Foreign Fields: Thai Workers in Israel

Foreign Fields: Thai Workers in Israel for 35 Years

Thai migrant workers have been employed in Israeli agriculture for 35 years. Place. Work. (1991), a film by Nurit Aviv, marks the moment the first workers arrived in the wake of the First Intifada, when the Israeli government was seeking a solution to the shortage of agricultural labor.

Since then, tens of thousands of workers have arrived in Israel, most from villages in the Isan region of northeastern Thailand, with the aim of working, supporting their families, and improving their economic situation in their homeland.

Although local agriculture relies entirely on the experience and professionalism of Thai workers, within Israeli society they are present yet absent, living in the agricultural periphery, far from urban centers. In the media and everyday discourse, “the Thais” are a faceless public, without names or individual voices, identified through their work clothes and face coverings. The nickname “ninjas,” which stuck to them in their early years in Israel, described quiet, obedient workers with the endurance required for hard labor. As a cheap workforce, they served as a convenient replacement for Palestinian workers—another testament to the collapse of the Zionist pioneering ethos.

In the October 7 massacre and the subsequent fighting in the north, 48 Thai workers were killed; some were abducted and murdered in captivity. The loss unwillingly joined the community to the national narrative of bereavement and trauma. The Israeli public, which had previously been indifferent toward them, recognized the victims and their relatives as members of the “family of mourners.” The collapse of the barriers brought awareness of their hardships, their prolonged absence from home, the families torn between here and there, and the distress of being caught up in a war that was not theirs.

The exhibition Foreign Fields presents works by seven Israeli artists who have formed connections with the Thai workers’ community. Micha Kirshner’s photograph Thai Worker in the Arava (2005) conveys the difficulties of the Thai worker who is present yet absent, and serves as a prescient representation of the suffering and pain that were yet to come. The social photographer Eli Attias, who documents the community...