Alienation,Racial Capitalism,and the Racialization of Palestinians

The Never-Ending War on Palestine

According to Simha Flapan state mythology about Israel’s establishment in 1948 presents it as a benevolent event where Jewish immigration to Palestine brought the benefits of development to all inhabitants of the country but were met with resistance from a feudal type of landlord class who believe their interests were jeopardized by European Jewry’s efforts to modernize the country. It was the intransigence of this class that brought calamity to the Palestinian people (Flapan, 1979: 194). This is far from the truth; from the Palestinian point of view, 1948 marked their dispossession of land and resources by a White settler class bent on expansion of their state borders at their expenses (Flapan, 1979). Palestinians termed this dispossession the Nabka or catastrophe. An eventuality that emerged from the Theodo Herzl led first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1887, which proclaimed its objective was to establish a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a place the Zionist Congress claimed was fit for settlement because it was a ‘a land without a people for a people without land (Shapira, 1992)’. Historian Illan Pappé (2006: 448) argues this was the assumption because,

For many Zioinists, Palestine was not even ‘occupied’ land when they first arrived there is in the late nineteenth century, but rather an ‘empty’ one: the native Palestinians who lived there were largely invisible to them or, if not, were part of nature’s hardship and as such were to be conquered and removed.

Pappé (2006) characterizes this dispossession as ethnic cleansing because from the inception of the idea to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Zionists planned to systematically remove Palestinians from their land to repopulate it with Jewish settlers. Pappé notes that during the 1948 Palestine War, 720,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven out or expelled from their homes because of Zionist settler colonialism and its desire for a Jewish state free of Palestinians. This removal process continues along with the active erasure of Palestinians’ personhood and histories as well as appropriation of their culture. This is by no means unintentional; it is an intentional endeavor to fulfill Zionism’s violent mission to clear the land of Palestinians. The state of Israel regularly uses an arsenal of oppressive policies and practices to dispossess Palestinians. Such tactics include forced removal, with over 7 million Palestinians living in refugee camps with no ability to return to their homes; apartheid for Palestinians who currently live in Israel, complete with de jure discrimination; and violent military occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Palestinians are subject to severe restrictions on their movement, thought, and education, and are deprived of basic human rights such as access to water, electricity, and health care. Palestinian universities are constantly assaulted by occupying forces; they are ransacked, bombed, and students, staff, and faculty are shot at, tear-gassed, and arrested.

Under the settler colonial state of Israel, Palestinians face two oppressive prospects: either be exiled from their traditional lands and live as perpetual refugees in the larger Palestinian diaspora or live in occupied territories controlled by racist paramilitary police and military force in what Pappé (2017) asserts is the ‘biggest (open air) prison on Earth’. Israeli officials and media consistently criminalize Palestinian existence, portraying violence against them as ‘isolated incidents’, and claim their resistance to state repression is ‘illegitimate’ or ‘terrorism’. In essence, Palestinians are ‘othered’ to be easily constructed as an existential threat to Israel so they can be dispossessed and cleansed from the land. For example, media regularly frame Palestinians as ‘demons’ to legitimate state violence directed at them. Palestinians under Israeli apartheid and occupation confront racialized narratives and ideologies daily—often in veiled forms—and systems of physical and social control (e.g. extralegal force (vigilantism), mass incarceration, barrier construction, and lethal over-policing) that work in concert to maintain their status as the racial ‘others’. ‘Otherizing’ for displacement within Israel proper is facilitated through segregation and various discriminatory practices such as housing discrimination, disenfranchisement, and over-policing. Such tactics receive tacit support from the state in the form of legal rulings like the September 2014 Israeli Supreme Court decision authorizing rural, Jewish-majority communities to reject Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and other ‘unsuitable’ (non-Jewish) applicants for residency. Support for such discriminatory rulings is fueled in large part by widespread public support among Israeli Jews for chauvinistic laws and policies toward Israeli Arabs.

