EDITION: CLASS.
The supposed “naturalness” of the Thai migrant agricultural worker as a basis for examining the longer history of racialisation and class formation in Zionist agriculture.
Cedric Robinson’s “racial capitalism” thesis, which has gained enormous influence in recent years, posits that since its earliest beginnings in medieval Europe, the capitalist mode of production has always thrown up racial formations as well as class ones.1 Though Robinson opposes his thesis to orthodox Marxist accounts of racialisation, I believe that a thoroughly historical-materialist approach to the question is likely to corroborate his thesis. Here I take up the challenge of analysing the emergence of a social sign which is at the same time classed and raced, that of the Thai farmworker in Israel, in historical materialist terms. First, I examine my own ethnographic experience of encountering tailandim (sing. tailandi) in the Israeli countryside and of working side by side with them on a farm, using the semiotic concept of “bundling” to show how imputed qualities that are analytically separable into race and class components are merged in reality. I then take up one aspect of the semiotic bundle of the tailandi – his supposed “naturalness” – to examine the longer history of racialisation and class formation in Zionist agriculture. Examining the successive mobilisation of Palestinians, Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jews, and Thais for this labor, I discuss why and how the two relevant senses of the adjective “natural” – close to organic nature, and naturally fit for the work – tend to reappear despite the obvious differences between these groups.
Perceiving the tailandi
You’re in the passenger seat of a car, somewhere in the Israeli countryside, perhaps between Tel Aviv and Beer Sheva. Looking idly out the window, you see people working in the fields, hunched over, swaddled head to foot despite the heat, something like the figure in the photo below. If you’re Israeli, you have no trouble identifying them: tailandim – among the 25,000 migrants from Thailand who make up the bulk of the country’s agrarian workforce. This is the way most Israelis see Thai migrants, not in their mind’s eye but in reality: distant figures in a field, gendered male but only presumably so, covered up in a way which renders them alien and inscrutable, and moving their body in a way which also seems very foreign but at the same time appropriate for the labour.
A bit later you stop for gas. In the air-conditioned convenience store where you gulp down a burnt espresso you see a mocha machine repurposed as a tip jar, with a childishly scripted little handwritten sign, saying “If I work like a tailandi, don’t I deserve a flight to Thailand?” 2
This text makes immediate sense to you. The convenience store cashier, perhaps inspired by the agricultural landscape around, is hyperbolically comparing his own work to that of the tailandim, who – as everyone knows – are astoundingly hard workers, and also happen to hail from a tourist wonderland of azure waters and coconut ice cream. The “flight to Thailand” which will take the tailandim home, making sure they don’t become a “demographic problem” for the Jewish state, is humouristically repurposed here as a reward for the Jewish citizen’s work, which – though neither as hard nor as meagerly remunerated – will also include a flight back home, where his presence is required for that same demographic fight to retain a Jewish majority.3
In Hebrew tailandi is simply the ethnonym for people from Thailand, gendered male by grammatical default but also by the overwhelmingly male composition of the workforce.4 But it is also something more. The vast majority of migrant farmworkers in Israel today are Thai, but not all. Thus, I have heard farmers saying things like “one of my new tailandim is Vietnamese,” or describing the work on offer to me, an aspiring workplace ethnographer, by saying “you’ll be working like a tailandi and getting paid like one.” The sign is obviously a racial one, insofar as it hinges on the imagination of a human type as possessing deeply embodied and immutable characteristics, which imply a certain (marginalised) position vis-à-vis the state; but at the same time it is also a class label, marking a particular position in the social division of labour as well as a particular level of remuneration which is constituted as appropriate for those who fill that position.5
The tradition of semiotics forged by Charles Saunders Peirce, unlike the better-known Saussurean tradition, begins its investigation of signs not with the assumption that signification relies on arbitrary convention, but by looking at its roots in the relations of similarity, causality and contiguity that subsist between phenomena in the real world. I will take up Webb Keane’s concept of “bundling,” which points to the way signs can come to encompass diverse phenomena through their shared features.6 But while such features are often physical, they do not signify on their own; for signification to take place, an interpretant must be present to make the connection against a ground of previous interpretive action. Thus Peircean semiotics, unlike the Saussurean, is open to both materiality and history.
