Caring for the 'Holy Land': Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel 9780857452627

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Israeli Migration Regime: On Foreign Workers and Migrants
Chapter 2 Transnational Female Lives
Chapter 3 Caring for the ‘Holy Land’
Chapter 4 On Weekends, Together: The Making and Unmaking of a Filipino Community
Chapter 5 Feeling Manila, Living in Hiding and Appropriating the Black Part of the ‘White City’: Filipinos in Tel Aviv
Chapter 6 Global Dreaming
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CARING FOR THE ‘HOLY LAND’

EASA Series Published in Association with the European Association of Social-Anthropologists (EASA). Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes, and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership. 1. LEARNING FIELDS Volume 1 Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology Edited by Dorle Dracklé, Iain R. Edgar and Thomas K. Schippers 2. LEARNING FIELDS Volume 2 Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education Edited by Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar 3. GRAMMARS OF IDENTITY/ALTERITY Edited by Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich 4. MULTIPLE MEDICAL REALITIES Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine Edited by Helle Johannessen and Imre Lázár 5. FRACTURING RESEMBLANCES Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West Simon Harrison 6. SKILLED VISIONS Between Apprenticeship and Standards Edited by Cristina Grasseni 7. GOING FIRST CLASS? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement Edited by Vered Amit 8. EXPLORING REGIMES OF DISCIPLINE The Dynamics of Restraint Edited by Noel Dyck 9. KNOWING HOW TO KNOW Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present Edited by Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely

10. POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE Anthropological Perspectives from Home Edited by László Kurti and Peter Skalník 11. ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE IN THE PRESENT Edited by Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell and Helena Wulff 12. CULTURE WARS Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts Edited by Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice and Christina Toren 13. POWER AND MAGIC IN ITALY Thomas Hauschild 14. POLICY WORLDS Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power Edited by Cris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Però 15. HEADLINES OF NATION, SUBTEXTS OF CLASS Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe Edited by Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai 16. ENCOUNTERS OF BODY AND SOUL IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS PRACTICES Anthropological Reflections Edited by Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes 17. CARING FOR THE ‘HOLY LAND’ Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel Claudia Liebelt

Caring For The ‘Holy Land’ Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel

Claudia Liebelt

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2011 Claudia Liebelt All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liebelt, Claudia. Caring for the ‘Holy Land’ : Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel / Claudia Liebelt. p. cm. -- (EASA series ; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-261-0 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-262-7 (ebook) 1. Household employees--Israel. 2. Women foreign workers--Israel. 3. Israel-Emigration and immigration. 4. Philippines--Emigration and immigration. I. Title. HD6072.2.I75L54 2012 331.4’8164089992105694--dc23 2011029420 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-0-85745-261-0 (hardback) E-ISBN: 978-0-85745-262-7 (ebook)

Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations

vi viii

Preface xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1

The Israeli Migration Regime: On Foreign Workers and Migrants

23

Chapter 2

Transnational Female Lives

45

Chapter 3 Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

79

Chapter 4 On Weekends, Together: The Making and Unmaking of a Filipino Community

105

Chapter 5 Feeling Manila, Living in Hiding and Appropriating the Black Part of the ‘White City’: Filipinos in Tel Aviv 129 Chapter 6 Global Dreaming

159

Conclusion 187 Glossary 193 Bibliography 195 Index 209

List of Illustrations

Maps 0.1

Map of Israel and the Palestinian Territories with locations mentioned in the book. (Daniel Ziethen)

0.2

Map of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa city centre with locations mentioned in the book. (Daniel Ziethen)

ix

x

Figures 1.1

Cover of the Tel Aviv city magazine Akhbar Ha’Ir (Issue 8-15 July 2004).

40

2.1

Notes on the door to a shared flat of Filipinos in southern Tel Aviv, January 2008. (Claudia Liebelt)

75

2.2 A Filipina’s fully packed balikbayan box, Tel Aviv, February 2008. (Claudia Liebelt)

76

3.1

Filipina caregivers shopping on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street while their elderly employers watch, January 2009. (Gil Tevet)

103

3.2

Origami paper swan crafted by a Filipina domestic worker during her work as a carer with an elderly man in Israel. (Claudia Liebelt)

103

4.1

Dance performance by the evangelical In His Care network, Philippine Independence Day celebration, Jaffa, June 2005. (Claudia Liebelt)

127

4.2

Philippines Embassy officials win the tug-of-war against ‘the community’, Philippine Independence Day celebration, Jaffa, June 2005. (Claudia Liebelt)

127

5.1

In front of the Tel Aviv New Central Bus Station on a Saturday night, August 2007. (Claudia Liebelt)

155

List of Illustrations  u vii

6.1

Filipinos writing requests for the Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, April 2005. (Claudia Liebelt)

6.2

Shepherds’ Fields near Bethlehem at Christmas 2004. (Claudia Liebelt)

184 185

List of Abbreviations

ACRI

Association of Civil Rights in Israel

CBS

Tel Aviv New Central Bus Station

DH

Domestic Helper

FFCI

Federation of Filipino Communities in Israel

HMW

Hotline for Migrant Workers

JIL

Jesus Is Lord

KLO

Kav LaOved (Hebrew, ‘Workers Hotline’)

MESILA

short for ‘Aid and Information Center for the Foreign Community in Tel Aviv-Jaffa’ in Hebrew

NGO

Non-Governmental Organization

NIS

New Israeli Shekel (Israel’s official currency)

OCW

Overseas Contract Worker

OFW

Overseas Filipino Worker

OWWA

Overseas Workers Welfare Administration

PHR

Physicians for Human Rights

POEA

Philippine Overseas Employment Administration

POLO

Philippine Overseas Labour Office

UPIMA

Union of Filipino Workers Abroad (Tagalog Ugnayan ng mga Pilipinong Manggagawa sa Abroad)

Map 0.1. Map of Israel and the Palestinian Territories with locations mentioned in the book. (Daniel Ziethen)

Map 0.2. Map of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa city centre with locations mentioned in the book. (Daniel Ziethen)

Preface

In 2003 I set out to do research on what I had come to reflect upon as a double paradox. First of all, while Israel is almost a classic country of immigration when it comes to Jewish migration, according to state law and the hegemonic discourse it is nothing of the sort when it comes to non-Jewish migrants. These have nevertheless succeeded in living in the country in large numbers, at least since the ousting of Palestinian workers from the Israeli labour market in the mid-1990s. Secondly, even though a large number of these so-called ‘foreign workers’ have lost their legal status, they have demanded rights, appropriated public spaces, and found homes for themselves in the country. Israel therefore promised to offer an interesting case for research on the production of migrant ‘illegality’, migrants’ claims and practices of citizenship, as well as contemporary migration policies on the fringes of an ever-expanding European Union. Since I wished to break with the anthropological tradition of studying a single ethnic group, I aimed to treat the urban space of southern Tel Aviv, namely the Neveh Sha’anan neighbourhood where many non-citizen migrants lived, as a social field. Shortly before I started my field research, a new police unit for the arrest and deportation of ‘illegals’ was established and soon a new police campaign was launched which aimed at deporting illegalized domestic workers, who by and large lived in the neighbourhood I intended to study. Only days after I began re-editing this book for publication in summer 2009, the Israeli parliament again launched a large deportation campaign, which recalled the extremely tense atmosphere of the first days of my initial fieldwork more than six years earlier: every day, dozens of illegalized migrants came into the workers’ centre where I was working as a volunteer. They sought practical help and legal advice because they had been fired by their employers who in turn feared being punished for employing an ‘illegal’, because family members or friends had been arrested and made subject to deportation orders, or because they feared that they might themselves be forced to leave. Research in such a field, where interlocutors suffered from a sudden change for the worse including increasingly restricted mobility due to

xii  u  Preface

their illegal status, posed limitations and specific problems for data collection. Since the de jure state of illegality in Israel had become a de facto and acute state of deportability, initial fieldwork took place in a state of crisis, full of distrust, misery and fear. Within this altered fieldsite, my intention to focus on illegalized migrants’ urban practices within this Tel Aviv neighbourhood became increasingly problematic. I consequently chose to both broaden and focus my research. I chose to focus on Filipina domestic workers, not least because Filipinos were still around in relatively large numbers, in contrast to domestic workers from Latin America and West Africa. In addition my interview partners took me in directions that I had not anticipated, both in conceptual and geographical terms. Geographically I was taken well beyond the urban space of southern Tel Aviv as a site for field research and was led to interlocutors’ workplaces, weekend tours through the country, and as far as the Philippines. I was obliged to diverge from my original path by the realization that in order to understand migrant domestic workers’ increasingly transnational experiences and narratives in Israel, I had to understand their situated imaginings and travel trajectories. My own imaginings of and travel trajectories to Israel are deeply interwoven in this book. My field research began many years prior to August 2003 and was significantly shaped by my experiences during a year after high school, when I left for Israel in order to ‘discover’ my Jewish roots. As part of this, I attended a Hebrew language course in a state-sponsored school in Tel Aviv, alongside dozens of ‘olim chadashim, that is (Jewish) immigrants (literally, returnees), from all over the world. During the course, we were taught not only the Hebrew language, but also cultural information that the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption apparently thought all proper citizens should know, like celebrating national holidays, singing the national anthem, or visiting sites of national interest, such as Theodor Herzl’s grave or the ruins of Masada. During the mornings I lived the life of a Jewish returnee, an ‘ola chadasha, but in the afternoons I turned into an ‘ovedet zara bilti chukit, an ‘illegal foreign worker’, to make a living. Working alongside mainly Nigerian, Ghanaian, Latin American, Rumanian and Filipina migrant women whom I met on the buses and at the bus stops on the way to and from our workplaces in the affluent north of Tel Aviv, I cleaned apartments as a part-time domestic worker, which was (and arguably still is) the easiest way to earn a relatively large amount of money without a legal work permit in Israel. My legal, economic, social and cultural status as a German citizen of European physical appearance and a merely potential/reluctant immigrant separated me from both groups, but these experiences nevertheless provided me with rich insights and much of what Donna Haraway (1988) has called ‘situated knowledge’ for my later research. I assume that most of my acquaintances from the mornings as a ‘returnee’ have since then settled in Israel, acquired houses, founded families and obtained regular employment, while those from the afternoons as an ‘illegal foreign worker’ have most likely either left the country or are continuing to

Preface  u xiii

work in Tel Aviv as illegalized cleaners, spending their days commuting by bus from the poor southern neighbourhoods, where they probably reside, to the affluent ones where they work. They are among the many people for whom I wrote this book and whom I would like to thank. Madga Zeevi, Minerva Brenner, Maryann Bautista, Linda Lucassan, Lina Caasi, Magdalena Erminpour, Yolanda Lopez, Rhose Sadca, many officers of the Federation of Filipino Communities in Israel and other domestic workers have shared their life stories, thoughts and dreams with me and integrated me into their everyday lives in Israel and beyond. Without them, this book would not have been possible and I am deeply indebted and grateful to them. This book grows out of my Ph.D. thesis, for which I was lucky to have had two exceptional and committed advisors, who continuously supported me. Professor Eyal Ben-Ari, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University Jerusalem (Israel), greatly assisted me throughout the research process in Israel and took an active part during the writing process. Professor Burkhard Schnepel, Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany), has provided me with much inspiration and assistance, as well as an extremely stimulating institutional involvement during the years of writing up. I extend many thanks to my colleagues and friends in Halle, especially the working group on ‘Diaspora, Migration and Transnationalism’, including Dr Ursula Rao, Patrick Neveling, Frank Donath, Katharina Gernet, Steffen Johannessen and Dr Carsten Wergin. Dr Robert Parkin and Timothy J. Gluckman provided much needed assistance with grammar and language. I should also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their elaborate and insightful comments. I also benefited, when I re-edited the book, from the discussions and team work within the highly enjoyable and immensely productive UK Arts & Humanities Research Council’s ‘Footsteps’ project on ‘Sociality, Caring and the Religious Imagination in the Filipina Diaspora’, in which I was able to further develop and reflect on my work within a team of internationally renowned scholars of Southeast Asia, religion and diaspora, namely Professor Pnina Werbner, Professor Mark Johnson, Dr Deirdre McKay and Dr Alicia Pingol. This is a good opportunity to express my deep respect for Professor Pnina Werbner, who read and commented on a chapter and whose work has inspired and guided me throughout the process. I am extremely grateful for the assistance given and generosity shown to me in Israel by the employees and deeply committed activists of Kav LaOved, the Hotline for Migrant Workers, the municipal centre MESILA and the Physician for Human Rights. Most importantly Hana Zohar, Adi Laxer, Reut Barak, Yuval Livnat, Rami Adut, Adi Azov-Amnon and Segal Rozen were never tired of answering my questions, discussing political and research problems and providing me with information, in spite of their extremely demanding and stressful daily routine. Moreover, I wish to extend my thanks to the Philippines Embassy in Israel, whose employees have consistently been helpful and willing to support my project.

xiv  u  Preface

I would sincerely like to thank Professor Adriana Kemp, who has read and commented on a chapter and whose work has inspired and guided me. Thanks go especially to Dr Nathan Marom and Dr Michael Alexander, who greatly assisted me during research and have commented on parts of this book. The artists, activists, researchers and friends of the Transit Migration Research Team have provided me with a great deal of intellectual input and a feeling of belonging in critical academia. Cornelia Siebeck has been a friend and companion during the entire production process, and her criticisms and encouragements, as well as our conversations, are deeply interwoven into the present text. As Gerd Baumann has remarked, ‘[f]ieldwork one lives, ethnographies are written’ (1996: xi). Yet, while writing ethnographies one also lives. Therefore, I want to thank my two wonderful (transnational) families, friends and Berlin flatmates, who have given me the love, support and inspiration necessary to live rather well through this period of my life. Finally, this book is dedicated with love to Ulaş Şener, who accompanied me over the years it took to finish it. The research was funded by the Minerva Fellowship Program with a grant for research in Israel, and by the graduate scholarship programme of the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.

