Child labour in Jewish settlements

At the West Bank of the Jordan Valley, a generation of youth grows up forced to work. More than half of the inhabitants of the West Bank is unemployed, which makes children the real breadwinners of their families. Every day again, off they go. Some are lucky and find a job for the day in a Jewish settlement or workplace. School education and dreams? Better forget those.
Half past one in the afternoon. At the military control post of Maále Efraim, West Bank, soldiers slowly start moving. Three Palestinian kids run up the hill. In the background, a sea of greenhouses glows under the hot desert sky – the striking panorama of the Jordan Valley of the eastern West Bank, specialized in the growth of vegetables and fruit.

For the 9,400 Israeli settlers of the 38 settlements in this area living here is desirable, because the authorities give subsidies and tax reductions. The poor Palestinian villages scattered around the settlements deliver with their 47,000 inhabitants a cheap labour force. But for the Palestinians the road to the Jewish settlements – partly running through military fire zones – is long and dangerous. Seven checkpoints (called hatcheries by the Palestinians, because you have to go through the fences hundreds at a time) close the area off from the rest of the West Bank. Regularly, the army patrols the surroundings for suspect persons and illegal workers.

The Palestinian boys show their birth certificate, the proof that they aren’t as yet eighteen, so they may walk through. Palestinian adults are only allowed in if they live or work here and have a special labour permit and pass. The three stop, panting, at an open plain, where some moments later a Palestinian labour subcontractor will pick them up with his car.

Nimer (14), the brave and curious one of the three, approaches us. He works with his friends Bilal and Saher – also fourteen years old – in the greenhouses in Peza’el, a Jewish settlement at the border with Jordan. He guesses that around hundred minors work there in the high season. A year ago the Palestinian subcontractor – Nimer does not want to say his name – came to their village and proposed this job to him. Nimer changed his schoolbooks for brooms and hedge-clippers. Now he cleans the greenhouses and helps with the packing, planting and pruning of aubergines.

Nimer works eight hours a day, six days a week. His daily wage: 50 NIS (9 euro). This morning he started at five o’clock. Every day the boy has to pass the checkpoint by foot and endure the checks by the guards at the settlement. “Sometimes I get pushed or beaten by the guards”, Nimer says. When I ask him what he does when he comes home after noon, he looks to me uncomprehending. “Play football? Read a book?” I try. Nimer shakes his head. He’s too tired to do such things. Does he not believe it’s a pity he doesn’t finish school? He shrugs his shoulders. “My father is sick, and unemployed”, he exculpates, and then, proudly: “I am the breadwinner for my parents and my five brothers and sisters.”

Bargain prices


Soeha Canaan tells me that child labour occurs for years in the Palestinian region, but small-scale, after school time and in the family business. Canaan is director of the research branch Labour Population of the Palestinian Central Bureau for Statistics. What worries Canaan is the rise in dangerous labour circumstances and the longer hours. Minors have to take the dangerous road to work passing military zones and checkpoints.

Because of the conflict and the occupation another element enters the story: exploitation. Salwa Alinat is a staff member of the Israeli organisation for labourers’ rights Kav La Oved, who also stick up for child labourers. For minors the Jewish settlements on the West Bank and factories in Israel are often the only places where they can get a job. The contracts run via Palestinian subcontractors who recruit minors for bargain prices in refugee camps and villages.

The origin of the shocking poverty in the Palestinian territories lies for the most part in the Jordan Valley, says Alinat. The building of the partition wall made working in Israel almost impossible for the 150,000 adult Palestinians. Severe restrictions on the granting of labour permits en passes to get passed the checkpoints make finding work on the Israeli settlements hard. Minors are cheaper and can easily skip through the checkpoints. They end up in the illegal traffic of the traders.

Scorpions and snakes


Some minors live in camps in the neighbourhood of their workplace. We receive a tip that there is such a camp in Al Jeftlik, north of Jericho. We go take a look at it with Alinat.

At the right of the entrance of the village is a slum, built up from corrugated iron sheets and old rags. Blankets and filthy mattresses function as beds. Ten boys between thirteen and eighteen are sitting on the ground, smoking a cigarette. They work at the neighbouring settlement Argaman.

At the moment, some fifty labourers live in this camp, but within a few weeks – when the date harvest begins – that number will double. In the summer the temperature in the huts rises to forty degrees. In the winter the terrain changes into a mud pool. An unsecured electricity cable runs to a light bulb; a tap outside is their washing facility. There are scorpions, flees, snakes.

Scorpions stung five adolescents. “The stungs weren’t reported,” Alinat tells, “because they feared they’d get fired.” What frightens the minors the most are the Israeli soldiers patrolling here, who sometimes round up and beat illegal workers.

Achmed, a boy of fifteen with the aura of a cherubin, labours here four months during harvest time. The rest of the year he works in Israel as a construction worker. He does this job for over four years now. The boys pay the subcontractor for lodges, Achmed tells. How much that is exactly he doesn’t know, because they get a net wage of which the rent is already subtracted. He dare not ask how much his gross wage is, since that may mean he gets sacked. Working ten hours a day, he gets 60 NIS (11 euro). With that money he still has to buy food. He shows us a cage with some birds the boys caught. To eat, Achmed gestures.

