Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture

For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer's ethnography of the region and its people, ...