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Abstract
The situation of West Bank Palestinians working in Israel has highlighted a number of parallels with the conditions of global labor employed in essential sectors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Under capitalism, the compulsion to work, ostensibly to cultivate life, comes at the risk of being exposed to death, but is preferred over immiseration caused by unemployment. The pandemic has merely amplified existing structural features of such employment. For Palestinian workers, with the risk of infection in Israel being significantly higher, the perilous conditions experienced by Palestinian labor have turned the preservation of life enabled by such employment more firmly into the production of death. The Palestinian Authority (PA), too, faces a conundrum: to balance the economic benefits it derives from Palestinian disposability in the Israeli labor market with public health considerations limiting such employment. This essay argues that the Covid-19 pandemic lays fully bare the necroeconomy produced by the intersection of settler colonialism and capitalism, which also forms the bedrock of the necropolitical order in the West Bank.
Acknowledgements
The writer would like to thank Paul Kohlbry, Kareem Rabie, and Sherene Seikaly for their incisive comments and invaluable suggestions. The usual caveat applies.
Notes
1 Suha Arraf, “‘The Moment a Worker Is Sick, They Throw Him to the Checkpoint Like a Dog.’” +972 Magazine, 24 March 2020, https://www.972mag.com/checkpoint-palestinian-laborers-coronavirus/.
2 Akram Al-Warra, “‘They Dumped Him Like Trash’: Palestinian with Suspected Coronavirus Symptoms Thrown Out of Israel,” Middle East Eye, 23 March 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/coronavirus-palestine-labourer-found-near-west-bank-checkpoint-covid19.
3 Ibrahim is a pseudonym used by Haaretz for this Palestinian laborer. His real name is not given.
4 Lee Yaron and Hagar Shezaf, “For Palestinian Construction Workers in Israel, the Coronavirus Is Just One More Danger,” Haaretz, 20 March 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-for-palestinian-construction-workers-in-israel-the-coronavirus-is-just-one-more-dan-1.8694613.”
5 Yaron and Shezaf, “For Palestinian Construction Workers in Israel.”
6 Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Aldine Pub. Co., 1962), p. 45.
7 Sujatha Gidla, “'We Are Not Essential. We Are Sacrificial,’” New York Times, 5 May 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/coronavirus-nyc-subway.html.
8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 926.
9 BBC, “Coronavirus: Virus Outbreaks Push Germany to Clean Up Abattoirs,” 20 May 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52738356.
10 Brian Fung, “Warehouse Workers Are Suing Amazon for Putting Their Families at Risk of Coronavirus,” CNN, 4 June 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/tech/amazon-lawsuit-coronavirus-warehouse/index.html.
11 Will Grant, “Coronavirus: Mexico Factory Staff Question ‘Essential Work,’” BBC News, 28 April 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-52440202.
12 Stop the Wall, “Briefing: Palestinian Workers in Israeli Corporations under Covid-19,” Palestinian Grassroots Anti-apartheid Wall Campaign, 8 April 2020, https://www.stopthewall.org/briefing-palestinian-workers-israeli-corporations-under-covid-19.
13 Palestine New Federations of Trade Unions Statement, “New Unions May 1 Statement,” 1 May 2020, https://www.stopthewall.org/2020/05/01/new-unions-may-1-statement.
14 Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
15 Sara Roy, “The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-development,” JPS 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): pp. 56–88, p. 56.
16 Leila Farsakh, Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 77.
17 Jeff Halper, War against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (London: Pluto Press, 2015).
18 John Collins, Global Palestine (London: Hurst and Co., 2011); Laleh Khalili, “The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (August 2010): pp. 413–33; Mandy Turner, “Peacebuilding as Counterinsurgency in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” Review of International Studies (May 2014): pp. 1–26; Elia Zureik, David Lyon, and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, eds., Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory, and Power (New York: Routledge, 2011).
19 Subhabrata B. Banerjee, “Necrocapitalism,” Organization Studies 29, no. 12, (2008): pp. 1541–63; Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review, no. 66 (November–December 2010): pp. 79–97.
20 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 141.
21 Marx, Capital, p. 381.
22 Glen S. Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
23 Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 1–34.
24 Marx, Capital, p. 823.
25 Marx, Capital, p. 915. The widely quoted line is: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”
26 Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2015): pp. 76–85, p. 77.
27 James A. Tyner, “Dead Labor, Homo Sacer, and Letting Die in the Labor Market,” Human Geography 7, no. 1 (March 2014): pp. 35–48.
28 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 351.
29 Warren Montag, “Necro-Economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal,” Radical Philosophy, no. 134, (November–December 2005): pp. 7–17, p. 17.
30 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): pp. 11–40, p. 40.
31 Marx, Capital, p. 932, emphasis added. For the notion of double freedom, see p. 272.
32 Montag, “Necro-Economics,” pp. 10–13.
33 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 35–47, p. 41.
34 Marx, Capital, p. 925.
35 John R. McKivigan and Heather L. Kaufman, eds., In the Words of Frederick Douglass: Quotations from Liberty's Champion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 136–37.
36 Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004): pp. 299–308, p. 304.
37 Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics, The Labour Force Survey Results 2019, press release, 13 February 2020, http://www.pcbs.gov.ps/portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Press_En_13-2-2020-LF2019-en.pdf.
38 Farsakh, Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel, pp. 186–87, table A4.
39 Farsakh, Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel, p. 1; The Portland Trust, Palestinian Economic Bulletin, April 2020, p. 4, https://portlandtrust.org/sites/default/files/peb/bulletin_163_english_final_a4_1.pdf.