Introduction

The theme of this book is Filipina1 migrants employed in providing care to the elderly and doing domestic work in Israel. Given the double meaning of ‘care’, these women, predominantly devoted Christians claiming that they love Israel and the Jewish people, are in their own words the ones who really care for the ‘Holy Land’. My aim in this book is threefold. First, I investigate ‘care’ ethnographically as, on one hand, a form of affective labour, which includes forms of the commodification of social interactions, and, on the other – and somewhat in opposition to this – as an outcome of moral claims and constructions of gendered subjectivities that complicate the understanding of migrant domestic care work as a form of commodification. The commodification of care and the intimacy related to this deeply affective form of labour, as Constable convincingly argues, ‘is not an analytical end in itself, but instead offers a valuable starting point for analyses of gendered social relations, cultural meanings, social inequalities and capitalist transformations’ (Constable 2009: 55). The second and closely related point is that I want to move beyond a description of Filipina care workers as the mere victims of ‘globalization’, while also taking care not to celebrate their agency as creative transnationals unhindered by structural constraints. As I argue in this book, the fact that contemporary migration flows are social formations that take place in a global economy based on an ever shifting international division of labour has to be conceptualized and understood with regard to its consequences for the creation of new subjectivities of globally mobile and feminized workers. Finally, taking the transnational approach to migration as a starting point, I hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of contemporary migration processes and the practices and meanings of lived citizenship. I shall show that migrants’ practices and orientations – the intimacy with persons of the here, the there and the elsewhere – change throughout the migration process, as do the coordinates of the relevant migration regimes. In spite of their precarious legal, social and economic positions as care and domestic workers in Israel, Filipina migrants have appropriated spaces, created socialities and

2  u  Introduction

adopted strategies and discourses that ultimately transform the coordinates of belonging and citizenship of the place where they reside, even if they are forced to leave. Citizenship is understood here not merely in a legal sense, but as a negotiated relationship, a collective struggle for participation. These struggles take place not in a single transnational political or social field, as suggested in much of the literature on transnationality; rather, they are diverse, place-specific and deeply contingent on changing patterns of migration as well as emerging social networks. The female migrants whose subjective practices, life stories and narratives will be the major theme of this book are part of an ever increasing flow of female migrants from poor countries to the centres of global capitalism. Filipina migrants undertake these journeys – which entail numerous risks, hardships and, according to the dominant emic discourse, sacrifices – in order to acquire a form of citizenship that transcends national borders and consists of economic security, political rights and social participation in a more encompassing way. This book will illustrate that Filipino women recruited to work in Israel as caregivers do not simply arrive from home and return there after ‘finishing’ their work contracts abroad. Their projects of migration, I argue, are heterogenous, engaged in an ongoing process of becoming, be it as Christians on pilgrimage in the ‘Holy Land’, young women who fall in love or give birth to children in Israel, or ‘global women’ who travel and come to participate in a global consumer culture with the dollars they earn. By employing the notion of a migration ‘regime’ (rather than a ‘law’ or a ‘system’), my intention is to stress the changing nature of the political, social and economic structuring of migration, depending on the practices of policy-makers as well as migrants, each embedded in multiple webs of power and agency. When in 2002 a change in the political climate in Israel led to the adoption of an extensive campaign to deport migrants who had become ‘illegals’, tens of thousands of Filipinos were forced to leave the country within a short period of time. Against the background of this change, migration to Israel for Filipinos became a different thing, based on different localizing strategies and altered hopes and orientations. In order to denaturalize migrant illegality and to emphasize the transformative nature of the production of illegality imposed by state law and practices, I suggest instead that we speak of processes of ‘illegalization’ and ‘illegalized’ rather than illegal, irregular or undocumented migrants. The ethnographic material presented in this book will show that for predominantly Christian Filipina migrants, the concept of Israel as a ‘Holy Land’ functions as a stimulus for migration. Nevertheless, many of those I interviewed for this book decided to move on after the above mentioned policy change. They attempted to move within a global hierarchy of desirable destination countries, ranked according to the great differences between nation states with regard to salaries and the legal entitlements migrants can claim, the costs and risks they are faced with in order to enter, and their overall subjective and imaginative attractiveness. Within this global hierarchy, Israel now holds a

Introduction  u 3

middle position, above most Asian and Middle Eastern destination countries, where many women were employed before coming to Israel, but clearly below Western Europe and Northern America, to which many dream of going. Their dreams and desires hence clearly go beyond Israel; their global trajectories and imaginations are deeply implicated in the global capitalist economy and its promises of modernity, liberty, wealth or even glamour. Migrants who move back and forth between their countries of origin and destination have by now become a fairly common theme in anthropological studies on migration. In contrast, migrants who move on and on rather than back and forth – like numerous Filipina domestic workers I have interviewed for this book – have so far received far less attention in the literature on transnational migration. Rather than celebrating things for being in flux – as is the dominant tone of much of the literature on the topic – I intend to demonstrate the ruptures, structural violence and social dramas implied in transnationalism as the produced outcome of contemporary migration regimes. On the other hand, although I do not wish to overemphasize or romanticize their subversive potential, I shall demonstrate that in their everyday practices and narratives and as part of the collective undertaking of migration, Filipina migrant women maintain an autonomy of migration that creates its own subjectivities. The transmigrant as an epistemological figure seems to evoke unhindered, quasi-borderless flows. As socially produced and politically contested terms, ‘transmigrants’ and ‘migrants’ respectively are interpretative subjects. As such, they often seem to invoke descriptions and analyses that tend to understate or neglect the embodied effects, that is, the horror, tragedies, violence and frequent deaths entailed in global movement. In contrast to this, my use of the term ‘Filipina transmigrant’ points not to the uncritical usage of an essentialized subject within a world of cultural flows, but to a historically specific subject formation within a capitalist regime of global migration.2 Critical theorists of space (Harvey 1989; Foucault 1979; Lefebvre 2007; Mitchell 2003) have shown that the problem of space is ultimately a problem of power. As Saskia Sassen has argued, ‘international migrations are produced, they are patterned, and they are embedded in specific historical phases’ (1993: 97). It is the structuring of global power relations that brings Filipina women as care and domestic workers to Israel and beyond. It is by using these women’s subjective experiences, practices and desires that I intend to shed light on the question of how global capitalism is being experienced and dreamt about and how it functions on the ground. By contextualizing Filipina migrants’ practices and narratives in Israel; by showing how they are being produced; by documenting how migrants’ moves and struggles succeed in changing migration policies and regimes on a daily basis; and thus by providing an ethnographic account of the desire, pain, violence and structural inequalities involved, I intend to contribute to an analysis dedicated to overcoming the predicaments of the present.

4  u  Introduction

In accordance with much of the research conducted within the Transit Migration project,3 Mezzadra (2007) argues for the concept of an ‘autonomy of migration’, to be used methodologically as an analysis of migration within a global capitalist regime.4 Such a perspective conceptualizes (transnational) migration as a social movement that has its own knowledge, follows its own rules and organizes its own practice collectively. Within this perspective, the social movement or project of migration can be understood as an ongoing struggle for rights within those formations that attempt to regulate and control it. In her anthropological analysis of the transnational practices and multiple citizenships of Chinese elite ‘transmigrants’, Ong (1999) utilizes a similar viewpoint. Drawing on both Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Marx’s critique of political economy, Ong develops an ethnographic analysis of (Chinese) transnational practices and relations, suggesting that ‘only by weaving the analysis of cultural politics and political economy into a single framework can we hope to provide a nuanced delineation of the complex relations between transnational phenomena, national regimes and cultural practices in late modernity’ (1999: 16). From this viewpoint, a migration regime is a conflict-laden field in which the social movement of persons crossing nation-state borders and the social order are engaged in power struggles within a capitalist field of ‘zones of graduated sovereignty’ (Ong 1999: 21). Such a perspective offers a great deal of scope for an ethnographic analysis of the creation of Filipina migrant, domestic workers’ subjectivities.5 Similar to the Chinese businessmen (and women) described by Ong, who practice an ‘Asian capitalism’ and also collect multiple passports to be on the safe side, Filipina domestic workers – so I shall argue – develop flexible imaginations of their spatial and social positionings as female, Filipino and working-class subjects, while collectively learning to adjust to an increasingly flexible flow of capital, and a strategically selective exclusion from ‘Western’ citizenship. If, following Stasiulis and Bakan (1997, 2005), we conceptualize citizenship as a negotiated relationship rather than merely a legal juridical status, it becomes possible to understand Filipina migrants’ practices as struggles for citizenship in spite of these exclusions. The fact that Filipina women are, as it were, classic transmigrants is due not least to the fact that in the Philippines an enormous number of state and non-state institutions have come into existence in order to control, manage and generally promote out-migration, while also encouraging migrants’ ongoing engagement with the home country. Women have played a major role in this state-sponsored migration regime from the beginning. Apart from the fact that they became the major breadwinners of a country that depends on the remittances of millions of its transborder citizens, through their outmigration in such large numbers they have created new social formations whose effects on dominant gender roles over an extended period of time have not yet been analysed. Not least, Filipina migrants have fuelled both the image and the imagination of the nation. As the apparently weak and helpless bodies representing and embodying an equally vulnerable postcolonial nation, the

Introduction  u 5

female Overseas Filipino Workers have been termed, treated and exploited as the ‘martyrs’ and ‘heroines’ of the nation. The structural vulnerability, exploitation and suffering of Filipina migrants as migrant domestic workers all around the globe have been well documented, and in academic literature too they have frequently been portrayed as the prototypical victims of the triple oppression of race, class and gender. Such a perspective, I argue, ultimately serves to victimize them. Moreover, the anti-imperialist claim that Filipina and other migrant women’s (and men’s) service labour in the centres of a gendered global economy is similar to the resource extraction of earlier colonial goods such as gold, ivory or rubber (cf. Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003) crudely simplifies a complex story of domination, resistance and immaterial labour, which is increasingly hegemonic in contemporary capitalism. This claim encompasses peoples’ practices, dreams and choices within the notion of commodification, but halts at a point where the truly interesting questions arise: how did international divisions of labour and the global care chain, in which some women of the so-called global South liberate some women of the global North from a lot of reproductive work, come into being? What are the zones of friction entailed in this process, and what the desires and struggles of those involved? What effects do the constantly changing coordinates of national and international migration regimes have on their daily lives? Do these processes indeed bring with them the commodification of ‘love’ and ‘care’, and of the carers themselves? In order to move beyond an over-simplified reading of contemporary global capitalism, we have to pay attention to the subjectivities that are being forged in the local and at the same time global ‘zones of friction’ (Tsing 2005). Accordingly, I understand my research as a documentation of Filipina subjectivities, in which those involved maintain a (relative) autonomy of migration. They do so from a marginal position within a global arena that is clearly beyond their control, yet one in which, to follow Anna Tsing’s (2005) rich metaphor, ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (ibid.: 4) produce friction. In an era often described as one of global motion, this friction inflects motion, slowing it down, but at the same time keeping it going in a socially meaningful way.

