In a letter sent by Attorney Elad Kahana of Kav LaOved on behalf of Kav LaOved, MAAN Workers Association, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the organizations called on the committee to publish the agendas of its meetings in advance. This would allow civil society organizations and professional experts to present relevant information, data, and arguments before decisions are made.
The organizations say this is especially important because decisions on the employment of large numbers of migrant workers have a major impact on Israel’s economy and labor market.
The letter, sent on Monday, July 27, was addressed to Amir Barkan, Deputy Director General for Environment and Infrastructure at the Prime Minister’s Office; Daniel Itach, Director of the Economy and Infrastructure Division at the Prime Minister’s Office; and Deputy Attorney General Adv. Avital Sompolinsky.
The three organizations argue that the committee’s current conduct shows a clear bias. Employer representatives are regularly invited to take part in its discussions, while organizations representing migrant and Palestinian workers are excluded and are not given an opportunity to present their views.
The Director-Generals Committee operates under Government Resolution No. 1752, adopted in May 2024, which significantly increased the quotas for recruiting migrant workers from abroad. The resolution gave the committee the authority to approve requests for migrant workers in different sectors of the economy according to labor market needs.
According to the organizations, it became clear soon after the committee received these powers that it was operating with very little transparency. The committee was originally given these powers in the context of the government’s decision, following October 7, 2023, to prevent Palestinian workers from entering Israel. Migrant workers were presented as a replacement for Palestinian workers who could no longer reach their jobs.
In practice, however, the committee also approved the recruitment of migrant workers in sectors where Palestinian workers had not previously been employed. These decisions were made without sufficient public discussion or oversight.
As a result, in September 2024 the organizations petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice (HCJ). They asked the Court to require the Director-Generals Committee to work transparently and allow public discussion before major decisions on the recruitment of migrant workers are made. They also asked that human rights organizations and other public stakeholders be allowed to submit their positions and objections before decisions affecting Israel’s labor market are adopted.
The HCJ rejected the petition on March 9, 2025. However, Justice Ofer Grosskopf stated that he expected the Director-Generals Committee to involve the public in its work and publish its meeting agendas in advance.
According to the organizations, nothing has changed since the ruling. The committee continues to make important decisions without transparency or public discussion and has failed to address important reports published by civil society organizations over the past year.
In April 2025, Kav LaOved published a major report, Spare Parts: Supply and Exploitation of Migrant Workers During Wartime. The report documented what Kav LaOved described as the systematic exploitation of migrant workers recruited to Israel in recent years.
According to the report, one of the causes of this exploitation is the decision to allow large-scale recruitment of workers through private recruitment arrangements without adequate supervision. This marked a departure from the previous policy, under which migrant workers were mainly recruited through bilateral agreements between Israel and their countries of origin.
In October 2025, MAAN Workers Association published another report, Barred from Their Jobs. The report examined the severe consequences of the government’s decision to prevent Palestinian workers from entering Israel following the outbreak of the war in October 2023.
MAAN Workers Association says that the decision to replace hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers with migrant workers was made too quickly, without sufficient professional examination or meaningful public debate, and without proper consideration of the consequences for both Palestinian and Israeli workers.
The authors of these two reports were not invited to present their findings to the Director-Generals Committee, and their conclusions were never discussed by the committee.
Further support for the organizations’ concerns came from the Israeli Ministry of Labor’s annual report on the state of the labor market in 2025. The report that was published in July 2026 criticized the continued expansion of migrant labor and warned about its possible negative impact on Israel’s labor market and workers’ wages. It also concluded that growing dependence on large numbers of migrant workers can delay the introduction of new technologies and reduce incentives to improve productivity in Israeli industry.
MAAN repeats its opposition to the blanket ban on Palestinian workers entering Israel, which it considers a form of collective punishment. MAAN hopes that a new government, expected to be elected this autumn, will carry out a comprehensive and professional review of Israel’s policy toward both Palestinian and migrant workers and put an end to the current government’s irresponsible handling of this issue.
