Last December, Mahesh Odedara signed a contract to live and work for five years in a war-torn foreign country, thousands of miles from home. Odedara, a 30-year-old farmer from the western Indian city of Porbandar, was aware of the risks of working on an Israeli farm. But Odedara’s contract promised a stable eight-hour workday, strong labor rights under Israeli law, and a monthly salary of 5,571 shekels ($1,500), many times what Odedara earned in Porbandar. was. It was a waste to refuse.
Israeli farms are in dire need of farmers like Odedara. Following the October 7 Hamas attack, the Israeli government banned the entry of tens of thousands of Palestinian workers, a key component of Israel’s agricultural workforce. By the beginning of winter, the farm was facing a “manpower crisis.” With no sign of government policy changing, farmers have since turned to importing thousands of foreign workers from countries such as India, Malawi and Sri Lanka to make ends meet.
Initially, expectations for Odedara were high. With his new salary, he will be able to send home a few hundred dollars each month to support his parents. The funds could also be used to purchase equipment for the family farm. Odedara had hoped that one day he might be able to buy his own house in Porbandar.
But soon after arriving in Israel, Odedara realized that his employer had little intention of honoring his contract. In Ahitub, a farming community in northern Israel, Odedara worked grueling 11- to 12-hour shifts to harvest crops. He was forced to work on weekends and was told he would be paid well below the legal minimum wage. At the end of the month, no salary was paid at all, and Odedara’s boss mysteriously told her that her salary had been transferred to her employer instead.
(When asked for comment, Mr. Odedara’s former employer denied that Mr. Odedara had ever worked for him, but another migrant worker independently stated that he had worked for the same employer. The employment agency did not respond to requests for comment.
The housing provided by the farm for its workers in Odedara was also adjacent to uninhabitable areas. Odedara worked in Hatsab for eight days, sleeping in a makeshift room made of wooden planks and metal panes. His bathroom was an outdoor dirt-floored hut toilet, and there was no hot water in the shower. In the first few months, Odedara said he lost nearly 25 pounds.
Odedara now says she “really regrets” coming to Israel and considers herself one of the lucky ones, but Odedara’s older brother, Bharat, has already worked as a caregiver in Israel for four years. He said he was eventually able to find a job in Israel. Farms with much better working conditions.
But Odedara’s experience with Ahitub and Hatsab is by no means unique. Bharat said abuses and illegal labor practices were widespread. “I used to meet all the new people coming into agriculture. I was talking to them and they all have the same problems,” said Bharat. “They have to fight for their salaries, rights and basic demands. No one will help them. They are powerless.”
Although agriculture is fundamental to Israel’s national identity, the country’s agricultural sector has relied on non-Israeli labor for decades. After Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the government decided to integrate the territory’s population into the Israeli economy. Since then, “Palestinians have become an integral part of the Israeli workforce,” said Adriana Kemp, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University who studies Israel’s workforce. “You can’t talk about whole sectors like agriculture and construction without talking about this large number of Palestinians.”
By the 1990s, following a spate of violence by Palestinian extremists, Israel “started talking about potentially opening up to overseas labor immigration,” Kemp said. “That’s when they really started bringing in (workers) from different countries.” But still, Palestinians remained in large numbers. In 2021, tens of thousands of Palestinian workers accounted for a quarter of Israel’s total agricultural workforce.
Then October 7th came. The Israeli government has banned about 20,000 Palestinian farm workers from re-entering the country, claiming that the farm workers in Gaza provided information to Hamas fighters. (Israel’s internal security authorities have since partially disputed this finding.) Around the same time, a 2012 bilateral agreement between Israel and Thailand meant that Israel’s former largest overseas worker population Approximately 7,800 Thai workers fled after at least 39 were detained. Died in Hamas attack.
Almost overnight, the agricultural sector lost more than a third of its total foreign workforce. In the early weeks of the war, farms drained profits even as Israeli volunteers intervened to help struggling farmers. The Israeli government has announced that up to 5,000 foreign workers will be allowed into the country through November through a new immigration system to replenish its workforce.
When Orit Ronen heard about this plan, she immediately thought it would lead to a “big barragan” (Hebrew for “chaotic mess”). Ronen, who works for Kav Raoved, a Tel Aviv-based labor rights nonprofit, was keenly aware of how vulnerable new arrivals were given existing exploitation. Ronen also noted that many farms lacked adequate infrastructure to accommodate workers, as the Palestinian workers who previously worked on the farms had only commuted from the West Bank or Gaza. I also knew.
