In order for the settler-colonial project to develop materially, expanding and deepening its control over Palestinian land, it has to build the necessary infrastructure. Many of the images most commonly associated with the structural violence perpetrated against Palestinians—including settlements, separation walls in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli-only roads, and checkpoints—are the product of this industry. In addition, construction is linked to housing new Jewish settlers, thereby further increasing Israel’s control over Palestinian land. Certainly, construction is not the only industry that serves the purposes of the settler-colonial project. Agriculture was key to settling Palestinian land during the Yishuv and in the aftermath of the Nakba, while the high-tech industry is crucial in maintaining Israel’s military rule over Palestinians.
The construction industry’s contribution to the Israeli economy is also not insignificant. In 2018, residential construction contributed “30.4% of the total gross fixed capital formation” in Israel, whereas “capital formation in non-residential buildings and other construction work (industrial buildings, offices, educational institutions, roads, etc.)” stood at 22.8 percent. In 2016, MarketLine reported that the construction industry in Israel accounted for 25.1 percent of the overall revenues in construction across the region, placing it second only to Saudi Arabia.Furthermore, the industry appears relatively resistant to crisis. For example, as the Bank of Israel (BOI) notes, the Israeli construction industry continued to grow at a time of general economic slowdown in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, which further underscores its political character. Even as the COVID-19 crisis brought many sectors of the Israeli economy to a halt.
The construction industry’s profitability is primarily underwritten by a very large dependence on “low-skilled” migrant and Palestinian labor. As the Bank of Israel laments, both labor productivity and workers’ skill levels are strikingly low in the construction sector, largely due to the labor-intensive nature of construction in Israel, which has hindered industrialization and technological development in the industry. But it is this fact that guarantees the profitability of the construction
This reality must be understood as the outcome of Israeli settler-colonial policies and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, the expulsion of indigenous Palestinians from their lands, coupled with their geographic fragmentation across historic Palestine, turned them into a captive labor reserve for Israel, largely in agriculture and construction, but also in other sectors such as manufacturing. Moreover, as Salim Tamari shows, this logic locks Palestinians into a vicious settler-colonial cycle. As the Israeli state dispossesses Palestinians from their land, it makes them increasingly dependent on its labor market. And the more dependent on the Israeli labor market they become, the more disconnected Palestinian workers become from their land, which in turn facilitates further dispossession.
5.The migrant workers
The ongoing presence of migrant labor also maintains higher levels of segmentation of the workforce, undermines possibilities for joint organizing in the sector, and presents an ongoing threat to Palestinian workers that alternative sources of labor are available and easy to mobilize. In 2021, the official number of migrant workers in the construction industry stood at 18,—down from 75,000 in 1996. At the same time, the official number of workers from the West Bank and Gaza has steadily risen since the end of the second intifada to 67,200. In 2019, before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, 107,200 Jewish and 89,600 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship worked in the construction industry. In 2021, these numbers stood at 114,400 and 75,900, respectively. However, the number of Palestinian workers is overrepresented; Palestinians make up about 20 percent of the Israeli population but around 40 percent of the workforce in construction.
6. The change in the condition of the Mizrahim
However, since 1967, the Mizrahim climbed in the social pyramid in Israel, and a large number of Mizrahim became lower middle class, petit bourgeois. Those Mizrahim who remained part of the Jewish working class are the labor aristocracy. They don’t work in agriculture, and very few are professionals in construction (such as managers, electricians, and inspectors), in the military industry, and in middle and upper management. Many Jewish workers are Russian immigrants.
The immigrant experience often leads to a mentality of “turning over a new page,” where individuals seek upward social mobility and view their current position as a transitional one. This creates a dynamic where individuals are focused on improving their situations rather than participating in collective class action and certainly not in support of the super-exploited workers: the Palestinians, African refugees, and guest workers.
7. The New Structure of Israel – Bonapartism
The occupation of 1967 that elevated the Mizrahim in the class structure led many of them to become petit bourgeois, and their presence in the labor force, particularly in management positions, fueled their desire for political power, while the Ashkenazim were losing it. This allowed Netanyahu to ride on the petit bourgeois, mainly Mizrahim, and to form a Bonapartist state. This is possible because the working class in Israel is very weak, and the Jewish workers are primarily from the aristocratic class, and the secular Zionist bourgeois Ashkenazim were unable to hold power because they did not have any solution to the condition of the Zionist monster in the region.
Marx used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counter-revolutionary forces, often including military officers, seize power by riding a radical movement and employ selective reforms to co-opt the radicalism of these previously radicalized masses. In the process, Marx argued, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower part of the ruling class. Thus, it is a situation where the new ruler is elevating the state relatively above the bourgeoisie and the working class, utilizing the energy of the petite bourgeoisie for this goal. The state ‘become relatively independent from and superior to all social classes, as being the dominant force in society rather than the direct instrument of a dominant class’, for Marx, the Bonapartist state, ‘however independent it may have been politically from any given class, remains, and cannot in a class society but remain, the protector of an economically and socially dominant class’.
8. Conclusion
We showed the super-exploitation of the Palestinian workers in a very important industry for a society of settler colonialism-construction. This, however, reflects the entire conditions of the working class in Israel. While the Palestinians and the guest workers are super-exploited, the Jewish working class is an aristocratic working class. In the harsh branches of the economy (construction and agriculture), Jewish workers are often professionals and managers. In the industrial sector, they work in the military industry, holding highly paid jobs in seaports and airports. Many work in high technology, which has connections with the military, and many belong to the upper echelon of the state bureaucracy.
- Studies show that Jewish workers, on average, earn significantly more than Arab workers. For example, one study indicated that the average hourly wage for Jewish men was NIS 52.8, compared to NIS 31 for Arab men.
- Annual Income:
Data from 2021 shows that the average annual pre-tax income for Arab Israelis was roughly half that of Jewish Israelis. - Factors Contributing to the Gap:
The Israel Democracy Institute points out that Arab workers are concentrated in specific economic sectors with lower wages compared to the sectors where Jewish workers are more prevalent.
Labor force by occupation
Agriculture: 1.1%
Industry: 17.3%
Services: 81.6% (2015)[i]
There is a significant movement that opposes Netanyahu’s Bonapartist regime; they demand a return to Israeli democracy, but what they mean is ethnocracy-democracy only for the Jews. They demand a deal with Hamas to get back the captives, but ignore the killing and the starvation in Gaza.
The only segment in Israel that wants a liberal democracy is the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have begun to understand that they are once again under severe attack by the Phalanges of Netanyahu.
What we need, especially in light of the plans to annex the West Bank and Gaza, is one democratic state with a workers’ government supported by the Fellahin.
Endnotes:
[i] “The World Factbook- Israel: Economy of Israel”. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Archived from the original on 15 April 2024. Retrieved 22 February 2023