Labor has long been a central category of Palestinian studies.Footnote ¹ This is true in part because of the specific development of Middle East Studies as a field in the English-language academy, much of which has regarded labor as an indispensable category of analysis for its own historical and institutional reasons. But this is also the case because of the specific historical centrality of labor to Zionism as a political project, and the consequences of this for Palestinian society.

Since the second aliya (wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine) around the turn of the twentieth century, the “conquest of labor” was a key aim of Labor Zionism: the replacement of the Palestinian laboring classes with Jewish settlers as a means of establishing a complete Jewish society in historic Palestine, and a parallel ideological investment in making productive laborers of European Jews historically denied access to many kinds of work. As the colonization of Palestine progressed, the “conquest of labor” evolved from a mere slogan espoused by a marginal political movement into a set of material and institutional arrangements that used labor – in combination with the acquisition of land – as a fulcrum of Palestinian dispossession. From the late Ottoman period onward, Palestinian farmers were evicted from lands their families had worked for generations to make way for Jewish farmworkers and Zionist agricultural colonies, or kibbutzim. Under the British Palestine Mandate (1920–1948), the Histadrut labor federation worked to attract Jewish labor to the yishuv (the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine), to remove Arab workers from the Jewish sector of the economy, and to expand that sector into new economic activities, with the aim of building a self-sufficient Jewish economy in Palestine.

As the contributors to this roundtable make clear, while there have been moments of greater and lesser dependence on Palestinian labor, the logic of replacement through labor has been with actually existing Zionism since well before the State of Israel existed. Over time, the “conquest of labor” succeeded in creating Jewish laboring classes in historic Palestine while pushing Palestinians outside of labor’s normative and institutional boundaries, into the position of the unemployed, the non-unionized worker, the “backward” peasant, and the reserve army of labor. But as Palestinian intellectuals from George Mansour and Ghassan Kanafani to Rashid Khalidi have long contended, the removal of Palestinian farmers from their lands and workers from employment in the Ottoman and Mandate periods also created the conditions for both civil and armed resistance, culminating in the 1936–1939 nationalist revolt against Zionist colonization under British occupation. Meanwhile socially reproductive labor has continued across the decades, sustaining Palestinian life and resistance through alternating periods of exploitation and removal.

Ismat Quzmar and Taher Labadi open the roundtable with an analytical framework for understanding labor as an instrument of colonial control. As they note, the yishuv and then –following the 1948 nakba – the State of Israel have long depended on Palestinian labor. But as Quzmar and Labadi argue, rather than fostering a mutually beneficial interdependence, under colonial conditions the unequal and conditional use of Palestinian labor has enabled “elimination (through the exclusion of producers and the destruction of economic autonomy), exploitation (of a cheap and disposable workforce), and discipline (through sorting, permits, and surveillance).” The authors aptly describe this as a “mode of domination structured through labor.”

But Palestinians have repeatedly challenged this mode of domination. Omar Jabary Salamanca provides a case study of a strike by Palestinian workers in defense of a critical national infrastructure. Following Israel’s 1967 conquest of the whole of historic Palestine and the ascent of the right-wing Likud Party in Israeli politics in the late 1970s, Palestinian employees of the Palestinian-run Jerusalem District Electric Company (JDEC) struck against plans to establish Jewish settlements in areas served by JDEC’s concession and to cede these potential new customers to Israel’s national power company under the logic of “Jewish electricity for Jewish customers.” As Salamanca argues, Palestinian electricity workers saw this as a threat to JDEC’s long-term viability, and mobilized to safeguard both their economic interests as employees and JDEC as a “popular infrastructure” belonging to the Palestinian nation, demonstrating in the process that “in a colonial context the national struggle is, in essence, a class struggle.”

Faiq Mari tells the more ambiguous story of the Palestinian cooperative movement. Mari traces the evolution of cooperatives in Palestine from Ottoman-era practices of communal land use and the British Mandate’s formalization of cooperative societies in support of the kibbutz movement, through to the State of Israel’s conditional support for Palestinian cooperatives in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) and the role played by unofficial Palestinian cooperatives in supporting revolutionary uprisings like the First Intifada (1987–1993). Mari shows that Palestinian cooperatives have often served as conduits for colonial dependency – especially during the era of the Oslo “peace process” from 1993 onward, which purportedly aimed at the creation of an independent Palestinian state – but that the cooperative movement nonetheless contains the seeds of Palestinian self-sufficiency and revolutionary mobilization.

Samia al-Botmeh describes the consequences of the current genocidal war for Palestinian labor in the West Bank. She argues that due to the West Bank’s structural dependency on the Israeli economy, post-October 7 detentions, movement restrictions, and supply chain disruptions have resulted in a massive increase in unemployment, a dramatic drop in income, and a deepening dependence on informal employment and the services sector at the expense of productive agricultural and manufacturing work. Botmeh comes to a similar conclusion to Quzmar and Labadi: that conditional Israeli dependence on Palestinian labor is entirely consistent with long-term processes and strategies of elimination.

Finally, Mai Taha raises the question of how to think about social reproduction – and how to write in general – in the context of the genocide in Gaza. What does reproductive labor become when labor as such has been halted, and when homes are being intentionally destroyed on an industrial scale? In what moments does reproductive labor sustain oppression and exploitation, and in what moments does it sustain resistance and life beyond mere survival?