Crisis-Driven Solidarity

This article examines how the war that erupted on 7 October temporarily reconfigured relationships between agricultural migrant workers and their employers in kibbutzim and moshavim along Israel's frontiers. Using qualitative analysis of media coverage and firsthand insights, this article investigates how the shared vulnerability of workers and employers during the war exposed deeper transformations in the agricultural sector. Specifically, it highlights how processes of state withdrawal and the gradual erosion of national ideals of Hebrew labor produced a system in which migrant workers are both indispensable and invisible. While the war briefly fostered crisis-driven solidarity between local employers, migrant workers, and civil society, this solidarity remained highly situational and conditional. These findings contribute to a broader understanding of the precarity produced by neoliberal restructuring in peripheral agricultural communities, specifically kibbutzim and moshavim.