Once a month the boy may go home for two days. The subcontractor pays him his wage then. Not that Achmed feels himself rich as a king: “I feel like a mailbox,” Achmed says. “I get an envelope with money, sometimes even 1000 sjekel. But I have to give it to my dad immediately.”

Coincidentally we meet one of the subcontractors in one of the poorest cities deep in the West Bank. Eleven minors work for him. The subcontractor – let’s call him Mohammed – gets a fee of 50 NIS a day, subtracted from the wage of his workers. Mohammed: “Ever since I was twelve I worked on a settlement. One day my boss asked me if I could get him some other labourers. It’s easier to recruit minors because they don’t need a labour permit. I’ve got a vehicle with a special permit and can take the minors via the checkpoints to their work.”

But even the subcontractor thinks that the salary en the labour circumstances of these youth are unreasonable. He does want to stick up for raises, but the employer refuses that, he explains: “And that’s the end of it, because I have to earn my bread too.”

Bruises


How dangerous child labour can be becomes apparent when we visit Beit Foerik. “I saw Hamed’s body lying at the side of the road,” Joesoef (60) tells with deathlike eyes. Joesoef, his little nephew Hamed and two other minors got work the 11th of April 2008 via a subcontractor (some Khitmat) at the settlement of Hamra. Joesoef reckons there were already twenty minors. They slept in a camp in the surroundings of Hamra. The colonists don’t want Palestinians in their settlement by night.

On Tuesday morning, Hamed had enough of the work. He took his belongings and headed home by foot. That was the last Joesoef saw of his nephew alive. The next morning he found Hamed’s body. “They tortured him terribly,” Joesoef whispers. He shows the pictures he made with his mobile: Hamed’s front teeth broken off, no eyes in their sockets, a finger ripped off, a bruised and battered stomach.

Joesoef thinks colonists have murdered Hamed. The police of Maále Efraim has no clue as to the identity of the culprits. “But some facts are undeniable,” Mihal Tadjer says, a lawyer of Kav La Oved. The road to and from work, with military zones and checkpoints, and the circumstances in which Hamed and other child labourers have to work, are dangerous and unhealthy. And this makes that this sort of labour is forbidden for all minors.

Circumventing the law


The Israeli law, that counts in the settlements, and the Palestinian law speak in one voice: child labour under fourteen is strictly forbidden. From fourteen years on only light work that does not endanger the health and development of children is allowed. The colonists working with Palestinian subcontractors have no contracts with the minors, which allows them to circumvent the Israeli law: “Less than the minimum wage of 15,5 sjekel is paid, and the minors aren’t insured.”

When I telephone Orit, administrator of the settlement Pezael, and confront her with stories about under aged workers, she dismisses them as exaggerated. “The farmers at the settlements work for many years with Palestinian subcontractors who bring their labourers with them. Maybe sometimes kids come with their parents.” She goes on: “Palestinians and Israeli lived here in peaceful co-existence for over forty years, and everybody is happy with that. Believe me, Palestinians with Palestinian bosses earn not even half of what they earn here.” But that the situation in the Palestinian territories is even worse does not make right what is wrong, Tadjer believes.

If Israeli, Palestinian, and international law protecting the rights of children are de facto violated on a daily basis, then the authorities have to act. I submit our findings to the Industry Department and, more specifically, to the labour inspection responsible for the settlements on the West Bank. Their representative says her department does not have data and directs me to the police – who, on their turn, point back to the labour inspection. Tadjer believes that the labour inspection does not have enough manpower and budget and hardly any inspectors in the West Bank.

Vicious circle


The problem of under aged labourers keeps itself alive. Israeli and Palestinian bosses do something illegal and shut their mouth. Subcontractors do not want to lose their lucrative trade. There are no protest actions from Palestinian parents and minors, afraid to lose their job. Apart from the small-scale investigations of Kav La Oved Israeli aid organisations hardly take action. Palestinian authorities have no authority in the Israeli settlements. Even our research for this article got impeded. Several times we were threatened via anonymous phone calls.

Alinat formulates the dilemma of the aid worker: “If I help minors to get better labour circumstances and wages, I assist the survival of the system. If I fight against child labour, the children get fired and they end up on the street or even worse exploited. Because the work makes getting a school education impossible, the minors are uneducated and have no perspective on better jobs.” As long as minors as Nimer, Hamed and Achmed have to keep looking for an exit route out of their desperate situation, child labour will survive.

Rising child labour in the Palestinian territories

The Palestinian Central Bureau for Statistics monitors since 2004 the evolutions with respect to child labour in the Palestinian territories. The data do not get published but Soeha Canaan, director of the research branch Labour Population of the statistics bureau could give us the following results:

- In 2004 there were 43,000 child labourers between five and seventeen. In 2007 this rose to 47,000; in the first half of 2008 to 53,500.

- 4,6 per cent of the Palestinian youth under 18 works.

- The highest concentration of child labourers can be found on the West Bank, more specifically in Jericho and the Jordan Valley (13,5 per cent). 1,900 child labourers work in settlements. The demand for workers is on the rise.

- The average hourly wage is 41,90 NIS (7,50 euro) and the workweek for a minor averages thirty hours.

Field research of Salwa Alinat of the Israeli organisation for the rights of employees Kav La Oved points out that the number of child labourers is higher still. Children get their jobs through subcontractors who do not register these contracts. As a Palestinian body the statistics bureau cannot check these data in Israel and in the settlements. (sk)


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