My paper examines the Histadrut – the General Federation of Jewish Labor in the Land of Israel – as seen by its Palestinian-Arab cadres between 1948 and 1967. Historians characterize the Histadrut as the settler spearhead of the Zionist movement. The Histadrut was indeed much more than a trade union. It furnished the Yishuv with a paramilitary force, a banking and investment system, health services, cultural enterprises, all of which would prove to be crucial for its eventual victory in the 1948 War. The prevailing critical accounts on Mandate Palestine have also deemed the Histadrut as an agent for segregation, separating Jewish and Arab workers, and as an example of Zionism’s modus operandi. My paper will show that after 1948, alongside continuing segregationist Zionist policies, the Histadrut moved in a different direction. While full membership for Arab unionists came more than a decade after 1948, already then, elements within Histadrut leadership and rank and file increasingly pushed for the integration of Palestinian-Arab citizens into its institutions and considered this goal as a major Zionist imperative. Moreover, as the years after 1948 passed, the Histadrut’s actions in Palestinian-Arab locales were progressively undertaken by Palestinian-Arab individuals who saw themselves as working in the interest of their own communities during a time when Israel exercised martial law over most of them. Once Palestinian-Arabs became members, they tended to take the Histadrut at its word and demanded that it adhere to socialist ideals and provide them with better worker representation, educational projects, cultural activities and, perhaps most importantly, healthcare. By closely reading the mundane, rarely analyzed, documents originating from Histadrut branches in Palestinian-Arab villages and towns, my paper will show that joining the Histadrut constituted a form of acquiescence with the organization’s ideological underpinnings, including Zionism itself. Concomitantly, as the paper will show, Palestinian-Arab membership in the Histadrut forced many Zionists to re-consider their level of investment in some, though not all, of the movement’s segregationist tendencies. In my talk I will point out that this dynamic is hardly unique and has occurred in other historical cases of settler-colonialism. If indeed a measure of settler-indigenous integration is inherent in all forms of settler-colonial consolidation, it could be concluded that the Histadrut post-1948 remained Zionism’s settler spearhead.

Mass migration of foreign laborers to the GCC is a significant phenomenon, both for its scale and effect on Gulf economies. Since its inception, the phenomenon has incurred much scholarship. Traditional analysis focuses on the treatment of foreign workers, their role in enabling the clientelist character of the GCC state and their significance as an obstacle to work-force nationalization. However, there is a significant lack of scholarship examining the effect of foreign labor on class formation among GCC nationals. The goal of this paper is to highlight this lack of scholarship, examine the effects of foreign labor on class formation and present its implications for future class-analysis in the GCC. The paper addresses a number of questions: What is the current extent of class analysis of the GCC? Where does it fall short and how can we fill in these gaps? How does foreign labor affect national identity and economic relations between GCC nationals? What is the role of the state in shaping class? The framework for conducting class analysis in the Middle East, particularly the GCC, is far from settled. However, the GCC countries present an especially challenging case due to their heavy reliance on foreign labor. The transfer of production from GCC nationals to foreign labor prevents capital accumulation in a traditional sense, namely through a relation to production, but instead capital accumulation to a relation with the state. As a result, individuals, tribes and ethnic groups engage in class formation through bilateral negotiation with the state. This prompts a rethinking of class analysis in the GCC. Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia were each chosen for specific characteristics with sufficient differences and similarities to extrapolate GCC-wide consequences. Bahrain provides a case with an exaggerated sectarian dimension, the UAE a history of migration flow from India, and Saudi Arabia a historical freedom from British administration. The paper traces the history of labor-migration to the GCC starting with the Trucial period, establishing a background of the socio-economic location of migrants, and evaluating current literature and recasting their arguments. It draws upon historical literature which describes British management of migration during the Trucial period, published interviews of nationals and migrants, as well as primary source data from current economic indicators. It provides a basis for future class analysis in the GCC and contributes to existing scholarship.

Highly-skilled migrants in the Arab Gulf countries: Exploring the nexus between economic growth and immigration of highly-skilled migrants. The migration of highly-skilled persons or ‘high value migrants,’ ‘elite workers’, or ‘knowledge workers’ as they are often referred to, is attracting increasing attention from scholars, practitioners and politicians the world over. This is due to the skills and the entrepreneurial qualities this category of migrants possesses, and thus the positive impact such migrants are expected to have for building or maintaining the competitiveness of a country’s economy. The Arab Gulf Countries (the GCC countries) host around 24 million migrants, most of them low or medium skilled, but also an estimated 3.6 million highly-skilled migrants. While there is a large and growing body of academic studies dealing with the former category, hardly any studies have been published on the highly-skilled migrants in the Gulf. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming. It sets out to explore the nexus between economic growth in the Arab Gulf states and immigration of highly-skilled migrants. The analysis will take its point of departure in the so-called Kafala system which is the broader framework through which migrant flows to the Gulf countries have been managed since the mid-1970s. The analysis will be guided by four research questions distilled from an extensive literature review: - What is the skills composition of the migrant community, and do they complement or overlap the skills of nationals? - How are migrants selected to enter the Gulf countries? - Do the highly-skilled migrants have appropriate incentives to fully contribute to the economy? - Are active policies related to knowledge transfer in place? The methodology applied in this paper is critical text reading in combination with interviews and extensive observations originating from a three-year teaching and research experience as professor at a Federal university in UAE. Two types of conclusions will be drawn from this study. Firstly, specific answers to the research question posted above. Secondly, conclusion related to concepts and theories applied to the study of highly-skilled migrants in the context of the Arab Gulf countries. They challenge e.g. the economic wisdoms embedded in the westernized neo-liberalized notions of the highly-skilled migrant when it comes to issues such as motivation, mobility and expected impact. This paper is in preparation as a part of the ‘Working Group on highly-skilled migrants: The Gulf and Global Perspectives,’ hosted by Georgetown University, Doha, Qatar.