The history of Thai labour in Israel is short, but grim. Following the government’s strategic decision to wean the economy off Palestinian labour (see below), in the 1990s the Israeli agricultural sector shifted to dependence on the labour of guestworkers from Thailand, who are allowed to come for five years only, and only once. Couples are not allowed to migrate together, and female migrants who get pregnant must choose between keeping their baby or their job. Under the Israeli migration regime, which is very similar to the kafala system in place in the Gulf states and Lebanon, employers are made responsible for the behaviour of their employees, such that if any one of them violates the terms of the contract, the employer is docked one “visa” or employee permit. This turns employers into de facto law enforcement agents as regards their workers’ right to stay in the country. At the same time, their rights as workers – theoretically equal to those of Israelis – are left completely unenforced, and the prevailing wage hovers at about 70% of the legal minimum.7 Of all the migrant and refugee groups in Israel, Thais are perhaps the most socially isolated. This compound isolation is linguistic – they do not speak Hebrew, Arabic or English, and usually have few opportunities to learn; geographic – they are concentrated in the most thinly populated parts of the country; as well as economic – they simply do not have enough money to participate in social activities, especially after remitting a large part of their income to family at home.
While some of these facts may be known to Israelis who encounter Thais, they do not enter directly into the semiotic constitution of the tailandi. Much more salient, as we have already seen, is the physical appearance of Thai migrants as Israelis encounter them – that is, primarily, at work. Racialist ideologies usually try to their empirical anchors in the naked body, and especially in bodily features such as skin colour, which are imagined as inherited and immutable. But we do not normally encounter strangers in the nude, and other aspects of physical appearance, including clothing choice and bodily comportment, play a much more important role in racial identification than is usually imagined. In the case of Thais in Israel, skin colour does play a role, but one that is quite a bit more complicated than what simplistic racialising schemas assume. Rather than a function of birth, both Israelis and Thais understand dark skin as an index of one’s individual experience in outdoor agricultural labour, though the valuation attached to this index differs between the two countries. In Thailand, a dark, chapped skin (sometimes compared to that of a buffalo) indicates peasant status, whereas in Zionist history, the tanned skin produced by agricultural labour (of a certain kind – as we shall see) has historically been considered highly prestigious.8
In the early days of settlement in the Arabah, a very sunny, hot and dry region in Israel’s far south, settlers worked almost naked – and many paid the price in skin cancer and other diseases caused by exposure to sun and pesticides. Tanned skin is still valourised in Israel, though – like in other wealthy “white” countries – it is now read more commonly as indexing the leisure which permits people to do outdoor sports, rather than outdoor labour. The causal connection between solar exposure and skin colour remains, but its signification has shifted together with the epochal shift from outdoor agricultural work to indoor employment in industry and services. Hence, while Israelis who work in the fields today cover up more than their forebears, they can still be distinguished easily from Thais by their clothing choices, as Figure 2 illustrates.
The photographic series “Behind the masks, there are people” by Danny Hadas, in which Thai workers are pictured in work and leisure attire, highlights the semiotic significance of this sartorial practice. The figure of the tailandi with which most Israelis are familiar, as we have seen, is the one on the right: the one at work. In a reversal of the classic image painted by Marx in Capital, where the worker and the employer meet as equals in the public sphere before the worker is dragged off to the dark recesses of the “abode of production,” here the public image of the worker is the one of him at work; it is rather when relaxing in his home environment, where he can be more easily recognised as a full, modern human being, that the tailandi becomes potentially scandalous.
