Matan Kaminer, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Matan Kaminer (MK): I have been interested in ethnographies of labor since I became an anthropologist, and having decided to do my doctoral fieldwork in Israel, I settled on agriculture as the economic sector that is perhaps most closely implicated in the Zionist project. I was fascinated by the way migrants from Thailand had replaced Jewish settlers as the bodies charged with carrying out the work of colonization—a process that took a particularly tragic turn when dozens of Thai migrants were killed and taken hostage during the 7 October attack in 2023. The region where I chose to do fieldwork, the Central Arabah, is far from “hot” borders, but I think what I learned there is very pertinent to understanding everything that has happened since, as I discuss in the book’s preface.

Of course, I had no inkling that any of this was going to happen when I entered the field in 2015. I did know that Thai migrants were extremely socially isolated as well as exploited—two closely interconnected phenomena, as the book shows. I wanted to learn more about their lives and work and their relationships with employers, and I was convinced the best way to do this was to work beside them, in the tradition of the late, great Michael Burawoy. I was surprised by the amount of power migrants exercise over the labor process and the way they define the terms of the relationship. However, this is within closely policed bounds—they have no power whatsoever, or even much of a visible presence, in the Jewish communities in which they work. The “capitalist” and the “colonial” of the book’s title find a tentative but productive modus vivendi on the farms of the Arabah.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

MK: What I love about the classic ethnographies is their aspiration to cover all aspects of life in the communities they study—economy, kinship, religion, politics, ecology, etc. I cannot say that I achieved this sort of holism in the book; I am not convinced that it is possible or even desirable in the interconnected and fragmented world that we live in today, and under the “patchwork” conditions in which we are obliged to do fieldwork. But the book does draw on a broad variety of literatures, and I have been gratified to see readers with different backgrounds latch onto different parts of it.

At the broadest level, the theoretical framework is Marxian, deeply influenced by Burawoy and labor process theory. But contemporary Marxist theory is in close conversation with questions of race, gender, and imperialism, including in fields like social reproduction theory, the black radical tradition, world-systems, and agrarian political economy. The book also engages with political ecology, and—somewhat unusually for an ethnography of “Israeli society” that does not feature Palestinian characters—it draws extensively on Palestine studies, including scholars like Leila Farsakh, Kareem Rabie, and Sai Englert.

On the other hand, this is also very much an anthropology book, in many ways quite traditional in its close attention to everyday interactions in work and outside it. Here I think my disciplinary training at Michigan comes into play: my conception of “interaction ideologies” owes much to linguistic anthropologists like Judith Irvine and Tamar Katriel. Almost everything I argue regarding Thai and Buddhist “culture”—a term I problematize but do not explain away—leans on the work of anthropologists and sociologists of Thailand, like Pattana Kitiyarsa, Piya Pangsapa, Claudio Sopranzetti, and Scott Stonington.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MK: My first research project was on Israeli workers in a logistical installation near the port of Ashdod, south of Tel Aviv. I came to it with what you might call a class reductionist mindset, but even before I started juxtaposing these workers to agricultural migrants (which I did in a 2019 article for Dialectical Anthropology) it was clear that processes of racialized and gendered class composition played a role: the workforce at the warehouse was split between young men of various backgrounds and middle-aged women who were almost all immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Capitalist Colonial departs from that previous work by centering questions of coloniality and race, but the departure is not a total about-face, because the last thing I want to do is abandon the labor process or class analysis. At a fundamental level, the book is proof of Stuart Hall’s well-known theorem that “race is the modality through which class is lived.” However, I am at pains to point out that the “bundling” of supposedly extra-economic categories with class goes both ways. It is not that these other categories are constituted outside the workplace and then imported into it. Work itself racializes, through things like the physical postures and clothing that it requires. So do the differences in living standards, life opportunities, and self-perceptions that are afforded by different wage levels, such as the minimum wage earned by Israeli workers and the illegally low wages—about thirty percent lower—that are received by Thai workers.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MK: I really hope Jadaliyya readers will read it! That is, I hope that progressives interested in Palestine and the politics of the broader region read the book. It is not obvious why people who care about Palestine should read an ethnography that does not directly engage Palestinian experiences. But to reappropriate a term from the Israeli state, Palestinians are “present absentees” throughout this book. As I discuss in the excerpt, most descendants of the Bedouin who lived in the Arabah until 1948 are just over the border in Jordan, and the so-called threat of dependence on indigenous labor is a primary motivation behind the importation of workers who are neither indigenous or settlers and must not be allowed to join either group.

