The Internationalist

Callum Copley is a researcher, writer, and editor whose work explores how speculative fiction articulates materialist perspectives. His research often engages decolonial, Indigenous, and ecological viewpoints, with a particular focus on world-building as a practice. He is the co-founder of Schemas of Uncertainty, a research initiative examining the role of prediction in contemporary society, and the editor of Reworlding: Ramallah, Short Science Fiction Stories from Palestine (Onomatopee, 2019).

Issue 118 is Part 2 of his series called Constructing Utopia. In this issue, Copley looks at Israel's plans of building an artificial island off the coast of Gaza, as a way of realising a colonial fantasy of mass displacement.

You can read Part 1 here.

In January 2024, Israel’s foreign minister, Yisrael Katz, sparked controversy after derailing a high-stakes meeting of EU foreign ministers to promote a plan to build an artificial island off the coast of Gaza. In the Peace Summit convened to discuss possible paths to end the ongoing hostilities, Katz screened clips of a 2017 promotional video created during his time as Israel's transport minister. The old video described the potential construction of artificial islands and was pitched to them as a solution to the Gaza problem. Joseph Borrel, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, who chaired the meeting, said that the concepts were “very interesting” but that they “had nothing to do with the peace talks.” [1]

INSS Proposal (2003): “Middle East Riviera”

This was not the first time Israel had produced a proposal of this kind. In 2003, Israel's leading security think tank, The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), proposed that the creation of a series of artificial islands could “solve the problem of population density” in Gaza. The proposal outlines a chain of three islands, each large enough to house 150,000 Palestinians, a total of 400000 people (one-third of the population of Gaza at the time). This chain of islands would offer employment in “tourism, commerce”, and other “services” in a bid to “convert into a Middle East Riviera, much like the isles of Greece and Turkey”. [2] The authors argue that their construction could “shatter the fixed assumption that territorial disputes in the Middle East must be solved according to a “zero-sum” principle, that is, an Israeli profit demands a Palestinian loss, and vice versa”. [3] In other words, creating artificial islands in the Mediterranean on which to relocate Gazans, effectively making Palestinian land available for Israeli settlement—framed as a solution where, in their view, no one would lose out.

The paper's authors go on to discuss the scheme's origins in further detail. They reference an earlier proposal to exchange an area adjacent to the strip (the Halutza sand dunes) for land in the occupied West Bank to be used for new settlements. This proposal was rejected but the authors propose that such a deal could be renegotiated and that “the establishment of islands … could be part of the compensation for the land they [Palestinians] would be giving up in the Westbank.”

Overpopulation, or “the problem of population density,” as the Israeli proposal describes it, is a genuine concern. However, the root of this issue lies with the state of Israel itself. During the 1948 war that led to its establishment, the Zionist forces bombed 29 villages in southern Palestine, forcing tens of thousands of villagers to flee to the area now known as the Gaza Strip. Today, only about one-third of Gaza’s residents have ancestral roots in the Gaza Strip itself. The remaining two-thirds are refugees from the surrounding towns and villages and their descendants from 1948. As a result of this displacement, Gaza remains one of the most populated places on Earth, with scarce natural resources to support its inhabitants whilst also suffering from the effects of occupation and a decades-long Israeli blockade.

Precisely how further displacing Palestinians in Gaza to a third location, as the INSS suggests, would offer a solution remains unclear. Their proposal fundamentally misunderstands—or cynically misrepresents—the core issue of the occupation and the broader Israel/Palestine conflict. It exploits Gaza’s forced overpopulation and its associated challenges as leverage to create a false equivalency between the illegally occupied land in the West Bank and speculative islands raised from the Mediterranean seabed. After systematically restricting Gaza's development, infrastructure, and access to technology, this Israeli proposal frames the issue as merely a technocratic problem to be addressed through novel engineering.

What the proposal does is erase the notion that the Palestinian land in the West Bank has any intrinsic significance to the Palestinians, presenting land as an entirely fungible thing to be traded. It posits a priori that Palestinians are content with the exchange of their ancestral lands for some yet-to-exist islands, and it is simply the details which would need to be ironed out.