But human bodies do not appear to us only at rest, and the way they move through space is central to their perception. In the case of the tailandi, a crucial additional element of appearance is what Marcel Mauss calls “body hexis,” the culturally variable ways in which humans approach physical tasks.9 Any casual visitor to the greenhouse in which I worked could observe obvious differences between the way I undertook the required tasks and the approach of my Thai colleagues. For me, planting was the most difficult task on the farm, because of the low height at which it is carried out. Our boss purchased tomato and pepper seedlings in large styrofoam trays, each containing about two hundred units; the trays were watered before planting and were therefore quite heavy. The task of planting consists of moving forward while carrying one of these trays along, plucking one seedling at a time from the tray while taking care not to rip it from its roots, reaching down every twenty centimetres or so to a pre-punched hole in the earth, placing the seedling in the hole, scooping earth over it and then gently tamping it down. This process demands spending a great deal of time close to the ground while moving steadily ahead. The ideal bodily position for it, if one has the necessary skills, is the crouch or deep squat. A stable crouch enables one to work carefully close to the ground and then get up easily to walk to the next hole. Bending over at the waist, as the tailandi in Figure 1 is doing, is another option, but this also requires practice and a particular musculature. Alternatively, one can bend one or both knees to the ground, as I did (see Figure 2). But kneeling is a demanding and inefficient position to get in and out of; it also caked my pant legs with mud, causing me discomfort and embarrassment.
In the West, and particularly in Zionism, the upright stance is valourised and postures like the deep squat associated with primitiveness and animality, and therefore denigrated.10 In Thailand, as in other Asian countries, squatting is normative, and often used in situations where Westerners would prefer to sit on chairs, for example for eating.11 The muscular capabilities developed over a lifetime of squatting allow Thais to carry out ground-level tasks such as planting without touching any part of their body to the earth except the soles of their feet, with a minimum of discomfort and back pain, while keeping themselves clear of the dirt.
Differences in physical appearance, and especially in bodily hexis, form a convenient ground for the bundling process which associates the tailandi with “naturalness,” in a double sense: first, that of being close to nature – quite literally, if “nature” in this case is taken to mean earth and the plants which require it to grow; and second, that of being particularly fit for this sort of work. Israelis who work with Thais often take up this trope: thus, one person who had been involved in recruiting Thai workers waxed lyrical to me about their “green thumbs” and the intuitive aesthetic sensibility which made them fine bouquet-makers as well as farmers and gardeners. Another employer suggested to me in all seriousness that for tailandim farm work represents “a form of meditation.” Such self-serving stereotypes are easy to sneer at, but the semiosis involved is Peircean, not Saussurean; in other words, they are not arbitrary conventions but bundles that seize upon really perceived differences, such as the ones I have described. In order to do so, however, they still require a historical ground.
The “natural worker” in Zionist agrarian history
Thai migrant workers are not the first group of agricultural proletarians in Zionist history to be thought of as “natural workers.” In this section I go beyond the ethnographic present to explore the historical ground for this repeated association of waged farmworkers – but not of landholding “pioneers” – with nature. I argue that an understanding of what Ghassan Kanafani called “the transformation of […] an essentially Arab agricultural economy to an industrial economy dominated by Jewish capital”12 can provide us with the key to understanding why Palestinians, Yemenite and other Mizrahi Jews, and then finally tailandim have all been understood as natural farmworkers while Ashkenazi farmers have, to the contrary, been seen as “voluntary” or “ideological” workers making a sacrifice in service of the nation.
The first wave of Zionist settlement or Aliyah, in the late nineteenth century, was decidedly bourgeois, and the settlers had no compunction about employing indigenous peasants, who – precisely because they had a bit of land of their own – were both skilled and cheap. They raised crops which had been grown locally for years, using methods quite similar to traditional ones, with the exception of the steam-powered pumps introduced for irrigation,13 and the Orientalist sense that the Palestinians were part of the natural landscape carried over easily into settlers’ perception of this workforce. It was only beginning with the Second Aliyah, in the early 20th century, that poor, young Jews from Eastern Europe started to make up the bulk of the settler population. They had little experience in farming, and no land of their own or funds to buy it. Perhaps most importantly, they had other options. In fact, most Second Aliyah immigrants ended up leaving the country for alternative destinations where industrial work was available, primarily the US; but other waves of immigrants from a similar background followed them.