There has been a debate in recent years on whether Palestine studies and Israel studies, indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies, should be kept apart or integrated in what Zachary Lockman called a “relational” paradigm. I am staunchly on the relational side, and I am heartened by the fact that despite the horrific genocide against the Palestinian people, there are plenty of Palestinian, Israeli, and other colleagues who continue to press for this. The appearance of the new Palestine/Israel Review, for example, shows this clearly.

Capitalist Colonial is not a political pamphlet, but it has several political takeaways: one is that coloniality is not simply an attribute of the Israeli state, but one of the United States-dominated, imperialist world-system—as is very clearly apparent from the United States’ involvement in the Gaza genocide. A second point is that decolonization should not be thought of as turning back the wheel to some pristine time before the arrival of settlers, but rather of abolishing the distinctions that colonialism employs by fighting for true equality for everyone who is in the country—including those who are neither settlers nor indigenous. As solidarity activists in Europe say, qui est ici est d’ici.  In this vein I have been really inspired by recent work on migration in the Middle East, by people like Rafeef Ziadah, Natasha Iskander and Faisal Hamadah, for example. So I hope that people who appreciate that sort of work also read mine.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MK: I am finishing work on two closely related articles with two good friends, Liron Mor and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite. Both have to do with the intertwined histories of proletarianization and racialization in Palestine/Israel. The collaboration with Liron, forthcoming in Palestine/Israel Review, looks at representations of the labour of Mizrahi Jews in three works of Zionist culture: a short story from the 1930s, a rock opera from the 1990s, and the contemporary TV show Fauda. The piece with Zvi is about three cases of immigration into Palestine for agricultural work: Egyptians in the nineteenth century, Yemeni Jews in the early twentieth, and Thais today. It is under review for a special issue of Historical Materialism on Palestine/Israel which I am co-editing.

I am also working with my friend Ben Schuman-Stoler on an audio series based on my article “The Abrahamic Ideology” (Millennium, 2023). Tentatively called “Bad Cousins,” the series will feature conversations with guests about how the family drama of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac is used as a framework for talking about politics in the Middle East, in the context of the Abraham Accords and beyond. The idea of Jews and Arabs as cousins, which is very prevalent in the region, has dark sides that the series discusses extensively. However, I must say that though I had a very negative view of “Abrahamism” when I first started working on this issue, conversations with people like the Orthodox Jewish thinker Yosef Kaminer (no relation) have shown me that there is radical potential in this story, especially in the character of Hagar—the migrant slave-woman with a direct connection to the divine.

In a different vein, more directly continuous of my work in the book, I am exploring the connections between Israeli-Thai military development collaboration and the beginnings of the migrant flow in the 1980s. It seems that the discourse of “frontier settlement” helped elites in both countries bridge the gap between nationalist developmentalism and neoliberal globalization, a phenomenon that I venture to call “structural hypocrisy.” In the future I hope to take part in a collaborative research project on agricultural migrants in three “Abrahamic” countries—Jordan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. The wager is that migrants’ perspective can tell us something new about the commonalities between these states, which all use a discourse of indigeneity to promote agriculture while denying basic rights to the migrant workers on whom the sector depends.