Through their struggle against Jewish settler colonialism, Palestinian come to understand that their basic human rights are abridged through simultaneous experiences with multiple systems of oppressions that structure their lives and conditions them for submission. These racialized, classed, and gender oppressions are not suffered separately but as a single, synthesized experience which, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2000) argues, work together to solidify oppression’s hold. Collins (2000) refers to such oppression mutuality as the ‘matrix of domination’ where interlocking systems of oppression are organized in structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power to recur across quite different forms of oppression. The structural domain organizes oppression through interlocking large-scale institutions to reproduce subordination of Palestinians. For example, confining Palestinians residentially and geographically in refugee camps, neighborhoods, and militarily occupied and controlled territory like the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The disciplinary domain manages power relations between Israelis and Palestinians through social policies and rulings implemented by the government bureaucracies and surveillance technologies. Palestinians resisting such practices are predisposed to being heavily surveilled, houseless, imprisoned, killed, or deported. The hegemonic domain involves the production and dissemination of ideas, symbols, and images of Palestinians to justify the genocidal practices Israel directs at them. For example, it is common for Palestinians resisting the daily violence of the occupation to be characterized by Israel’s ideational/cultural institutions as inhuman terrorists deserving of elimination. Within these cultural institutions old ideas that uphold the brutality of Zionism are refashioned as common sense to support the dispossession and killing of Palestinians. When Israel’s settler colonial practices and occupation are routinized and naturalized, many Palestinians become susceptible to alienation. At this point, the interpersonal domain of power directs Palestinians ‘to go along to get along’ in ways that perpetuate their subordination. It is through routine daily interactions within and outside organizations that individuals uphold Israeli settler colonialism and the occupation of Palestine. Collins’ formulation of oppression as interlocking systems is useful for helping us better understand how the Israeli Zionist project and occupation operate in layered mutuality to dehumanize and alienate Palestinians. During this endeavor Palestinians are racialized as ‘other’. Given this outcome we use the concepts of ‘alienation’ and ‘racialization’ explain the Palestinian experience under settler colonialism as racial.

Alienation

After the initial ethnic cleansing in 1948, Israel began the process of ‘judaization or Ashkenazification, [which made] Palestinians feel like strangers in their country (Saccol, 2015: 81)’. Yiftachel (1999: 365) maintain that this Judaization marked Israel as an ethnocracy settler society

pursuing a deliberate strategy of ethnic migration and settlement that aims to alter the country’s ethnic structure to ensure the dominant Jews occupy the highest positions in the economic scale, while the indigenous Palestinians are excluded from capital or mobility in the labor market.

Economic relations between colonizers and colonized Fanon (1986) contends are based on the colonizers’ sense of superiority over the colonized. As such, Israeli settler colonialism fashion social relations to rob Palestinians of their status as human beings. Instead of feelings of inferiority, Palestinians are pervaded by feelings of nonexistence (Fanon, 2004). They are stigmatized as existential threats to the state of Israel when they exert their existence. In short, Palestinians are made to feel like strangers, in their homeland, producing a deep sense of alienation among them. Alienation represents an intersection of the personal and the collective, the psychological and the sociological. It involves feelings of powerlessness, meaninglessness, and self-estrangement. Palestinian alienation, then, is generated by design.

Racial Capitalism

The racial capitalism concept first emerged in the context of the anti-apartheid and South African liberation struggles in the 1970s. People aligned with the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa developed the racial capitalism concept to counter liberal analysis, suggesting apartheid is reformable through a reorientation of capitalism to be attentive to questions of ‘race’ and racism (Burden-Stelly et al., 2020; Hudson, 2018). Their conception of racial capitalism enabled them to introduce a stronger structural and class analysis into the interpretive discourse of Black Consciousness which centers what Du Bois termed the dark proletariat: racialized toilers whose historical presence dislodges the pretension of a universal working-class subject, who is invariably ‘white’ (Hudson, 2018). Cedric Robinson (1983) popularized the term racial capitalism in his book Black Marxism, in which he specifies that racial capitalism relies upon and reinforces commodification of racial identity, reducing racially oppressed people to disposable things. Robinson argues that their commodification ignites resistance among oppressed people because it condemns them to die prematurely from violent and exploitative capital extraction conditions that exhaust their bodies and minds.

The elementary thesis of the racial capitalism concept then specifies that capitalism as an economic system subsists on the perpetual accumulation of capital and an increasing rate of said accumulation, and capital ‘can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups’ (Melamed, 2015: 77). To survive, capitalism exploits and preys upon the ‘unequal differentiation of human value’ (Melamed, 2015: 77). As Robinson (1983: 2) put it, ‘the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially [material] racial directions [that] inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism’. Thus, the term racial capitalism requires its proponents to recognize that ‘capitalism is never not racial’, ‘race’ is constitutive of capitalism.

