NOVANEWS
Please go read Roy Arad on Israeli racial capitalism as it plays out in the construction industry (and yes, capitalism will always play on and widen existing fault-lines of communitarian identification; divide and conquer!). Arad’s punchline is that in a quid pro quo for Eastern European vetoes of the bid for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, Israel would get to import Romanian and Bulgarian construction workers. In Israel, the construction industry currently has employment rolls half composed of ’48 Palestinians, half Chinese or ’67 Palestinians, from the West Bank.
The Chinese workers are Israel’s replacements for the workers from Gaza who used to work in Israel: over 100,000 of them who used to commute from Gaza for daily employment in Israel and in the wake of the gradually tightening post-1stintifada closure policy have seen their numbers reduced to nothing, in the process themselves being reduced to bare life, dependent on UNRWA for survival.
Israel took to heart the lesson of South Africa in its careful crafting of apartheid 2.0. The South African capitalist class, and especially the mining industry, relied on the labor power of black workers. It needed them for internal accumulation. This made it vulnerable to their strategic disruptive power. A political economy that does not rely on the labor power of the people over which it rules need not worry about them using their strategic location to disrupt the economy to push for the reorganization of citizenship rights.
The Israeli Palestinians have the best strategic location from which to fight for Palestinian liberation. The problem is that to do so successfully would entail a portion of the Israeli working class breaking from ethnonational identification and joining in solidarity with the Israeli Palestinians on working-class lines.
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