Who Built Israel? The given wisdom is that Jewish settlers did. Unused to manual labor, they learned on the job and made “new Jews” of themselves according to the doctrine of Labor Zionism. But the labor record I review in Stone Men is quite murky on this point and has been obscured by the agrarian romance of the kibbutz and the pervasive influence of nationalist mythologies. While Palestinians have always been at the core of the workforce, there have been at least three large-scale efforts to replace their labor: in the Conquest of Labor campaign in the early decades of the twentieth century; then after 1948, with the importation of Mizrahi Jews; and again after the first intifada with the recruitment of migrant workers from overseas.In spite of these efforts, which were only partially successful, employers, especially in the construction industry, have always preferred Palestinian workers, and still do (today, there are more workers from the West Bank employed in Israel and the settlements than ever before). Acknowledging that Palestinians have built Israel (along with other states in the region, like Joran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE) helps us understand how and why they should have labor-based claims on rights as well as claims on lands stolen during the Nakba and since.Now, I am aware that this argument has not fared all that well for laboring populations in other countries. Think of the African-Americans, Irish, Chinese, and Mexicans who have built the United States. Pushing for full social inclusion and rights on the basis of their foundational labor did not work for them in the short-term, but, over time, the moral force of the argument has translated into fuller acceptance of their civil and political rights. In the case of Palestine, the argument is even stronger; we are not talking about populations brought from elsewhere; these are people who labor on their own lands to build another people’s nation-state.My journey to this book began in Abu Dhabi, where I had been doing research, with colleagues in the Gulf Labor Coalition, on South Asian migrant workers (documented in the book The Gulf: Hard Labor/High Culture). The government did not like what we were doing there so they banned us from entering the country. Shortly thereafter, some of us re-grouped in Palestine to help make a film, and I found myself doing interviews, at the Green Line checkpoints, with people who were, in effect, migrant workers in their own land.My decision to pursue the research was also driven by a personal effort to follow through on the BDS—Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—resolution vote passed by my professional association, the American Studies Association, in 2014. It’s one thing to vote for such a resolution, but how do you make good on the analogy often cited as an argument for the resolution—that our discipline’s knowledge about settler colonialism in the U.S. had some intimate relevance to the ongoing record of Zionist settlement in historic Palestine? Like many others in the field, I felt a responsibility to engage further in my own research. So, too, I joined the organizing committee of USACBI, the American branch of the BDS movement.The book was written for the general reader, so no specialist knowledge of the region is required. I am not a Middle Eastern expert myself, which makes it easier to approach readers roughly on the same level. But I also wanted to put some materials and reasoning on the table that might be useful to front line advocates of Palestinian liberation. Hence the argument I make about political sweat equity—based on the principle that building a country should translate into political rights within it. Palestinians have put in more than a century of toil building the Jewish “national home,” and most other assets on these lands. What rights accrue from that long inventory of labor, and how can this record of contributions feed into the transitional justice claims needed to bring about the one-state solution with full rights for all?