They were harvesting courgettes or collecting eggs when Hamas came, and were slaughtered beside tractors or hiding in chicken sheds. The brutal men who cut their throats or bundled them on to trucks would have known from their faces that they weren’t Israelis, or even dual-nationals. Neither “colonisers” nor “settlers”, they were peasant labourers from a faraway land.
What nation beyond Israel has had most citizens taken hostage? From news coverage you’d never guess it’s not the US, Britain or any EU country, but Thailand. The fact that numbers are unclear — about 30 killed, between 19 and 54 kidnapped or missing — reflects the chaos but also their status. Thai faces do not appear on posters, the Thai government has maintained diplomatic silence, Thai survivor testimony is largely unheard.
This horrific conflict forces us daily to weigh the value of human lives: butchered Israeli teenagers against bombed Gazan children. I don’t wish to engage in this tragic calculus here. Rather I’m interested in those rendered invisible because they are of no political use to either side. Neither Jews nor Muslims, not citizens of a wealthy or strategically important country, the Thais are almost battlefield collateral, like dead livestock or burnt crops.
Why were so many Thais there, 7,000 miles from home? Because they make up almost 100 per cent of Israel’s foreign agricultural workers. The Hebrew word “tailandi” is used to describe the 30,000 Thais who toil in the orange groves and avocado plantations but is sometimes now a generic term for hard-working migrants. (Like Mexicans in the US.)
The Thais replaced the Palestinians who, since they’d once owned this land, knew how to cultivate it. Poor, dispossessed, with few other economic prospects, cheap Palestinian labour allowed Israel’s agricultural produce to compete in European supermarkets. But after the 1987 intifada, Arab workers began to strike and confront employers in pursuit of wider political goals. With Israel’s wealth and food security threatened, migrant labour was needed so Palestinians could be shut out. So Thailand, a predominantly Buddhist country, with no skin in this bitterest of fights, was the perfect source.
Advertisement
The workers came mainly from poor, rural northeast Thailand, hoping like all migrants to send cash home from their higher wages, eventually build a house or buy a car. But they paid intermediaries up to $9,000 to come for a single fixed period of five years, a sum reduced to $2,100 in 2013 with the creation of the Thailand-Israel Co-operation on the Placement of Workers (TIC) project. Even so this sum takes years to pay off, leaving the Thais as essentially bonded labourers.
Living on isolated farms, many in the perilous countryside around Gaza, unable to speak Hebrew or English, they became a self-contained community segregated from Israeli life and ripe for exploitation. Human rights groups investigating their conditions, including Human Rights Watch, found Thai workers unable to access medical care, overworked, paid below the minimum wage and in squalid housing. But non-unionised, on temporary visas, deep in debt, their only choice was to work on.
Only rarely, when disaster strikes, do we notice the silent armies who keep the global economy turning. We seldom think about the lives of Vietnamese women who perform our cheap high-street pedicures until they asphyxiate in a human trafficker’s sealed, refrigerated truck. The dire conditions and industrial accidents endured by migrants who built Middle Eastern skyscrapers and stadiums briefly entered public consciousness before the 2022 Qatar World Cup but outspoken players offered multimillion contracts with Arab clubs tend to shut up about human rights. The terrible lives of Chinese cockle-pickers run by cruel gangmasters were invisible until 23 drowned at Morecambe Bay in 2004.
Yet there is so much quotidian suffering: waiting for a flight in Colombo airport, I watched dozens of Sri Lankan families each saying goodbye to a weeping daughter bound to work as a maid in the Gulf, and who knows what behind-curtains loneliness, misery and violence.
South Asians, Filipinos especially, are drafted in to fill the service jobs the rich world now disdains. The Philippine state educates its young to serve abroad, marketing its stereotypical qualities of peaceable servitude, stoicism and politeness. Filipinos are uncomplaining merchant seafarers living below decks in container ships, rarely allowed on land. Filipinas raise rich western children without bitterness about never seeing their own babies back home. Four Filipino care workers were killed by Hamas, several slaughtered defending elderly Israelis. I find no tributes to their sacrifice but then they’re service humans, fleshy droids.
Advertisement
It is unclear whether Hamas killed Thais indiscriminately or were targeting Israeli agriculture by scaring away its workforce. Certainly 4,000 Thais have returned home and others await repatriation flights. But many have stayed on or will reportedly return whatever the risk, shackled to their debts, fearful that Israeli employers will withhold their wages or lured by pay rises.
Meanwhile, as the bodies fly into Bangkok and the injured recount watching friends die then being left for dead themselves, the Thai government stays quiet. It has not taken sides in a conflict since the Cold War: non-confrontation, it claims, is the Thai way. Besides, it needs investment, relies upon tourism — 160,000 Israelis visit every year — and foreign currency from its emigrants. But a Thai newspaper asks when “neutrality becomes indifference to the lives of its own citizens”. Shouldn’t it urge Israel to compensate its traumatised workers and widows, or at least write off their debts?
As Israel-Gaza rages on, the Thai hostages are no one’s top priority: just low-status citizens of a country known for affordable tropical holidays by azure seas, caught in the crosswinds of the world’s most intractable war.