The Feminization of Migration and Female Domestic Workers in the Global Economy The presence of Filipina workers in Israel reflects the ever-increasing proportion of women in global migration flows. More specifically, these women belong to a growing number of female migrants who are moving from the so-called Third World to the centres of global capitalism in order to take up low-wage jobs as service or domestic workers within a highly gendered economy. In an attempt to understand the implications of Filipina care work

6  u  Introduction

in Israel as a gendered and racialized niche within the global economy, these paths of belonging shall be contextualized in the following. Statistics show that women have been playing an ever-increasing part in international migration flows since at least the 1960s, currently comprising approximately half of migrants worldwide.6 This phenomenon is commonly termed the feminization of migration, and is highly relevant to countries of the so-called Third World like the Philippines. The increasingly female face of cheap, flexible and therefore often migratory labour not only has multiple implications for contemporary men’s and women’s lives and gender roles respectively, but also poses severe challenges to existing theories of migration. The need to theorize these changes, rather than take them as statistical givens, has only recently been recognized and addressed. Taking the feminization of migration moves as a methodological tool, I argue that Filipina care and domestic workers must be studied within the framework of a ‘gendered global economy’ (Mills 2003). Women who move were only rarely the subject of sociological or anthropological research, let alone migration theory, until the 1980s. Feminist critics have analysed this as reflecting a male bias in migration research where the male migrant ‘has so long served as a prototype for all migrants’ (Brettell 2003: 195). Within these models, the state policies of migration, the capitalist transformation of agriculture and industry, and increasing global inequalities seemed to affect men and women in the same ways. In contrast, anthropological research on migrant women and gender has highlighted the substantial differences between the causes, experiences and trajectories of male and female migrants respectively. It showed that factors such as marital violence or ideologies of reproduction and marriage often stimulate female migration (cf. Moore 1988: 95f.). In much early research on female migration, female migrants were treated as being motivated by social reasons, while men were analysed and portrayed as being politically and/or economically motivated in migrating. Apart from the fact that this view was based on hegemonic gender ideologies – according to which women are predominantly ‘social’ beings, responsible for the moral and emotional integrity of the family, whereas men are its breadwinners, adventurous individuals who like to travel – it hardly corresponded, nor corresponds now, to reality. In contrast, ethnographies showed that economic rather than social factors may be at the forefront of women’s decisions to leave. Subsequently, a more critical feminist anthropology made clear that while women share many problems with men leading to migration, these are nevertheless still gendered in themselves (Kofman et al. 2000; Moore 1988; Parreñas 2001a, 2005; Willis and Yeoh 2000). Research has shown that the decision to migrate is not made on an individual basis, but is the outcome of complex sets of subjective images, rationales and strategies by collectivities such as families and households (cf. Grasmuck and Pessar 1991). Furthermore, concepts like the ‘feminization of poverty’ (cf. Moore 1988: 74ff.) have contributed greatly to the understanding of the causes of

Introduction  u 7

women’s migration, by arguing that men and women in rural societies which are undergoing capitalist transformation are affected by structural changes in different ways. Following this analysis it was shown that capitalist transformations of agriculture often result in a rural exodus of women seeking work in nearby urban centres. In order to do this, women often have to overcome great difficulties. In an overview of the relevant literature, Moore (ibid.: 95f.) concludes that male resistance towards the migration of women is widespread, due to an association of female migration with prostitution or morally and sexually lax behaviour and – closely tied to this – the fear of losing control over (‘one’s own’) women. This ideological resistance to female migration extends well beyond the subjective level: until well after the Second World War, dominant gender ideologies often led state (including colonial) actors to restrict female migration in many regions of the world through legal regulations and sanctions. Nevertheless, and contrary to most representations of migration, in many places and time periods, women were (and are) frequently the first household or family members to migrate (see e.g. Morokvasic 1984). As of today, many of these early female migrants have found jobs as domestic workers in private urban households (cf. Momsen 1999; Moore 1988: 82ff.). Domestic work typically involves reproductive tasks and takes place within the private confines of the household. Both spheres, the household and domestic work, have been constructed as universally female within dominant gender ideologies. Domestic work is in general socially devalued, is considered non-professional and is frequently un- or underpaid. While paid domestic labour declined in the West after the Second World War, sociologists today have noted the return of paid nannies, house-cleaners and maids into privileged private households (e.g. Anderson 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Rerrich 2006). Contemporary paid domestic work is typically performed by (international) migrants constructed as culturally different (cf. Momsen 1999). Moreover, Ehrenreich and Hochschild argue that female migrants today overwhelmingly take up work in domestic service (2003: 6). Accordingly, a highly feminized and racialized international market for carers and domestic workers in private households has developed, which has been described ethnographically with respect to Latina domésticas in the United States (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001), Sri Lankan maids in Saudi Arabia (Gamburd 2000a, 2000b), Moroccan, Polish, Filipina and Latin American domestic workers in Western Europe (Anderson 2000; Rerrich 2006) and Filipina domestic workers in Los Angeles and Rome (Parreñas 2001a), Hong Kong (Constable 1997; McKay 2007a, 2007b), Singapore (Yeoh and Huang 1998) and Malaysia (Chin 1997), among others. Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001) analyses three major aspects of increasing global inequality in relation to domestic work. First of all, ‘paid domestic work is increasingly performed by women who leave their own nations, their communities, and often their families of origin to do it’ (2001: 19). Secondly, this movement includes not only women from the lowest socio-economic classes, but also women of relatively high status within their country of

8  u  Introduction

origin. Finally, ‘the development of service-based economies in postindustrial nations favours the international migration of women laborers’ (ibid.). It is this last aspect which needs further attention at this point. Reports and statistics suggest that there is a constant decline in the employment of male labourers in certain sectors and a new female global proletariat in the making. As Patricia Pessar and Sarah Mahler put it, ‘the new class subject of global capitalism tends to be female, a person of color, and a resident in the Third World’ (2003: 837). Thus, aside from domestic work, more and more women are coming to work in the factories of export-oriented industries like the garment or electronic industries (cf. Ching 1998; Ong 1987). As ethnographies of female factory workers have pointed out, women are often preferred because they are regarded as more docile than men, used to doing boring and repetitive work (due to their apparently natural role in reproduction) and well-suited for fiddly jobs due to their apparently nimble fingers. Furthermore, because it is assumed that women only need to earn supplementary incomes to add to those of their breadwinning men, they are not paid ‘family wages’ which would suffice to cover their households’ or even their own expenses, but so-called ‘lipstick money’ instead (Ching 1998; Ong 1987; cf. Moore 1988: 101). Accordingly, women are generally cheaper to employ than men. As Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini point out, it seems that predominantly ‘women, particularly young women, have become the largest section of local populations to be drafted as temporary, contingent, and part-time laborers for industrial subcontractors and other firms using the forms of labor regulation characterizing flexible accumulation’ (1997: 10). Several concepts have been developed to explain what this (new) international division of labour means with regard to migration and gender. In Servants of Globalisation, Rhazel Salazar Parreñas (2001a) links globalization and the feminization of wage labour and analyses an international division of reproductive labour in which women from the global South are taking over apparently female tasks of social reproduction such as caring for children and the elderly, cleaning, cooking etc., from women of the global North. In a very similar way, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (2003) speak of the female underside of globalization, in which female migrants from poor countries find jobs as nannies, maids and sex workers in rich ones. Doreen Massey (1993) has observed that time-space compression has its own ‘power-geometry’ in that it affects persons and groups – among them women – unequally. Drawing on this idea, Sarah Mahler and Patricia Pessar have developed their own concept of ‘gendered geographies of power’ (2001; revised Pessar and Mahler 2003). Made out of three building blocks, namely gendered ‘geographies’, ‘social locations’ and ‘power geometries’, the concept aims at taking into account both structural and subjective factors of the causes, practices and experiences of gender-specific migration. Perhaps most forcefully with regard to Filipina migrants, in Fantasy Production Neferti Xina Tadiar (2004) describes such women as ‘new-industrial slaves’ in more than a merely metaphorical way. She is thus clearly following a Marxist

Introduction  u 9

tradition, in which women have long been treated as the global reserve army of capitalism (cf. Moore 1988: 112ff.). Perhaps most convincingly, Mary Beth Mills (2003) speaks of a ‘gendered global economy’. As she points out, the recruitment of women as a flexible, cheap and apparently easily disciplined labour force is not a new phenomenon, but one that can be traced back to the early industrial revolution and is particularly linked with colonial labour regimes (ibid.: 42). Mills points out that the feminization of global (migrant) labour is not limited to women alone, a fact that other concepts have hardly addressed. Instead, ‘transnational migrants, both women and men, represent a pool of vulnerable, feminized labor in the lowest wage sectors of the world’s wealthiest economies’ (Mills 2003: 45). As feminist scholars have pointed out, gender is not synonymous with sex, but has to be viewed as constructed in a process of ‘gender work’ (Ortner 1996) or ‘gender performance’ (Butler 1988) within institutionalized social relationships, to which persons are enculturated to regard biological distinctions as natural and immutable. As feminist and queer theory have shown, gender ideologies function to legitimize gender-specific and hierarchically structured divisions of labour. In the contemporary global economy, international structural adjustment policies and neo-liberal economic programmes based on ‘Western’ gender ideologies have functioned to support and further strengthen inequalities between gendered social and economic positions. This process is closely related to an emergent hegemony of highly gendered ‘emotional’ (Hochschild 2003: 9ff.), ‘immaterial’ (Hardt and Negri 2004) or ‘affective’ labour (Clough and Halley 2007) in contemporary global capitalism. Struggles within the global economy therefore need to consider the dominant normativity as well as the subjectivities and performances of gender. This leads us to one of the central questions debated by researchers of migration and gender: does increasing (female) migration within contemporary global capitalism transform gender roles and ideologies? Research on gender within the transnational approach to migration has shown that gender ideologies play a major role throughout the migration process (Pessar and Mahler 2003): for example, jealousy and the attempt to discipline or control one’s spouse overseas or back home is a recurrent and dominant theme in transnational communication between spouses (cf. Gamburd 2000b; Pessar and Mahler 2003: 824f.; Pingol 2001). Moreover, and perhaps surprisingly, women were found to be more reluctant than men to return ‘home’ (Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001; Goldring 1996; cf. Pessar and Mahler 2003: 826f.). This is due to the fact that women often feel that their social status improves with migration, while men experience the opposite emotion. Likewise, the reimposition or reinforcement of dominant gender ideologies after the return of both male and female migrants is a recurrent theme in the literature. Women often take up wage labour abroad, but may be asked to (or prefer to) stay at home once they have returned in order to maintain the honour or social status of the family, or out of respect for local gender ideologies

10  u  Introduction

opposed to female wage labour (Goldring 1996; Guarnizo 1997; cf. Pessar and Mahler 2003: 828). While gender norms and relations have to be analysed in their specific, historical and cultural machinations, anthropological research has shown that by becoming main breadwinners of the family or household, women bring into question gender norms in many contexts. Hania Zlotnick has argued that in crossing territorial borders, women move from one ‘system of gender stratification’ into another (1990: 372). Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila speak of a ‘radical, gendertransformative odyssey’ (1997: 25) in which women engage as they enter and take up work in another country. As they show, in contrast to Mexican men – who leave their families in order to work in the U.S., thus fulfilling masculine obligations as the breadwinners for the family – Mexican women who come to the U.S. not only have to cope with the difficulties entailed in the migratory move, but also with ‘stigma, guilt, and others’ criticism’, especially for leaving their families behind (ibid.). In their research on what they call ‘transnational mothering’, Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) show that Latina women who leave their children behind in order to engage in domestic work in the U.S. reconstitute and rearrange their motherhood to accommodate the temporal and spatial separation from their children that is forced on them through restrictive immigration laws, the U.S. labour market and the broader migration regime. Parreñas (2001a, 2005) has challenged this view, and she offers an ethnographic account of Filipina domestic workers and their families in the Philippines, Los Angeles and Rome. Contrary to the assumption that the migration of women necessitates a questioning of gender conventions, Parreñas (2005) contends that not only does this not occur, but that gender conventions are even reinforced through the migration of Filipina mothers: ‘This process of gender reinforcement contradicts the gender reconstitution initiated by women’s migration. This contradiction sets up a gender paradox: the reorganization of households into transnational structures questions the ideology of women’s domesticity but the caring practices in these families maintain this view’ (2005: 92). Within a cultural and political context that regards migrating mothers as ‘bad mothers’ and expects women to provide radiance and care rather than material needs for the family, Filipina women become ‘reluctant breadwinners’ (Parreñas 2005: 63). As such, they narrate themselves as martyrs in relation to other members of their family – most especially children – to assure them that they suffer from rather than enjoy being away, and they also strive to fulfil conventional notions of mothering in spite of their physical remoteness. By taking the stigma, guilt and others’ criticism analysed by Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) very seriously, Filipina migrating mothers often do what Parreñas – drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performing gender’ – calls an over-performance of female roles (2005: 92ff.). While Parreñas, Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila have provided much insight into the dilemmas and gender performances of migrant mothers, ethnographic research on female migrants who have

