Paper long abstract:

My previous research focused on the legal and bureaucratic classifications by which West Bank (WB) labour was regulated at the time and the employment of 'the enemy' was legitimized. It was an ethnography of the fluid, constantly negotiated legal status of WB Palestinians mass labouring at the time, inside the Green Line, focusing on the dual danger they are both collectively attributed with as well as experience and face. This danger, I argued, mobilized what I conceptualized as an economy of danger, through which the state of Israel minimizes WB physical and political presence across the land to the most profitable minimum. My DPhil project continues this research and was planned to broaden its scope by adding to its focus Jewish employers of WB labourers, interested in the negotiations and mediations of danger and profit that take shape in the context of these labour relations, tracing the political and territorial border formation and maintenance they are both shaped by and promote. In this talk I will present how Oct 2023 and the catastrophic violence it brought abruptly reshaped Israel’s policy towards WB labourers, still evolving today, touching upon its territorial and political possible implications and my relationships with my interlocutors