The High Demand for Palestinian Labour Should Not Be Surprising
How can students learn when their schools are being constantly bombarded? How can doctors practise medicine when their hospitals are raided and their access to basic medicines, machines, and technologies denied? How can engineers and architects construct buildings when they are not permitted equipment and materials? The intuitive answer is that they cannot. But once again, the beauty of the Palestinian people shows itself in its ability to challenge common intuitions. Having to work under the most restrictive conditions in the world has made the ingenious and highly versatile skill set of Palestinian labourers in all fields one of the most highly demanded in the world.
Palestinians are known as some of the world’s “Best Educated Refugees”, as many Palestinian graduates are often proficient in two or more languages, highly proficient, and able to adapt rapidly in incredibly dynamic environments. This is of course reflected in data, as Palestinians have one of the highest literacy rates (97.8% in 2022) and the highest per-capita PhD ratio in the world. Education is considered a key aspect of Palestinian resistance against the brutal settler-colonial occupation, as it is a means of accruing social capital, securing economic mobility, and achieving psychological assurance. Palestinians have historically taken a localised and instrumentalised approach to education to guarantee that the skills learned in school have a substantive application that allows individuals to directly ameliorate their and their community’s material conditions. The systematic destruction of educational spaces has been one of the most consequential fronts on which the apartheid state has carried out its genocidal campaign. Yet in the face of an active Israeli extermination crusade, students are defending their theses under tents in Rafah and receiving their schooling in refugee camps— making them active targets.
One of the manifestations of the unique Palestinian skillset is the emergency and rescue services that operate in Gaza being considered to be some of the highest quality providers of emergency medical services on the planet. Having to treat victims of occupation- bombings, shootings, and famine without a steady source of electricity, sterile equipment, and medicine has led to creative life-saving interventions. A month before the beginning of this genocide, the Palestinian International Cooperation Agency (PICA) was sent to Derna, Libya after hurricanes caused heavy flooding, completely destroying communities leaving 40,000 people displaced and almost half that number dead, to provide urgently needed assistance. The conditions of isolation, scarcity of supplies, and desperation which Palestinian doctors are so accustomed to working under make them invaluable in other parts of the world whose historic over-exploitation has made them vulnerable to the collapse of highly-dependent upon infrastructure. Further examples include Zimbabwe, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Guinea, Grenada, Djibouti, Türkiye, Syria, Indonesia, and Lebanon whose struggling healthcare systems benefit from the presence of Palestinian doctors who perform countless tasks from cataract surgeries and corneal transplants to oncoplastic operations and trauma relief.
Israeli scholasticide should therefore come to no surprise to any of us. The way to eradicate a population is to ensure that there are no avenues for the people to secure their future. Education not only opens doors for millions, but provides the necessary tools for individuals to pave their own path forward. The systematic destruction of every university in Gaza, funded by King’s College London among countless Western academic institutions, is wholly intentional. A Palestine without doctors, engineers, and educators who cannot adapt to the violently imposed dynamism of occupation is a Palestine that cannot survive.
This brief article hardly does any justice to the vastly intricate position that Palestinian labour is situated in both within the apartheid economy and the dependent occupied system. Palestinian labour is a precious thing precisely because of the irreproducible conditions under which it is cultivated and the associated mental fortitude that comes with being a Palestinian labourer. The epistemic goal underpinning the fruits of Palestinian labour— knowledge acquisition as a key to liberation— adds a deeper meaning to its value beyond simply a job one performs for the sake of survival. The steadfast resolve of the Palestinian people brings hope that regardless of how many bombs rain from the sky, the hunger for knowledge and liberation will never die.
Further Reading:
