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برامج مساعدة الفقراء كي يظلوا فقراء: تشجيع ريادة المشاريع عند النساء نموذجاً

العمّال المصريّون في محطّات الوقود «جيت بلدك على رجلي... إدّيني حقّي»

كاريكاتير: فرح نعمة
ورقة اليمين: قوانين متعلقة بالحجز التعسفي
ورقة اليسار: قوانين لحماية العمال من مخاطر البنزين

كلام الليل

برنامج النشاطات الخاصة بحملة فلسطين حرّة:

• الاثنين ٨ شباط ٢٠١٠، الساعة ٦ مساءً (مخيم صبرا وشاتيلا - بيروت): ندوة حول الحقوق المدنية للشعب الفلسطيني في لبنان، مع الاستاذ جابر سليمان، قاعة الشعب، مخيم صبرا وشاتيلا
  
  
• الاثنين ٨ شباط ٢٠١٠، الساعة ٥ مساءً (طرابلس): عرض فيلم "ان تطلق النار على فيل"، فيلم وثائقي عن حصار غزة
  المكان: قاعة القصر البلدي الثقافي (نوفل)، طرابلس
  
  
• الثلثاء ٩ شباط ٢٠١٠، الساعة ٥ مساءً (مخيم البداوي - شمال لبنان): عرض فيلم "ان تطلق النار على فيل"، فيلم وثائقي عن حصار غزة
  المكان: قاعة القدس، مخيم البدواي
  
  
• الاربعاء ١٠ شباط ٢٠١٠، الساعة ٥:٣٠ مساءً (الحمرا - بيروت): اعتصام لشباب ضد التطبيع امام مقهى ستاربكس - الحمرا (ضمن سلسلة نشاطات الداعية الى مقاطعة البضائع الاسرائيلية)
  
  
• السبت ١٣ شباط ٢٠١٠، الساعة ١١ صباحاً (بيروت): الانطلاق في مظاهرة من امام مقبرة الشهداء في شاتيلا وصولاً الى السفارة المصرية في بئر حسن (رفضاً للجدار ورفضاً لعمالة الانظمة العربية ومن اجل فكّ الحصار عن غزّة)

عسكر على مين...على فلسطين (تحيّة إلى العسكر الوطني)

What Happened at the Egyptian Embassy in Beirut: the shame of the Lebanese Army

Frequently Asked Questions And Answers About Live-in Domestic Workers in Lebanon

Balajinagar...Bangalore..India

العمال السوريّون من يحميهم من الاعتداءات؟

SMOKING KILLS

Apartheid in Israel through labor policies: The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies

This well written aricle portrays the apartheid policy of Israel through migrant labor controls and policy. Which means excluding Palestinians in the occupied territories and in the zionist state through "importing" labor from Thailand and Philippins... it is a deliberate strategy that goes beyond economic rationale in order to make the apartheid more acute... I posted extracts of the article. You can find the complete article on counterpunch.org

By YONATAN PREMINGER

As an increasing number of people feel the grip of the global financial crisis, Israel’s familiar bugbear has been wheeled out yet again: deport the foreign workers! True to form, the newly appointed Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz has decided that the deportation of 100,000 migrant laborers will improve the economic situation.

We’ve been here before. In 2003, Israel launched its first major campaign to reduce the number of “foreign workers,” as they are known in Hebrew (ovdim zarim). Now the workers are preparing themselves for another round of brutal operations by the infamous immigration police.

In Israel’s labor market, deportations of “foreign workers” are followed by imports of others to take their place. Yet, Israel has an abundant supply of local workers – why does it still prefer the migrant laborers? Because they are not Arabs.

[...]

The truth is, Israel is confused. Since the 1980s, when the country began a process of deregulation with the aim of hitching its markets to the global economy, Israel has been torn between the myth of Jewish solidarity and the Zionist enterprise on the one hand, and the demands of the growing economic elite on the other. Bluntly put, it wants to keep the country open to Jews only but have access to workers willing to do the dirty work for peanuts.

In the past, Israel employed Arabs as cheap labor – both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (who have no Israeli citizenship). Then, in the 1990s, as Israelis opened their eyes to the Oslo Accords, watched their economy grow, and enjoyed the “quiet” that the promise of peace granted them, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories found themselves stuck, cut off from their source of livelihood in Israel by renewed policies of military closures around the Territories. Meanwhile, Palestinian Israelis watched their jobs disappear as factories were moved abroad and as they competed with a million newly arrived Russian olim(Jewish immigrants) for the remaining labor-intensive work.

[...]