!!!Over time, the leadership of the “labour settlement movement” became convinced that exploiting “foreigners” – that is, Palestinians – was bad not for the exploited, but for the exploiters, who thus exposed their community to moral and even physical destruction.”
The Zionist leadership understood that to retain these settlers in the country, and especially in the countryside – an ideological and strategic goal as well as an economic one – they would have to raise the technological level of agriculture, so as to support a higher standard of living. The result was the establishment of kibbutzim and moshavim – communal and cooperative settlements set up on land bought by the Zionist institutions, who retained ultimate ownership.14 Thanks to economies of scale, new crops and technologies, the establishment of a protected urban market, and other forms of subsidy, these communities were able to provide a relatively high standard of living for their members while declining to employ wage-labour. Over time, the leadership of the “labour settlement movement” became convinced that exploiting “foreigners” – that is, Palestinians – was bad not for the exploited, but for the exploiters, who thus exposed their community to moral and even physical destruction – a new ideological orientation I have elsewhere called “exploitation anxiety.”15 Against the background of rising tensions in the 1929 events, then the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, the idea that the cheapness of Arab labour was outweighed by the dangers it posed became more and more accepted. Just as they began to perceive Palestinian labourers’ intimacy with the land as a threat to their own rights in it, settlers also began to understand their own labour as distinguished by its “voluntary” and “ideological” character from that of the Arab worker.16
So Ashkenazi labour was set up – not only by ideology, but by material practice – as ideological but expensive, and Palestinian labour as natural but dangerous. The terms of the problem foreshadow the appearance of a group which would transcend the distinction – Arab and thus natural, but Jewish and therefore safe. This is precisely how the labour of Yemenite Jews was understood by those who arranged for its importation in the 1910s. The Zionist apparatchiks who brought hundreds of Yemenite Jews to the country imagined that, thanks to their religion, they would conform to the colonisation project, but that since they were Arabs and therefore “natural workers,” they would also be immune to backbreaking labour, unhygienic conditions and low living standards. But As Zvi Ben-Dor Benite demonstrates, both these assumptions turned out to be wrong. The Yemenites generally came from artisan backgrounds, not peasant ones. The horrendous conditions under which they laboured caused many deaths, leading others to abandon their posts and to demand, as Jews, an equal place in the political institutions of the Yishuv.17
Despite this dismal failure, this strategy was resuscitated when hundreds of thousands of Mizrahim immigrated to Israel after the state’s foundation. Many were semi-forcibly settled in the countryside, and many of these were employed in agriculture in the moshavim and kibbutzim, which had just been gifted huge tracts of land which had been expropriated from Palestinians during the Nakba of 1947-49. Like the Yemenites, most of these people had not been farmers before coming to Israel, but their conversion into a rural proletariat was seen as quite fitting by the ruling Ashkenazi elite, again, because of their assumed racial characteristics. Also like the Yemenites, the new Mizrahi settlers were seen as politically safe; indeed, their presence on the frontier was considered a strategic bulwark against the return of the Palestinian refugees. This time the move was more successful – the labour-power of Mizrahi immigrants was mobilised in agriculture for several decades.18
