By Assaf Adiv

Caption: Palestinian workers on a one-day strike in the Meitar Checkpoint south of Hebron on August 21, 2022. Two hundred thousand Palestinians enter Israel every day to work. They are  subject to forced labor conditions as a result of security arrangements.

Credit: Palestinian worker from Dura City

With ongoing protest against Netanyahu’s extreme rightwing government, Israel is wracked by internal crisis. Protesters’ calls for democracy concentrate on the need to stop the government’s dictatorial legislation and eventually to bring it down. The protest movement has not clearly stated its position on the rights of Palestinians, but the obvious link between the suppression of five million Palestinians and the rise of fascism in Israel is becoming clearer. MAAN Workers Association, which unionizes Palestinians and Israelis on the basis of equality, is part of this movement for democracy and sees the current crisis as an historical opportunity to build a strong foundation for equal partnership between Israelis and Palestinians in our land.

An Unprecedented Protest Movement in Israel

In December 2022, after five general elections in three years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to form a government that included the extreme and fundamentalist right. Only such a coalition, he believed, would enable him to evade charges of bribery and breach of trust that had been brought against him in November 2019.[1] The new government, in the mendacious name of restoring “governance,” immediately began an unprecedented overhaul of every aspect of the political regime. The first step was an offense against the independence of the judicial system.[2] Then it initiated a range of additional anti-democratic initiatives and legislative proposals, including suppression of freedom of expression and the media; increasing religious and nationalist motifs in secular education;[3] continued assault on the status of women; harming LGBTQ+ communities; and undermining the right to unionize and the right to strike. The most far-reaching policy change is undoubtedly the stated aim to annex the West Bank and depose the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah,[4] thus making Israel de facto an apartheid state.

. . . [T]he obvious link between the suppression of five million Palestinians and the rise of fascism in Israel is becoming clearer.

However, in the face of these initiatives, a massive protest movement has gathered momentum. Since January 2023, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated each Saturday—at times as much as 5 percent of the population. The demonstrators include economists, [5] academics, former army officers,[6] civil society organizations, women’s rights groups, LGBTQ+ organizations, artists, and thousands of ordinary citizens. They have led a protest movement, unprecedented in strength, that is determined to stop the Netanyahu government.

The protest focuses mainly on defending the independence of the judicial system. But it has expanded to include a slew of urgent issues.[7] Those protesters who represent Israel’s “center”— the high-tech industry, the financial sector, the defense establishment, the health sector, the universities, among others—have suddenly found themselves facing fundamentalist and racist forces that scorn democracy and the basic values of modern society. This means that a pluralist, democratic society with a free press and independent courts is no longer a given.

The protest peaked in March 2023, after Netanyahu announced the dismissal of Defense Minister Yoav Galant who had called for a halt to legislation that would severely restrict judicial autonomy. Within a few hours of Netanyahu’s dramatic announcement, spontaneous protests were rapidly organized. Tens of thousands of people blocked major traffic arteries throughout Tel Aviv. At the same time, Histadrut, the powerful General Federation of Labor, together with key businesses, hospital directors, and universities, declared a general strike, also demanding a halt to the judicial overhaul.[8] The power of protests and the strike, which brought economic activity to a halt, compelled Netanyahu eventually to declare that the legislative process would be  suspended and that the Defense Minister’s dismissal would be reconsidered.

Those protesters who represent Israel’s “center” . . . have suddenly found themselves facing fundamentalist and racist forces that scorn democracy and the basic values of modern society. This means that a pluralist, democratic society with a free press and independent courts is no longer a given.

These declarations were clearly nothing more than tactical steps aimed at manipulating the protesters. The government did not change its intentions. The first to call out the government’s dissembling was U.S. President Joe Biden, who declared at the time that the suspension of the legislation was not convincing and that Netanyahu remained persona non grata in Washington, D.C.[9]

The end of this internal crisis is still pending. It is clear that, in order to guarantee a democracy in Israel, the opposition will have to bring down Netanyahu and tackle three fundamental issues: relations between religion and state; the status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens; and, most importantly, the brutal occupation regime of some five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

It is important to note that these are not just tasks for future discussions. The protest movement is tackling these issues daily when it opposes the Israeli government’s racist anti-Palestinian plans and legislations.[10] Physicist Shikma Bressler, the most vocal spokesperson of the protesters, explained that the democratic camp, which believes in freedom and civil rights and equality, faces a camp that advocates absolute supremacy over others.[11]

