The murder and abduction of dozens of Thai migrant workers as part of the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023 briefly brought the plight of these migrants into the limelight in Thailand and across the world. But the involuntary involvement of Thai migrants in a project of agricultural colonisation has coloured their experience in Israel for decades. In the late 1980s, an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from Isaan enabled the rapid transformation of Israel’s agricultural sector away from dependence on Palestinian labour and towards export-oriented monoculture. This influx in turn was made possible by Thai military leaders’ interest in the Israeli experience with “frontier settlement” as a solution for pacifying the country’s own restive border zones in the wake of the Third Indochina War.

Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer’s ethnography of Israel’s desert Arabah region and its Israeli and Thai inhabitants, mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the world today. Placing the findings of fieldwork as a farm worker within the ecological, economic, and political histories of both the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labour flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the “interaction ideologies” found among both migrant workers and settler employers, and raising the question of the place of migrants from outside the region in the Middle East’s future, the book demonstrates anthropology’s ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations.