The suspension of Palestinian work permits after October 7, 2023, exposed the long-standing fragility of Palestinian labor in Israel and illuminated the political purposes this labor regime serves. This article situates Palestinian workers within a historical continuum of exclusion and conditional incorporation that has structured Zionist and Israeli labor policy since the Mandate period. Drawing on archival, historical, and contemporary sources, we show that Palestinian labor has functioned not as a neutral economic exchange but as a central instrument of colonial governance.

We argue that Israeli labor policy toward Palestinians combines three interlocking logics—elimination, exploitation, and discipline—through which workers are rendered simultaneously indispensable to key sectors and permanently vulnerable to surveillance, disposability, and political sanction. The permit regime, tolerated informality, and externalized social reproduction constitute a technology of control that manages mobility while fragmenting collective agency.

By analyzing Palestinian labor as a colonial apparatus, the article contributes to wider debates on the coloniality of labor and demonstrates how labor regimes can be mobilized to restructure dependent economies and pacify subordinated populations.

The centralization of conflict resolution and the administration of justice, two crucial elements of state formation, are often ignored by the state-building literature. This article studies the monopolization of justice administration, using the historical example of the General Indian Court (gic) of colonial Mexico. The author argues that this court’s development and decision-making process can show us how the rule of law develops in highly authoritarian contexts. Centralized courts could be used strategically to solve an agency problem, limiting local elites’ power and monitoring state agents. To curb these actors’ power, the Spanish Crown allowed the indigenous population to raise claims and access property rights. But this access remained limited and subject to the Crown’s strategic considerations. The author’s theory predicts that a favorable ruling for the indigenous population was more likely in cases that threatened to increase local elites’ power. This article shows the conditions under which the rule of law can emerge in a context where a powerful ruler is interested in imposing limits on local powers—and on their potential predation of the general population. It also highlights the endogenous factors behind the creation of colonial institutions and the importance of judicial systems in colonial governance.