How Did Israel Reach This Point?
The answer is rooted in the schizophrenia between the Jewish character of the state and the total negation of Palestinian rights and, on the other side, the stated principles of democracy and equality that were declared in the Declaration of Independence in 1948. The Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 1967 pushed this contradiction to its limits. It took a major revolutionary uprising—the Palestinian intifada of 1987-1993[12]—for Israel’s leaders to realize that they could not eliminate the Palestinian people or their struggle. However, in signing the 1993 Oslo Accords[13] with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel never made a true break with its colonialist past, leaving Palestinians completely dependent on Israel. That said, many people among liberal and left wing forces in Israel and around world saw Oslo as a first step toward a Palestinian state.

However, in November 1995, the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by an Israeli extremist, and a year later, Likud took power.[14] This conjuncture proved the superficial nature of change in the Labor Party and other supporters of Oslo. Instead of waking up to the danger posed by the racist, violent Israeli rightwing that was the driving force behind the assassination, it opted for Israeli national unity.

The second Intifada that broke out in September 2000 saw the end of the Oslo peace illusion.[15] In the two decades since then, a consensus between left, centrist, and rightwing Israeli forces has emerged regarding the impossibility of a political solution. While the left talked about possible political changes that could address unfavorable conditions, the right rejected any political solution. Consequently, governments of all stripes have permitted the massive expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. U.S. President Donald Trump’s support for Netanyahu, crowned by the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf states, was the last nail in the coffin of a two-state solution.[16] Trump’s regional peace plan, which Netanyahu called “the deal of the century,” jumped over the Palestinians to prove that the Arab World could make peace with Israel even as the occupation of Palestine continues.

With corruption charges brought against Netanyahu and the threat that he might end up in jail, the populist anti-“deep state” campaign dominated the scene. Netanyahu opted for a coalition with openly fascist forces, including the Otzma Yehudit Party, led by attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Religious Zionism, led by Bezalel Smotrich. Overnight, these two politicians moved from being outcast extremists to Finance Minster (Smotrich) and Police Minister (Ben-Gvir) in the new coalition of a “full-on” rightwing government.

Netanyahu’s plans are in line with processes, carried out in recent years by authoritarian regimes in Hungary and Poland, to wipe out the independence of the judicial system, the press, and academia. The Israeli version of a political coup d’état is linked to a racist plan to put an end to Palestinian struggle as well. The link between Israel’s government and the worlds’ semi-fascist forces, above all Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, are well  known. It is not by chance that Israel refuses to oppose Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Internal Rifts Left Palestinians in Disarray
According to an opinion poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah last March, 77 percent of Palestinians are dissatisfied with the performance of PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party. Only 19 percent indicated support for Abbas.[17] Abbas was elected in 2006. No presidential or parliamentary elections have been held since.[18]

Since the 1990s, the PA and Fatah and the PLO had become synonymous. Yasser Arafat, the legendary leader of Fatah and the PLO from 1969 to his death in 2004, was recognized by  Palestinians as the symbol of liberation and freedom. But when he signed the Oslo Agreements and became the first President of the PA, people realized he could not bring freedom. His political impotence and the corrupt regime he established in Ramallah drove people to support Hamas.

Hamas’ prestige among Palestinians was built in the 1990s, as negotiations with Israel failed to deliver tangible results to Palestinians who remained subject to the daily humiliations and injustices of the Israeli occupation. Even after the Oslo Agreement was signed, land confiscation and building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land continued unabated. Support for Hamas reached its peak during the Second intifada of 2000-2005,[19] but it was based on false promise.

The Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip proved to be no better. In 2007, its members hunted down, maimed, and even killed Fatah leaders and finally expelled them from Gaza.[20] Hamas became the exclusive ruler, sowing terror upon its citizens. It prevents any political or economic progress for residents of the Gaza Strip, who have borne sixteen years of the destructive Israeli siege and extreme poverty.

Hamas’ support for armed struggle—meaning sending Palestinian youth on suicide bombing missions against Israeli civilians—and refusing all negotiation with Israel was soon exposed as self-destructive. After thirty years and five bloody rounds of conflict in Gaza, it is clear to all—including Hamas leaders—that, faced with the superior military power of Israel, there is no military option.[21] Both regimes, the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, are subject to the Israeli shekel economy. They continue to depend on Israel to issue identity cards and provide their electricity and water.[22] The Israeli regime, for its part, used the internal division between Hamas and the PA to isolate Gaza and use its military might to repress Palestinians. Instead of recognizing Palestine’s right to self-determination, Israel promotes the idea of “economic peace,” based on the illusion that, if Israel permits Palestinians to work in Israel and increase their income, their desire for freedom will be neutralized.