Robinson challenged the Marxist notion of capitalism’s negation of the basic discriminatory tenets of European feudalism, namely, its rigid caste system and reliance upon multi-generational serfdom. Rather than considering capitalism as revolutionary and radically liberating, as, say, Michael Novak (1982) does, Robinson (1983, p. 27) argued for the inverse: capitalism does not liberate the racially oppressed, nor does it reject feudal principles of order. In other words, capitalism bred a new world order that extended rather than deconstructed feudalism’s ethical faults, it intertwined with various forms of racial oppression: slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide.

Robinson asserted that although racial capitalism is not limited to European territories or those previously under Europe’s colonial or imperial rule, it was in the context of 17th-century Western Europe that capitalism and racialism first conflated to facilitate economic exploitation. Thus, racial capitalism, according to Robinson (1983: 27), emanated from the ‘tendency of European civilization . . . not to homogenize [groups of peoples] but to differentiate’—differentiation that led to racial hierarchization and resulting exploitation and expropriation. Through racialism, capitalism facilitates the accumulation of wealth through the unequal differentiation of human value using ‘race’ as an ideology and White racism as a practice to exploit and dominate human beings. It accomplishes this by displacing the uneven life chances that are a characteristic part of capitalist social relations onto raced fictions of differing human capacities (Melamed, 2015: 17).

Alienation of Palestinians

Frantz Fanon (2004), like Robinson, maintains that economic othering is a central component in alienating the colonized/oppressed. He argues that colonial alienation is fundamentally economic: ‘If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: primarily, economic; subsequently, the internalization or, better, the “epidermalization”—of this inferiority’ (Fanon, 2004: 4). That is, ‘colonial rule and the relations it fashioned tried to rob the people under subjugation of their status as human beings’ (Hansen, 1977: 80). And so, instead of feeling inferior, the colonized are pervaded by a feeling of nonexistence (Fanon, 1986: 106).

Due to this systematic negation of the other colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: ‘Who am I in reality?’ (Fanon, 2004: 182).

According to Emmanuel Hansen (1977) colonial alienation is experienced intensely in two main areas: political oppression and cultural degradation. Under political oppression, colonizers control the political destiny of the colonized, who are not allowed to participate in political processes shaping their lives. The colonizers make all decisions, and thus the colonized suffer political oppression that makes them feel like aliens in their own country. In the case of cultural degradation, Hansen (1977), following Fanon contends that colonizers seek to control cultural elements like education and language during their effort to systematically alienate colonized people. Hansen (1977) contends,

Fanon discusses in some detail the cultural factors that lead to such alienation. Of

these, perhaps the most important are education and the language of the colonizer,

which remain the most potent instruments for the systematic alienation of the native. In the colonial territory, the colonizer first imposes its own language on the colonized. The language of the colonizer becomes the official language, the language of commerce and business. [. . .] the language of the colonizer is not only a medium of communication: it is a ‘social artefact’. Thus, to adopt the language of the colonizer is to assume his cultural forms of thought and patterns. [. . .] It is the adoption of the colonizer’s language that estranges the native (p. 93).

From Israel’s independence in 1948, Arabic was a co-official language alongside Hebrew; however, this changed with the 2018 passing of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. This law affords exclusive rights to Jewish people and removes Arabic as an official language. A move that rippled through Israel’s Arab communities who correctly understood it as an unabashedly racist statute. Arabic’s status is now that of an auxiliary language, meaning its use in government documents and in the public sphere is still mandated under Israeli law. The basic law is designed to estrange the Palestinians from their language and facilitate their domination through the organized control of their cultural lives. Through this process, Israel projects their history and culture as standard/normative to facilitate Palestinians internalization of Israeli hegemonic ways of knowing and being which in turn further their alienation. Hebrew is used to erase Palestinian culture and replace it with new Euro/Ashkenazi one. During the process Hebrew is lifted as the superior language with respect to that of the Arabic one.

