Book talk: "Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture"

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents

Matan Kaminer
Lecturer in Business and Society, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London

Henry and Marilyn Taub Associate Professor of Israel Studies; Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies; and Director, Taub Center for Israel Studies, New York UniversityFor 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, argues that the paid and unpaid labor of Thai migrants has been essential to resolving the clashing demands of the bottom line and Zionist ideology here as elsewhere in Israel's farm sector.

Kaminer's account mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the Arabah. Placing the findings of fieldwork as a farm laborer within the ecological, economic, and political histories of the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws surprising connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labor flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the "interaction ideologies" found among both migrant workers and settler employers, and raising the question of the place of migrants who are neither Jewish nor Arab in visions of decolonization, this book demonstrates anthropology's ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations.

Matan Kaminer is Lecturer in Business and Society and joined Queen Mary in 2024. His background is in cultural anthropology, political economy, and political ecology. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University.

A long-time activist, he has participated in movements against militarism and occupation, in solidarity with migrant workers, and for the democratisation of academic life. His research on agricultural labour migration from South and Southeast Asia to the Middle East encompasses geo-political and geo-economic processes from the perspective of the most marginalised.  Matan’s research interests include (but are not limited to!) the political ecology of desert agriculture, the racialisation of agrarian labour, and labour migration in the Indian Ocean world.

His most recent interests span the history of proletarianisation in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere and the synergy between exploitation and elimination of the indigenous in colonial contexts. His book, "Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture", is out now and available from Stanford University Press.

Contact: Liz Flanagan