But eventually the contradiction between first-class membership in the political community and exploitation at the bottom tiers of the labour market came to a head. The Mizrahi rebellion of the 1970s – from the protest movement of the Black Panthers in 1970 to the Likud electoral victory of 1977 – can be seen as an expression of this contradiction.19 In agriculture as well as elsewhere in the economy, the conflict was dampened by the occupation of 1967, which opened a huge new reserve of Palestinian labour and enabled a move up the occupational ladder for many Mizrahim. Palestinian labour again became dominant in agriculture, with employers and the state happily enjoying the advantages of exploiting a trapped indigenous population denied independent economic development.20 This contradiction exploded too, of course, in the first intifada of the late 1980s, whose methods included workplace confrontations, strikes and even attacks on employers.21 The workforce whose cheap labour had turned Israel into a wealthy country began to use its ability to withhold that labour to back up political demands. This was very dangerous indeed, and the solution found by the Rabin government of the early 1990s was to wean the Israeli economy off of Palestinian labour by importing migrant workers from abroad.22
Today, the racialisation of the tailandi as a natural farmworker has become so entrenched that Israelis rarely ask themselves why Thailand was selected as the source country for agrarian labour in this period. From the above analysis, indeed, it follows that the solution could have been found in any country whose citizens fit the two principal criteria: first, they could not be Jewish, because the political power afforded by the first-class citizenship to which all Jews are entitled in Israel would eventually translate into bargaining power and therefore higher wages. Second, they could not be Arabs (or Muslims), because these would be as politically dangerous as the Palestinians who had just been ejected from the Israeli labour market. In the event, Thailand was chosen because its military regime’s interest in Israeli settler-colonial know-how had already brought hundreds of “trainees” to barely disguised wage-labour in Israeli fields, with private middlemen in both countries establishing the foundations of an infrastructure for labour recruitment.23
Conclusion: The return of the “natural worker”
As a process of class formation predicated on the primitive accumulation of Palestinian land, the mobilisation of successive groups of workers for farm labour as part of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine has always been accompanied by a racialising ideology. Successive generations of farmworkers have been posited as “natural workers” in the double sense – both close to the nature with which they work, and naturally fit for the labour involved. The association, so powerful as to elide the vastly different histories of Palestinian peasants, Yemenite artisans, North African urbanites and Thai semi-proletarians, may seem amenable to an understanding of ideology as simple propaganda serving the needs of the powerful. But each of these groups (excepting the Thais, for now) has in turn revolted against the ideological determination which bundles “natural” labour with cheapness on one hand and with docility on the other. It is not academic analysis but the political praxis of these groups, from Yemenites abandoning farms to Palestinians rising up and Moroccans voting out the Labor Party, that gives the lie to this naturalising ideology. At the same time, as my ethnographic data shows, this ideology depends for its coherence and continuity – ephemeral as these may be – on the real-world encounter between racialised others and the Zionist gaze.
In other words, the bundling of race and class means that race cannot be understood as an arbitrary “construction” any more than class can. It would be foolhardy, and not particularly materialistic, to ignore the ways in which racism gloms on to the sort of observable differences between groups which might also be understood as class differences. Understanding this does not entail giving in one inch to racism; as I hope to have shown, people conform to such typologies because of the “dull compulsion” of economic and political relations, not because they express some inherited essence. To bring out this contingency, it is necessary to take in the historically specific ground against which such ideological bundles arise. In the case of the “natural worker,” this ground is the primitive accumulation which chases agrarian populations off their land and takes back a small number of them as wage-labourers, often doing the same work but now under vastly different circumstances. A historical-materialistic approach is thus able to show that the naturalness of the “natural worker” is itself anything but natural, providing both further evidence and an additional theoretical argument for Robinson’s thesis. Yet another reason, if any were necessary, to insist that the battle against capitalism and the struggle for racial justice must be closely allied at all scales, from the global to the local.