This is to say nothing of the quality of the land being exchanged. Palestinians are being asked to surrender the western tip of the fertile crescent, the first region on Earth where settled farming emerged, for, as the plans spell out, islands with no dedicated farmland. This isn’t surprising, considering the soil would certainly not be airable. “For a colonized people,” writes Frantz Fanon “the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity.” [4] It’s unlikely wheat could ever sprout from the vibro-compacted sand; it could provide no bread for its inhabitants.

However, despite how the project is pitched, these plans have little to do with improving Palestinian livelihoods and, instead, more to do with leveraging their suffering to increase the rate of settlements across the occupied West Bank. Much like the utopian and imperialistic impulses underpinning the UAE’s island-building projects, as discussed in part one of this essay, I argue that these Israeli projects embody similar ambitions, though their implementation differs.

Where the UAE utilises island-building technologies to create spaces of localised utopia, Israel would use the same technology toward the opposite goal. In this context, artificial islands serve as a prism through which the utopian impulses shared by Israel and the UAE are mirrored in opposite directions. This is not to say Israel is intent on creating island dystopias (though that would most likely be an outcome), but instead, that the islands they create are a means toward realising a utopia elsewhere. Rather than constructing artificial islands as utopias in their own right, the proposal would use these islands as tools to offshore what it sees as obstacles to the Zionist project—namely, the Palestinian people. In doing so, Israel would further facilitate their own, explicitly desired utopia—a Jewish-majority Greater Israel.

Islands have long-held utility as remote destinations on which to confine people who are deemed undesirable. The very structure of an island makes the landmass ideal for isolation, not only for sanctity and respite for its inhabitants, as in Dubai, but conversely, as a prison in which to trap them. As Baldacchino writes, “An island can be both paradise and prison, both heaven and hell.” [5] From one enclosure to another, the fantasy of Isolation becomes a desire for containment. For centuries, nations across the globe have constructed penal colonies, work camps and prisons on isolated land masses, consigning countless people to live out their days there.

One of the most recent resonances would be with the UK’s Rwanda scheme, which sought to offshore and detain one group of people (“illegal migrants”) while their asylum claims were being heard. [6] Whether their case was accepted or not, they would never be permitted to return to the UK, but rather, be allowed to remain in Rwanda or deported from there to their country of origin. The plan was closely modelled on Australia’s ‘Pacific solution’, which sent migrants to the remote island of Nauru where they were held in what has been described as an ‘open-air prison’ by Amnesty International. [7] Fortunately, the detention centres on Nauru are now shuttered, and despite some £318 million already spent on the Rwanada scheme, the plan was struck down by the U.K. Supreme Court before it could ever be enacted.

However, these other schemes are not the most uncanny historical parallels to the INSS proposal. For that, we must look further back to the 1940 Madagaskarplan (Madagascar Plan), devised by Nazi Germany, which sought to forcibly relocate Europe’s Jewish population to the island of Madagascar. Prior to the announcement of the 'Final Solution,' this plan explicitly proposed to resolve the 'Jewish question' through forced relocation, isolating people on a remote island and confining them there, all to free up European land for an envisioned 'Aryan' ethnostate.

Prior to the Holocaust's formal onset in 1942, this technocratic blueprint for ethnic cleansing gained traction within Nazi leadership, with plans to transfer one million Jews to the island every year for four years. [8] Had the plan been implemented, the island itself would have been governed as a police state under the SS, with the assumption that many of those held there would succumb to the harsh conditions. According to one biography of Hitler, within the island itself, barren and unproductive lands were deliberately chosen as resettlement destinations to prevent the deportees from ever flourishing there. [9] Although never enacted due to an ongoing British naval blockade, the plan itself was utilised as a bargaining chip in a peace deal with France after Germany invaded the country on May 10, 1940. As one of the terms of France’s surrender, Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, recommended that the French colony of Madagascar be made available as a destination for the Jews of Europe. [10]

Whether by cruel irony or unsettling inspiration, the parallels—both in form and intent—between these two plans are striking. While the Nazis’ proposed transfer of Jews to Madagascar represented a calculated strategy to isolate and control a targeted population in a contained environment, similar considerations of selective population control appear to take place in the 2003 INSS proposal. On the viability of the plan, the authors discuss how control of precisely who is permitted to inhabit the new islands would be crucial to its success. They state, “From a socio-economic point of view, the islands would be populated by a heterogeneous population, with at least 25% of the area devoted to luxury housing. Note that the absorption of a massive, lower-class population on the islands would doom the project to failure.” [11]

Here, the Gazan’s deliberate impoverishment by Israel is held against them. The project planners deem the average Gazan to be de facto a threat not only to Israel (they’re certainly forbidden to return to their villages within Israel) but also to a danger to the speculative island territory—land ostensibly explicitly built for them to inhabit.

