To Work and Back: Exploring Palestinian Labour Mobility and its Development Effects on the West Bank

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One in four people live in fragile and conflict affected states and the role of secure labour mobility is essential to enhance resilience of affected populations: a sustainable level of security, justice and jobs helps to 'break cycles of insecurity and reduce the risk of their recurrence' (World Bank 2011). This project examines the contribution of labour mobility to socio-economic development and resilience in the Palestinian West Bank against the backdrop of inequality, segregation and conflict. The focus is on Palestinian labourers who move into Israeli workspaces in daily and often strenuous commutes. Generating empirical evidence on the diverse effects of labour migration in this context will illuminate new opportunities for governmental and non-governmental interventions that strengthen the positive impact of labour mobility. This research is particularly important at a time when numbers of Palestinian workers in Israel have risen steadily for several years with some 92,000 Palestinians currently working in Israel and another 36,000 in Jewish settlements in the West Bank (BOI 2015).Palestinian labour commuters have played a key role in shaping economic growth patterns and in securing jobs and income, but their mobility also increased dependence on Israel and undermined sustainable growth at home (Farsakh 2005; Hanieh 2006). Palestinians in the West Bank increasingly face an obligation to keep on circulating due to increasing demand for 'cheap labour' in Israel and lacking opportunities at home. A better understanding of how the empowering and disempowering dimensions of labour mobility intersect is essential for the building of social and economic resilience despite an intractable conflict and ongoing military occupation.'Economic resilience' is meant to decrease the vulnerability of economies to crises or disasters by strengthening their capacity to absorb 'shocks' and achieve growth (Röhn 2015; Hallegatte 2014). However, in the context of the West Bank these 'shocks' have been institutionalised in relations of systematic economic 'de-development' (Roy 1999), intermittent closures and legal segregation (Weizman 2012; Yiftachel 2001), as well as economic dependency of the Palestinian periphery on the Israeli core (Portugali 1993; Roy 2004). This has consequences for questions about how social and economic resilience, as one form of 'getting-by' under occupation (Allen 2008), can be strengthened in inclusive and sustainable ways without further deepening dependency. Despite the benefits of comparably higher wages in Israel the positive spill-over effects into Palestinians' home areas remain severely limited by legal exploitation, widespread fatigue and unreasonable commutes. Building on these conceptual underpinnings, the proposed work-programme has five pillars:a) Research and analysis: generate new insights about how the disempowering effects of labour mobility can be alleviated with concrete policy-interventions, based on two years of PhD research on Palestinian employment in Israeli workspaces and on additional research to be conducted for six weeks in the West Bank.b) Knowledge exchange and impact: maximize the academic and non-academic impact of the research outputs through strategic partnerships with users, targeted academic collaboration and the publication and dissemination of high-quality evidence.c) Sustainable partnerships: engage in a strategic and sustainable partnership with the ILO to inform UN policies on labour migration while developing important skills in effective user engagement.d) Academic collaboration: collaborate with key-researchers and projects in order to achieve the highest possible quality of publication outputs during the fellowship and to establish a sustainable international network.e) Skills development: develop the skills necessary for securing a position after the Fellowship with the help of career development workshops, courses and well-structured mentoring.