Faced with competition from low-paid computer programmers in India and elsewhere, many Western software companies have opted to ‘offshore’ their testing and development operations to the Subcontinent or East Asia. In Israel, however, the largest it company, Matrix, has come up with a novel solution: introducing, as the Matrix website describes it, ‘the first Zionist local offshore outsourcing’, using low-paid ultra-orthodox women workers in state-subsidized settlements in the Occupied Territories. Matrix has opened a new development centre, named Talpiot—after the idf’s elite combat unit—in the West Bank settlement of Modi‘in Illit. As Matrix ceo Mordechai Gutman explains, outsourcing to East Asia is not all perfect:
Long distances, cultural and language differences, different time zones, as well as rising wages and high turnaround rates, all combine to reduce the attractiveness of development in these countries. To tackle the problem, Matrix has set up a development centre in Israel, employing a highly qualified workforce at competitive rates . . . [At Talpiot], religious women gain employment in development centres close to their home, in a homogeneous environment that provides for their specific needs . . . Because the religious population competing for the jobs faces relatively low living costs, Matrix is able to provide its local offshore outsourcing services to customers at prices similar to those in Far East countries, but with the advantages of . . . geographic and cultural proximity.footnote1
Glossed over in this ‘proximity’ is the fact that Matrix’s ‘offshore outsourcing’ operation in Modi‘in Illit takes place in the Occupied Territories, and that the ‘low cost of living’ is due to the substantial subsidies advanced by the state for the development of Israel’s colonial frontier.
Three miles east of the Green Line, Modi‘in Illit was founded in 1996. It is situated some 20 miles east of Tel Aviv and 8 miles west of Ramallah, on what were then the orchards, fields and pastures of five Palestinian villages: Ni‘lin, Kharbata, Saffa, Bil‘in and Dir Qadis. Modi‘in Illit is among the fastest-growing settlements in the West Bank today, soon to be granted the status of a city, and with a population of over 30,000; the Housing Ministry projects 150,000 residents by the year 2020. Along with the huge ring of Israeli-only housing around Greater Jerusalem, the eastward sprawling conurbation of Ma’ale Adumim, and other rapidly expanding settler towns such as Ariel, Karnei Shomron, Betar Illit and others in the cluster of settlements at Gush Etzion, it is part of a rash of new building that has transformed the West Bank landscape over the past ten years.
Modi‘in Illit is not the work of messianic settler-zealots but of a heterogeneous socio-political alliance that links real-estate developers, capitalists seeking the opportunity to profit from land confiscation and government subsidies, politicians driving forward the colonization project—and captive labour. Its development, like that of Nirit, Alfei Menashe and Tzufin, is part of a larger project, begun in the 1980s, that aimed both to establish enclaves in the Occupied Territories for wealthy, more ‘mainstream’ settlers, and to dissolve the Green Line (Israel’s pre-1967 border) by creating ‘facts on the ground’—linking the new settlements to communities inside the Line, while expanding the latter in the direction of the Territories. Its very name, ‘Upper Modi‘in’, misleadingly suggests that it is part of the town of Modi‘in, situated some miles away on the Israeli side of the pre-1967 border.
With the post-Oslo expansion of West Bank settlements in the mid 1990s, thousands of housing units were built in Modi‘in Illit in violation of the law—and with the ex post facto approval of the local council.footnote2 In one area, the council whitewashed the illegal construction by making retroactive adjustments to the zoning plan. According to a 1998 investigation, the entire Brachfeld Estate—built on the lands of Bil‘in—was thrown up without construction permits; though naturally, not one of these houses was demolished when this fact was revealed. The close cooperation between the Modi‘in Illit Council and powerful private entrepreneurs, who were granted special benefits and no-bid contracts, is well documented in the state comptroller’s report: again and again the council sought to justify its cosy relationship with the investors, arguing that the private contractor ‘has already built housing units and other projects in the area’, and that there is ‘an urgent need to complete the project’. The state comptroller also determined that the Modi‘in Illit Council collected only 10 per cent of the taxes that the developers owed on the lands and that the Council ‘offset the debts it was owed’ from the two main developers of the settlement ‘by means of shady bookkeeping involving future building projects, even before receiving the required permits for their construction’.
While the settlement itself is kept spotlessly clean—winning the ‘Beauty Star’ award from the Council for a Beautiful Israel—much of its sewage flows into the Modi‘in stream, polluting the area’s water resources. All this is not a matter of mere corruption or mismanagement, but a structural feature of the colonial frontier: unregulated settlement activity creates possibilities for vast profits at the expense of the human and natural environment. In Israel’s Wild East, the need to establish ‘facts on the ground’ gives developers a free hand; the political urgency of the colonization process works in tandem with investors’ attempts to secure quick profits. Ethnically, too, Modi‘in Illit practises the same policies of destructive exclusion: officials in one of its main neighbourhoods claimed that ‘on principle and for the sake of security’, they did not hire Arabs.footnote3