Below is the contribution of MAAN’s Executive Director, Assaf Adiv, at a discussion held on 21.1.26 with academics, social activists, and Palestinian workers (a summary of the full discussion will be published soon).
MAAN – Workers Association – organizes Palestinian workers in factories in the Mishor Adumim and Atarot industrial zones and defends workers exploited by employers or injured in workplace accidents. Over the past two-plus years, we have been highly active in trying to reverse the Israeli policy that banned workers from entering Israel following the October 7 attack.
Initiated by MAAN, the panel discussion, follows the publication of our comprehensive report covering two years of closure. The report is available on MAAN’s website in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
When the shocking scope of Hamas’s attack became clear, an emergency decree was issued closing all 15 crossings from the West Bank into Israel. As a result, approximately 200,000 Palestinian workers who had been employed in Israel and in the settlements stopped working — 120,000 with permits inside Israel, 40,000 with permits in the settlements, and 40,000 who entered with temporary non-work permits and used them to work.
The war declared by Hamas, as part of the Iranian axis against Israel, changed the country’s attitude also toward the Palestinian Authority and workers coming from it. Israel was using the one-sided clauses of the Paris Protocol (the economic annex of the 1993 Oslo Agreement), where Israel is not formally obligated to employ them. From that moment, these workers were left at home without income and without any social safety net — neither from Israel nor from the Palestinian Authority.
At the same time, thousands of employers — mainly in Israel’s construction sector — were left without workers and forced to shut down sites and delay projects, causing damages amounting to tens of billions of shekels to them and to the Israeli economy.
Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran — fundamentally a defensive war — has enabled extreme right-wing and racist elements, both in Netanyahu’s government and outside it, to create an atmosphere of intimidation that makes objective discussion of the issue extremely difficult. Contractors who admit privately that they need Palestinian workers are afraid to say so publicly.
On the Palestinian side, the Palestinian Authority has positioned itself in opposition to Israel and allowed extremist Muslim nationalist discourse to dominate. Slogans about creating alternative jobs are widely used, but they are not accompanied by real action. Unemployment in the West Bank has reached 500,000. Workers have no health insurance, no emergency assistance, and are pursued over bounced checks and even arrested.
Palestinian workers themselves have been unable to organize an alternative civic force that could chart a different direction from that of Hamas and the
- They lack support from civil society organizations, which has been won over by populist nationalist discourse and complete indifference to this huge segment of society which contributed over 20% to the Palestinian GDP . What does exist, however, is an interesting phenomenon reflecting resilience and a will to live: Facebook and TikTok discussion groups involving thousands each night. I participate in these groups and repeatedly encounter workers striving for a different reality and expressing feelings of betrayal by their leadership.
Several months into the closure, we began witnessing the phenomenon of workers without permits — tens of thousands risking their lives to enter. In meetings I have held recently in the Hebron and Ramallah areas, workers describe total despair and a willingness to risk death by crossing the separation barrier. Estimates suggest that 50,000 workers are employed in Israel daily under these conditions.
One worker told me that after his 8-year-old daughter was humiliated at school because he had not paid the 40-shekel registration fee, he collapsed. He said: “I am 35 years old and healthy. How did I reach a point where I cannot provide my daughter with protection and dignity?” Hundreds have been killed or seriously injured and permanently disabled attempting to cross the separation barrier in al-Ram. In such circumstances, no security system can fully stop this phenomenon.
Israeli employers transport workers through breaches in the fence, house them, employ them, and pay wages — an entire clandestine industry has developed around the unstoppable need to earn a livelihood. Employers who know their workers personally speak with them by phone and urge them to return. Many of these relationships are positive — including employers in Ashkelon, Netivot, and Sderot, not only liberals in Tel Aviv.
In the settlements, workers were rehired after one month (!), and 15,000 are currently employed there. Palestinian workers were also employed in Israeli hotels after October 7, with positive reviews by their employers. During two years no terrorist activity was registered.
Against this background, a serious question is repeatedly raised in Israeli media regarding the logic of the current policy, which is essentially an ostrich policy that ignores the reality that tens of thousands are working in Israel without any permit. Security officials, and certainly economic officials, understand that regulated, controlled entry would create a safety valve and improve stability.
To advance a serious and objective discussion, a political change in Israel is necessary — replacing the failed Netanyahu government with one committed to peace. Even the establishment of a rational government willing to hold a substantive discussion on workers would be an important first step.
Change is also needed on the Palestinian side: a new democratic Palestinian social-political force that can outline practical solutions for workers and the broader population, and that is committed to peace.
It is important to note that the employment system prior to October 7 was itself exploitative and restrictive. Tens of thousands obtained permits through intermediaries in exchange for thousands of shekels under the table each month. In the two years before the war, MAAN and LEAP campaigned to grant workers a “green card” — transferring control over permits to the workers themselves rather than to employers who trade in them.
We believe Palestinian workers deserve the basic rights of free human beings — freedom of movement and the freedom to change employers without losing their permit. It is essential to prevent a return to the destructive practices of the past. Achieving this would be a small but important step toward relations of respect and fraternity between Israelis and Palestinians and toward building a future of equality and freedom for all.
