When Boonchai Saeyang returned to Thailand this month, his thoughts were with his fellow Thais who had stayed behind in Israel to work on a farm near Gaza.
They chose to remain out of economic necessity, he said, despite Hamas combatants shooting civilians in their village.
“It’s understandable because some still have debts to be repaid. They want to wait and see the situation,” the 35-year-old told reporters upon arriving at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport.
“They told me to come back first. They will remain there to wait and see, and they might come back. Some of them, if they return, will be under a lot of debt, so if the situation calms down, they will continue to work there.”
Boonchai is just one of the thousands of Thais who have gone to Israel over the past 10 years under a foreign worker system that provides the country with desperately needed labour for its agricultural sector.
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Dozens of foreign workers have been killed or abducted since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. The death toll for Thai nationals, who comprise one of the largest groups of foreign workers in the country, has risen to at least 29.
Israel said on Wednesday that 54 Thais were being held hostage — almost a quarter of the total of 220 captives. Thai authorities have yet to confirm this figure.
Thailand’s government has vowed to repatriate workers who want to come home, and has set a target of bringing back 4,000 by the end of this month. More than 7,000 Thais are waiting for a seat on the next plane home, according to cabinet officials.
As of July, there were about 119,000 legal foreign workers in Israel and more than 25,000 there illegally, according to Israeli authorities. In agriculture, there were 22,862 legal foreign workers and another 7,493 without valid paperwork, largely those who had overstayed visas. This sector imports almost all of its labour from Thailand, though there are also a few thousand “trainees” from Asia and Africa working in Israel’s agricultural sector as part of work-study programmes.
The history of Thais working in Israel goes back decades.
Hundreds of agricultural “trainees” and “volunteers” from Thailand arrived in Israel in the 1980s and thousands had gone there by 1992, according to research by anthropologist Matan Kaminer, with a particular influx following the 1987 intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
“There was a strategic decision that was made on the part of the Israeli state to replace Palestinian workers with migrant workers so they wouldn’t have this dependence,” Kaminer told Nikkei Asia.
Under pressure from the US and non-governmental groups over labour rights issues, the worker pipeline was formalised in 2011 when the countries signed an agreement known as the Thailand-Israel Co-operation on the Placement of Workers (TIC) project, which was implemented in 2013.
The agreement cut out labour brokers on the Thai side, established fixed fees and placed the UN’s International Organization for Migration in charge of recruitment and training in Thailand. On the Israeli side, 13 government-appointed manpower agencies are responsible for worker recruitment and welfare.
The TIC agreement, which allowed Thais to work in Israel for a maximum of five years and three months — but only in agriculture — helped slash the fees paid by workers from an average of $9,000 to about $2,100, according to a 2019 study by Rebeca Raijman and Nonna Kushnirovich.
Kushnirovich said the proportion of visas to work in the agricultural sector had remained stable at about a quarter of all foreign work visas.
The exclusive bilateral deal means Israel’s agricultural industry is its most homogeneous sector in terms of foreign workers.
“Close to 100 per cent of the foreign workers in it came from Thailand,” she said.
In 2020, the countries signed a new deal for the TIC that did not include the participation of the IOM but otherwise retained similar terms.
According to Raijman and Kushnirovich’s study, most Thai migrants in Israel were men and 84 per cent were from north-east Thailand.
“Due to high poverty rates in these areas, they have become prominent ‘exporters’ of manpower abroad,” according to the authors, who found most workers went to Israel for the comparatively high wages of more than $1,000 a month.
An official at the Thai labour ministry’s employment department, which oversees the training of migrant workers, called the pipeline a “win-win” arrangement.
“Workers could come back home with a big sum of money in Thai baht. They can pay all debt and even build a new house for their families, and that becomes a social value that everyone wants,” said the official.
However, cases of mistreatment of Thai workers on Israeli farms have continued to plague the sector. A 2020 snapshot of Thai migration to Israel by workers’ rights non-governmental organisation Kav LaOved found 83 per cent were paid below the legal minimum wage. Many do not receive legally assured entitlements and face unsafe working conditions and difficulty accessing medical care, according to the study.
Similar concerns were documented by Human Rights Watch in a 2015 report, while the 2022 US state department Trafficking in Persons Report characterised the treatment of some Thai workers in Israel’s agricultural sector as forced labour.
There were about 5,000 registered Thai workers and 1,000 unregistered ones in the area near the Gaza Strip when the attack occurred, said Yahel Kurlander, a volunteer with Aid for Farm Workers, a newly formed group set up to help Thai workers in Israel.
“In many of the sites to which workers have been evacuated, they were pressured to go to work immediately, and in others the hosts have clarified that those who wish to stay another week will have to work,” the group, which has established a refuge for workers, said in a statement.
In a Facebook post, Israel’s ambassador to Thailand, Orna Sagiv, vowed Thai workers caught up in the Hamas attack would receive the “same treatment and protection as every person in Israel”.
The researcher Kaminer, who is also a member of the volunteer group, said it was important to prioritise workers’ welfare despite farmers’ concerns about retaining staff.
If the response to the situation was handled poorly, he said, there was a possibility it could deter migrants in the future, particularly given the sector’s record of labour rights violations.
“The relationship between the two sides, between the Israeli employers and the migrants from Thailand . . . it’s been very rocky for years. This might be a kind of turning point,” Kaminer said.
Kurlander, an academic specialising in Thai workers in Israel, was also cautiously optimistic that the situation could be a catalyst for improvements as there would probably be a deficit of workers with more Palestinians shut out and some Thais deterred from returning.
“When there is an extreme need for workers, they can ask for more money, they can ask for more rights,” she said.
A version of this article was first published by Nikkei Asia on October 18. ©2023 Nikkei Inc. All rights reserved.
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