Moreover, who would live in the 25% of luxury housing remains unclear. Financing for the project was intended to come from loans by the international community, which could then be paid back by selling portions of the land, presumably to international buyers (who would be the most likely to be able to afford them). Therefore, it is unreasonable to suspect that up to a quarter of the island could belong to foreign investors or even house settlers from elsewhere—perhaps the same individuals snapping up parcels of land along Dubai’s ever-expanding shoreline.

The Gaza Artificial Island Initiative (2011)

Jump forward to March 2011, and the then-Israeli transport minister, Yisrael Katz, reveals an entirely new plan to build an island off the coast of the Gaza Strip:

"The Gaza Artificial Island Initiative. This time, the island would include both sea and airports, a desalination plant for seawater, and a tourist area. Nested within this already speculative proposal is a “future option” that would see the construction of an international airport at Israel's discretion (something Gaza has been without since Israel destroyed their previous one in 2001)."

At the time, Katz claimed the project would free Israel of responsibility for controlling commerce with Gaza and that it “would allow us to break all ties with Gaza while maintaining our control over maritime security through the blockade, which is critical in blocking arms traffic." [13] In the same breath, he also spoke of the necessity for the island to remain under “international control” for at least 100 years to ensure Israel’s security. A somewhat paradoxical position that reflects Baldacchino’s comments about our relation to islands, “Our obsession with islands knows no bounds, but our islands are paradoxical spaces: they are both self-evidently bounded and selectively accessible.” [14] Ghassan Khatib, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, described the plans as "pure fantasy”, maintaining that the only real way to help the Palestinians in Gaza is to end the siege and “allow the reintegration of the West Bank and Gaza and the establishment of a Palestinian state." [15]

Six years later, in 2017, no material action had been taken to begin the project. Instead, Israel released a flashy promotional film that, complete with computer-generated imagery and stirring music, revealed further details of the 2011 proposal. "The artificial island initiative is aimed at providing an answer to a reality that is bad for the Palestinians and not good for Israel," says the English-speaking narration, inelegantly acknowledging that the goal is, at least in part, to change the perception that Israel is to blame for the dire conditions of the two million people living in Gaza. Israel Katz, the then transport minister, promoted the video as an alternative to calls to allow Gaza to build its own seaport.

Despite the grand vision presented in 2017, the artificial island project remained nothing more than a symbolic gesture, intended more to influence perception and stimy more actionable plans than to effect change. Fast forward to January 2024, amidst Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, and this same promotional video resurfaces as Israel Katz inexplicably screens clips of the now 13-year-old film to a group of bewildered EU diplomats. The summit, convened in Brussels on January 22nd, was set to pave the way for a peace plan in the Middle East. On the agenda was a 12-point discussion paper regarding the establishment of a two-state solution, which Katz disregarded in favour of discussing the video, which had no relevance to the issues under discussion, with one official reportedly describing the video as “several years old” and “very bizarre”. [16]

At the time, Israeli-American anthropologist and the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Jeff Halper, said of the proposal, “The point of Israeli apartheid is to disappear the Palestinians as a people and Palestine as a country: confine the Palestinians to small islands… take their lands and then normalise that regime in the international community.” [17] This proposal, then, is less a construction project than it is a calculated act of erasure—focused not on building anything new but on facilitating the obliteration of Gaza as it stands today.