Introduction  u 11

no children or who practice their motherhood differently from expected mothering roles still remains to be carried out. I intend to contribute to this debate with my own ethnographic material. As noted above, female migrant domestic workers have frequently been described as affected by the triple oppression of race, class and gender (cf. Anderson 2000; Anthias and Lazaridis 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Yet, as I argue, concepts of female migration must go beyond the notion that women are the victims of a triple oppression. Ethnographic research points to the fact that while female migrant domestic workers are often subject to rigorous disciplinary regimes, they do not necessarily internalize triple oppression, but often engage in political action to better their situations and openly challenge ideologies that help to oppress them (Anderson 2000, 2001; Constable 1997: 155ff.; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001: 210ff.). Furthermore, this view has rightfully been analysed as a form of victimization (Andrijašević 2007; Constable 2009; Ogaya 2004: 382). When even institutions like the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which are much better known for their restrictive control of global migration than their feminist policies, have come to acknowledge the fact that ‘migration is different for men and women’ – in their words because ‘migration holds more dangers for women than men. They are more vulnerable to physical, sexual and verbal abuse when travelling. And they are more likely to fall prey to human traffickers for the sex industry’7 – the critical potential of an analysis of migrant women as victims demands consideration. The problematic nature of a view of female migrants as victims stands out perhaps most clearly in the discourse on the trafficking of female migrant sex workers. In order to ‘protect’ female migrants, the IOM has launched large-scale campaigns against trafficking in women, aimed especially at women from Eastern Europe. As Andrijašević (2007) shows in her research on what she calls the ‘regime of representation’ of trafficking in female sex workers, these campaigns stereotypically portray migrant women as the prey and victims of (male) perpetrators. According to her, this binary logic not only downplays women’s agency, but also fails to analyse reality in all its complexity. As she also shows, these campaigns function to reproduce gender stereotypes and voyeuristic representations which strengthen the image of women as passive and helpless, thus supporting traditional gender roles rather than empowering those whom they declare they are protecting. Consequently, I shall analyse Filipina domestic workers within national and global migration regimes by also taking into account their subjective narratives and practices. Rather than ‘prey’ or ‘victims’, migrant women will be described as actively negotiating and challenging dominant positions of gender, class and racialization. As a process of ongoing struggle and negotiation, empowerment is deeply embodied and, to a certain extent, contingent. Finally, Filipina women’s out-migration is decisively structured by the demands and desires not only of the Israeli labour market or the global economy, but of the Philippine state, as the following will make clear.

12  u  Introduction

The Philippine Migration Regime and the Making of Filipina Migrants The Philippines count as one of the world’s largest exporters of temporary contract labour. According to some estimates, up to eight million Filipinos are living and/or working outside the country in more than 160 countries of the world, now forming – together with Mexican citizens – the largest group of international migrant workers in the global economy.8 With a population of approximately eighty million and numerous family members in the Philippines who depend heavily on emigrants’ remittances, a large part of the Philippine population is deeply affected by these migration movements, both economically and socially. Beginning with colonial domination, and following the restructuring of the Philippine economy and politics during the Marcos regime, Filipino labour migration now makes up a considerable part of the migrant labour force throughout the wealthier part of the world. Similarly to other migrant-sending, nation-state economies (Mexico, Sri Lanka, Morocco etc.), overseas employment has become a cornerstone of the Philippine economy.9 When during the 1970s, global migration flows became increasingly ‘feminized’, more and more Filipina women – who had long migrated domestically to find employment in the cities (Eviota 1992) – left the country to work abroad. Within culturally infused public discourses, they became both the nation state’s ‘new national heroines’ and – especially after the highly publicized case of the execution of Flor Contemplaciòn, a Filipina domestic worker in Singapore – its ‘martyrs’. In the following, I intend to investigate how female migration has been regarded as both threatening and strengthening for Filipino women and the Philippine nation. As set out in a publication by the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR 1987), the history of Philippine migration is often linked to domestic poverty and colonial domination. Accordingly, for Gonzales the history of Filipinos’ out-migration begins with American colonization of the Philippines in 1898, preceded by a ‘prehistory’ of Filipinos’ employment in the Spanish galleon trade (1998: 26). In agreement with many representations of the history of Philippine migration, Gonzales analyses three periods of Filipinos’ out-migration: a first wave of migration to the U.S. during the colonial period (1898–1946); a second, more complex but mainly male worker wave to the Western world in the post-war period (1946 until about 1972); and a third period of an increasingly vast, female and global emigration flow after Marcos’ declaration of martial law in 1972, characterized by the adoption of a state, labour-export policy (1998: 26ff.; see also CIIR 1987; Tyner 2004: 29ff.). Catherine Ceniza Choy (2003) tells the history of how the U.S. colonial system laid the foundations for a Philippine Empire of Care. Based on a colonial ideology, which racialized Filipinas as ‘caring’ and ‘subservient’, Choy shows that Filipinas’ emigration to the U.S. during colonial times was in large part produced by the creation of an Americanized hospital training system in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. By creating such

Introduction  u 13

an empire of care, the U.S. labour market was for decades provided with hundreds of thousands of Filipinas to be employed as cheap care workers in the United States. This regime continues to operate on a more global level today, as young Filipinos (both male and female) take up training opportunities in the medical and care professions in very high numbers by international standards in order to fill their national niche within an international division of labour in a global market. As Parreñas argues, ‘it is the export of care that sustains the economy’ (2005: 24). In Made in the Philippines, James Tyner traces the making of Filipina migrants and of the large, state migratory apparatus which came into being under Marcos’s labour-export policy. According to Tyner, Filipina migrants were actively produced by state institutions as a means of furthering capital accumulation (2004: 19). Suffering from a balance of payments deficit and vast external debts, the Philippine state and economy were in a state of ‘permanent crisis’ in which both the government-turned-dictatorship in 1972 and external institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were increasingly able to push forward export-led industrialization and, from 1980, repeated so-called structural adjustment programmes that sustained rather than removed the crisis (Bello 2004). In this context, out-migration was recognized by the state, and – even though at first not openly encouraged – thought of as a temporary solution situated within a national ‘development diplomacy’ (Tyner 2004: 32; Bello 2004: 11). ‘For us, overseas employment addresses two major problems: unemployment and the balance-of-payments positions’, President Marcos stated in 1982, thus bluntly summarizing the state’s interest in emigration (quoted from Gonzales 1998: 57). Accordingly, numerous state bodies were created to process the handling of migrants, who at first were forced and since are still encouraged to remit a portion of their salaries and to take up contract labour, thus becoming state-sanctioned Overseas Contract Workers (OCW), later renamed Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) (cf. Tyner 2004: 32). Originally planned as a temporary measure, the Philippine labour-export policy turned into a permanent national development strategy throughout the global economic recession after 1980, a process which led to the creation of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) in 1982 (ibid.: 36). Filipino citizens were now marketed as an internationally attractive global labour force by Philippine government institutions, as in the POEA brochure quoted by Tyner: ‘They are properly educated and well trained, proficient in English and of sound temperament’ (2004: 67). With the Philippines being the only Southeast Asian country where internal migration has been dominated by women since at least the 1960s, Filipina women have a long-standing history of migration (cf. Gonzales 1998: 43; Palma-Beltran and de Dios 1992). With rising demands in the service sectors throughout the Western world, many of them moved on in search of work as nurses, factory workers, performing artists or domestic workers, first in Asian metropolises such as Singapore or Hong Kong, and later throughout

14  u  Introduction

the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Israel etc.), as well as in North America and Western Europe (Gonzales 1998; Parreñas 2001a; Ogaya 2004; Tadiar 2004; Tyner 2004). A factor only rarely mentioned with regard to female outmigration from the Philippines is the large number of marriage migrations. As Lauser (2004) has pointed out with regard to the marriage migration of Filipinas to Germany, this phenomenon also has to be seen in the context of transnational migration flows. While in 1975 over seventy per cent of Filipino OCWs were male, the male–female ratio changed in the late 1980s. Ever since – and very much in accordance with the global feminization of migration – at least half of Filipino emigrants are female, even according to official statistics.10 Therefore, Filipino migration had already taken on a female profile when, in 1995, two incidents marked what is considered as a critical turning point in Philippine migration policies in much of the literature: the highly publicized trials of Flor Contemplaciòn and Sarah Balabagan (cf. Gonzales 1998: 1f.; Hilsdon 2000; Tyner 2004: 41ff.). Flor Contemplaciòn, the married mother of four children in the Philippines, was a Filipina domestic worker in Singapore. She was executed on 17 March 1995, convicted by a Singaporean court of double murder, which ‘many still claim she did not commit’ (Hilsdon 2000: 172). The emotional outcry after her hanging not only made more than 25,000 people join her funeral in the Philippines several days afterwards, it also triggered a heated public debate about the situation of the ‘Overseas’ and the state’s migration policies. The mass mobilization of Philippine migrant organizations, international lobbying and a bomb attack in Manila showed widespread disappointment with and resistance to the state’s labour-export policy (Gonzales 1998: 6; Hilsdon 2000: 176f.). As a reaction, the so-called Magna Carta of overseas employment (Republic Act 8042) was issued by President Ramos on 7 June 1995. In it, the former migration policy was literally turned into its opposite, as the state committed itself ‘not [to] promote overseas employment as a means to sustain economic growth and achieve national development’ (POEA 1996: 2, quoted from Tyner 2004: 47). This change in the official discourse signifies not only a giving way to pressure from the streets, it can also be interpreted as an application of the neoliberal arguments that were being promoted successfully on the global level, namely the discourse on human rights and the ‘management’ of migration.11 Several months later, the national migration regime had the chance to prove its different approach when, in the United Arab Emirates, Sarah Balabagan, a fifteen-year-old Filipina domestic worker, was sentenced to death for killing her employer after he allegedly raped her. Not least because of the damaging effects of the Contemplaciòn case, this time President Ramos made Balabagan’s case a national priority, and indeed succeeded in having her released (cf. Hilsdon 2000: 179; Tyner 2004: 41f.). Both Flor Contemplaciòn and Sarah Balabagan, as highly politicized public figures, had a major impact on the image of Philippine female migrants and on what constitutes a ‘good Filipina’ abroad. Filipina migrants, as both the

