Palestine along the colour line: race, colonialism, and construction labour, 1918–1948

This article examines how racialized concepts of the labouring body shaped the division of labour in British-ruled Palestine’s construction industry between 1918–1948. In contending with Palestine’s “labour question”, Zionist Jews, British authorities and Palestinian Arabs engaged in competing and overlapping racial and anti-racist projects embedded in global and imperial racial thought and politics. Israel/Palestine’s racial division of labour and the land’s twentieth-century social structures were an expression of the continuous evolution of the encounter between such racial projects and between changing material, political and social conditions. Narrating this encounter allows us to move beyond treatments of race and racial politics as abstractions, demonstrating how they marked and classified bodies, and shaped experiences, lives and landscapes.