The entry of some two hundred thousand Palestinian workers each day to workplaces in Israel and the settlements is the most crucial factor affecting social and political reality in the West Bank.

The result has been a continued and unprecedented increase in the number of West Bank residents (also Gaza Strip residents since 2021) working in Israel and the Israeli settlements. In 2022, this number reached some two hundred thousand workers.[23] This crucial social and productive population from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip finds itself increasingly reliant on the Israeli economy for its livelihood, which has important strategic implications.

In the context of the PA’s economic weakness and the low salaries in both the public and private sectors in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian trade unions face a structural problem stemming from the Paris Protocol (an economic appendix added to the Oslo Accords in 1994): no Palestinian union, rights organization, or lawyer has the right to intervene in the legal status of Palestinians employed in Israel or in the territories under Israeli control.[24]

The entry of some two hundred thousand Palestinian workers each day to workplaces in Israel and the settlements is the most crucial factor affecting social and political reality in the West Bank. With no political horizon, the increase in their numbers magnifies the scale of their abuse. These workers are “bound” to their employers via a complex permit system that results in an illegal trade in permits and violations of workers’ rights.

This large group of workers, whose average wage is three times higher than the average wage of those in PA areas, contributes approximately US$4.0 billion to the Palestinian gross national product annually (16 percent of the gross national income).[25] All rules and regulations governing these workers are unilaterally determined by Israeli authorities and are being implemented unilaterally. These workers cannot benefit from the guidance or support of Palestinian unions to defend themselves.

The general mood in the Palestinian arena is one of despair and helplessness. This might explain the overall underestimation of the Israeli protest movement and its potential long-term contribution to the Palestinian struggle. Apart from the voices of individual intellectuals like lawyer Jawad Boulos, writer Muhammad Ali Taha, and others,[26] Palestinian public opinion almost entirely ignores the possibilities created by the current crisis in Israel.[27]

A New Kind of Union for Palestinians and Israelis
MAAN Workers Association—which I direct—is the only Israeli trade union organizing Palestinian workers and accepting them as full and equal members alongside its Israeli members.

In 2009, MAAN began acting in the interface between Palestinian workers and the Israeli authorities and employers,[28] announcing that it was the representative organization for Palestinian workers at the Salit Quarries in Mishor Adumim.[29] MAAN demanded that management negotiate over their employment terms. This was the first time in the history of Israel’s colonial control of the Palestinians that such a demand had been made. Later, other workers— including those at Zarfati Garage,[30] Maya Food Industries, and Rajwan food in Atarot among others—declared that they too were joining MAAN. This development has political significance: Palestinian workers struggling for their rights are joining a democratic Israeli organization, which recognizes them as equal members. For the first time since Palestinians began working in Israel in 1970, these workers have the opportunity to represent themselves and take action in their workplaces.

In an article in Besheva magazine in 2019, attorney Yaron Eliram (who represents dozens of firms in the industrial zone of Mishor Adumim), expressed the employers’ concerns about MAAN: “Nearly a hundred businesses . . . are dealing with the phenomenon of repeated allegations, extortion, and brutal association of workers with no real desire to reach a serious dialogue with employers.”[31] This describes the classic Pavlovian reaction of employers whenever workers demand their rights after years of exploitation. MAAN has been accused of being an extremist  organization that supports terror and aims to damage the “good relations” between workers and employers in the industrial zone. In fact, these are exploitative relations, which have kept the workers lacking basic rights for years.[32] When MAAN began unionizing at Salit Quarries in 2009, for example, we met workers who had never received the mandatory pay-slip, proving they were employees of the company. In the Zarfati Garage, we met workers who had been paid New Israeli Shekel (NIS) 2,500 a month when the legal minimum at the time was NIS 4,850. Before they organized with MAAN, Zarfaty workers had no insurance for work accidents, no paid sick leave, and no pay-slip. In Maya Industries, it was common for workers to be fired without warning if they refused to work overtime.

MAAN Workers Association . . . is the only Israeli trade union organizing Palestinian workers and accepting them as full and equal members alongside its Israeli members.