The GCC-South Asia Labor Recruitment System: Comparing Nepal and Pakistan Within the scholarship on GCC migration states there continue to be significant gaps in relation to the transnational labor recruitment system that brings the vast majority of labour migrants to the region. Scholars have certainly provided evidence that the large majority of migrants to the Gulf States secure their jobs via the labour recruitment system, and that this system is fraught with challenges and places individual migrants in a precarious position. It is understood that labour agents and agencies amongst other things assist migrants with complexities of the paperwork process, arrange transportation and documentation, and that for these various services migrants end up paying large recruitment fees. Often migrants are required to secure loans informally or formally in order to pay for these services, and frequently arrive in the Gulf bearing heavy debt burdens as a result. Beyond this existing knowledge of the problematic aspects of the labour brokerage system, little is about the different actors engaged in the labour brokerage system, their explicit roles, and the particular services that they provide. This paper, based on fieldwork conducted in Nepal and Pakistan, provides an ethnographically-rich comparative portrait of Nepali and Pakistani components of the Gulf-South Asia labour brokerage system. Utilizing field notes and interviews drawn from two-week periods of fieldwork in both Nepal and Pakistan, ethnographic data is analyzed within the context of the differing policy environments that govern labor brokers in these two South Asian states, as well as the existing systems in the receiving states. Moving beyond existing studies that focus on the operation and economic role of labour recruiters, this paper provides deep insight on how different stake-holders in the Gulf-South Asia labour brokerage system view their roles, their institutions, the broader contextual environment in which they work, the role of the state and systems of governance (both in the Gulf and in the sending states), and their contribution to migrants’ success.

This paper ‘decenters’ Europe within scholarly debates on the migration-home nexus by focusing on people that leave Europe rather than ‘flood its gates’. It conceptualizes the term ‘status migration’ by focusing on European nationals with a Maghrebi minority or ‘second generation’ background from France, Belgium and The Netherlands, who are today moving to the United Arab Emirates. While Dubai features often through reference to the controversial labor conditions of the Subcontinental and South-East Asian manual labor masses, or by description of the contemporary cultural affectivities of the ‘white’ Anglo-Saxon elite on site, this paper is concerned with a distinct European ‘Muslim’ minority experience that comes about during physical mobility across space. With their ‘integration’ and ‘national loyalty’ amounting to public security concerns in Europe, nowadays, skilled members of this stigmatized social group navigate further afield in search of adequate (employment) opportunities, be it temporary or permanent. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork throughout 2016, this paper first discloses daily accounts of social mobility and class acculturation in the super-diverse city of Dubai, where less than 10 percent of the total population holds Emirati citizenship, thus catering for a very particular order of stratification. Through a concise portrayal of several life-narratives of Maghrebi-Muslims from different EU member states, it then assembles an analytical gaze on the advent of racial transformation dynamics in continental Europe, transcending ‘methodological nationalism’. A discussion of the Foucauldian notion of ‘heterotopia’ will further provide comparative meaning to the liminal experience of the sudden acquisition of considerable privileges and anonymity as individuals in Dubai that stand in stark contrast to a prior group condition at ‘home’. By looking at Europe from a distance and through the eyes of minorities-turned-expats, the act of emigration, along with notions of belonging and performative claims to ‘Europeaness’ and ‘Arabness’, become intrinsically political. While ‘leaving’ appears to function as a coping technique to circumvent restrictive technologies of ‘access’ to ethnos in Europe, based on color-coded and ethno-religious permutations of race, citizenship and the mobilization of ethnicity feature as social capital in the Arab Gulf. This complicates the sociological understanding of both geographies, often imagined as antithetical regarding participatory potential in abstract debates that overlook hierarchy. Indeed, encountered celebrations of Dubai as a heaven for ‘Anglo-Saxon cosmopolitanism’ or as a ‘home in diversity’ need to be read foremost as reconfigured positionalities that are situational (class) and relational (Europe), and which embody ultimately the culture capitalism.