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Cedric J. Robinson. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; see also Walter Johnson and Robin D. G. Kelley. 2018. Race Capitalism Justice. Cambridge: MIT Press. ↩
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I am grateful to Shahar Shoham for introducing me to this artefact. For further discussion see her forthcoming dissertation, “The Heroes from Isaan Working in Israel: The Production of Migrants in the Thailand-Israel Migration Regime”. Berlin: Humboldt University. ↩
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See Yossi Yonah. 2004. “Israel’s Immigration Policies: The Twofold Face of the ‘Demographic Threat,’” Social Identities 10, no. 2 (March 1, 2004). pp. 195–218. ↩
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A serious discussion of gender is beyond the remit of this piece. For more on the gendering of tailandim, see Matan Kaminer. 2022. “Saving the Face of the Arabah: Thai Migrant Workers and the Asymmetries of Community in an Israeli Agricultural Settlement,” American Ethnologist 49, no. 1 (February 2022). pp. 118–31. ↩
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See also Matan Kaminer. 2019. “At the Zero Degree / Below the Minimum: Wage as Sign in Israel’s Split Labor Market,” Dialectical Anthropology 43, no. 3 (September 2019). pp. 317–32. ↩
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Webb Keane. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things,” Language & Communication 23, no. 3–4 (July 2003). pp. 409–25. For a very accessible introduction to Peirce, see Richard J. Parmentier. 1994. “Peirce Divested for Non-Intimates,” in Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 3–22. ↩
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For details, see Kaminer. “At the Zero Degree / Below the Minimum: Wage as Sign in Israel’s Split Labor Market.” ↩
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For Thailand, see Pattana Kitiarsa. 2018. “An Ambiguous Intimacy: Farang as Siamese Occidentalism,” in edited by Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson. The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp. 57–74; Amare Tegbaru. 2020. “The Racialization of Development Expertise and the Fluidity of Blackness: A Case from 1980s Thailand,” Asian Anthropology 19, no. 3 (July 2, 2020). pp. 195–212. For Israel, Tamar El Or. 2010. “The Winter of the Veiled Women: Covering and Unconvering in 2007/8,” Theory and Critique 37 (Fall 2010). pp. 37–68; Yifat Biton. 2011. “Mizrahim Under the Law: ‘Absence’ as ‘Presence,’” Mishpatim 41. pp. 455–516. ↩
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Marcel Mauss. 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (February 1973). pp. 70–88. ↩
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Sander L. Gilman. 2014. “‘Stand Up Straight’: Notes Toward a History of Posture,” Journal of Medical Humanities 35, no. 1 (March 1, 2014). pp. 57–83. ↩
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Gordon W. Hewes. 1955. “World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits”. American Anthropologist 57, no. 2. p. 238. ↩
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Ghassan Kanafani. 1972. The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine. London: Tricontinental Society. p. 23. ↩
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Tamar Gozansky. 1986. The development of capitalism in Palestine. Haifa: Haifa University Press. ↩
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.Gershon Shafir. 1989. Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ↩
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Kaminer, “Saving the Face.” ↩
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Though the author explicitly refuses a materialist analysis, the attitude of the “pioneers” to land and labor is masterfully explored in Boaz Neumann. 2011. Land and Desire in Early Zionism, translated by Haim Watzman. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. ↩
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Zvi Ben Dor Benite. n.d. “Satan and Labor: Proletarianization and the Racialization of the Mizrahim”. ↩
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Shlomo Swirski and Deborah Bernstein. 1993. “Who Worked at What, for Whom and for How Much? Israel’s Economic Development and the Emergence of the Ethnic Division of Labor,” in edited by Uri Ram. Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives. Tel Aviv: Breirot. pp 120–47; Shelly Shaul. 2016. “From Morocco to a desert city: Migration, settlement and proletarianization in Dimona’s first decade, according to the oral testimony of its residents”. Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv University; Smadar Sharon. 2017. “Kach Kovshim Moledet”: Tihknun ve-Yishuv Hevel Lakhish Bi-Shnot Ha-Hamishim. Tel Aviv: Pardes); Liron Mor, Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Israel-Palestine, forthcoming. ↩
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Sami Shalom Chetrit. 2010. Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews. London ; New York: Routledge, 2010. ↩
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Harold Wolpe. 1972. “Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid,” Economy and Society 1, no. 4 (November 1, 1972). pp. 425–56. ↩
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Leila Farsakh. 2005. Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. ↩
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Rebeca Raijman and Adriana Kemp. 2010. “The New Immigration to Israel: Becoming a de-Facto Immigration State in the 1990s,” in U Segal, N Mayadas, and D Elliot. Immigration Worldwide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 227–43. ↩
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Matan Kaminer, “Transnational Coloniality: The Thai Army, the ‘Frontier Settlement’ Project, and the Beginning of the Migration Flow from Thailand to Israel” (n.d.) (manuscript under review). ↩