Abstract

Since the 1990s, Israeli agricultural settlements in the remote Central Arabah region have relied heavily on the cheap labor power of Thai migrant workers. Yet the agrarian settler-colonial movement to which these settlers belong has historically rejected such “foreign labor” as a moral threat to the collective. Thai employees are thus enjoined not only to plant and pick vegetables in sweltering greenhouses, but also to enlist their own cultural resources to perform the tactful, implicit work of maintaining the settlement's public “face” as a pioneering, self-supported Jewish community. The result, both at work and in public spaces, is a fragile, asymmetrical cultural intimacy, subtended by a convenient one-sided misunderstanding which reflects the racial-capitalist world-system in which it is embedded. [agriculture, cultural intimacy, colonialism, community, facework, labor, migration, Thailand, Israel]