The 400,000 Foreign Workers Plan: How Israel is Engineering the Labor Market to End the Presence of Palestinian Workers?

SadaNews Translation - The labor market in "Israel" is witnessing a comprehensive change aimed at ending the historical dependence on Palestinian labor. Reports and official Israeli data have revealed the outlines of a government and Knesset-led plan to permanently replace Palestinian workers with foreign ones by importing hundreds of thousands from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, thus closing the door on the return of workers from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Figures released by Moshe Nakash, head of the Foreign Workers Administration in the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority, clearly show that the occupying state is moving towards an official government decision to raise the number of foreign workers to about 400,000 sustainable foreign workers, up from no more than 140,000 prior to October 2023, who were concentrated only in the agriculture and healthcare sectors. The occupying state received more than 115,000 new migrant workers in just 2024 and 2025 alone, marking an unprecedented surge.

This step is no longer limited to the construction and agriculture sectors as temporary solutions, but has expanded through governmental decisions and facilitations to reach the economic and daily service sectors. Doors have been opened to bring in workers from India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Uzbekistan to work in factories, companies, large stores (supermarkets), hotels, car maintenance workshops, and even to discuss employing them as assistants in kindergartens, which are sectors that were almost entirely dependent on Palestinian workers, or suffer from the reluctance of young Israelis who refuse to take on hard manual and service jobs, despite local wages being raised by up to 40%.

The Hebrew website "Wai Net" describes this transformation as SadaNews has translated it as a "dream come true" for Israeli employers and companies that are now sending external missions to select Asian labor, driven by the security stability of this labor. The economic administration of the occupation sees the foreign worker as a substitute that is not affected by military closures or political crises and does not face the security concerns associated with Palestinian workers, in addition to being a tool to prevent a significant rise in wages within the Israeli market, as the incoming worker accepts the average overall Israeli wage (about 10,000 shekels monthly), placing him among the wealthy classes in his home country.

The other side of this policy, as translated by SadaNews, reflects from the perspective of Israeli economic experts like Professor Yossi Spiegel from Tel Aviv University, a state of "addiction to cheap labor" that the system has resorted to cover the absence of Palestinian workers instead of developing its sectors technologically, warning that this temporary solution will create complex social and security dilemmas for a state that rejects immigrants and their cultures and treats workers as production tools rather than as human beings, paving the way for the emergence of slums and the rise of crime gangs among the children of these workers in southern Tel Aviv due to discrimination and the continuous threat of deportation.

These sweeping changes in the Israeli labor market undoubtedly confirm that the exclusion of Palestinian workers is not merely an emergency punitive measure, but a systematic policy aimed at dissociating economically from Palestinian labor and denying them these jobs, thus placing the Palestinian economy before existential challenges to absorb tens of thousands of unemployed whose jobs, across the Green Line, are now managed in foreign languages and cultures from the farthest reaches of Asia.