Author: Helena

There are many different ways of using economic integration to tie countries together after recent wars. The “European Coal and Steel Community” pioneered between France and Germany after 1945 was one of the most successful…
The ECSC– which laid the basis for today’s thriving European Union– was built on a strong basis of equality between its two founding countries, and on a notable spirit of generosity by the French who decided, after 1945, not to repeat the mistakes made by the victorious Allies after the First World War, when they decided that, as “victors”, they would rub the German people’s noses into the ground for as long as they could. (We know what that led to.)
And then, a very different example from the ECSC, there is this: “Human Trafficking, Abuse, Forced Overtime, Primitive Dorm Conditions, Imprisonment and Forcible Deportations of Foreign Guest Workers At the Musa Factory in Jordan”– as described in great and painful detail in that report from the Pittsburgh, US-based National Labor Committee.
But what nobody who has written about this horrendous sweatshop has yet drawn attention to, is that “Musa Textiles”, located in Al Hassan Industrial City in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid is one of the important economic “fruits” of the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty.
Al-Hassan Industrial City is one of three “Qualified Industrial Zones” in Jordan. QIZ’s are given that designation by the US government. That website from the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour tells us that,

In 1996, U.S Congress authorized designation of qualifying industrial zones (QIZ’s) between Israel and Jordan, and Israel and Egypt. The QIZ’s allow Egypt and Jordan to export products to the United States duty-free if the products contain inputs from Israel (8% in the Israeli-Jordanians QIZ agreement, 11.7% in the Israeli-Egyptian QIZ agreement). The purpose of this trade initiative has been to support the prosperity and stability in the Middle East by encouraging regional economic integration…

“Integration” of a certain sort, that is. “Integration” that keeps the businesses that operate out of the QIZ’s in the Arab countries firmly under Israel’s economic heel.
The website tells us this:

On March 6th, 1998, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) designated Jordan’s Al-Hassan Industrial Estate in the northern city of Irbid as the world’s first QIZ.

It also tells us that the Al-Hassan Industrial Estate is “owned and operated by the Jordan Industrial Estate Corporation.”
So here’s how this “integration” works– as revealed in the NLC report, and these recent articles in Haaretz (1, 2):
The NLC report says that “Mr. Musa”, the owner, is an Israeli. But Haaretz’s Dana Weiler-Polak tells us,

the real owners are Jack Braun and Moshe Cohen from Tel Aviv… The two employ 132 people from Bangladesh, 49 from India and 27 Jordanians. Chinese, Sri Lankans and Nepalese have also worked there in the past.

Jordan has a chronic unemployment problem, and fwiw, a large proportion of its population is made up of Palestinian refugees (who generally have Jordanian citizenship.) Estimates of the country’s unemployment rate range from 13.5% through 30%.
Can somebody tell me how employing just 27 Jordanians out of Musa Garments’ workforce of 208 “support[s] prosperity and stability in the Middle East by encouraging regional economic integration”?
Oh, I don’t doubt there are a few Jordanians who manage the “Al-Hassan Industrial Park” or who do some jobs around the factories in it, and who get a little bit of benefit from the enterprise.
But at the heart of “Musa Garments” are two Israeli clothing manufacturers who ruthlessly exploit very vulnerable migrant workers from very low-income third countries to make clothes for leading Israeli “labels.”
The NLC report contains very serious allegations against not only the line managers in the factory– who threatened to “cut off the penises” of some balky workers– but also against the Jordanian authorities. After an apparent riot by the migrant workers inside the factory in June, the managers locked them out of the factory. Of course, most of these men and women in these jobs are deeply dependent on them, having often gone into great debt in their home communities to be able to “afford” the airfare that brought them to Jordan. (The managers, not surprisingly, kept– and apparently still to this day keep– their passports.)
Then, this:

On Sunday, June 21, a delegation of Musa workers walked 3 ½ hours to appeal to the Labor Court. There was not much of a discussion, but the workers were told that if they did not return to work within 48 hours, they would be fined 50 JD ($70.52 U.S.)—about two weeks’ wages—for the first day and 5 JD ($7.05 U.S., more than they earned in a day) for each day after that.
On June 24, the workers met with an official from the Bangladeshi Embassy, Mr. Shakil, and a local representative of the Ministry of Labor office at Al Hassan. According to the workers, the Ministry of Labor official behaved very rudely, shouting at the workers that “if you don’t listen to us, we will call the police and have you all arrested.” He also threatened that food would be cut off if they did not return to work. (If fact, it appears that all food was cut off on Saturday, June 20.) The Bangladesh Embassy official essentially explained that he had no power to help.
On July 2, the general manager, Mr. Riad, met very briefly with the workers, telling them they must either return to work or “I’ll call the police and stop the food.” (Though the food had already been stopped.) Mr. Shakil, the Bangladesh Embassy official, was again present. The workers wanted to return to the factory but asked the Embassy official for help. They would return to the factory, but they wanted their passports back and a guarantee that they would not be beaten by the police. The desperate workers kept pleading with the Embassy official, begging : “You are a Bangladeshi official. Please, you must help us. We have nowhere else to turn to.” Mr. Shakil responded as he had in the past, saying, “I have no power and there is nothing I can do here.” The workers begged him again to arrange an agreement so they could enter the factory to work. When the workers, who had gathered around the Embassy official’s car, continued to plead for help, Mr. Shakil called the police. The workers had peacefully blocked his car for 30 to 40 minutes.
The police arrived and beat five workers, including women, who were visibly bruised and bleeding. At that point, to protect their co-workers, some workers did throw stones at the police, who were beating the women.
On July 5, as the workers put it, “We surrendered to the boss.” They knew they would never receive justice. So, in desperation, they agreed to whatever the owner said. They would pay the fine of over 200 JD ($282) if they had to.
On July 6, Musa supervisors came to the dorm and picked out about half the workers, asking that they return to the factory immediately. The other half were told they would return to work the following day, July 7.
Instead, around 2:00 p.m. on July 6, about 50 police charged the dormitory and took 24 workers—10 men and 14 women, to prison. The men were taken out in handcuffs. Several of the women were not allowed to fully clothe themselves before being dragged out, which for them was a great humiliation.
Of the 24 workers taken to the police station, 18 were freed. But six workers were imprisoned from July 6 to July 15, when they were forcibly deported without any of their personal belongings.
Two of the six workers, both women, were beaten in prison. One was slapped, and the other kicked when they asked why they were being arrested. Conditions in the prison were very poor. The workers had no mattresses, no pillows, little food, and unsafe drinking water. They only got by because the husband of one of the imprisoned women brought her food every day, which she shared with the other workers.
In another bizarre police action, the imprisoned workers were told to give the names of their closest friends to the police, supposedly so they could retrieve their personal belongings. But when the six workers, including one supervisor, showed up at the police station at 5:00 p.m., they too were arrested. To date, no one knows where these six workers are being held.
According to the Ministry of Labor report, “…the six workers in question were detained for repatriation by order of the Ministry of Interior on request of the governor by letter of June 30. The reasons for the detention relate to their involvement in activities contravening public security and are not related to their possible involvement in the strike.”
The six imprisoned and forcibly deported workers—three men and three women—had all worked in Jordan for up to five years without a single incident or complaint against them…

The NLC report also tells us that the very bad conditions in the factory have led most Jordanians to avoid taking jobs there, leaving the jobs to be filled only by the very vulnerable South Asians.
In today’s Haaretz, Avirama Golan tells us that yesterday, in Tel Aviv,

many decent people… demonstrated in front of chain stores Jump, Irit, Bonita and Pashut at Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Mall. The demonstrators protested the horrifying exploitation of factory workers by the company Musa Garments, as detailed in the NLC report. They promised a consumer boycott.
Unfortunately, their boycott will not sting the owners’ profits. Nonetheless, these people represent the spearhead of the few Israelis fighting for human rights. Most of them are certain to have demonstrated against the expulsion of migrant workers’ children [from Israel itself].

Golan asks rhetorically,

What is the connection between [the mgrant workers inside Israel] and the Bangladeshis, Indians, Chinese and Nepalese who sleep on dilapidated beds, eat barely cooked chicken still dripping with blood and work themselves to the point of exhaustion after having their passports confiscated and their self-respect and civil rights trampled in the Musa Garments factory in Irbid, whose real operators are Israeli? There is an obvious link that could be called “the backyard.”
The people exposed in Irbid are not some of globalization’s bad seeds. Rather, they provide a peek into the Israeli economy’s backyard. Unlike other economies, the Israeli economy does not need to look far to manufacture its consumer goods and brand names. Until recently, it had no need to import slaves. For nearly 40 years, the glorious Israeli economy relied on the very near backyard – the occupied territories.
When cheap labor is so readily available, when it arrives in the morning and disappears in the evening, it’s very easy to deny the human existence of those who build homes, clean streets and apartments, wash dishes in restaurants and tend gardens. This ease was made even easier thanks to the settler-like hierarchical mind-set that views the Palestinians as the lowest level of human existence. This attitude trickled down quickly and conveniently into people’s consciousness within the Green Line. Thus, it is so easy for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sell his false vision of “economic peace” in Ramallah. The removal of migrant workers from the center of the country under the so-called Gedera-Hadera plan is the other side of the coin.
The moment things no longer went as planned in the backyard and Israeli entrepreneurs, contractors and farmers lost out to the cheaper global market, people here began searching for a new backyard, and they found it in two places.
The entrepreneurs found Jordan, and the farmers and contractors found the “legal” migrant workers who are rendered slaves in hiding. But now it seems that Jordan is not cheap enough, so a new arrangement has been conceived, one seen in Musa Garments – a backyard within a backyard.
Yes, it is important to demonstrate against them. It is also important to boycott their products. But it is more important to understand the real hidden danger in their activities. With the same ease with which settler-like values have trickled across the Green Line, values of slave exploitation are now trickling in…

Golan is right to note all these connections. But I wish that s/he had also pointed out that the whole basis on which “Musa Garments” and the “Al-Hassan Industrial Park” were built was on the completely mendacious promise of mutually fruitful economic “cooperation” between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
And now, of course, we have Netanyahu claiming that what he aims at is an “economic peace” with the Palestinians…