MAAN’s activities have led to significant change. Despite several setbacks in recent years, we have succeeded in reaching pathbreaking collective agreements in the industrial zones of Atarot[33] and Mishor Adumim,[34] with ripple effects in other factories as well. MAAN’s social media posts and press releases are reposted widely, and thousands of workers are in close contact with the organization, perceiving it as dependable.

In addition to unionizing and negotiating collective agreements in non-unionized workplaces, MAAN is also active on broader questions of policy. For example, MAAN successfully petitioned the National Labor Court in 2020 to end the payment of agency fees to Histadrut.[35] For years, these fees had been deducted from the wages of Palestinians, often overnight and without authorization.

MAAN also closely monitors harsh conditions at checkpoints for Palestinians entering Israel. In the second half of 2022, MAAN pressured the authorities to deal with the urgent issue of sexual harassment of Palestinian women agricultural workers at the Tulkarem checkpoint.[36] MAAN’s intervention led to greater oversight at the checkpoint, putting an end to the harassment.

MAAN, together with Legal Aid for Palestinians, initiated a public campaign that calls on the Israeli authorities to issue a “green card” for Palestinian workers and an end to the trade in permits . . .

Since 2021, MAAN has led a major public campaign to fight the permit regime that regulates the entrance of Palestinian workers to Israel. The current system violates International Labour Organization standards as it leads to a massive illegal trade in permits. Moreover, all workers, including those who do not need to buy permits from brokers, are bonded to their employers and thus subjected to forced labor conditions. According to recent statistics, some fifty-eight thousand workers are forced to buy their permits and end up paying NIS 2,500 per month.[37]

Data we have gathered reveal that this criminal activity has continued unabated for years although all government agencies recognize its harmfulness.[38] The authorities are not stopping hundreds of Israeli contractors who manipulate the system and engage in this trade in permits, reaping NIS 1.7 billion in black money in 2022.[39] On the other side, the PA allows broker’s agencies, which receive the permits from Israeli contractors, to sell them openly in the main squares of towns in the West Bank. After they charge each worker NIS 2,500 per month, they take their part of the profit and send the rest (estimated at 80 percent) to the Israeli contractor. In order to force the worker to pay them every month, they demand open promissory notes, which can be used as a threat to file a criminal charge against the worker and thus might cost that worker the ability to get a work permit.

There is a criminal aspect to this system, including human trafficking and tax evasion by hundreds of companies engaged in these profitable businesses. However, another aspect is the inherent super exploitation that leaves workers unprotected and powerless: they get through the border using the permit they have bought, and then they seek another employer in the “free market.” These workers are often employed in dangerous conditions, without insurance or employment security, and they fall victim to extreme abuse.

The protest movement in Israel has the potential to engender significant democratic change, since it provides an opportunity to raise fundamental questions that have been silenced or dormant for many decades.

To counter this, MAAN, together with Legal Aid for Palestinians (LEAP), initiated a public campaign that calls on the Israeli authorities to issue a “green card” for Palestinian workers[40] and an end to the trade in permits by granting permits directly to workers. This Green Card Campaign was conceptualized through many discussions and meetings with Palestinian workers who belong to MAAN’s activists group. MAAN is engaged in an intense exchange of ideas with organizations and institutions who do research and work on this issue. Our call to issue green cards to  Palestinian workers has been discussed with government officials and presented officially to the Inter-Ministerial Committee, a committee that was formed in June 2022 to propose new ideas on how to regulate the permit system.[41]

A Democratic State for Palestinians and Israelis
Today, there is broad agreement that the “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians, which began in Oslo in 1993, has reached a dead end. There is no political force on the Israeli side or on the Palestinian side able to implement a “two-state solution.” The establishment of Israel’s extreme rightwing government, which aims to impose an apartheid regime on the Palestinians, confirms this deadlock. Given this reality, many are calling to abandon the “two-state” paradigm, based on separation between the two peoples, and replace it with the principle of a democratic one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis that is based on the idea of cooperation and working for a system that serves everybody without regard to their national affiliation.[42]

The protest movement in Israel has the potential to engender significant democratic change, since it provides an opportunity to raise fundamental questions that have been silenced or dormant for many decades. MAAN’s activities on both sides of the separation barrier and its active participation in this movement for democracy[43] contribute to the creation of a new social, cultural, and political reality of equal partnership between Israelis and Palestinians. This may be proof that a democratic Israeli-Palestinian partnership is not just a dream for the distant future but a reality that can be built today.