Summary
The traditional, lower-tech and labour-intensive industries — packaging, plastics, furniture and food processing — located in industrial zones in the West Bank colonies, where, on Shir Hever’s account, substantial government subsidies, lower taxes and access to an exploitable Palestinian workforce let them compete with cheap East-Asian imports (Exploitation of Palestinian Labour in Contemporary Zionist Colonialism, PDF p.5 / printed p.128).
Details
- Shlomo Swirski noted colony industries tend to be slightly lower-tech and more labour-intensive compared to Israeli industries, although some notable exceptions exist (PDF p.5, note 5).
- Colony employers distance themselves from workers through local Palestinian contractors who bring the workers, avoiding responsibility for their rights and reporting of numbers, a disavowal deemed illegal by the Israeli courts but still in practice (PDF p.3).
- About 28,000 Palestinians work in the colonies, 3.2% of the West Bank workforce and 2.2% of the total Palestinian workforce, on rough estimates (PDF p.3).
- The Palestinian Authority’s 2010 boycott of colony products highlighted the industry’s role; Shraga Brosh of the Manufacturers Association of Israel lobbied to protect it (PDF p.5).
- In the absence of statistics — the government uses different tools to obfuscate the distinction between colony industries and Israeli industries — the actual importance of the colony industries remains unclear (PDF p.5).
Related pages
Exploitation of Palestinian Labour in Contemporary Zionist Colonialism, Shlomo Swirski, Shraga Brosh, Kav Laoved