The Agony of Crossing to Work: Palestinian Labor in Israel and Alienation.

Building on Marx's theory of Alienation and deriving from an indigenous framework, my paper argues that Israel's modern and settler colonial state managed to create alienated laborers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip through various mechanisms of its racial capitalist and settlers' power. The Palestinian laborers' feelings of Alienation appear clearly in their daily discourses and narratives, expressing the unjust, thus harrowing work conditions they experience daily when crossing to their workplaces in Israel. But more than that, the workers become emotionally exhausted by realizing their labor benefits and empowering their oppressors, and subsequently, that power is used against Palestinians in many ways. Some of the expressions that the Palestinian workers frequently echo are:

"I hate this work In Israel; it fills me with shame."

"I know that people in my village have this idea about me as if I am a traitor."

"I do not have other choices; if the Palestinian Authority offers us good wages, I will never think of work in the Israeli settlements."

Historically, the Palestinians have been deprived of working in their lands as peasants through a systematic process by the colonial power(s), which started with land "transfer" and "grabbing" before 1948. It developed into a territorial "closure" and active building of settlements after 1967. Then, the land and the body control evolved through a severe security apparatus after the first Intifadah of 1987. The Israel surveillance system was used to not only control people's mobility but also humiliate them and degrade their dignity. Those control processes have evolved in the last 76 years to become increasingly entangled with "a security apparatus" that incorporates key features of Foucault's idea of "surveillance" to discipline society and subject people to their power to ensure their humiliated life and obedience to the colonial capital system of Israel.