Farmers and contractors explain their preference for foreign labor by claiming there is no local workforce. “Israelis aren’t willing to do those kind of jobs,” so the mantra goes. And it does, indeed, seem that few Israeli Jews are willing to do hard manual labor anymore. But there are Israelis willing to do those kinds of jobs – Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

Anyone But Palestinians

[...]

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008 only 40 per cent of Arab men of working age participated in the workforce, compared with 56 per cent for Israel as a whole, and only 19 per cent of Arab women, compared with 56 per cent of Jewish women. Half of Israel’s Arab citizens live below the poverty line. Many would jump at the opportunity to work, though a job in Israel today is not always a way of escaping the poverty cycle.

And, if these workers prove insufficient, there are thousands more on the other side of the “security fence.” Israel has administered the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, flooding the Territories with its products, thereby – deliberately or otherwise – preventing the development of local industry and discouraging entrepreneurship. Residents of the Territories have also provided Israel with builders, cleaners and agricultural laborers for thirty years. The result is an underdeveloped Palestinian economy, entirely dependent on Israel, and a huge workforce eager to work in Israel.

The proof of their willingness to work can be found at Israel’s major intersections, where Palestinians from the West Bank wait each morning in the hope that some contractor will offer them work. Most of them have gone through hell to get around the checkpoints and across the separation wall, a dangerous – occasionally fatal – journey of many hours. Many sleep in makeshift camps such as abandoned building sites just minutes from Tel Aviv’s chic boulevards, and return to the West Bank and their families only on the weekends.

[...]

Police raids, a common nightmare for illegal Palestinian workers, aim to intimidate the workers and put on a show for Israelis, so fearful of “infiltrators.” The workers are deported and may lose whatever job they were lucky enough to find, but everyone knows that they will be back as soon as they have negotiated their way through the porous “security” system: work in Israel is in great demand.

Clearly, Israel has easy access to willing labor, so why does Israel maintain such a large migrant labor force? The principal reason has little to do with the lack of a local workforce. The migrant workers are simply cheaper and easier to exploit.

Thais and Filipinos

Most migrant laborers in Israel today are Thais, working primarily in agriculture, and Filipinos, working primarily as caregivers. Many arrive with huge debts after paying middlemen between $6,000 and $9,000 in mediation fees (through arrangements that are mostly illegal). However, their wages in Israel amount to less than the legal minimum because some of the long hours they work are not remunerated.

[...]

Migrant workers are legally subject to the collective agreements negotiated by the Histadrut, but law enforcement is minimal, and the state’s representatives almost invariably take the employers’ side in any dispute.

[...]

[...]the issue of Israel’s labor preferences goes beyond economic calculations and concerns the identity of the workers themselves. In any discussion about the use of Palestinian labor, security concerns are invariably voiced: “When my father used to go to work in the fields with Arabs,” says E. from a kibbutz in the north, “he would take his pistol and be looking over his shoulder all the time. With the Thai workers he feels safe.”

Though not everyone feels the threat in quite this way, the government of PM Ariel Sharon decided in 2005 that, by 2008, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories would no longer be working within Israel. Keeping the Palestinian workers out, then, is part of a deliberate policy that borders on demagoguery, playing on the fears of Israeli Jews and strengthening the misleading consensus of “us here, them over there” – misleading, because Israel is “over there” too, with its ever-expanding settlements, and “they” are here in the form of Israel’s largely unseen Palestinian citizens.

But security, as always, tells only part of the story. After all, if workers can get into the country from the West Bank, so can others with more insidious objectives. The preference for migrant labor over Palestinian labor stems from something for which “security” serves as a fig leaf: Israel’s striving to reduce the Arab presence on this piece of land.

The ideology of separate economies for Jews and Arabs goes back to the days of Jewish settlement in Palestine, when it was feared that cheap Arab labor would discourage European Jews from immigrating. After 1948, freedom of movement for Arab citizens was restricted until 1966, when the military administration was finally lifted. After 1967, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories had the advantage of “disappearing” at the end of the workday, but they, too, were a constant reminder of the local population, which Israel was not ready to acknowledge.

Migrant workers, on the other hand, pose no “demographic threat,” particularly if the immigration police keep working. Though many have been here for years, and their children speak Hebrew just like Israeli children, they are deemed a temporary presence. The situation has plumbed new depths of absurdity: farmers consider the migrant Thais to be permanent workers and the local population – Arabs – as seasonal laborers who fill in during temporary labor shortages.

Israel has also succeeded in depoliticising the issue. The hiring of migrant labor is perceived simply as an economic necessity, while questions of identity, the closure of the Occupied Territories, the “security fence” and the “demographic threat” (not to mention workers’ rights) are held to be unrelated.

