Work, Reciprocity, and Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Jisr al-Zarqa
Open Access DepositedEntangled Labor, Entangled Lives
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Jisr al-Zarqa (Jisr for short) is the last remaining Palestinian fishing village on the Israeli coast and one of the country’s poorest municipalities. Its history of proletarianization and survival is emblematic of settler-colonial capitalism and the process whereby settlers seek to expropriate the majority of native land while maintaining a native reserve army of labor to be exploited by the settler economy. In 1922, during what many Jisrawis call their “first Nakba” (“catastrophe”), settlers from Zichron Ya’akov and the Jewish Colonization Association purchased, drained, and cultivated the marshland in which Jisrawis (then called al-Ghawarneh) had lived for hundreds of years. These evicted Ghawarneh were concentrated in a new village, named Jisr al-Zarqa, and hired as agricultural wage laborers on the settlers’ farms. This dependent labor relationship made Jisrawi labor so indispensable that the head of Zichron Ya’akov intervened during the “Second Nakba” of 1948 to protect Jisr from destruction, allowing villagers to become Israeli citizens in the process. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jisr, this dissertation traces the long-term impacts of these two nakbat on Jisrawis’ everyday lives. Most Jisrawis supplement their formal, waged labor outside the village with some sort of labor, often informal or unpaid, within it. This doubled labor is deeply embedded within Jisrawi social—particularly familial—webs of reciprocity. Jisrawis work a second shift to invest in their children’s education, hoping to take advantage of new education opportunities abroad and labor demands at home (particularly in healthcare) to improve their family’s economic future. These networks have become an important social safety net for villagers in the context of the state’s continued under-investment in Palestinian citizen communities. I argue that Jisrawi labor reveals and reproduces the entanglements that are central to both Israel’s survival and Palestinians’ survival within it. While Jisrawi labor reveals how these relationships are often deeply unequal and exploitative, Jisrawis’ reciprocal labor and their discourse around it articulate an alternative ethic of responsibility in which labor performed for others should be properly reciprocated. This ethic of responsibility serves as the basis for their critiques of the state and society, calling on neighbors, the municipality, and the state to properly compensate Jisrawis for their labor contributions.
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