Israel’s construction industry has been in deep trouble since October 7, 2023, facing a debilitating shortage of experienced workers due to the ban on PA Arabs. Meanwhile, the effort to recruit workers through manpower firms in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe has not been yielding the needed results. On Thursday, Calcalist broke the news that the failure to recruit construction workers abroad who aren’t potential Hamas agents is not going anywhere because of draconian conditions invented by the Justice Ministry, which in turn is being pushed by the Biden administration.
The American excuse is that Israel’s effort to bring in foreign workers who were recruited by private companies would lead to the exploitation of these workers, to the point of trafficking, arguing that Israel is not prepared to combat this problem.
But the real effort, clearly, is to force Israel to legitimize the entry of some 100 thousand Arab workers from the PA. This is because the Biden administration is pushing the two-state solution down Israel’s throat worse than President Obama had done (in some cases it’s the same people), and the envisioned Palestinian State’s economy would inevitably rely on those day workers who bring home the shekels.