Perspectives on labour migration in Israel

The Setting: Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station, "capital of the foreign workers" 1 1 Half a century after the establishment of the State of Israel, a stranger meandering through Tel Aviv's labyrinthian, seven-story Central Bus Station would be surprised to hear not just Hebrew, or even just Israel's recognized languages of Hebrew and Arabic, Russian and Amharic, but rather a global cacophony of languages: Tagalog and Romanian, Nigerian languages like Igbo and Yoruba, and Ghanaian languages like Twi and Fante.May be Mongolian.Certainly Spanish.Perhaps the South African click language, Xhosa 2 . 2For residents of south Tel Aviv, the Central Bus Station -or Takhana Mérkazit, as it has come to be called in multiple tongues -is a commercial and social hub as much as a hub for intra-and inter-city transportation.It houses a grocery store, two full-service pharmacies, dozens of stores selling clothing and jewellery, housewares and hardware; an indoor market selling everything from superglue to men's undershirts and from pornographic videos to tall glass water pipes; a post office; branches of all major Israeli banks; and dozens of food stands and restaurants including a wildly popular McDonald's. 3But it is not commercialism that has made Tel Aviv's Takhana Mérkazit, the largest of its kind in the Middle East, unique.Rather, the Central Bus Station -full of life, sound, music, color, opinions, negotiations, and consumer goods suiting a vast spectrum of taste and temperament -is also, always, full of people -many of whom are not Israeli.In local parlance, these people -Filipinos and Colombians, Romanians and Chinese, Nigerians and Thai -are collectively described as ovdim zarim, or "foreign workers". 4While this varied and polyglot group is monolithically represented in Israeli public discourse by the single term "foreign workers", the cultural, linguistic and religious diversity the term conceals is clearly striking.More precisely, this striking diversity was visible until the implementation of a massive deportation operation declared by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2002.The goal of the campaign, in the language Perspectives on labour migration in Israel Revue européenne des migrations internationales, vol.