At the end of December 2023, the Histadrut Leumit (affiliated with the right wing Likud Party) published an official document filled with nationalist rhetoric, culminating in a call to take advantage of the war in Gaza to bring about a total halt to the employment of Palestinians in Israel, replacing them with migrant workers from foreign countries.
Instead of fulfilling its role as a labor organization and defending workers’ rights, it chose to engage in populist arguments and ignored the destructive impact of mass importation of migrant workers on the Israeli labor market (including on the workers it represents).
The main union federation Histadrut, on the other hand, did not take a formal stance on the matter. Some senior officials in the Building Workers’ Union initiated informal meetings with government officials to explore the possibility of reinstating Palestinian workers, but the organization clearly avoided taking an official position on the lockdown imposed on Palestinian workers since October 7.
While many people in Israel adopted after October 7th the accusation towards workers from Gaza that they served as informants for Hamas, it later became clear that this charge was baseless. (see journalist Nahoum Barnea in Yediout Ahronot on this).
However the two Labour Federation remained conspicuously silent. As mentioned above Histadrut Leumit called openly to ban Palestinian workers and the Secretary-General of the Building Workers’ Union, Yitzhak Moyal, declared in a Knesset discussion in early July that immediate action should be taken to import 100,000 migrant workers to save the construction sector.
It is worth noting that for decades all Palestinian workers paid dues to the Histadrut. In 2019, Histadrut Leumit was also allowed to receive membership fees from thousands of Palestinian workers through arrangements imposed by the Payments Department of the Population and Immigration Authority. Only in 2020, through a legal process initiated by MAAN these illegal deduction of dues was stopped. One would have expected that millions of shekels in dues paid over the years by Palestinian workers would oblige these labor organizations to take a fairer stance today. Their stands are in stark contrast to the principle of solidarity between all workers upon which labor unions worldwide were built.