But even if we momentarily set aside the underlying objective and imagine the project moving from speculation to reality, practical questions remain: how would it be built, and, more pointedly, who would do the building? Before October 7th 2023, over 200,000 Palestinian day labourers would enter Israel each day from Gaza and the West Bank to undertake work ranging from cleaning offices to picking fruit. Of this number, nearly 80,000 work in the construction sector, specialising in ironwork, flooring, formwork, and plastering, and typically handle the hard labour at most Israeli construction sites. [18]

The use of Palestinian labour by Zionists has been a longstanding issue since the early 20th century, predating the establishment of Israel. In 1920, Jewish settlers formed the Histadrut, whose primary focus was to facilitate Jewish settlement and coordinate the so-called "conquest of labour" (kibush avoda) campaign. Led by the emerging Labour Zionist movement, this sustained campaign sought to enforce exclusively Jewish employment at Jewish-owned businesses and eliminate the Yishuv's (the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948) dependence on Palestinian workers. [19]

Though, at the time, it presented itself as a trade union, the Histadrut was an explicitly Zionist organisation open only to Jews, with former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir describing it as "a great colonising agency" essential to Israel’s creation. [20] One of the Histadrut’s earliest goals was to secure employment for newly arrived Jewish settlers in Palestine while systematically excluding Palestinian Arab workers. This created tensions with the Zionist bourgeoisie, whose vision of Israel was based on an economic model that relied on Jewish landowners exploiting cheap Palestinian labour for cash crop production, such as citrus groves in rural colonies (moshavot)—naturally driving down wages for Jewish workers.

Over the following decades, the movement sought to push Palestinian workers out of the economy but never fully succeeded. Instead, Palestinians were treated as a reserve army of labour that the Israeli state could draw upon or shut out depending on market demands. [21] By the early 1970s, Israel’s expanding economy and construction sector, increasingly dependent on a population it had displaced and dispossessed, required additional cheap labour beyond the Palestinians it already regularly exploited within Israel. Meanwhile, decades of occupation and underdevelopment left many Palestinian workers in the Occupied Territories unemployed and vulnerable to hyper-exploitation.

Then, in 1972, to remedy this, the Israeli state issued the "general exit order," permitting Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to enter Israel for work. In doing so, Israel further expanded its reserve army of labour, offering its most gruelling and physically demanding jobs to Palestinians, who were forced to endure low wages, no job security, and harsh working conditions. [22] Despite being barred from joining the Histadrut as non-residents, Palestinian workers were still forced to make automatic payments to the very organisation that sought to undermine them. Key to the "general exit order" initiative was the stipulation that between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. each night, workers had to leave Israeli territory, ensuring they were never eligible for permanent residency. [23]

These workers, crossing military checkpoints, now became migrant workers, many of whom will have been returning to their own ancestral land for the duration of a shift, only to be expelled again after the work day is done. Of this exploitation, Ali Kadri writes, “For capital to have a high surplus labour relative to low necessary labour, the worker as well as his community have to be pauperised. The closest human being personifying the ideal type required by the law of value is the migrant labourer.” [24] Unlike most countries that utilise an externalised and disposable workforce, in the case of Israel, it is responsible for the very creation of the one on its doorstep. Every Palestinian farm confiscated by Israel not only seizes land but also strips livelihoods, turning self-sufficient farmers into a vulnerable labour force—left with little choice but to work for the very entity that displaced them, perpetuating a cruel cycle of dispossession and exploitation. As Kadri continues, “The receiving country immiserates the labourer’s country of origin, uses an already grown labourer in production upon whom it defrayed no costs and throws him back to his debilitated community afterwards.” [25]

Much like South Asian migrant workers in Dubai, Palestinian workers are exploited the moment they arrive to perform labour—without Israel bearing the costs of raising, educating, or training them. While unproductive migrant workers in the UAE are segregated into camps, Palestinian workers return to their place of origin each night, even if only for a few hours. This practice represents an even more extreme distillation of the law of value, ensuring that the costs of their social reproduction remain entirely externalised whilst the fruits of their labour are extracted. Put more starkly, Kadri describes it thus; “Ideally, it [Capital] wants a worker born at working age, to die at the exact day of his retirement, paid as little as possible and costing little in hours of labour to be reproduced by his community. Capital needs a society whose own labour power is of no use to it.” [26]

