State-Corporate Crime in Israel’s Construction Industry: Harm at the Intersection of Settler Colonialism and Business

• In Event: Organized Crime and State-Sponsored Terrorism

Abstract

Construction is both the most dangerous job within Israel and exhibits more harm than any other industrialized nation-state. Individuals laboring in Israel's construction industry die at a rate of 12.25 per 100,000 laborers, a figure substantially higher than the average rate of 5 per 100,000 across Europe. Moreover, estimates suggest that Palestinians constitute about seventy percent of construction workers in Israel, making them the most likely to die in this field. Given the racialized nature of Israeli construction labor and the death rate of this occupation, I argue that workplace-related deaths are not random or merely "accidents." Instead, by drawing on theories of state-corporate crime (Michalowski and Kramer, 2006) and settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006), I argue that Israel and construction corporations co-produce the harms experienced by laborers by failing to provide the necessary conditions to prevent death in the workplace. Through an examination of historical and contemporary policies and practices surrounding Israel's construction sector, I analyze deaths in this occupation as a consequence of neoliberal and settler colonial symbiosis, in which the aims of profit maximization and indigenous elimination operate simultaneously. In doing so, I highlight the ways in which harm exists at the intersection of settler colonialism and business.

Author

• Nicolas Ryan Howard, Old Dominion University