Four Years, Three Months: Migrant Caregivers in Israel/Palestine
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2017 Four Years, Three Months: Migrant Caregivers in Israel/Palestine Rachel Brown The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2065 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] FOUR YEARS, THREE MONTHS: MIGRANT CAREGIVERS IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE by RACHEL H. BROWN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 RACHEL H. BROWN All Rights Reserved ii Four Years, Three Months: Migrant Caregivers in Israel/Palestine By Rachel H. Brown This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Political Science to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Joe Rollins _________________________________________ ____________ _________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Alyson Cole ____________ _________________________________________ Date _________________________________________ Executive Officer Supervisory Committee Joe Rollins Rosalind P. Petchesky Susan Buck-Morss Carol C. Gould Linda Martín Alcoff THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Four Years, Three Months: Migrant Caregivers in Israel/Palestine by Rachel H. Brown Advisor: Joe Rollins Rachel Brown Dissertation Abstract This dissertation explores the relationship between migrant caregivers and their employers in Israel. Based on interviews I conducted with migrant caregivers from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and India, and their Jewish-Israeli citizen-employers, I illustrate how the daily glances and exchanges comprising this relationship are shaped by the transnational racialized, gendered, and sexualized division of labor and ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship law. I also examine the many ways migrant caregivers navigate debt bondage, Israeli laws and policies legally “binding” them to their employers, and de jure exclusion from the body politic. I therefore contextualize the reproductive labor done by migrant caregivers within Israel’s broader ethno-racial Zionist project of nation- building, and the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian land. Throughout my iv dissertation, I highlight how networks of mutual aid, service provision, and community- buliding unfold at the local and transnational levels, considering the implications for transnational feminist solidarity. I thus treat Israel/Palestine as a case study for rethinking how the segmentation of transnational labor markets and the privatization of labor recruitment under neoliberal forms of governance intersect in particular ways with a de jure ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship regime. In undertaking this analysis, I foreground the affective, relational components of migrant labor and citizenship in addition to the political and legal. This project contributes to transnational feminist scholarship on migration and the racialization of labor and to empirically grounded theories of transnational care migration. It also intervenes in debates about nationalism, occupation, and settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine by providing an intersectional analysis of legal exclusions and state violence as they differentially unfold across lines of gender, ethnicity, race, class, religion, nationalism, and citizenship status. The introduction situates the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship in Israel/Palestine within the broader context of domestic and care migration transnationally, and the neoliberal turn to labor outsourcing in Israel. It also addresses the mutually constitutive relationship between citizenship and labor as it has unfolded within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, and considers the impact of Israel’s perpetual state of emergency on the daily lives of migrant caregivers. Finally, I examine the racialized, gendered, and sexualized construction of migrant caregivers by migrant-sending countries, private recruitment agencies, and Israeli employers. v Chapter one explores migrant caregivers’ political orientations towards the Israeli government, looking in particular at interviewees’ narratives about the government’s treatment of Palestinians and Eritrean and Sudanese refugees. I argue that the support migrant caregivers demonstrate for the Israeli government and the Zionist project are partially explained by the high cost of political dissent in Israel. I also examine how migrant networks of service provision and community organizing publicly represent themselves so as to appear, out of necessity, non-threatening to the Jewish body politic. Chapter two addresses migrant caregivers’ experiences working inside Jewish- Israeli homes, and their strategies for navigating debt bondage, Israel’s “Slavery Law,” and for gaining greater control over the work process. In doing so I treat the household as a site of race, class, and gender conflict that reflects, perpetuates, and contests hierarchical social relations in Israel/Palestine. I illustrate how migrant caregivers are at once treated as intimate members of the family and as “foreign” interlopers, a pattern reflecting the state’s legal classification of migrant caregivers more broadly. While their treatment as workers performing an exceptionally intimate form of labor creates the conditions for task expansion and under-compensation, their constitution as threats to the ethno-racial state justifies surveillance practices within the home. Chapter three examines the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship through the narratives of Jewish-Israeli citizen-employers, focusing upon two of the most common tropes arising within my interviews. The first, what I term the “kinship trope,” portrays migrant caregivers as “one of the family,” while the second trope depicts migrant caregivers as individual agents of economic development. I illustrate how both of these discourses naturalize the division between citizen and non-citizen labor, and reinforce vi social ideologies about domestic and carework as a racialized and gendered form of labor. I also argue that both discourses depoliticize live-in migrant carework by obscuring relations of power within the home. In chapter four I delineate the ways migrant caregivers use Internet Communication Technology (ICT) to contest and navigate the gendered and racialized naturalization of their work. I argue that within the asymmetrical migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship, they use ICT for self-expression, to fortify relationships of support with family and friends, and to strengthen community networks of mutual aid and solidarity. I suggest how each of these strategies can inform our understanding of state power and illuminate some of the potentials of virtual mobility. In the conclusion, I suggest how the narratives of migrant caregivers and their employers in Israel/Palestine can inform transnational feminist solidarity efforts aimed at supporting migrant caregivers’ rights and the Palestinian right to self-determination and liberation from occupation. Finally, I propose future lines of inquiry that can further illuminate the intersection between neoliberalism, gendered and racialized forms of labor, citizenship and national belonging in Israel/Palestine. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the generous time, encouragement, and insight of over one hundred interviewees who agreed to speak with me formally and informally about my project. Upon arriving in Tel Aviv with a list of questions three years ago, I was immediately welcomed into homes, weekend flats, religious services, community events, and various social gatherings by individuals and groups willing to help me further my research. I am especially grateful to the many interviewees working as caregivers who met with me despite their extremely limited free time, which amounts at best to twenty-four hours per week, and at worst, twenty-four hours per month. In addition to inviting me into their homes and out with their friends, they were willing to give me critical feedback on my project and to suggest ways of expanding its applicability and reach. I am particularly grateful to “Nina” and “Rina” for their continued input and friendship. I could not have completed this project without the guiding insight and support of my advisor, Joe Rollins. Joe has encouraged me to trust my own analytic and organizational instincts from the beginning, has been a sounding board when I have encountered methodological queries, and has made helpful suggestions when I was unsure of which thematic threads to pursue. He has reminded me to let my interviews drive my interpretations, and to tell the less expected but critically present story. Rosalind Petchesky has been a source of inspiration and support throughout my time at the Graduate Center, in the model she provides as a feminist scholar/teacher/activist, in her commitment to critiquing dominant narratives about Israel within Jewish and non-Jewish viii spaces, in her willingness to always engage with and push my thinking, and in her incredible dedication to mentoring her students. I am