Despite these conditions, between 1967 and 1992, the number of daily workers arriving from the West Bank to Israel grew from practically none to approximately 35% of all employed persons and 60% of all wage-earning workers. [27] Then, in the early 1990s, in a bid to replace these Palestinian workers from the Occupied Territories, Israel enacted a temporary migration scheme for low-skilled workers from further afield. These workers came mainly from Eastern Europe, China, and Turkey to work in the construction industry and from Thailand, where they became the backbone of Israel's agricultural sector. This system, known as the “binding policy”, was modelled on the “kafala system”, and like it, foreign workers' visas were restricted to a single employer, preventing them from changing jobs. If dismissed, resigned, or their employer went bankrupt, they would lose their residence permit and face arrest and deportation. [27] Regardless, from 1993 until 2005, the share of foreign workers in Israel's labour market grew rapidly, surpassing the peak number of Palestinians recorded previously. [28]

However, as Israel became increasingly reliant on this new class of migrant workers, the outbreak of the Second Intifada reshaped security and economic priorities. Amid rising tensions, there were growing calls from the military and security services to increase the employment of Palestinian workers. The logic was that employing Palestinians would allow for greater control over them by granting or withholding work permits. Around this time, in March 2006, the Israeli Supreme Court struck down the Israeli version of the kafala system in a landmark decision, citing human rights concerns. [29]

Fast forward to the present day, and despite this ruling, concerns remain to this day about the conditions of non-Palestinian migrant workers, with estimates suggesting that 180,000 illegal migrant workers remained in the country after their contracts ended. [30] For Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, employment within Israel began to increase again to the figures stated earlier, until 2023, when on October 7, Israel decided to seal the border, bringing many of its industries, including construction, to a standstill. As a result, in late 2023, residential construction dropped by 95%, leading to a 19% decrease in overall economic activity. [31]

Returning Yisrael Katz’s proposal and its realisation, it follows that if it (or any of the many proposed island-building projects) were to proceed, Palestinian workers or another equally marginalised group of migrant workers would be the ones labouring to construct the islands. As with Dubai’s ongoing island constructions or More’s allegorical Utopia, it falls upon an exploited and racialised workforce to actually raise the islands from the ocean and create another's utopia.

I would suggest, however, that these Israeli proposals were never truly meant to be acted upon. Commenting on the latest proposal, Professor Neve Gordon of Queen Mary University of London Law School noted that Katz 'introduces us to a parallel universe, a figment of his distorted imagination,' which may very well be the point. These plans seem intended to remain in the realm of discussion rather than implementation. This is evident if we take a teleological approach—not examining the proposal's content but instead its instrumental role in diverting diplomatic conversations at the highest levels. These plans can be seen to serve their purpose by derailing genuine political negotiations, consuming time and energy with each new iteration. As Professor Gordon further states, such proposals are 'not worthy of any serious evaluation or discussion' and reveal, instead, 'the Minister’s desire to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.’ [32]

Whether it is the much-discussed U.S. aid pier—which, in the two months it was operational, delivered only the equivalent of a single day's pre-war land aid [33] (not to mention its suspected involvement in the Nuseirat massacre [34])—or the so-called "two-state solution" itself, which Western leaders continue to present as a genuine goal despite Israel’s explicit rejection of this outcome,[35] these are nothing more than performative acts of distraction. In this light, these recurring proposals from the Israeli government function as a kind of fiction. The documents and films discuss them act as utopian texts designed to satisfy Western technocrats who may or may not sincerely believe in the possibility of engineering a way out of the situation. At the same time, the proposals also postpone action indefinitely to maintain present conditions (favourable to Israel). By dangling these 'solutions' in front of the world, Israel buys time to change facts on the ground as they annex more and more land to cement their control of the region.

Through these documents, Palestinians are being cynically written into speculative fiction while their very real conditions worsen. The fact that these proposals are endlessly renewed—with flashier visuals and more extravagant promises—speaks to their empty futurity. Each added feature inflates the project, giving the impression of progress while pushing any real outcome further from reach. Likewise, the medium in which the proposal is presented is updated, developing from a document with a few sketchy computer-generated images in 2003 to the audio-visual presentation of 2017 (2024). With each reissue, the contents grow more grandiose and the presentation more impressive, creating a façade of action. Perhaps for the next iteration, we can expect a VR experience. Each time, the future, “the thing that draws further out of reach the closer you get to it”, as writer Sam Kriss describes it, appears brighter than before, even as life in Gaza grows unbearably bleaker.

