panned_cakes

By F.M. Shakil – Apr 24, 2024

Israel is mitigating its labor shortage by importing Hindu-only Indians after revoking work permits for Palestinians – an old colonial practice that could impact its deepening geopolitical ties with New Delhi.

On 10 April, in the thick of the war on Gaza, the Israeli government, facing a labor crisis, announced that it would fly in 6,000 Indian laborers during April and May on state-subsidized shuttle flights.

This decision follows Israel’s suspension of work permits for Palestinian construction workers, a move that has significantly impacted its building sector. Israel’s Finance Ministry estimates that the absence of Palestinian laborers is costing the economy about three billion shekels ($828 million) monthly, which could lead to a loss of three percent of GDP as the building and housing markets struggle with debt amounting to 400 billion shekels ($106 billion).

Simultaneously, New Delhi, overlooking the genocide and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza, has agreed to send Indian construction workers to replace the displaced Palestinian workforce. This decision aligns with a bilateral agreement to integrate 100,000 Indian laborers into Israel’s construction industry, matching the number of ousted Palestinian workers.

A colonial strategy

Canadian immigration attorney Aidan Simardone, speaking to The Cradle, compares the situation to historical colonial practices in North America where marginalized European religious groups, like the Puritans, were brought in to service colonial interests.

Israel, he points out, is adopting a similar strategy by recruiting economically disadvantaged Hindu Indians from regions like Uttar Pradesh, aiming to manage demographic and political challenges seamlessly.

The move is also an attempt by Israel to pull the rug out from under one of the thorns on the side of colonialism. Colonialism requires squeezing blood out of a stone, yet this squeezing depends on the sweat and tears of those who are at the bottom of the barrel.

Simardone notes the inherent risks for the colonizer in relying entirely on an indigenous labor force, as workers will rebel when colonialism reveals its true nature.

To steer clear of this predicament, colonizers bring in labor from other parts. These laborers are often pushed to the sidelines as well, but unlike the Indigenous population, they go with the flow rather than swimming against the tide when it comes to the colonial project.

The plight of Palestinian laborers Since Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza began over six months ago, the closure of the occupied territories has severed the economic lifeline of approximately 100,000 Palestinian workers, cutting off their main source of income and depriving them of a financial safety net.

Worse yet, many Palestinian workers did not receive their September salaries as the war commenced before their scheduled pay date.

The fact that so many Palestinians are unable to support themselves in Israel may have disastrous effects on the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) economic agenda and, inadvertently, worsen the occupied West Bank’s security situation.

[...]

From looking at their posts they were able to get enough performance to start caching popular tweets, that doesn't sound that expensive to me. Might get into hosting that soon but putting this out there in the hopes someone else does, I'm happy with my secluded option.

Still, having you all using something being routed thru people who poison results with Israel tweets for teh lulz seems like bad for everyone no?

It looks like Lee Fang is part of some kind of limited hangout thing where they turn this into a vaccine issue. Whenever something can't be omitted it's turned into a tug of war issue nobody wants to spend time thinking about because it's annoying discourse. Just my hypothesis. Still, he's the person I heard about this from first in my RSS feed.

The fact is none of us actually have a threat model for what the people coming at our communities from these orgs look like. All that is put into the code of conduct is a set of rules for slapfighting with whoever is put into the cage next to us. That's putting everyone right where these organizations want.

From the promotional material at least, we can glean security by obscurity is something they expect targets to seek out and something that clients are looking to pay to get past by default, as it harbors the fringes. While this extensive data collection could be said to result in a kind of informational overload in most interpretations, it looks like these low-level tendrils of the intelligence community either have taken their own initiative to groom kids to be terrorists, or it's working as intended, and there is in fact a lot of combing that happens of people's activity well before they're arrested for anything unrelated. I think it would be easy for one really effective data processing employee to keep tabs on dozens of people. We have to assume all these tactics are being used against union organizers obviously.

There's honestly got to be a shift to more secure communications to the point where Starbucks can't get close to pulling employee text records like judges will do for gangs. If it seems like I'm brewing up reasons to worry about this, it's because I remember all the Sbux labor litigation very clearly and how scared people I knew who'd been relying on insecure communications channels became when shit started to hit the fan. But all people tabled was hit like Signal which if not legally accessible seems obviously compromised.