Occupational hazards

In July 2011, another small episode was written into the history of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. For the first time in forty-four years of occupation, Palestinian workers engaged in a collective dispute with their Israeli employer. Forty Palestinian workers in the Sal‘it quarry, located in the West Bank east of Jerusalem, went on strike, demanding that the management, comprised of Jewish Israelis, guarantee them fair employment conditions (including pensions), refrain from arbitrary dismissals, and sign a collective agreement entrenching these terms. This event came in the wake of recent important and interesting legal developments, which have contributed to the shaping of economic relations between Israel and the Palestinians, individually and collectively. These developments, which have received relatively little attention from legal commentators, merit documentation and analysis. This Article aims to fill this gap in legal research with respect to the discrete area of labor law. In particular, it examines the law applicable to the employment of Palestinian West Bank residents in Israeli West Bank settlements, as developed by judgments of the Israeli National Labor Court and High Court of Justice. Since 1967 and for the first two decades of Israel‘s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, the Palestinian workforce has relied in an incremental fashion on work in Israel and for Israelis in the occupied territories.1 From