The two sets of projects discussed in this short series—the UAE’s artificial islands and Israel’s proposals for Gaza—are, quite clearly, extensions of a historical colonial imaginary regarding islands. The parallels with More’s Utopia (in all cases) are more than incidental; they echo the enduring ways in which islands have been viewed and used throughout history as sites ripe for intervention. Unlike in More’s world of 1516, however, these modern projects of territorial expansion unfold within a world that has already been colonised once over.

Islands, with their suggestively simple geography, invite a certain authoritarian vision, as Baldacchino notes, because 'what could be neater than a piece of land surrounded by water?' [36] The isolation and separation afforded by islands serve to feed “a sense of mastery and authoritarianism that smacks of neo-colonialism and plays to a deeply held need for control,” and with the advent of technologies that enable the wholesale creation of islands, this colonial fantasy finds a fresh manifestation.

In the UAE's case, while it may not be a former European colonial state, its approach to island-building echoes (neo)colonial fantasies, with international elites from former colonial powers as the primary market for its real estate. Projects like The World invite buyers not only to 'colonise' but to role-play the process of global colonisation all over again. And, in the 21st century, in lieu of islands with resources and populations to claim, control over the very shape and form of the land becomes the new prize.

For Israel, the Gazan islands represent a twisted inverse of this fantasy: an imagined escape valve to displace an 'excess' population, thus freeing up other land for the occupier’s use. Or, in reality, the proposal itself is used as a tool to obfuscate diplomacy and enable other methods of colonisation. As McMahon et al. observe, 'The Island is so thoroughly steeped in emotional geography that it is perhaps impossible to determine where island dreams stop and island realities start.' [37] What better location to situate an unrealisable fantasy than an Island then, and a non-existent one, no less? I believe the possibilities afforded by this new technology raise serious questions about settler colonial projects going forward. What sort of precedent would be set if a lifeless pile of sand could be exchanged for sovereign land? How might artificial islands be used in the future to offshore and detain the millions of climate refugees that we will see in the coming decades?

Notes:

[1] O’Carroll, Lisa. 2024. “EU Foreign Policy Chief Says Israel Failed to Engage With Brussels Peace Summit.” The Guardian, January 23, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/22/eu-foreign-policy-chief-vows-to-push-for-two-state-solution-in-middle-east.

[2] The Institute for National Security Studies, Strategic Assessment Volume 5, Number 4, Feb 2003. Evan, Gartner and Kehat

[3] ibid

[4] Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

[5] Godfrey, Baldacchino. (2006). Islands, Island Studies, Island Studies Journal. Island Studies Journal. 1. 10.24043/isj.185.

[6] El-Enany, Nadine. “What Is Rwanda? • System of Systems.” n.d. https://systemofsystems.eu/research/what-is-Rwanda.

[7] Amnesty International. 2022. “Australia Has Turned Nauru Into an Open-air Prison.” August 8, 2022. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2016/10/australia-has-turned-nauru-into-an-open-air-prison/.

[8] Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5.

[9] Kershaw, Ian (2008) [2000]. Hitler: A Biography. New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06757-6.

[10] Browning, Christopher R. (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-1327-1.

[11] The Institute for National Security Studies, Strategic Assessment Volume 5, Number 4, Feb 2003. Evan, Gartner and Kehat

[12] “In New Vid, Israeli Minister Promotes Gaza Island Plan.” Timesofisrael.com, 2017, www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-intelligence-minister-promotes-gaza-island-plan-with-new-video/. Accessed 4 Nov. 2024.

[13] The National. 2021. “Israel Planning to Build Island off Gaza Strip for Port.” The National, June 17, 2021. https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/israel-planning-to-build-island-off-gaza-strip-for-port-1.431656.

[14] Godfrey Baldacchino, Island Images and Imaginations: Beyond the Typical Tropical, J. Riquet, M. Heusser (eds.), Imaging Identity,

[15] Urquhart, Conal. 2017. “Israel May Build Artificial Island off Gaza Strip Coast.” The Guardian, November 26, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/30/israel-artificial-island-gaza-coast.