The Basic law also unequivocally asserts and enshrines the right of national self-determination as ‘unique to the Jewish people’, thereby under-cutting all claims that Israel would be now or in the future be a bi-national state that allows Palestinian citizens now or in the future to have equal status. This law essentially declares that there is no possibility for Palestinians dispersed around the world, to return to the sovereign ‘Jewish state of Israel’. Other parts of the law declare ‘Jerusalem, complete and united’ as the capital of Israel, and for Israel to ‘act within the Diaspora to strengthen the affinity between the state and members of the Jewish people’. The law generated criticism from Palestinians and some Israelis because it does not explicitly state that Palestinian Israelis are equal citizens, nor does the basic law refer to Israel as a ‘democracy’. The codification of such discriminatory statutes continues and enhances the alienation of indigenous Palestinians. Discrimination in against Palestinians is thus a daily reality. As summed up in the 2021 Christian Aid report, inequality characterizes practically all the main fields of private and public life, such as citizenship rights, income, social welfare, employment, land, educational access, health, and political participation (Bell, 2021). Furthermore, the 2001 Amnesty International report entitled Israel and the Occupied Territories revealed how Palestinians face routine and systematic discrimination, in the context of their rights to nationality, freedom of movement, the highest attainable standard of health, family life, education, work, and participation in public life. Palestinian citizens of Israel are prosecuted under incitement laws, but Jewish politicians and groups who incite racially motivated violence do so with almost total impunity. This all suggests that ‘the right to equality and freedom from discrimination is not explicitly enshrined in Israeli law as a constitutional right, nor is it protected by statute’, to ensure the settler colonial state of Israel has free rein to alienate, racialize, and dominate Palestinians. The state’s emphasis is on being Jewish over being democratic.

The Concept of Racialization

Michael Banton (1977) note that racialization is the process by which European imperialists applied racial categories to individuals from colonized nations. Such racial categories, he argued, were based on socially constructed categories tied to perceived and misguided biological differences. In their now classic work, Michael Omi and Winant (2014) made the case that the concept of racialization reflects the ways in which racial meaning(s) become attached to ‘a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group’ (p. 111). As groups become racialized, the state reifies their existence in the dominant social and racial order. For Omi and Winant, the state’s role in the racial formation process is important because racial categories and hierarchies are deeply connected to social, economic, and political processes. According to Omi and Winant (2014), racial formation is ‘the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed’ (p. 109). Racial projects inform the hierarchical organization of ‘race’ by which resources are organized around racial lines. Thus, as groups become racialized, they become embedded into a society’s racial hierarchy and imbued with racial meanings, stereotypes, and generalizations that categorize them as distinctly different from other so-called racial groups. For Omi and Winant, the concept of racialization is central to understanding the creation and reproduction of racial meanings.

Criticisms levied toward Omi and Winant’s interpretation of the concept of racialization are largely centered on their overemphasis of the state’s role in the racial formation process Bonilla-Silva, 2001), its limitations toward understanding newer forms of racism such as Islamophobia (Garner and Selod, 2015), or the uniqueness of racism tied to deeply rooted systemic racism such as can be found in the United States (Feagin and Elias, 2012). These shortcomings are important to note because racial meaning and meaning making through the racialization process is not limited to phenotypic/biological differences, nor only through so-called cultural traits (see Miles, 1993).

Following these conceptualizations of racialization, we understand it as ways in which oppressed groups are dehumanized so they are rendered inconsequential for the purpose of maintaining White supremacy capitalist societies. The process of racialization is often connected to settler colonial projects to help them facilitate alienation, promote otherization, and imbue second-class citizenship for those deemed uncivilized or unworthy of participation in settler colonial societies. We conceptualize racialization as a dynamic process that refashions and renews meanings about ‘race’ and Whiteness in numerous ways in different socio-historical moments to maintain structures of systemic racism crucial for disciplining people into their otherness (Wehelive, 2014). This means that newer activities and cultural forms are given racial meanings and the way in which ‘race’ appears to be a, or often the key, factor in the ways they are defined and understood (Murji and Solomos, 2005: 3). Concertedly, for us, racialization is the process by which colonizers erase differences among and within the colonized in terms of racial categories such as Arab or Black. Fanon (2004) argues that such categorization affirms colonizer’s racial thought and domination is naturalized and legitimated when the colonized adopt them to stake their claim for liberation since it denies the existence of the colonized culture and thought. Since racialization is an instrument of colonialism and domination, Fanon (2004) advocated for looking beyond colonialism models of thought and influence, of which racial categorization, racialization, and racial thinking are examples. Thus, racialization may be best understood as a changing system of ‘race’ based power structures assigning and delimiting ‘whites’ as full humans and racial Others as less than human who must be controlled and dominated for exploitive purposes.

Racialization of Palestinians

The concept of racialization, particularly one applicable outside of the US or Western European context, is a complex and highly debatable conception. On one hand, caution is stressed when trying to employ Global North rationalizations of ‘race’ and racialization typically rooted in the Black/White dichotomy and anti-Black racism, on the other. More recent scholarship on racialization and Muslims (see Selod and Embrick, 2013) is centered mostly on the US or larger Global North experiences. Thus, the racialized dynamics of Israel and Palestine is under explored, particularly as it is linked to the Zionist settler colonial project and occupation of Palestine.

As we, and others (Selod and Embrick, 2013) have argued, racialization is not a new concept. Fanon (2004) complicated his ideas around the ‘racialization of thought’ (in reference to Africans who had adopted a colonized way of thinking about their national identities; see Murji and Solomos, 2005) and alienation through both political oppression and cultural degradation. Miles (1993) further expounds on this line of thought with his argument that the concept of racialization is based on the idea that the object of study should not be ‘race’ itself, but the process by which it becomes meaningful in a particular cultural and historical context. In short, racialization is the idea that the object of study is not ‘race’, but the process by which ‘race’ becomes meaningful in a particular context. By using Miles’ application of the concept, ‘racialization’ we can better understand how racial meanings are assigned to groups that are officially designated as White and racialized Others.

One of the underlying premises of our analysis here is that it is impossible to fully comprehend the Israeli settler colonial project without looking how ‘race’ plays a part in its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As anthropologist, Jemima Pierre (2012) demonstrates in her book The Predicament of Blackness, the logics of ‘race’ and racism and Whiteness are global and inseparably linked to colonial and settler colonial projects. She highlights, for example, how colonizers use indigeneity to racialize colonized people into subordinate and inferior roles. Racialization works through ethnicization—where the constitution and reorganization of the colonized depends on mediating its racial and cultural separation from the colonizers ‘civilized’ society. Zionists legitimized their colonization and occupation by painting the Palestinians who are indigenous to the land as biologically and culturally incompatible with modern life. They therefore regard Palestinians as racial Others who are incapable of living in a country occupied by ‘civilized’ European Jewry. As we mentioned earlier, settler colonial Israel is structured through forms of segregation, legalized exclusion and discrimination that mark Palestinians as the Other. Thus the concept of ‘racialization’ illuminates how this violent process continues to be refined through a dehumanization process that renders Palestinians incapable of being worthy of basic human dignity or rights.

Palestinians as a racialized group are stereotyped by Israel, the United States, and European nations as inferior, uncivilized, barbaric, and violent to justify the occupation and implementation of discriminatory policies against them. Given this political dynamic, it is interesting to witness the boundaries of Whiteness insofar as how, if, and when support for Palestinian liberation emerges. The violence and oppression directed at Palestinians is real. This is not in dispute. Since 1948, the state of Israel has consistently increased its arsenal of oppressive policies and practices toward Palestinians. Such tactics have included forced removal, with over 7 million Palestinians living in refugee camps with no ability to return to their homes; apartheid for Palestinians who currently live in Israel, complete with de jure discrimination; or violent military occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Palestinians as a racialized group are subject to severe restrictions on the everyday freedom of movement; freedom of thought; freedom from violence; freedom of education; and even basic human right needs such as access to water or electricity.