Introduction  u 15

martyrs and the heroines of the nation, may play varying roles in national discourses on migration, but they always do so within a national landscape. The discourse on Filipina migrant workers as national heroines was coined in particular by President Corazòn Aquino in 1988. Speaking to a crowd of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, she called the OCW (the OFW of today) the ‘new heroes’ of the nation.12 In doing so, she put women of lower- or middle-class status, who performed the highly feminized as well as dirty, difficult, and dangerous low-wage jobs of the OCW, at the heart of the nation state. For Rafael, this move signifies that, as ‘tragic figures subject to alien powers’ (2000: 211), the (female) overseas came to symbolize the postcolonial nation. By being employed as apparently vulnerable and caring domestic workers and by remitting their earned dollars home, they embody the ethos of mutual caring and pity, as well as the sharing of obligations linked to Filipino nationalism (ibid.). When Contemplaciòn became ‘the Filipino everyman’, Rafael goes on to argue, this signified ‘a feminisation of the national image’ (2000: 213). Thus, for Rafael, the discourse of the martyr is inherent in that of the heroine. Likewise, Tadiar argues that the image of Filipina migrants as heroines entails the image of the martyr, since ‘the hero is the inversion of the slave. The slave becomes the object of sacrifice – the martyr – enabling the heroization of the nation’ (Tadiar 2004: 147). These discourses are historically shaped representations of gender that precede female migration in large numbers and can also be linked to the Philippines’ anti-colonial struggles (Blanc-Szanton 1990; Errington 1990; Hilsdon 1995). Not surprisingly, the out-migration of women thereafter was rendered increasingly problematic within the Philippine public discourse. When, during the first decades after independence, Filipino fathers left the country in increasingly large numbers to seek employment abroad, it was assumed that the mothers were still around to pull the Filipino family together. Likewise, fathers leaving to work abroad were considered above all to be fulfilling their culturally infused gender role as the providers of the family. Even though the migration of fathers violated the cultural norm of the cohabitation of families, it was not until the feminization of Filipino out-migration that the problem of so-called broken homes began to provoke greater alarm (Parreñas 2005: 38), which took on more concrete forms in the post-Contemplaciòn era. As Rafael (1995) points out, migrant women now appeared to ‘debase’ the nation’s women in general and, in possibly being either sex workers or sexually molested and maltreated domestic helpers, they served to embarrass the nation globally. Accordingly, throughout the Philippine media and a large portion of its social science literature, the families of migrating women – in contrast to those of migrating men – were now described as ‘broken homes’ (cf. Parreñas 2003: 39f.). Married women with children in particular, who had allegedly abandoned their families in order to seek employment abroad, therefore signified the ‘destruction of the moral fabric’ of Philippine society (ibid.). In compliance with the post-Contemplaciòn discourse on Filipina migrants, the

16  u  Introduction

role of Filipina mothers was in the domestic sphere of their own, not foreign homes. This becomes clear from reports such as Hearts Apart, published by two Philippine Catholic welfare and research institutions and the state body OWWA. In it, the authors wonder how within families of migrating mothers, the ‘children [can] be raised without the “light of the home” [that is, the mother, Tagalog ilaw ng tahanan]’ (ECPCMIP/ASM, SMC and OWWA 2004: 3) and attribute a multitude of social problems, such as gambling, excessive drinking of alcohol, drug abuse, failing in school and adultery to the families of migrant mothers. In consequence, migration was increasingly framed as an individual act and responsibility, which the state only reluctantly facilitated (Tyner 2004). In the course of this process, leaving the country for employment has nonetheless become highly regulated for prospective migrants. To become an OFW, for whom state bodies assume responsibility and offer protection, Filipinos have to register and process their ‘papers’ in the POEA, apply for a job through a licensed recruitment agency and undergo a week-long, pre-departure seminar, among other things.13 Nevertheless, as the high and apparently rising number of undocumented Filipino migrants worldwide indicates (Lao 1995), not to mention numerous ethnographic accounts of Filipino migrants abroad, including my own, the state’s monopoly over Filipinos’ overseas employment was never fully achieved. As the Philippines continues to be characterized by a political economy of permanent crisis, and almost every Filipino seems to wish to achieve the status of naka-pag abroad, one who has gone abroad, an ever increasing number are succeeding in doing so.

Research Process and Methods Between August 2003 and June 2006, I spent sixteen non-consecutive months of field research in Israel (fifteen months) and the Philippines (one month), the main period lasting from November 2004 to September 2005. My field research was based on a multi-level approach and used a variety of ethnographic methods, of which ethnographic interviewing and participant observation were the most important. Within field research, I conducted a total of 101 interviews, of which 76 were recorded and largely transcribed. Interviews were conducted with three major groups, namely Filipino (domestic) workers (49, including three male interviewees), Israeli and Filipino officials or ‘experts’ on or practitioners in the field of migration policies (34) and several non-Filipino domestic workers, among them leaders of migrant organizations. The experts/ practitioners whom I interviewed included employees and volunteers of Israeli NGOs and Tel Aviv municipal institutions, shopkeepers and house-owners in the southern Tel Aviv neighbourhood of Neveh Sha’anan, owners of several employment agencies who were recruiting and employing Filipino domestic workers, two members of the Philippines Embassy in Tel Aviv and an official of the Israeli labour union, Histadrut.

Introduction  u 17

I kept in touch with most of the Filipina domestic workers I interviewed over an extended period of time and in the course of my field research met many of their Israeli employers. During subsequent visits to the Philippines, I met many of their family members or – as in the case of interview partners who had been deported prior to my visit – met former interviewees again. Some of my interview partners have in the meantime found their way to Italy, the UK, the United States or Canada, where I managed to visit some and from where others keep in touch through e-mail, telephone or text messages. Interviews were conducted in English and in the case of Israeli interviewees, Hebrew. Even though English was not my mother tongue any more than it was for most of my interviewees, I felt that its use did not hinder the research. Throughout my field research I became familiar with some Tagalog/Filipino, a fact that often triggered amusement, but I also sensed that it helped me be taken increasingly seriously. In general, informal conversations and interviews, as well as spontaneous story-telling sessions in shared flats, during barbecues or on excursions, produced deeper and more intimate knowledge than ‘artificial’ interview situations with technical equipment lying on the table. The sample of my interviewees is by no means representative. In order to complement the data generated by interviews, I conducted a questionnaire survey among Filipino participants in the course of an excursion and relied on the statistical data collected on 328 Filipinos by the Philippine OWWA office in Israel. During the first months of field research, participant observation was conducted mainly within NGO settings. Apart from the migrant workers’ centre established by the non-profit organization Kav LaOved (KLO) mentioned above, I participated in the activities of an anti-deportation network and later NGO, the Hotline for Migrant Workers (HMW), whom I joined on visits to several detention facilities, as well as of a municipal social centre for migrants, and I regularly visited the Physicians for Human Rights’ (PHR) open clinic. I participated in and observed numerous events related to ‘foreign workers’ issues, such as discussion panels, workshops, demonstrations, film screenings and celebrations organized by both migrants’ self-organizations and Israeli culture producers and political activists in Tel Aviv. In the Israeli parliament, I attended several meetings of the parliamentary commission on the ‘Problem of Foreign Workers’. Within the neighbourhood of Neveh Sha’anan, I regularly met up with interview partners and Filipino acquaintances in migrants’ shared flats, shops, and – in its midst both geographically and mentally – the new Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. On weekends, I repeatedly joined excursions and church services alongside Filipino interviewees. Through them, I gained access to the homes of some Israeli employers, learnt to enjoy basketball, and was made to sing karaoke and dance Igorot ‘tribal dances’. My study is rooted in ethnography and social anthropology, but is also informed by the contributions of scholars from numerous other disciplines, including gender studies, geography, sociology and political science. Studying

18  u  Introduction

migration in the twenty-first century has to be an interdisciplinary enterprise (Brettell and Hollifield 2000; Massey et al. 1993).

Structure of the Book This book is arranged into six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter describes the so-called foreign worker regime in Israel and Filipinos’ positioning within it. It also gives an account of how migration and citizenship have been conceptualized and are governed in Israel, drawing attention to the fact that Jewish migration (‘return’) has been at the centre of Israel’s ideological and bio-political self-definition, while non-Jewish migration was neither intended nor provided for. It will become clear that Israel, in many ways a prototypical immigration country in terms of Jewish migration, has experienced a major influx of non-Jewish Asian, African and Latin American labour migrants since the 1980s in a process closely related to the ousting of Palestinian workers from the Israeli labour market. As has happened in other Western societies, these migrants soon formed their own ethnoclass within Israel’s highly segmented labour market and were separated from Israeli society by restrictive citizenship laws and policies based on the temporalization and illegalization of migrants. Nevertheless, non-Jewish migrants’ everyday practices and struggles, as this chapter shows, put national migration policies increasingly into question. In the second chapter, drawing on the work of Rhazel Salazar Parreñas (2001, 2003, 2005) on Philippine transnational families, and inspired by GlickSchiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton’s (1992) notion of transnational social fields, I investigate Filipina migrants’ social networks, affective obligations and gendered roles and practices. By describing the life stories of three migrant women, I intend to point to the complexities of their reasons for migration and transformative experiences of travel. The transnationality implied in contemporary projects of migration for Filipina domestic workers, highlighted in Chapter 2, signifies subjective suffering and rupture on one hand, whilst on the other it creates and informs new forms of sociality, desire and subjectivity. In Chapter 3 I focus on paid domestic work, most especially care-giving, the employment sector ascribed to Filipinos in Israel by the migration regime. Given the double meaning of ‘care’ as having a practical as well as an emotional dimension, Filipinos – or so the predominantly devoted Christian migrants narrated their stay in Israel – are those who both physically and emotionally care for the ‘Holy Land’. As carers, housekeepers, nannies and cleaners, Filipinos’ domestic work realities are extremely complex, often implying deeply affective and intimate social ties between employer and employee. This chapter illustrates that Filipina domestics in Israel, through their work in Israeli homes, come to know ‘Israel backstage’ and sometimes even manage to translate their employers’ status into their own, at least – but not only – for themselves. Filipino domestic workers typically come together in large numbers at weekends, which are characterized by collective undertakings and intimate

Introduction  u 19

sociality. Drawing on early migrants’ stories, in Chapter 4 I shall outline the processes of making and unmaking a Filipino ‘community’ in Israel, starting in the 1980s and changing fundamentally with the number of Filipino migrants mushrooming after the official recruitment of Filipino caregivers to Israel in 1995. As well as simply growing in numbers, Filipinos have since also managed to create and maintain spaces and institutions of their own, including numerous religious groups, a workers’ union, regional associations and local magazines. When these self-organized structures came increasingly under pressure and partly dissolved in the wake of a deportation campaign from Israel, the Philippines Embassy organized community structures from above. As part of a large, working-class diaspora, Filipina migrants in Israel practice a transborder citizenship based on highly localized, yet interconnected struggles, which necessarily exceed a state-informed nationalism. Filipina migrants’ politics in Israel, I shall argue, are informed by the knowledge of their precarious position in Israel, and draw much from the collective remembrance of an imagined community forged in past struggles against inequality and injustice. If there is one single place that Filipinos in Israel narrated as ‘theirs’, it is the Central Bus Station and its adjacent neighbourhood in southern Tel Aviv. Chapter 5 will show how Filipinos succeeded in asserting their ‘right to the city’ (Mitchell 2003) within this urban space. Yet, they did so within a neighbourhood which is itself socially excluded from the so-called White City Tel Aviv (cf. Rotbard 2005). In spite of the shabbiness of both the southern neighbourhoods and the Central Bus Station, both are narrated as ‘truly Filipino’ spaces by migrants, an ambivalent ‘home’ within the unhomely. It is within this space of communal gathering and consumption that the tragic moments of Filipinos’ migration to Israel stand out most clearly: against the background of the mass arrests of illegalized migrants, for Filipinos this urban area signifies vulnerability and exclusion as well as kababayan (Tagalog ‘fellow national’) solidarity. Consequently, their search for the modernity, liberty and riches of abroad makes them look onward, towards the ‘greener pastures’ of yet another destination country. These are the topic of the final ethnographic chapter. Entitled ‘Global Dreaming’, Chapter 6 argues that imaginative factors play a crucial role in Filipinos’ migration to Israel and beyond. As an intrinsic part of the political economy of the postcolonial nation state, it is Filipinos’ collective dreaming of Western lifestyles that encourages them to leave for Israel, often narrating this move as a form of travel. In Israel, the ‘Holy Land’ for Christians worldwide, the dream of travel is turned into reality by weekend tours throughout the country, often to Christian holy sites. By travelling the ‘Holy Land’ in large groups, Filipinos collectively relate to, act within, and claim the land. During these tours, Filipinos experience their being in the ‘Holy Land’ as both a touristic and religious experience, narrated as a privilege, pilgrimage or mission. As such it entails affective practices, social obligations and embodied transformations. By becoming pilgrims and tourists, Filipino travellers at least temporarily transcend their position as presumably poor ‘foreign workers’ in Israel.

