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Latino Migrants in the Jewish State: Undocumented Lifes in Israel (full book)
Indiana University Press
In the 1990s, thousands of non-Jewish Latinos arrived in Israel as undocumented immigrants. Based on his fieldwork in South America and Israel, Barak Kalir follows these workers from their decision to migrate to their experiences finding work, establishing social clubs and evangelical Christian churches, and putting down roots in Israeli society. While the State of Israel rejected the presence of non-Jewish migrants, many citizens accepted them. Latinos grew to favor cultural assimilation to Israeli society. In 2005, after a large-scale deportation campaign that drew criticism from many quarters, Israel made the historic decision to legalize the status of some undocumented migrant families on the basis of their cultural assimilation and identification with the State. By doing so, the author maintains, Israel recognized the importance of practical belonging for understanding citizenship and national identity.
Spheres of Migration: Political, Economic and Universal Imperatives in Israel’s Migration Regime
Middle East Law and Governance, 2013
This article seeks to describe the piecemeal process of creation of what may, arguably, be a new immigration regime in Israel. In order to do so, we focus on three distinct waves of non-Jewish entry to Israel. The first is the day-labor entry of Palestinian workers from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) since 1967; the second is the entry of migrant workers from various countries, primarily since 1993; and the third is the entry of asylum-seekers, primarily from Africa, since 2007. Each of these waves was carved out by the state as a distinct sphere of migration, a narrow exception to Israel’s general Jewish Settler Regime, which is based on a different functional imperative. The entry of Palestinians is justified primarily by a political imperative – the political relationship between Israel and the Palestinians under occupation. The entry of migrant workers is, first and foremost, seen as the result of economic imperatives – a way to supply cheap labor to cater to the nee...
Review Article: The Immovable Fight over the Transitional Nature of Israeli Identity
2007
Academic research of identity-related issues is a fascinating global phenomenon, both in terms of the detailed examination of worldwide events and in terms of research theories attempting to define their common denominators within various frameworks. A particularly interesting strand of identity research deals with immigrant societies coping with stresses and conflicts on at least two levels: first, between groups of diverse ethnic and cultural origins within the immigrant society, and second, between the immigrant society as a whole and the local, ‘native’ society encountered in the target country (which is usually also composed of several subgroups which tend to experience a certain degree of conflict themselves). The Israeli case, both as an arena for events and as an area of research, is unique. First, Israeli society bears the burden of a complex historic legacy characterized by identity struggles within the Jewish community since the Enlightenment. Second, British Journal of M...
Citizenship and the state in the Middle …, 2000
The invisibility of Israel's Palestinian citizens in the viewfinder of Israeli sociology is a well-known feature of the discipline's past, now thankfully eclipsed by a decade-long wave of research. (For a fuller discussion, see Rosenhek 1998). Traditionally guided by an implicit social map that defined the borders of "Israeli society" as synonymous with "Jewish society" (Kimmerling 1992), all but a handful of Jewish sociologists (notably Henry Rosenfeld and Sammy Smooha) treated the Arab minority as at most a footnote to the dominant Jewish text. Just as the Arab-Israeli conflict was seen largely as a matter for specialists on military and foreign-relations questions (Shafir 1996), so the study of the Arab citizenry of Israel was consigned mainly to the "orientalist" wing of the academy (Rabinowitz 1993). Insofar as sociologists or political scientists did become actively engaged, their principal interest was defined by the political concerns of the Jewish establishment: Why did so many Arabs reject the "Zionist parties" in favor of the Communists? What was the import of the sense of kinship that Arab citizens came to display in their relations with the Palestinians in the occupied territories? Might either of these trends portend challenges to Jewish dominance of Israeli territory and the Israeli state? (e.g. Rekhess 1989).