40 World Bank, Palestinian Territories Economic Update, April 2020, p. 169, http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/394981554825501362/mpo-pse.pdf.
41 Adel Samara, “The Political Economy of the West Bank, 1967–1987: From Peripherialization to Development,” in Palestine: Profile of an Occupation (London: Zed Books, 1989), pp. 7–31, p. 16.
42 Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2013), p. 99.
43 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): pp. 387–409, p. 387.
44 Musa K. Budeiri, “Changes in the Economic Structure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli Occupation,” Labour, Capital and Society 15, no. 1 (April 1982): pp. 46–63, p. 53.
45 Emmanuel Farjoun, “Palestinian Workers in Israel: A Reserve Army of Labour,” 12 September 2013, available at: https://libcom.org/library/palestinian-workers-israel-reserve-army-labour-emanuel-farjoun.
46 Adriana Kemp, “Labour Migration and Racialisation: Labour Market Mechanisms and Labour Migration Control Policies in Israel,” Social Identities 10, no. 2 (2004): pp. 267–92; David V. Bartram, “Foreign Workers in Israel: History and Theory,” International Migration Review 32, no. 2 (Summer 1998): pp. 303–25.
47 Who Profits, Exploited and Essential: Palestinian Labour under Covid-19, June 2020, https://whoprofits.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Exploited-and-Essential-Palestinian-Labour-under-Covid-19-2.pdf.
48 Arie Arnon and Daneil Gottlieb, “An Economic Analysis of the Palestinian Economy: The West Bank and Gaza, 1968–1991,” The Bank of Israel, Jerusalem: Research Department, Discussion Paper, October 1993, p. 17, https://www.boi.org.il/en/Research/DiscussionPapers1/dp9307e.pdf.
49 Lee Yaron, “Israel Has One of Highest Rates of Construction Accidents in West, Report Shows,” Haaretz, 6 September 2015, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-has-one-of-highest-rates-of-construction-accidents-in-west-1.5380752.
50 Andrew Ross, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (London: Verso Books, 2019).
51 Kav LaOved, “Position Paper on the Government Decision to Promote Economic Cooperation by Granting Work Permits to Palestinians (Decision 1236, March 8, 2016),” trans. Yarden Altschuler, 4 April 2016, https://www.kavlaoved.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/09/Position-Paper-on-The-Government-Decision-to-Promote-Economic-Cooperation-by-Granting-Work-Permits-to-Palestinians.pdf.
52 Calculated from Trading Economics, “Israel GDP from Construction,” https://tradingeconomics.com/israel/gdp-from-construction.
53 Emphasis added. As defined by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Advisory Memorandum on Identification of Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers during Covid-19 Response, Homeland Security Digital Library, 19 May 2020, https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=838384.
54 Suha Arraf, “In an Ironic Twist, Palestinians Count on Israel's Separation Barrier to Keep Out Coronavirus,” +972 Magazine, 16 April 2020, https://www.972mag.com/separation-barrier-west-bank-coronavirus/.
55 Riya Al-sanah and Rafeef Ziadah, “Palestinian Workers Are Bearing the Brunt of the Pandemic,” Jacobin, 23 May 2020, http://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/israel-palestinian-workers-pandemic.
56 Ross, Stone Men, p. 6.
57 Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 198.
58 Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid, p. 109.
59 As found in an opinion poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development, “Opinion Poll on the Palestinian Government's Performance against the Coronavirus,” March 2020, http://www.awrad.org/en/article/10705/Opinion-Poll-on-the-Palestinian-Government's-Performance-against-the-Coronavirus.
60 Alaa Tartir, “The Palestinian Authority Security Forces: Whose Security?” Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, policy brief, 16 May 2017, https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/palestinian-authority-security-forces-whose-security/.
61 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, The Palestinian War-Torn Economy: Aid, Development and State-Formation (New York: UNCTAD, 2006), p. 17.
62 Evidenced by public announcements treating workers who fail to abide by the fourteen-day self-quarantine period as “fugitives” committing “premeditated murder,” or those returning to the West Bank as “lepers.” See Lama Rabah, “‘Indama yu‘amal ‘ummal al-daffa kal-‘jarathim,’” Metras, 27 March 2020, https://bit.ly/30BwNAT.
63 In 2002, the year with the greatest economic damage during the Second Intifada, gross national income was 38 percent lower than its 1999 level. See World Bank, Twenty-Seven Months: Intifada, Closures, and Palestinian Economic Crisis: An Assessment, May 2003, p. xi, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/14614.
64 Yaniv Kubovich, “Israel Fears Economic Crisis, Annexation Could Cause Palestinian Street to Explode,” Haaretz, 16 May 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-israel-fears-economic-crisis-annexation-could-cause-palestinian-street-to-explode-1.8849017.
65 World Bank, Palestinian Territories Economic Update, p. 169.
66 Rob Wallace et al., “Covid-19 and the Circuits of Capital,” Monthly Review, 1 May 2020, https://monthlyreview.org/2020/05/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/; Laura Spinney, “Is Factory Farming to Blame for Coronavirus,” The Guardian, 28 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/is-factory-farming-to-blame-for-coronavirus.
67 Sara Roy, “De-development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society since Oslo,” JPS 28, no. 3 (Spring 1999): pp. 64–82.
68 Sam Bahour, “Economic Prison Zones,” Middle East Research and Information Project, 12 September 2010, https://merip.org/2010/12/economic-prison-zones; Peter Lagerquist, “Privatizing the Occupation: The Political Economy of an Oslo Development Project,” JPS 32, no. 2 (Winter 2003): pp. 5–20.
69 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” p. 27.