Lisa Goldman
New Lines Magazine / May 13, 2026
Does Israel aspire to be like Dubai? This is the contention of an Israeli journalist who reported on the sudden and rapid increase in the presence of unskilled workers from South and Southeast Asia for The Marker, a business newspaper owned by Haaretz. In less than one year, the Israeli government, via bilateral agreements with several countries, including Thailand and India, brought in about 130,000 people to fill a critical labour gap in the low-skill, blue-collar sector of the economy.
These are physically taxing jobs that Israelis do not want and that West Bank Palestinians, because they are no longer permitted to work in Israel, cannot have. The government plans to bring many more foreigners in to ease the critical dearth of workers in Israel, where unemployment is very low and employers cannot find enough people to carry out essential menial work. Dubai employs a similar system of importing foreign workers, but the oil-rich Gulf state chose this path because its population is small and there is no other local source of manpower. Israel does have a local source of labour in the Palestinian population, but refuses to use it.
Foreign workers have been a part of the Israeli landscape for more than 20 years. Before the recent arrival of new workers from South and Southeast Asia, there were already about 110,000 in the country legally, but they were employed in only three sectors of the economy — as home aides for the elderly, in agriculture and in construction. Now, for the first time, foreign workers are filling unskilled retail jobs, like stacking shelves and scanning purchases at the supermarket checkout.
Some employers interviewed for the article acknowledge that the new arrivals speak no Hebrew, but say the language gap has not caused any difficulties. One Jerusalem supermarket manager, whose name indicates that he is a Palestinian citizen of Israel or an East Jerusalem resident, praised the newly hired foreign workers for their cheerful attitude and work ethic (“The Thai workers … don’t take cigarette breaks and never miss a day of work. Every morning they come to me and say ‘Good morning boss’ and every time I ask them to do something they say ‘Yes boss.’”) The reporter for The Marker notes that the managers are not shy about generalizing about entire ethnic groups: “The Thai workers have a good work ethic,” for example, or saying that Indians don’t know how to process instructions. This, too, mirrors attitudes that one commonly hears about in Dubai.
Construction contractors are not enthusiastic about the foreign workers. They miss the Palestinian workers from the West Bank, who are now languishing behind the checkpoints, desperate to return to their old jobs but denied permits since Oct. 7, 2023. Most of the construction contractors and site managers are Arabic-speaking Palestinian citizens of Israel, so they have a language in common with the workers from the West Bank. Now they are frustrated by their inability to communicate with the new workers, who often don’t know English, let alone Arabic or Hebrew. One contractor said that the new workers were not qualified to do the work that the skilled West Bank Palestinians had been doing before Oct. 7, adding that the language gap was a serious issue. The reporter for The Marker told the host of the Haaretz podcast that he personally knew of two separate incidents involving fatal work accidents that occurred as a direct consequence of the language gap.
But the government is determined to continue importing workers from abroad, rather than restoring permits to the West Bank Palestinians who had been employed in Israel for decades before Oct. 7, 2023. Based on current trends, the number of foreign workers in Israel could reach half a million within five years. For a country with a population of about 10 million, that is an astonishing number.
The question of how the massive presence of foreign workers will affect Israeli society is one that is causing tension between two factions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government — the neoliberal hawks and the messianic nationalist settlers. The neoliberal hawks say that bringing in foreign workers is a patriotic duty because they obviate the need for Palestinian labourers, whom they claim are a security risk, and because they fill the massive manpower gap in low-skill, physically demanding jobs that has been preventing the economy from growing as quickly as it could. The messianic nationalist settlers, however, are concerned that importing half a million non-Jews will undermine the country’s Jewish character, particularly if there is intermarriage between the foreign workers and Jewish Israelis.
Human rights and workers’ rights advocates worry that the foreign workers are ripe for exploitation. Others are concerned that if the majority of manual labourers are in the country on five-year visas, don’t speak Hebrew and don’t form any connections with other Israelis, their presence will surely weaken the country’s social fabric. The secular liberals, meanwhile, object to importing foreign workers rather than training ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who often live off state benefits, or underemployed working Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in the crime-ridden towns and cities of the Triangle region that borders the West Bank.
Israelis are enthusiastic travellers, so once the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020, normalizing relations with the UAE, they rushed to take advantage of direct flights to Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Six years later, a family holiday at a resort in Abu Dhabi or a shopping trip to Dubai is so normal that it doesn’t even merit comment. Many Israelis have become quite enamoured with the way of life in the oil-rich Gulf country, where close to 90% of the population are foreign workers, notably people from poor countries, who fill a vast array of menial and service jobs that make life very convenient and comfortable for those with money. Israelis, said the journalist for The Marker, imagine that their country can be like Dubai, “with a Ferrari in the garage, a Hermes bag, and an Indian to do the housework.” But instead of fuelling its Gulf lifestyle with oil, Israel has the proceeds from its flourishing high-tech sector.
Israel’s economy and society have gone through several major phases since the establishment of the state in 1948. During the state-building years of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the economy was centrally controlled, major industries were government-owned and income gaps were narrow. During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a shift toward a more Scandinavian style of democratic socialism. But since the first decade of this century, successive governments have privatized the industries and liberalized the economy. Israel’s economy is resilient, and its middle class is, according to the latest OECD report, thriving. But it also has the highest rate of poverty in the OECD. And it seems that the “haves,” who look to Dubai as an example of how nice it would be to have even more, have forgotten that Israel also has something significant that the UAE does not, which is instability, both in politics and in security. One wonders if Israel can rationally aspire to be a Dubai on the Med while it is engaged in three separate military conflicts, has no internationally recognized borders and is tearing itself apart internally over basic issues like whether it wants to be a democracy, a theocracy or an authoritarian neoliberal state.
Lisa Goldman is Europe Editor at New Lines Magazine