[16] O’Leary, Naomi. 2024. “Israel’s Foreign Minister Shows Video Promoting Artificial Island off Gaza.” The Irish Times, January 22, 2024. https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2024/01/22/israeli-palestinian-ministers-to-attend-meeting-where-eu-will-push-for-peace/.

[17] “Plan to Build Artificial Island in Israel Seen as Attempt to Legitimize Occupation of Apartheid Regime.” n.d. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/plan-to-build-artificial-island-in-israel-seen-as-attempt-to-legitimize-occupation-of-apartheid-regime/3151244.

[18] Scheer, Steven, et al. “Loss of Palestinian Workers at Israeli Building Sites Leaves Hole on Both Sides.” Reuters, 21 Mar. 2024, www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/loss-palestinian-workers-israeli-building-sites-leaves-hole-both-sides-2024-03-21/. Accessed 4 Nov. 2024.

[19] Language of Propaganda: The Histadrut, Hebrew Labor, and the Palestinian WorkerAuthor(s): Steven A. GlazerSource: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter 2007), pp. 25-38Published

[20] Englert, S. (2023). Hebrew labor without Hebrew workers: The Histadrut, Palestinian workers, and the Israeli Construction Industry. Journal of Palestine Studies, 52(3), 23–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919x.2023.2244188

[21] Baroud, R. (2019, August 23). The decades-old war on Palestinian workers. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/8/23/the-decades-old-war-on-palestinian-workers

[22] “INVESTIGATION: The Palestinian Struggle for Labor Rights in Israel.” 2024. April 2, 2024. https://jacobin.com/2024/04/palestine-labor-unions-occupation-apartheid.

[23] Baroud, R. (2019, August 23). The decades-old war on Palestinian workers. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/8/23/the-decades-old-war-on-palestinian-workers

[24] Kadri, A. (2020). A theory of forced labour migration. In Springer eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3200-9

[25] ibid

[26] ibid

[27] ibid

[28] Bringing in State Regulations, Private Brokers, and Local Employers: A Meso-Level Analysis of Labor Trafficking in Israel1

[29] Kadri, A. (2020). A theory of forced labour migration. In Springer eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3200-9

[30] Kav LaOved Worker’s Hotline v. Government of Israel | Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. (n.d.). https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/opinions/kav-laoved-worker%E2%80%99s-hotline-v-government-israel

[31] Ellman, M., & Laacher, S. (2003). Migrant Workers in Israel - A Contemporary Form of Slavery. The Euro-mediterranean Human Rights Network & The International Federation For Human Rights. Retrieved February 14, 2025, from https://www.refworld.org/reference/countryrep/ifhr/2003/en/49326

[32] Reuters & TOI staff. (2024, April 4). Shortage of Palestinian Workers at Israeli Building Sites Leaves Hole on Both Sides. Times of Israel. Retrieved February 14, 2025, from https://www.timesofisrael.com/shortage-of-palestinian-workers-at-israeli-building-sites-leaves-hole-on-both-sides/

[33] Taha Ersen, Enes . “Plan to Build Artificial Island in Israel Seen as Attempt to Legitimize Occupation of Apartheid Regime.” Aa.com.tr, 2024, www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/plan-to-build-artificial-island-in-israel-seen-as-attempt-to-legitimize-occupation-of-apartheid-regime/3151244. Accessed 4 Nov. 2024.

[34] Borger, J. (2024, July 11). US Gaza aid pier to be permanently dismantled after operating for just 20 days. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/10/us-gaza-aid-pier-dismantled

[35] Admin. (2024, June 8). Fake aid truck used to carry out rescue operation – US ‘Special Cell’ participated in Nuseirat massacre. Palestine Chronicle. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/fake-aid-truck-used-to-carry-out-rescue-operation-us-special-cell-participated-in-nuseirat-massacre/

[36] “Rejection of Two-State Solution by Israeli Leadership “Unacceptable”, Says Guterres | UN News.” News.un.org, 23 Jan. 2024, news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145807.

[37] Baldacchino, Godfrey. 2019. “Island Images and Imaginations: Beyond the Typical Tropical.” In Springer eBooks, 301–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_14.

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