20  u  Introduction

Nevertheless, being engaged in a journey towards a better life, many Filipina women come to Israel from other destination countries and decide to move on as soon as they realize that their stay there is limited. The ethnographic outline shows that this on-migration implies considerable knowledge, strategic and at times intergenerational life planning, immense costs, painful decisions and a great deal of precious time on the part of Filipina migrants. As ‘working-class cosmopolitans’ (Werbner 1999), the Filipina migrants described in this book transcend the divide that is typically drawn in the literature between parochial migrants and bourgeois cosmopolitans. Most of all, in an attempt to keep their options open in a global gendered economy, new transnational subjectivities are being forged as migrants negotiate and struggle for what I shall term a global form of lived citizenship.

Notes 1. In this book, I use the term ‘Filipina’ as a noun (plural: Filipinas) to refer to a woman who lives in or originates from the Philippines. In several cases, I use ‘Filipina’ instead of the gender-neutral adjective ‘Filipino’ in order to stress the female-gendered aspect of this study. 2. While Mezzadra (2007: 186) speaks of the migrant as a ‘cancelled subject’ (that is, a ‘subject’), following Lacan’s notion of a sujet barré, Tyner speaks in this context of the ‘death’ of the migrant (2004: 58), following both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. 3. Cf. Bojadžijev (2008), Karakayali (2008), Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (2007). 4. In recent years, the notion of ‘regime’ has frequently (and fruitfully) been employed in migration research. It has been applied with regard to national citizenship regimes (Brubaker 1992), welfare regimes (Rosenhek 2000) and incorporation regimes (Soysal 1994), among others. In contrast to ‘systems’, regimes are generally understood as conflictive spaces of complex sets of explicit or implicit principles, norms and rules, which include multiple actors whose practices are mutually dependent but unordered by systematic logic. This is the way I shall apply the notion in the present book. 5. The difference between the concept of ‘individual’ and ‘subject’ is substantial. As Tyner (2004: 18f.) has pointed out by drawing on Foucault, the notion of a ‘subject’ suggests a constant struggle between the two aspects of the term, the power of the subjugated and the subjected. It means that a person is subject to structural forces without being denied an agency of his or her own. Accordingly, the term ‘subject’ will be preferred here to ‘individual’. 6. See the United Nations’ publication, ‘Trends in Total Migrant Stock’, retrieved 14 November 2009 from http://esa.un.org/migration. According to UN figures, women accounted for 49.2 per cent of all migrants worldwide in 2005. 7. Quoted from the IOM fact sheet on ‘Gender and Migration’, retrieved 5 August 2007 from www.iom.int. 8. Cf. Weekley (2003: 3). Exact figures on Filipino citizens abroad are lacking. The Philippine government estimates the number of ‘Overseas Filipinos’ at 6.5-7.5

Introduction  u 21

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

million (cf. http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html; retrieved 22 November 2009), whereas NGOs generally speak of eight million (see, for example the website of Migrante International, retrieved 22 November 2009 from http:// migrante.tripod.com/). For the latest official figures for world migrants, see http://esa.un.org/migration; retrieved 14 November 2009. The central importance of remittances for domestic consumption and the Philippine currency is generally recognized (Mellyn 2003). Accordingly, the official remittances of Overseas Filipinos amounted to $3.5 billion in the first quarter of 2007 (see Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Media Release on 15 May 2007, retrieved 22 November 2009 from http://www.bsp.gov.ph/publications/media.asp?id=1574). Cf. Gonzales 1998: 42f.; for more recent data, see the statistics of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration at http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/ statistics.html (retrieved 22 November 2009). Cf. Tyner 2004: 47; Hilsdon 2000: 179. As Hilsdon (ibid.) states, the content of the Magna Carta ‘aligns well’ with the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, which was drawn up in 1990 but has not been enacted since because major receiving countries did not ratify it. Furthermore, the POEA’s slogan that ‘Labor Migration is a global phenomenon that should be managed’ (see the institution’s website at www.poea.gov.ph; retrieved 22 November 2009) resembles the slogan launched by the IOM to ‘manage migration for the benefits of all’ (see www.iom.int; retrieved 22 November 2009). The one sentence most often quoted from this speech is ‘Kayo po ang mga bagong bayani’ (Tagalog, ‘You are the new heroes’; quoted from Rafael 2000: 211). See POEA website at www.poea.gov.ph (retrieved 5 August 2007) for the statesanctioned employment regulations and process. See Asis (2005) for empirical research on Filipinos’ experiences prior to their employment as OFWs.

Chapter 1 The Israeli Migration Regime: On Foreign Workers and Migrants

As a nation state where, until recently, more than two-thirds of the population consisted of migrants and the children of migrants, it is hardly surprising that the management and conceptualization of migration flows and citizenship is regarded as being of central significance in academia, as well as by state and non-state actors in Israel.1 When it comes to Jewish migration, Israel can be described as a de facto immigration state that actively encourages migration into the country, although terming it ‘return’ rather than immigration. In contrast, non-Jewish migration until recently lacked terminological and legal equivalents and was simply non-existent as far as the hegemonic public discourse, state policies and legal regulations were concerned. In many respects comparable to the European guest-worker regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, the large-scale recruitment of so-called ‘foreign workers’ (Hebrew ‘ovdim zarim) began in 1993 in Israel. It has been conceptualized as something temporary which would have no significant effects on Israeli society. However, Filipinos, who came to work in Israel well before the official recruitment policy began, continue to arrive, work and live well beyond the limitations set for them by official migration policies. As was the case in European labour-importing countries, it took Israeli state institutions several years to realize that the ‘foreign workers’ would stay on, turn into Tel Avivian residents, establish families and become an integral part of Israeli society and lived citizenship. In this chapter, I shall outline this conflict-laden process.

Conceptualizing Migration and Citizenship in Israel Israel’s Declaration of Independence in May 1948 made two commitments, which still shape the dilemmas of migration, citizenship and the character of the State today. First of all, the Declaration states its universalistic commitment to be a democracy with equal rights for all its citizens,

24  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

irrespective of their religious and ethnic origins. Secondly, it also formulates a particularistic commitment as a Jewish state – the only Jewish state in the world – to serve as the focal point for Jews worldwide. Jewish immigration – the return, ‘ingathering of the exiles’ or ‘fusion of the diasporas’ in Zionist terminology – was strongly encouraged and organized by Zionist pre-state institutions, and after the founding of Israel in 1948, by state bodies. It played a key role in the demographic, cultural and socioeconomic development of the state and can be considered Israel’s raison d’être. The Zionist call for mass Jewish immigration to Israel was legally sanctioned in 1950 through the Law of Return (Hebrew Hok HaShvut),2 which still forms the basis of Israeli immigration policy today. The Law of Return grants virtually unrestricted immigration rights and citizenship to Jews, and, since the so-called ‘grandchild clause’ was added in 1970 in a major reform of the law in order to facilitate immigration from the (former) Soviet Union, to their children, grandchildren and spouses, irrespective of their religious and/or national affiliations. This commitment forms the background to the assumption of an Israeli ‘exceptionalism’ with regard to migration flows and concepts of citizenship.3 As Shuval (1999) has pointed out, Israeli migration researchers have long showed little interest in contemporary models of migration, especially those that integrate migration flows into the global context. Instead, research on migration took place in a normative context, in which ‘Israeli sociologists accepted the prevailing (state) ideology and social definitions regarding the meaning of immigration and carried out their research within the apparently consensual axioms’ (ibid.: 230). Migration research in Israeli academia was for a long time institutionally connected to immigrant absorption agencies, and as an applied research field of apparently little theoretical interest has hardly become a dominant research area in the scholarly community (cf. Leshem and Shuval 1998: 23). For example, Sergio della Pergola, Israel’s foremost demographer, divides the country’s international migration flows into five main categories (2005: 123): first of all, Jewish immigration into Israel (Hebrew ‘aliyah, literally ‘rise, ascent’); second, Jewish out-migration from Israel (Hebrew yeridah, literally ‘descent, decline’); third, the expulsion and flight – an ‘exodus’ in della Pergola’s terms – of Palestinians during 1948-49; fourth, and related to this, the reunification of Palestinian families afterwards; and finally, the inflow of mostly non-Jewish labour migrants, which della Pergola characterizes as largely temporary. The clear division between Jewish, Palestinian and nonJewish overseas migration flows in della Pergola’s writings (cf. 1998, 2005) is characteristic of much earlier academic writing on migration in relation to Israel. This view is founded on the assumption that these migration flows are based on completely different motivations and identity references, and hence must be conceptualized and treated using completely different terminologies, disciplines and theoretical frameworks. According to hegemonic discourse, the immigration of new Jewish immigrants, or ‘olim chadashim, is permanent and ideologically motivated, whereas non-Jewish migration is regarded as

The Israeli Migration Regime  u 25

temporary and economically motivated (cf. Alexander 2007: 84ff.; Kemp and Raijman 2000, 2004; Leshem and Shuval 1998). Non-Jewish overseas (that is, non-Palestinian) migrants are accordingly named ‘ovdim zarim or ‘foreign workers’, a term that essentializes both their ethnic non-belonging to the nation and their economic definition as workers. The fundamental division between Jewish and non-Jewish migration flows in state law, policies and public discourse has only recently been challenged by left-wing political activists, critical academics and migrants themselves. Not least through their consequent use of the affectively more neutral term ‘migration’ (Hebrew hagira) – long avoided in both Israeli public discourse and migration research – for both Jewish and non-Jewish migration flows, the bifurcation of Jewish and non-Jewish migration flows in official state terminology has slowly begun to erode. New Israeli researchers have in recent years emphasized the need to deconstruct Zionism as the hegemonic discourse and state ideology by pointing to its colonial beginnings and ongoing practices of repression.4 Accordingly, Israeli migration research has increasingly criticized what Leshem and Shuval (1998: 9ff.) have called the ‘myth of uniqueness’ of the Israeli migration regime. Instead, it highlights Israel’s embeddedness in a global regime of migration. More recently, sociologists like Adriana Kemp and Rebecca Raijman have conducted qualitative research on non-Jewish migration. They were arguably the first to focus on non-Jewish migrants’ ideological and imaginative, rather than merely economic, motivations for coming to Israel, as in their joint articles on pro-Israeli African and Latin American ‘Christian Zionists’ (2003, 2004, 2008). Sarah Willen, who carried out anthropological research on migration in Israel focussing on migrant ‘illegality’, health and Africans in Tel Aviv (2003, 2005, 2007a, 2007b), also edited a volume on Israeli migration from a transnational perspective and placed it within a global context (2007c). Barak Kalir has written on undocumented Latin Americans in Israel (2006, 2010), as well as on Chinese Christians (2009). Galia Sabar (2008) published a monograph on Ghanaian Christian migrants employed in house-cleaning and the food services in Israel, tracing interlocutors back to West Africa after they were deported. Critical researchers have stressed the exclusionary character of the Israeli, state-led migration regime with regard to non-Jewish migrants (Alexander 2003, 2007; Bar-Tsuri 1996; Kemp 2004; Kemp and Raijman 2000, 2004, 2008; Rosenhek 1999, 2000). Legally, permanent non-Jewish immigration was neither intended nor provided for. The Law of Entry was originally enacted in 1952 in order to deal with tourists, and another law was enacted in 1991 in order to deal with non-Jewish labour migrants. As its name suggests, however, this so-called Foreign Worker Law applies mostly to (temporary) workers, not residents, who do not perceive their stay as temporary, but rent their own apartments, get married and may even have children in Israel.5 Thus, Adriana Kemp has described the policy of the Israeli state towards non-Jewish migration as one that for a long time did not even recognize the existence of migrants (2004: 267). As ‘foreign workers’ stayed on and not

26  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

only turned into de facto residents but demanded legal, social and political incorporation in Israel, it became increasingly clear that the state had no formulated migration policy, in spite of the fact that the country had long been a place of (non-Jewish) immigration.

Engaging, Governing and Debating (Filipino) ‘Foreign Labour’ in Israel The explanation generally given for the rising number of non-Jewish ‘foreign workers’ in Israel is the removal of Palestinians from the Israeli labour market in the early 1990s. According to this argument, overseas labour migrants replaced a large, non-citizen, Palestinian labour force from the occupied territories. After the first Intifada, begun in 1987, these Palestinians were increasingly perceived as a security threat by both Jewish Israeli employers and state institutions. Palestinians from the occupied territories were accordingly repeatedly prevented from entering Israel through increasingly far-reaching ‘closures’ of the occupied Palestinian territories. The resulting lack of workers was filled by importing them from overseas (Bartram 1998; Condor 1997: 45; Rosenhek 1999; Shafir and Peled 2002: 324). In order to understand the entanglement between Palestinian and overseas workers in the Israeli labour market, it is necessary to examine its historical structuring more closely. Like elsewhere, in Israel the sector of the so-called 3-D jobs, that is jobs considered ‘dirty,’ ‘dangerous’ and ‘degrading’ (Pai 2004), has historically been occupied by cheap labourers from the bottom of the social structure. Throughout Israel’s history, this position was attached to several ethnicized groups, which is why the Israeli labour market is generally described as ‘ethnically segmented’ (cf. Bartram 1998; Kimmerling 1989; Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein 1987). As in the United States, where the American dream is sustained by the wave theory of migration, the major idea underlying the Israeli labour market is that migrant groups subsequently enter the market and move ‘upwards’ with every new group that enters. The first group that was pushed into the country’s menial jobs were the Mizrachim, Jewish immigrants of non-European descent, alongside Palestinians living within Israel (so-called Israeli Arabs),6 who were subject to military rule until 1966. When, during the 1960s, political self-organization and social unrest among the Mizrachim increased and Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza strip following the Six-Day War in 1967, these were increasingly replaced by Palestinian workers, first from within Israel, later from the newly occupied territories (non-citizen Palestinians). In the following decades, the non-citizen Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories became Israel’s Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water at the bottom of Israeli society, as Moshe Semyonov and Noah Levin-Epstein (1987) called their analysis of non-citizen Palestinians in the Israeli labour market. Semyonov and Levin-Epstein identify a ‘tripartite ethnic order’ in Israeli society after

The Israeli Migration Regime  u 27

1967, with European-American (‘Ashkenazi’) Jews at the top, Asian-African (‘Mizrachi’) Jews in the middle and ‘Arabs’ at the bottom of society (1987: 5).7 After Israeli employers’ initial illegal hiring of non-citizen Palestinians, the government chose to establish a policy of controlled admittance of noncitizen Palestinians into Israel for the purpose of work. Under this policy, the number of work permits for Palestinians was limited to a quota set by the government, and Palestinians were required to carry a legal work permit that was tied to a specified Israeli employer while they were in Israel (ibid.: 12ff.). This ‘binding arrangement’, like many other details of the employment of Palestinians, was later adopted for the employment of overseas ‘foreign workers’. Hence the employment of Palestinians was expected to originate in a request by Israeli employers and was handled through a government employment office. Like ‘foreign workers,’ Palestinian employees could not change employers without first obtaining permission from the Israeli authorities, and they had to renew their permit periodically or else risk becoming ‘illegal’. It is noteworthy that the Palestinian and Israeli labour force within the Israeli labour market became complementary rather than competitive. Certain jobs, especially in the building sector and agriculture, soon became ‘Arab work’, and many Israelis considered it less shameful to be unemployed than to work in them (cf. Bartram 1998: 308). Even though several individual Israeli employers had been granted permits to employ overseas workers before the removal of Palestinians from the Israeli labour market in 1993, it is generally agreed that their employment started as official state policy that year (cf. Bartram 1998; Condor 1997; Rosenhek 1999). From the very beginning, such workers were legally employed in only six sectors, namely ‘nursing care’, ‘agriculture’, ‘construction’, ‘welding and industrial professions’, ‘hotel work’ and ‘ethnic cookery’. For each of these sectors, workers from specific nation states were recruited. During my research, these were, for example, Eastern European, Sri Lankan, Nepalese and Filipino females in nursing care, Thai males in agriculture, Eastern European, and Turkish or Chinese males for both construction and the welding and industrial professions (cf. KLO 2003; Drori and Kunda 1999). Within this state-sponsored system of employment and recruitment, the legal employment of Filipinos in Israel was restricted to caring in either private homes or public institutions providing medical and geriatric care. The basis of this system was laid down in 1986, when the nursing insurance law first enabled households to use private home care services (cf. Efrat 2006), as well as in 1995, when a state-sponsored system of migrant, live-in domestic work was introduced, which arranged the temporary employment of Filipino workers for the private care of the sick, elderly and/or disabled. The Israeli Ministry of Health decided to bring in thousands of Filipino workers in order to shift the geriatric care system from hospitals to care in private homes, arguing that up to fifty per cent of the costs of care could be saved if those needing care were looked after by ‘foreign workers’ in their private homes rather than in medical or geriatric care institutions (Bender 1995). The name ‘Filipino Plan’

28  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

(Hebrew HaTokhnit HaFilipinit) given to this large-scale transformation points to the policy-makers’ ethnic preference for carers. In contrast to many Western societies, there is hardly a long historical tradition of paid, live-in domestic work in Israel, which may be attributed to Israel’s political and societal formation. Both the harsh economic situation of many private households and Israel’s socialist character, with the chalutz (Hebrew, ‘pioneer’) as its ideal citizen throughout the first decades after the founding of the state in 1948, propagated norms that contradicted the employment of private servants or maids. Throughout the first decades of Israel’s existence as a nation state, paid domestic workers accordingly comprised mainly cleaning women and private babysitters. These tasks were typically performed by (immigrant) women of low economic and social status, for example Yemenite, later Moroccan, Romanian and Russian women, and after the so-called Six-Day War in 1967, especially in the Jerusalem area, Palestinian women from the occupied territories (Livneh 2004). Ever since, the increased integration of women into the labour market, together with a growing income inequality, especially in Israel’s densely populated coastal strip centred on the urban area of Tel Aviv, has contributed significantly to an expansion of paid domestic work.8 It is noteworthy, however, that in spite of the strong association of Filipino workers with caring, official statistics imply that from the very beginning only about half of Filipinos in Israel were employed within the state-sanctioned system of caring, while a similarly large number worked in other kinds of informal and illegalized domestic work, such as cleaning, babysitting, or cooking. Moreover, the majority of home-care providers employed legally to take care of the approximately 120,000 Israelis who were eligible for longterm care by the end of 2004 consisted of Israeli citizens, in general women from the lower ranks of the social ladder (Sinai 2004c). From its very beginning, the official policy of the importation of migrant workers was subject to heated debates and was in itself a highly contested process, in which state and political institutions acted in a heterogeneous manner. In simplified terms, it can be said that the groups that were most in favour of the importation of migrant workers were largely private actors who profited from their recruitment and employment – such as recruitment and manpower agencies, employers in the construction and agricultural sectors, and professional associations – as well as political actors intimately connected with them, among them the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Health. In contrast to this, the opponents of migrant labour were composed of a multitude of social institutions and actors ranging from government bodies to extra-parliamentary political activists. This division becomes clearer when we consider the public debates that took place in Israel with regard to the employment of ‘foreign workers’, namely the ‘exchange argument’, the discourse of a ‘demographic threat’ and the portrayal of the recruitment and employment of foreign workers as a ‘dirty business’.

The Israeli Migration Regime  u 29

According to the logic of the exchange argument, the rising unemployment in the Israeli labour market was directly linked to the importation of foreign workers, who were supposedly taking jobs away from Israelis. As in other Western countries, where the number of unemployed nationals is frequently linked to the number of non-citizen residents,9 this discourse on unemployment in Israel must be seen in a political context in which policymakers frequently resort to populist and at times xenophobic stereotypes. Accordingly, Raijman and Semyonov (2004) found that a substantial number of Israeli respondents to a large-scale survey were opposed to granting equal rights to ‘foreign workers’ and perceived them as a threat to their own social and economic status (as well as a threat to the Jewish character of the state). Within Israeli mainstream media, the unemployment discourse was most clearly exploited by state officials. In October 2003, a high-ranking official talked of ‘blunt maths’ when interviewed by a journalist from the Israeli daily paper Ha’aretz: ‘There are 300,000 foreign workers here, and 300,000 local unemployed. Chucking out the foreigners will solve the unemployment problem’ (Bassok 2003). In the wake of this remark, a heated debate developed over the actual ‘truth’ of the argument that 300,000 migrants could be exchanged for 300,000 unemployed. Within this discursive landscape, groups within the Israeli labour movement were generally in favour of exchanging migrant workers for the Israeli unemployed, but they pointed out that Israelis could and should not be forced to endure the conditions under which labour migrants were working.10 As Hana Zohar, president of the NGO Kav LaOved, explained in a personal interview, ‘the foreign workers destroyed the labour conditions for the Israeli workers. Their employment depressed the wages of jobs already on the low end of the wage scale. Apart from that, no Israeli worker is ready to work the long hours or under the conditions foreign workers are forced to work.’11 The argument in public debates – that the employment of ‘foreign workers’ had worsened Israeli working conditions – was typically linked to the statement that labour migrants had nonetheless become irreplaceable in the Israeli labour market. So in rather typical fashion, an editorial on the topic by the influential daily Ha’aretz came to the conclusion that ‘foreign workers […] perform essential functions here, doing jobs that no Israelis are willing to do’ (Ha’aretz editorial 2001). In a report on the sector for paid domestic work, Ettinger and Sinai (2004) showed that, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, only some 3,000 Israeli workers had taken up domestic work since approximately 50,000 illegalized domestic workers had been deported from Israel. They went on to describe how the deportation campaign ‘has left hundreds of thousands of homes in Israel covered in dust’ and explained the reluctance of unemployed Israelis to enter the workplaces of ‘foreign workers’, given the bad working conditions and social stigma attached to such jobs (ibid.). Furthermore, it was pointed out that in spite of a decline in the number of migrant workers, unemployment had actually risen.12

30  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

The almost obsessive focus on numbers in connection with non-Jewish migrants in Israel deserves further attention and explanation. It has been pointed out that ‘knowledge’ of the size and bio-data of populations is a major tool of power in the contemporary politics of bio-political governance. In Israel, according to Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh in her important ethnography on reproduction and Palestinian women’s discourses and strategies of ‘birthing the nation’ in Israel, ‘the calculation of the ratio of Jews to “Arabs” and the often violent separation, rigidification, and essentializing of these identities is a cornerstone of the imagined community’ (2002: 28). According to this rationale, non-Jewish labour migrants, like ‘Arabs’, are clearly part of the population to be calculated and controlled, especially if they entered the country without being legally recruited. As elsewhere, the number of (illegalized) migrants in Israel is to some extent only an estimate and varies considerably according to the political interests of the speakers. The variation of estimates can be seen from looking at the numbers provided on Filipino workers in Israel: while in 2002 the KLO (2003) stated that there were 60,000, the Philippines Embassy in Tel Aviv spoke of ‘some 30,000’ for the same period.13 Frequently, high numbers, especially for ‘illegals’, were employed in the public discourse in order to argue the existence of a (demographic) threat. This was expressed almost prototypically by the Deputy Budget Chief of the Treasury, Kobi Habar, in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz: ‘12 percent of the work force was foreign labour, a quarter of Tel Aviv’s population were foreign. The time had come to stop, to think, to change direction if we want[ed] to be a Jewish state’ (Bassok 2003). This ‘change of direction’ was realized when Israeli authorities launched a new deportation campaign against illegalized migrants in September 2002. The demographic threat argument which underlies the discourse on numbers was a major theme in Israeli public debates. According to the demographer Sergio della Pergola – who arguably represents mainstream Israeli opinion on this topic – the future of the Israeli state is directly linked to the existence of a Jewish majority, which he sees as acutely threatened by the influx of non-Jewish groups and their reproduction rates (della Pergola 2005; cf. Kanaaneh 2002). Apart from non-Jewish immigration, for della Pergola this threat is made even more acute by the fact that further waves of large-scale Jewish immigration to Israel seem unlikely in the near future (della Pergola 2005: 130). Implicit in his analysis is the view that unless there is a dramatic change in its immigration policy, Israel will lose its Jewish majority and what is frequently called its ‘character’ in this context; accordingly, the state in its present form would cease to exist. In the state’s terminology, the need to maintain a Jewish majority is generally expressed by referring to the need to keep a ‘demographic balance’. In contrast to earlier migration flows, more recent immigrant groups – such as immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopians, non-citizen Palestinians and ‘foreign workers’ – were perceived as either non-Jewish or not Jewish enough. According to the hegemonic discourse, instead of maintaining the demographic balance,