Thus, despite the economic crisis and associated rising unemployment, it is unlikely that Israel will wean its employers off cheap “foreign workers” in favor of opening more employment opportunities to the Arab sector or Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. The current situation is too convenient: migrant labor has enabled Israel to open its borders to the globalized economy without endangering its Jewish identity, while bolstering the myth that Israel can be a country for Jews alone.

In fact, Israel has finally succeeded in doing what it failed to do during the years it was still reliant on cheap Arab labor: it has taken the Arabs out of the market.

Yonatan Preminger lives in Tel Aviv and is active in the field of workers’ rights. He can be reached at yonatanpreminger@yahoo.co.uk.

مشاهد من مسرحيات "الإزدهار" والعصرنة

المشهد الأول: يُنزلون البيرة والويسكي على الطاولة، موسيقى صاخبة جدًّا تحدّ من إمكانية التواصل الشفهي، يُخرج من جيب قميصه علبة دخان، يضع السيجارة بين شفتيه، من دون أن يتفوه بأي كلمة يربت على ظهر النادل ليُخرج من جيبه قداحة ليشعل سيجارة الزبون ويمضي في طريقه.

المشهد الثاني: حلبة الرقص، الأجساد تحاكي بعضها، تفوح رائحة العطر الممزوج بالعرق، الكحول يُذبل نظرات الراقصين يؤرجح بطونهم على إيقاع الموسيقى. يأتي النادل إلى وسط الحلبة يحمل طبق مقبلات حارّة، يعتذر من الفتاة التي طلبت المقبلات لأنه قاطع ترنحها على نغم الهيب هوب. يقف إلى جانبها وبين أصدقائها الذين شكلوا دائرة رقص، يمدّون أيديهم إليه ليأخذون الطعام من الصحن في يد النادل الذي تحول الى طاولة.

المشهد الثالث: حان وقت إغلاق المكان، المطعم يقع في الطابق الخامس من المبنى الراقي. الشبان المتعبين، الكادحين بعد ليلة رقص مرهقة يتوقون للرجوع إلى السيارات التي تنتظرهم. يدخلون المصعد الكهربائي الذي يُفتح بضغط موظف الأمن على الزر، يُغلق الباب لكن المصعد لا ينزل. ربما كان معطلاً، أو ربما كان هناك الكثير من الناس داخله فيفوق الأمر قدرة احتمال المصعد، رغم ذلك يتفوه الشاب الذي يتصبب عرقًا جراء كده خلال السهرة: إنه موظف الأمن الغبي الذي يضغط على الزر فيمنع المصعد من النزول! يضحك رفاقه...

هذه ليست مشاهد من فيلم يتحدث عن أرستقراطية ما تعيش حياة خيالية منعزلة عن المجتمع، ليست حوادث في مجمع ملكي في إحدى مملكات النفط... إنها حياة الليل والسهر في احدى المدن الهندية. النادل ليس طالباً جامعياً يريد أن يؤمن مصروفه الشهري ليخرج مع رفاقه، الشبان على البار ليسوا "كول" يأتون برفقة رفاقهم ويتباهون أمام صديقاتهم. موظف الأمن أمام الملهى ليس برجل ضخم، يضع تحت رحمته كل من يرغب ارتياد المكان، إنهم كلهم ينتمون الى السواد الأعظم من الفقراء أو الأقل فقرًا، يجوز أنهم متزوجون ولديهم أولاد، يسكنون في أحياء شعبية ولا يجرؤون على تذوق طعام المطعم الذي يعملون فيه. لا يلبسون بنطلون جينز أزرق، قميص يبين شعيرات الصدر يتناسب والحذاء/السنيكرز ذات الماركة. بل يرتدون بنطلون قماش أكله الزمن أو لباس تقليدي يشبه التنورة، قميص أبيض لونه باهت لا يتماشى مع غيره من الثياب وصندل أو شحاطة. "الحداثة" أو العصرنة وصلتهم على شكل تلفزيون، بنطلون مهترىء وتلفون.. لا يفقهون الموسيقى الغربية، ولا الطعام الذي لا يحتوي الحرّ، وأينما تجولت تجد أيقونات ورسمات لآلهتهم. معظمهم لا يتجرؤون أو يمنعون من دخول المراكز التجارية التي تتحرش بأحيائهم. يشترون السجائر فلت، لكن النساء لا يدخنّ. العديد منهم لديه عربة تاكسي ذات ثلاث عجلات، آخرون يمرّون بشاحنتهم الصغيرة للمّ النفايات لإعادة تصنيعها مقابل مبلغ زهيد ومنهم من لديه دكانه الصغير بالكاد يجمع قوته منه.

طائر الفينيق ينثر رماده في عيون الفقراء