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1, pages 27 to 45)

From the seventeenth century on, the Arabah was under the de facto control of Bedouin tribal federations. The valley often served as a rough border between these federations, which sometimes clashed over water, pasturage, and political dominance. State power was very weak, and European travelers were wary of approaching the region for fear of being caught up in intra-Bedouin rivalries. In his History of Beersheba and Its Tribes, Palestinian historian ‘Aref al-‘Aref wrote that the Arabah, nicknamed “the wadi of fire” after the many victims of tribal warfare who had fallen there, belonged to the Sa‘idiyyin tribal federation. In 1942, a Zionist exploratory expedition provided a more detailed account, describing the valley as divided from south to north between the territories of the Ahaywat, Sa‘idiyyin, and ‘Azazma federations, and estimating that at the yearly peak of occupation it was home to 15,500 goats, 7,800 camels, and 2,040 Bedouin tents, perhaps housing about 10,000 people.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which greatly facilitated the shipment of goods from Asia to Europe, fueled renewed imperial interest in neighboring areas, including the Arabah. Following the British conquest of the Negev at the end of World War I and the imposition of Mandatory rule by the League of Nations, the territories of Palestine and Transjordan were administratively separated, with their border— at this point entirely unmarked—running down the center of the wadi. The British, who had depended on Bedouin allies to win the war in the Middle East, attempted to cement the alliance locally through the establishment of a Bedouin desert police corps. This corps staffed a series of police stations along an ancient Roman route, descending from Kurnub in the eastern Negev through the winding path of ‘Aqareb (Heb. Ma’aleh Aqrabim), reaching the Arabah at ‘Ayn Hosb (today’s Ein Hatzeva) then cutting south along the Dead Sea Transform to Umm Rashrash on the Red Sea coast, near ‘Aqaba in Transjordan. 

[...] While the northwestern Negev saw intense fighting between Israeli and Egyptian armies beginning immediately after the British withdrawal and Israeli declaration of independence in May 1948, its wedge-shaped south was not conquered until March 1949, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) swept to Umm Rashrash with little resistance, expelling the Bedouin population over the Egyptian and Jordanian borders as they passed through. [...] Fearing “infiltration” by Palestinian guerrillas and the displaced Bedouin inhabitants, the IDF placed the Central Arabah under military administration, establishing bases at the former British police posts at ‘Ayn Hosb and ‘Ayn Ghadyan (renamed Ein Hatzeva and Yotvata) as well as at Be’er Menuha and Paran. In 1953, the Bedouin al-Misk and ‘Amrani families of the Sa‘idiyyin federation were allowed to return from Jordan and settle near ‘Ayn Hosb in return for military services, which included patrolling the border.

Zoologist Giora Ilani, who served as a military wireless operator at ‘Ayn Hosb in 1956 and later settled in the Arabah, provides an account of the post in which wonder at the area’s natural splendor clashes with disgust at the army’s destructive actions:

[T]he limestone mountainside sloped wildly towards Wadi Fuqra . . . dotted with tamarisks and acacias. . . . To the north, the gray eminence of mesquite, seepweed and nitre-bush dominated the landscape . . . ample trees—twisted acacia, umbrella thorn acacia, and even Christ’s thorn jujube—grew and cast their gladdening shade across the land, but the jewel in the crown was the hundreds of desert gazelles. […] Abu Ghanim and his friends estimated the distance to the camp at ‘Ayn Hosb, and after ascertaining that no one would hear the shots, tried to kill as many gazelles as they could. The gazelles had learned from experience to run out of the rifles’ range, so I could only see them from afar.[...]

As far as the army and much of the government bureaucracy were concerned, military administration of the region was adequate to the need of retaining security control; but others warned that if the Arabah were not permanently settled, it would never be stably integrated into the national territory. Wearying of the hypocrisy of the veteran settler leaders, who they perceived as enriching themselves while shirking their duty to the nation, these young traditionalists found an ally in [Israel’s founding father David] Ben-Gurion, who felt an urgent need to furnish fresh ideological content to the hegemony of his MAPAI over other parties within and without the [labor settlement movement (]LSM[)], as well as to ensure the ascendancy of the state over all parties, including MAPAI itself.