COVID-19 Pandemic

The treatment (or nontreatment) of COVID-19 in Palestine is the latest example of how racial capitalism works in Israel’s favor to alienate and control Palestine (Williams and Embrick, 2022). Israel controls Palestinian lives through its apartheid and military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza while denying any meaningful responsibility for their responsibility for their welfare. This is contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention’s articles 27–34 and 47–78 stipulating that occupying powers have a general obligation to ‘ensure . . . the provision of food and medical care to the population under occupation’, and prohibits ‘collective punishment’ of the occupied population and the ‘confiscation of private property’ by the occupier. Despite this violation of international law, Israel rolled out its COVID-19 vaccine campaign selectively in December 2020. It secured 8 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which did not include dosages for Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza. This was the case even though Israel transported batches of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine deep inside the West Bank to distribute to Jewish settlers, but not Palestinians living around them who waited for weeks or months. Moreover, the Israeli public security minister directed health officials not to administer the vaccine to so-called security prisoners—all of whom are Palestinians (Breiner, 2020). Because racial capitalism exploits and preys upon the ‘unequal differentiation of human value’, it runs counterintuitively to scientific insights for containing the spread of COVID-19. Offering vaccines to just two-thirds of the people under Israel control was not effective at combating the spread of the coronavirus (Karmi, 2020). In contrast to racial capitalism’s differentiation of human groups, the coronavirus makes it plain that we are single species whose differing susceptibility to virus infection and death is the result of the structural regimes of settler-colonial racial capitalism. This requires us to recognize that though people have differences in phenotype, these apparent differences are not understandable using racial capitalism’s narratives of COVID-19 to understand differentiation rates of infection and death because they do not allow us to see racial capitalism’s essentialist differentiating structures as the source of the problem.

To date more than 600,000 Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory have tested positive, with over 5000 deaths related to COVID-19. And as the coronavirus continues to ravage the 4.5 million Palestinians of the East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza—fracturing an already badly under-resourced Palestinian health care system—particularly in Gaza which is enduring ongoing blockade, bombing, serious water and electricity shortages, and endemic poverty and unemployment. Palestinians in Gaza live in an area with little space for physical distancing. Jabilia, for example, the largest of Gaza’s eight refugee camps houses 110,000 people in the area that is only 1.4 square kilometers (345 acres) (Deutsch, 2020). Palestinians are resource deprived and cordoned off in ways that increase the probability of their contracting and dying from coronavirus as compared with resource rich Israeli occupiers. Exports from Gaza are almost completely blocked, imports and cash transfer are severely restricted, and the flow of all but the most basic goods are suspended. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s water and sewage system, making it difficult to maintain the required standard of hygiene required to help fend off COVID-19 infection (Deutsch, 2020). This all does not bode well for racialized Palestinians’ health.

The disregard for Palestinian health is not new but rather a feature of the racial capitalist settler-colonial state of Israel. Occupied Palestine is entirely dependent on Israeli occupiers. Palestinians are routinely denied access to basic health by Israeli land confiscations and checkpoints. In the West Bank town of Negev, for example, over 80,000 Palestinians have no access to emergency healthcare. As the coronavirus rapidly spreads in the West Bank, Palestinians public health infrastructure is being undermined by Israel’s withholding of revenues to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and austerity measures imposed on the PA by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (Nithya, 2020). Even when Palestinians are able to scrape together funding to secure equipment needed to fend off the COVID-19, Israel decides whether to let these medical tools into the occupied territories. The point is, the coronavirus pandemic is deliberately being used by Israel to further intensify military actions, electronic, and other mechanisms of surveillance to facilitate ethnic cleansing and the annexation of Palestinian land. This all deepens Palestinian food insecurity and susceptibility to contracting viruses given many Palestinian families have no money for food because Israel starves Gaza and the West Bank by holding on to taxes and duties it collects on their behalf.

The source of coronavirus infection for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is among their laborers who prop up Israel’s construction and agricultural economies commuting back and forth to Israel and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. According to Garbett (2020) the COVID-19 crisis in occupied Palestine highlights the multiple ways Israeli racial capitalism exploits Palestinian labor to bolster Israel’s settler colonial racial capitalist project, while cutting costs and displacing responsibility for the protection of workers on the weak besieged infrastructure of the Palestinian health system and economy. Israel continues to use the pandemic to assist its racial capitalism settler colonial project by accelerating infrastructure projects restricting Palestinian access to land in both Israel and the West Bank (Garbett, 2020). For example, in Jerusalem, Israel is fast-tracking work on the Begin highway, with expansion of light train and settlement projects in Romot, Pizagat Ze’ev, and French Hill. In addition, West Bank settlements are speeding up infrastructure and construction work. The continuation of these projects is of high importance to Israel because they ensure the movement of goods, people, and capital. In addition, the Palestinians building this infrastructure are expendable and necessarily so to cleanse the land of their presents and to ensure the Israeli economic sector continues unhindered. Garbett (2020) contends that if construction work were to stop it would cause significant damage to the Israeli economy by triggering a cascade of delayed payments to banks and insurance companies—with major consequences for the banking sector. For this reason, Israeli authorities are reluctant to test workers before they return home after a day’s labor.