Ronen was right to worry. Since early December, when thousands of new workers began arriving in Israel, Kav Raoved has received more than 300 requests for information and assistance from workers reporting persistent abuses. . The situation Odedara and others experienced is clearly illegal under Israeli labor law. But since the Oct. 7 attack, labor law enforcement has been “less than before,” Ronen said. “And even before, it was low.”
The Population and Immigration Authority (PIBA), the Israeli government agency tasked with enforcing labor laws, did not respond to requests for an interview. “We have a call center for foreign workers where they can accurately explain the problem and get tested,” PIBA spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said in an email.
Migrant workers are often reluctant to contact PIBA’s call center for fear of retaliation. Employers are “telling (workers) that if they don’t do what we say, we will send them back to India,” Bharat said. The employer says, “You can’t do that. I know that, but[the workers]don’t. They’re new.” (Under Israeli law, if a worker is fired, the new employer are allowed to stay in the country for 90 days to find
The threat of deportation is particularly strong because most workers are effectively stuck in Israel for the duration of their five-year contracts thanks to the exorbitant fees they pay before leaving for Israel. In Odedara’s case, an Indian agent asked him for a $6,300 slush deposit, which he paid with his family’s savings.
These fees are not a new phenomenon, but labor advocates scored a major victory in 2012 when Israel and Thailand signed a bilateral agreement to eliminate predatory fees for Thai migrant workers. There has been no such provision in the Section 7 immigration system since October, which threatens to undermine this progress. “(Workers), especially from India, paid brokers thousands of dollars,” Ronen said. “For them, it’s a huge deal, and that makes them very vulnerable.”
And then a war breaks out. Melvin Paul, 29, from the southern Indian state of Kerala, was assigned to work at a poultry farm near the Israel-Lebanon border, where the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has been firing rockets almost daily since October 7. .
On the morning of March 4, Paul looked up from cutting down an almond tree and saw a missile coming straight at him and his fellow workers. “I didn’t have time to run,” he said. The projectile was a Hezbollah anti-tank missile and landed “in the blink of an eye.” Paul’s friend Pat Nivin Maxwell, 31, from Kerala, died instantly. Paul, who was standing several yards away from Maxwell, was left with a dime-sized shrapnel wound on the right side of his body.
“Even before the war, agricultural workers working near the Gaza Strip were often injured or killed,” said Michal Tajer, a lawyer who runs the Workers’ Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University. Maxwell is one of at least six farmers killed in rocket attacks in the past decade.
In response to Iran’s attack on Israel on April 13, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs prompted Israeli citizens must register with the Indian embassy and “restrict movement to a minimum.” This warning belies the reality that new workers have far less understanding of the security situation than long-time Palestinian workers or Thai immigrants who have been in Israel for decades.
Paul and his friends were not even informed that their farm was within the closed military zone from which the residents of Margaliot were evacuated in mid-October. “This is my first time coming to Israel,” Paul said. “(I didn’t know) where the firing and the war took place.”
However, the scale of exploitation of migrant workers may soon become even worse. Fewer than 3,000 new agricultural workers have arrived since November. Ronen said an additional 8,000 to 12,000 workers are needed to bring the farm back to full capacity. Another agreement has already been signed to bring 10,000 Sri Lankan workers to Israel in the coming months. More Barragans are likely to follow.
Moving away from the Palestinian workforce would also have serious security implications. Before October 7, the income of Palestinian workers in Israel accounted for about 20% of the Palestinian Authority’s GDP. In recent months, Israeli internal security officials have called on Palestinian workers in the West Bank to return to Israel, warning that the increasingly dire economic situation in the West Bank would lead to further instability and violence. But right-wing ministers in the Israeli government have refused to lift the ban, saying they need to move away from Palestinian workers at all costs.
For workers, their salaries far exceed the meager sums they could earn in their home countries. For Odedara, there is still much work to be done. Although his current job is a significant improvement over his previous employment, his salary is still below the terms of his contract and there is the issue of recouping the missing wages. Odedara “is going to find a solution,” Bharat said. “He wants to stay here, but he wants to be in good shape. He can’t stay like this.”
In any case, after October, seven waves of new immigrants will remain in Israel until 2029. This means that for at least the next five years, many Palestinian agricultural workers will not have jobs to return to, even if the ban on Palestinian labor is lifted.
The only certainty seems to be that Israel must continue to look beyond its own citizens for labor. “Israel has long relied on non-national agricultural labor, whether Palestinian or non-Palestinian,” Kemp said. “This structural dependence is not going away.”