Since the end of the war Ben-Gurion had been concerned about two problems, for which he envisioned interconnected solutions. First was what he saw as the waning of the pioneer spirit among the younger generation in general and within the labor settlement elite in particular. Second was the need to settle the Negev in order to fortify and perpetuate Israel’s control over its newly acquired expanses. [...] When a group of youth intensely committed to initiating agricultural settlement in the Arabah received no support for its project from subordinates, it was an obvious move to turn to him. With his help, the Arabah’s first permanent Jewish settlement, Ein Yahav, was organized as an outpost (he’ahzut) of the NAHAL, or “Pioneer Fighting Youth.” The most successful of Ben-Gurion’s state-pioneering projects, perhaps because it also served the interests of the LSM, the NAHAL was a unit of the Israel Defense Forces composed of conscripts from the movement, who spent part of their service establishing and running paramilitary agricultural settlements, or “outposts,” in frontier zones, with a view to their eventual “civilianization.” […]

The idea of establishing a NAHAL outpost in the Arabah was hatched by Shai Ben-Eliyahu and Hagi Porat, two young men of urban origins who had spent their teenage years together in Kfar Yehoshua, one of the oldest and wealthiest moshavim of Israel’s north. The two toured the country in search of a worthy spot to settle, and eventually homed in on the failed experimental station and military base in Ein Yahav—“spring of hope” in Hebrew, a euphemistic inversion of the original Arabic ‘ayn weiba, or “spring of disaster.” Near the point where a wadi draining much of the Negev entered the Wadi Arabah, the site had relatively good access to water but was difficult to get to. One hundred twenty-five kilometers from both Eilat and Jerusalem as the crow flies, this was one of the remotest spots in the country, distant not only from Jewish metropolitan centers and transport infrastructure, but also from concentrations of Palestinian labor in the country’s north and center.

For Ben-Eliyahu and Porat’s vision to become reality, administrative and financial support was needed, and as we have seen, the military and civilian bureaucracy could not see any strategic need for settling the Arabah. Using personal connections, the two managed to reach Ben-Gurion and secure his active support for the creation of their NAHAL outpost, overcoming the objections of these officials. In 1960, final permissions were received, and the first group formally settled at Ein Yahav. Within two years, the outpost was “civilianized” and temporarily became a moshbutz, a transitional form that served as a compromise between the settlers, most of whom hailed from veteran moshavim and desired to remain affiliated with that branch of the LSM, and the institutional actors who saw the kibbutz as the most appropriate format for settlement in such hostile conditions. The settlers soon had their way: in 1962, Ein Yahav became a moshav and was accepted into the national Moshavim Movement. It was quickly followed by Hatzeva in 1965. [...]

The youth who set up the moshavim of the Arabah were not motivated primarily by a desire to escape the temptations of a readily exploitable labor force. Rather, they were attracted by the romance of the frontier. They were enthralled by proximity to the “majesty of nature” in a region that contrasted sharply with the rain-fed valleys to the north and seemed to belong on “another planet,” as Ben-Eliyahu wrote. Inspired by the Spartan spirit required to live in this “uncompromising, hard and cruel land,” they were eager to raise children who would work beside them in the fields and eventually take over as natural-born peasants. Unlike many of their peers, however, they were committed to the realization of the ideology on which they had been raised, and this did mean—first and foremost—refraining from employing “strangers.” This is how Yossi, one of the first settlers of Ein Amal, put it to me:

For many years we didn’t let Arabs in here. Today it sounds a little racist, but in those years, there were grounds for it, ideological grounds, because in fact we had conquered them.... We had expelled them from their lands, and here we are employing them as... our workers on their own lands. There’s something immoral about it.... Many places in the country, moshavim and kibbutzim, were on Arab lands. And for many years the position was held that it’s immoral to employ the people you have conquered and expelled from their lands, to employ them as workers.... The motto was: whoever works the land will in the end be its owner. That was the ideology. Not on racist grounds but rather on moral ones.

Excerpt from Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture by Matan Kaminer, published by Stanford University Press, ©2024 by Matan Kaminer. All Rights Reserved.