Immediately after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli towns near the Gaza Strip on 7 October 2023, Israel closed all entry to Palestinians from the occupied territories. Overnight, some 100,000 Palestinian workers lost their source of income from jobs inside the ‘Green Line’ – Israel’s internationally recognised sovereign border.[1] However, like many countries, Israel has become dependent on non-citizen labour. The government, pressured by a concerned central bank and a strong employer lobby, moved swiftly to enable the import of migrant workers to replace the Palestinians.
Yet the border that was closed to Palestinians runs through territories controlled by Israel, and Israel controls the lands in which the Palestinian workers live.[2] There is no independent ‘Palestine’ from which they come as migrant workers, and no bilateral agreement regulating their employment. Moreover, Israeli citizens live on both sides of that border: Hundreds of thousands have made homes in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. And this is not the only border: The areas under Israeli control are criss-crossed by myriad borders, sometimes marked only on maps with little or no physical presence on the ground, many of them unstable, and subject to military requirements and the territorial ambitions of Israel’s settlement efforts.
Clearly, these borders do not demarcate the edges of Israel’s sovereignty or the entry point of foreign citizens into Israel’s de facto sovereign space. So, what do they do? They fulfil two key and related functions: Firstly, they enable the efficient management of the non-citizen population within the territories controlled by Israel, in particular Palestinian workers. Secondly, the idea of borders, particularly the border most prominent in the imagination of most Israelis (the Green Line), has an important discursive role: It contributes to the fiction that ‘we’ (Israelis) are here and ‘they’ (Palestinians) are there, and that the ‘conflict’ is a border dispute over contested territories between two independent political entities.
In their first function, borders divide territories in Israel–Palestine into various enclaves, each of which is subject to its own set of entry restrictions and a complex configuration of laws, directives and military orders. In research published last year, I traced how these restrictions and regulations in turn determine the institutions and organisations active in these enclaves, thus shaping the working conditions and employment terms of Palestinians who labour within them. For example, Palestinians require different permits to enter the seam-line industrial zones, to cross the Green Line, to work in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and to enter the land between the Green Line and the separation fence.[3] Various Israeli and Palestinian trade unions and civil rights organisations are active in some enclaves and not in others, impacting which rights Palestinians can claim and what assistance they can access. Moreover, ‘troublesome’ Palestinians deemed a security threat or simply those who demand better employment terms or dare to unionise can easily be sent back over a border and distanced from their workplace.
Bordering practices also depoliticise. For example, Palestinians apply for permits via an app that reduces their contact with both Palestinian coordinators and Israeli authorities, streamlining, depersonalising and disempowering all at once. Similarly, many checkpoints are now handled by private firms rather than by Israel’s national army, which smooths and conceals the political face of Israel’s occupation of the territories. Moreover, by legitimising only their identities as workers, borders separate Palestinian spheres of reproduction (their social and family life) from the sphere of production (the extraction of value).
Borders, then, enable Israel to instrumentalise Palestinians. Through bordering practices, Israel creates and legitimises the normative ‘useful’ workers, separating them from other aspects of life, removing them from their ethnic and political collective and determining how they are integrated into the labour market. But they do more than that: They enable Israel to manoeuvre between the conflicting interests of actors on the ground, and resolve the tensions between what I have called elsewhere (with Assaf S. Bondy) Israel’s ‘ethnonationalist imperative’ to exclude and eliminate the ‘native’ in the context of its settler colonialism, and the ‘neoliberal imperative’ to exploit Palestinians as a source of ready labour. Through bordering practices, and through the power these borders grant employers and state authorities, the Israeli state neutralises the political and human aspirations of the Palestinians, integrating the ‘native worker’ without undermining its settler-colonial project.
Borders’ second, related function is in their contribution to the discursive creation of a ‘Palestine’ with which Israel is in conflict. In closing the Green Line to Palestinians after October 2023 and ‘replacing’ them with migrant workers, Israel draws a parallel between the two groups: Each ostensibly enters Israel as part of a mutually beneficial deal struck between two equal parties (the migrant/Palestinian gets work; Israel gets the labour it needs). Israel has simply replaced migrant workers from one country (‘Palestine’) with those from another country.
However, the border Israel has ostensibly closed is in fact closed only to Palestinians, and Israelis continue to travel freely across the Green Line and around most parts of the West Bank. Moreover, some Palestinians continue to work in Israeli settlements even since October 2023, as well as in some industrial zones. Yet by keeping Palestinians ‘out’, Israel can talk of ‘national’ security and ‘national’ conflict.
The idea that Hamas crossed the border to carry out its horrendous attack is crucial to this discursive role too. Israel emphasises the entry of Hamas militants into Israel, thus underlining the hostile act of an external enemy against the state, eliding Israel’s de facto control of many of those same crucial resources and infrastructure that it controls in the West Bank. Thus, Israel can paint Hamas as an Islamist, ‘naturally’ violent movement that has defiled Israel’s sovereign territory – the barbarian at the gate – against which all military operations are ipso facto defensive. Through this discursive manoeuvre, aided by the very real breach of the physical barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip, we are blinded to Hamas’s creation and existence within a settler-colonial context.
To conclude, in Palestine–Israel, borders do not just filter who is permitted entry; they are not merely a barrier to pass through en route to ‘better jobs’, but create an existence for Palestinians that is embedded permanently within bordering practices and shaped by the rules governing the enclaves created by these borders. Importantly, there is no national border that Palestinians can exit; they have no way of leaving Israel’s control. Instead, myriad borders create a Palestinian subject that is useful to Israel’s (capitalist) economy while ensuring Palestinians as political agents are neutralised. Borders thus enable the efficient management of the occupation and the resolution of tensions within the settler-colonial endeavour.
At the same time, the idea of borders enables Israel to discursively create the ostensible separation between two independent political entities, where one (Israel) ‘closes’ its borders to protect its citizens from the violent activities of the other (Palestine). While in the past Palestinians have crossed the Green Line even during times of ‘closure’, with Israeli authorities turning a blind eye, this discursive aspect of the border is even more significant now: As Israel’s army continues its genocidal operations in the Gaza Strip, Israel needs the world to see it as an independent state fighting hostile neighbours, rather than as a colonial-settler state eliminating the natives within the territories under its control.
Jonathan Preminger is Senior Lecturer in Management, Employment and Organisation at Cardiff Business School and author of Labor in Israel: Beyond Nationalism and Neoliberalism (ILR Press, 2018). His research interests include employment and industrial relations, the sociology of work and alternative organisations. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Work, Employment and Society, communications officer for the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and director of the Employment Research Unit at Cardiff Business School. Email: premingerj@cardiff.ac.uk
[1] The Green Line is approximately the ceasefire line of 1948, with some subsequent territorial adjustments. Israeli control over territories beyond that line (e.g. the West Bank, the Golan Heights) are not recognised as part of the State of Israel.
[2] Some small enclaves, known collectively as Area A, are under the control of the Palestinian Authority, but even here Israel controls crucial resources and infrastructure including air space, water, electricity, the banking system and overall security.
[3] Sometimes high concrete wall, sometimes hi-tech fence, the ‘separation fence’ runs roughly along the Green Line, but makes frequent incursions into the West Bank, creating many enclaves between it and Israel’s official border.
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