The Israeli Migration Regime  u 31

these recent migration flows created the threat of an imbalance. Foreign workers on their way to becoming permanent residents and an integral part of society – as in the so-called European example, frequently quoted as a kind of demographic nightmare by analysts (della Pergola 2005; Schnell 1999; cf. Shafir and Peled 2002: 324) – are therefore regarded as posing a threat to the existence of the state through the sheer size of their numbers there. A third major theme to be mentioned in this context emerged following several highly publicized scandals and court trials for corruption in connection with the recruitment and employment of so-called foreign workers. Here the importation of foreign workers was portrayed as a ‘dirty business’, deeply connected with crime and the lack of transparency of political power structures. First of all, journalists and NGO activists warned that the employment of migrants in Israel constituted ‘human trafficking’ or even ‘slavery’, given that workers were bound to specific employers and had to pay illegal, so-called placement fees.14 A second common reproach was the non-transparent policy of the allocation of work permits to recruitment agencies and companies to employ foreign workers (cf. KLO 2003: 12ff.). A common joke among NGO activists and migrants is that the most important thing in opening a recruitment agency in Israel was to have either a cousin or brother-in-law in the Ministry of the Interior. The heterogeneity of state institutions and the conflictive political and economic interests involved in the Israeli foreign worker regime resulted in state policies that may initially appear to be contradictory. As an example of this in September 2002, the Israeli government established a body called the Immigration Authority and a special police unit whose responsibility was to implement a cabinet decision of 18 August 2002 to ‘deport 50,000 illegals annually’.15 At the same time, the importation of new labour migrants continued and created what can be called a ‘revolving door’ situation. In a comment to Ha’aretz entitled ‘Schizophrenic Policy’, the renowned social geographer Itzhak Schnell lamented that ‘one arm of the government is deporting migrants, while the other is inviting them to come’ (Schnell 2002). 16 The state reacted by launching its first official policy with regard to ‘foreign workers’, ironically called the policy of ‘Closed Skies’ (Hebrew shamaim sgurim).17 Announced by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in October 2002, the policy had as its declared aim to reduce the number of newly recruited foreign workers by first of all ‘freezing’ the agreed number of employment permits, and secondly by legalizing the illegalized migrants in the country. Yet, as several NGOs soon pointed out, the policy of legalizing illegals was enacted only with regard to migrants employed in the construction sector, and even there it was never fully applied (cf. KLO and HMW 2003: 9f.; Sinai 2004a). With thousands of actively recruited workers entering Israel and intensified deportations (mainly by air) still going on, under the Closed Skies policy the skies above Israel were probably fuller than ever before.18 More recently, state bodies have repeatedly declared their wish to reduce the quota of ‘foreign workers’ and to favour Israeli labour over ‘foreign workers’.19

32  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

In contrast, the number of workers recruited from overseas in the sector of nursing care continued to rise until at least 2008.20 Rather than being simply schizophrenic, profit-oriented or contradictory, Israeli state policies with regard to ‘foreign workers’ attempted first of all to regain control over processes that were already occurring on the ground, and were sometimes well beyond the governing power. As is attested by the significant numbers of migrants without a legal status according to state logic, present from the very beginning of the active recruitment of ‘foreign workers’, migration to Israel took place long before, and parallel to, official recruitment policies. It became clear from interviews that Filipinos had been entering Israel as tourists as early as the 1970s.21 Accordingly, it is important to stress that Filipino domestic workers were no novelty in Israel, when in 1995, recruitment from the Philippines started officially. Even after 1995, Filipinos continued to enter as tourists, who took up work in the informal sector or managed to regularize their stay as carers with the help of recruitment agencies, and as ‘direct hires’ by employers. This became especially clear in the urban space of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, located at the heart of Israel’s largest metropolitan area, has been portrayed as posing a challenge to restrictive national policies by a regime of urban incorporation based on the territorial category of residence (Alexander 2003, 2007; Kemp and Raijman 2004). Indeed, it soon became the centre of Israel’s non-Jewish migrant communities, and in its southern districts an extensive social, political and religious infrastructure developed to serve their needs (see Chapters 4 and 5). As at the nation state level, municipal authorities long ignored the presence of migrants in the city and provided only ad hoc solutions for urgent problems, such as the admission of migrants’ illegalized children into municipal kindergartens or primary schools. This approach changed considerably throughout the late 1990s, when local authorities realized that ‘the state does not have a “problem” of migrant workers. We (the local governments) do’.22 From 1998 onwards, the awareness that migrants were a permanent presence in the city accordingly translated into a ‘migrant-oriented policy’ (Kemp and Raijman 2004: 39). In this process, migrants became a local brand of urban cosmopolitanism, embodiments of Tel Aviv’s renowned image as the tolerant city ‘that never sleeps’. As such, the (humanitarian) support of migrants enjoyed great popularity among Tel Aviv residents. Social institutions that assisted migrants on a humanitarian basis were supported by hundreds of local volunteers and received great attention in the local media, as well as from the local cultural and art scene. Hence, the Tel Aviv municipality became a leading political actor in the governance of migration in Israel, at least partially including lobbying for the incorporation of migrants into Israeli society, irrespective of their legal status. The limitations of the urban regime of incorporation soon became obvious, however. The municipal authorities in Tel Aviv could not halt or hinder the deportation of a large number of its residents, and municipal policies in support of illegalized migrants only apparently contradicted

The Israeli Migration Regime  u 33

national deportation policies. Instead, the urban incorporation regime of migrants has to be seen as an integral part of a strategically selective migration regime, which gains from the presence of a large number of subjects whose legal, social, political and economic statuses can be described as precarious at best. So it should not be forgotten that migrants richly contribute to the city’s cosmopolitan lifestyle, simply by being there in large numbers and, for a cheap price, cleaning the dishes and tables in restaurants and private homes, cooking and serving the food, caring for the children and elderly among its affluent residents, and in many other ways.

Setting Anew the Contested Limits of Israeli Citizenship Against the background of migrants who organized themselves collectively, struggled against being deported and demanded more all-embracing rights in Israel, a reform of the Israeli citizenship regime appeared long overdue. Most importantly, it became clear that a first second generation of migrants’ children – born in Israel, but with no legal status in the country – had grown up and was now demanding its rights, as well as organizing itself against being deported to countries they had never even been to. In 2005 an interministerial committee was set up to formulate a new immigration policy. The following section will trace this process through which the limits of Israeli citizenship were debated and re-established. In the early spring of 2005, the National Security Council recommended that the government act should tighten up Israel’s immigration laws. According to the demographic threat argument outlined above, the Council regarded the demographic ‘balance’ and the Jewish character of the state as being acutely threatened by an apparent laxity and inconsistency in dealing with non-Jewish migration into Israel. As a result a meeting was held shortly thereafter in the Prime Minister’s Bureau in order to discuss the council’s recommendations. During this meeting, it was decided to establish a commission headed by the acting Minister of the Interior, Ophir PinesPaz, in order to formulate a new immigration policy (cf. Shahar 2005d). In an interview with the liberal Ha’aretz daily, which covered the debate over citizenship with a series of articles by the journalist Ilan Shahar, Pines-Paz argued why Israel needed such a new policy: The Population Administration is an arbitrary organization instead of a service organization. […] I uncovered the internal Comptroller’s Report regarding the Population Administration, which was classified. The report […] reveals atrocious findings – mainly that in every population administration office, people get different solutions to the same problems. […] It’s unbelievable. It’s a system that works like it’s still the ‘60s without taking everything that happened in the ‘90s into consideration – the wave of immigration, the peace process and the foreign workers. (Quoted from Shahar 2005g)

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In a preceding editorial note, the newspaper voiced its criticism of existing immigration practice in similar terms and expressed its hope for a new immigration policy, which was ‘transparent, realistic and humane’ (Ha’aretz Editorial 2005a). Among the inter-ministerial committee members was acting Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, at the time a member of the conservative Likud party, who summarized the two schools of thought in the committee with regard to Israel’s immigration politics in the following way: the first school focussed on the Arab-Israeli conflict as the major structuring force of Israeli society; its proponents welcomed a strengthening of the non-Arab sector in Israel, whether through Jewish or (non-Arab) non-Jewish immigrants. A second school of thought (with which she associated herself) was principally concerned with the preservation of the Jewish character of the state. Livni, like her ‘schoolmates’, saw the Jewish character of Israel threatened by any non-Jewish migration flow into the country (cf. Shahar 2005d). Livni’s argument illustrates how, throughout the debate, conservative opinionmakers on the committee defamed the more liberal committee members for being unconcerned about the Jewish character of the state, and even for being anti-Jewish. Moreover, during the committee meetings two major themes of debate quickly emerged: first, a reform of the Law of Return, namely the abolition of the ‘grandchild clause’ and its ‘enshrinement’ by making it one of Israel’s basic laws;23 and secondly, granting legal status to the children of illegalized overseas migrants, the ‘foreign workers’ kids’, as they were commonly called in media reports.24 In my outline of the debate, I shall focus on the discussion of the status of the latter. Overseas labour migrants who had managed to bring their children to Israel or had had children in Israel in general ‘lost’ their legal status and were unable to arrange legal status for their children (cf. Willen 2005). This practice was heavily criticized by several NGOs, among them the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). In 2002, ACRI submitted a petition to the government to formalize the status of children in Israel who were legally stateless (cf. Feller 2004). The acting Minister of Interior, Avraham Poraz, adopted several of the ACRI proposals and put the topic of ‘child legalization’ on his political agenda. His successor in office, Ophir Pines-Paz, approved the conferral of legal civil status on the children of illegalized migrants into Israel in March 2005 and presented a draft bill to the inter-ministerial committee. On 26 June 2005, the Cabinet decided in favour of this proposal. One of the committee members, the Minister of Internal Security Gideon Ezra, defined the main ‘problem’ of the legalization of the second generation as follows: ‘You cannot disregard the humane aspect of the problem of the children of foreign workers, to whom the State of Israel must offer a solution. But on the other hand, the decision to regulate their status could impair the Jewish character of Israel’ (quoted from Sa’ar 2005a). Like many other committee members whose opinions were made public, Ezra viewed the apparent ‘problem’ of the second generation as a predominantly ‘humane’

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one, but still one that needed to be solved without threatening the Jewish character of the state. In similar terms, Pines-Paz argued that ‘Israel cannot ignore the distress of children who do not know a different country or culture. […] We are concerned with youths who want to be a part of Israeli society and we must allow them to do so while stressing the fact that we are dealing with a limited group of people’ (quoted from Alon 2005). Indeed, the question of the ‘group limits’ became central to the discussion over legalization. Because no trustworthy statistics on the number of the children who might be eligible for legalization were available, estimates varied considerably according to specific political interests.25 Within both the committee and the public (media) debate, there was an apparent consensus that the number of children subject to legalization had to be limited and that citizenship as such was not to be granted. As a result, a debate on the general criteria of eligibility for Israeli citizenship was launched. The central question raised was whether citizenship should be tied to ‘being a Jew’ and on how ‘being Jewish’ should be defined. Committee member Amnon Rubinstein, the acting Minister of Education, Culture and Sport (renowned for his writings on Zionism, anti-Semitism and Israeli law), supported the idea of a ‘community of choice’ rather than of ‘blood’. He was quoted as having suggested considering ‘anyone who wants to belong to the Jewish community a Jew. Israel is not all that attractive. It draws people from the Third World, not from Jewish communities’ (quoted from Shahar 2005d). In contrast, other committee members favoured tightening up the legal definition of being Jewish to conform with that given in religious law and granting citizenship to illegalized non-Jewish children for humanitarian reasons only. Committee member Asher Cohen coined the term ‘internal assimilation’, stating that ‘citizenship should be made conditional on meeting certain conditions, in order to prove a true attachment to the state: a minimal period of residence – three years, say – and an examination of the individual’s knowledge of Hebrew and perhaps also of Jewish history and the laws of the country’ (quoted from Shahar 2005d). Within the debate, the idea of a civil conversion, that is, conversion to an Israeli citizen rather than a religious individual, came up. Ha’aretz journalist Shahar summed up the criteria for civil conversion as follows: ‘Knowledge of Hebrew, Zionism, basic concepts in Judaism, loyalty to the state and readiness to fulfil the obligations of Israeli citizenship. For the purpose of civil conversions, Independence Day would be no less important than Passover, and adherence to the law would be much more important than observing the Sabbath’ (Shahar 2005b). In media reports and public discussions, knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish traditions emerged as the most frequently mentioned and significant boundary markers for Israeli citizenship. In typical fashion, Shahar defined an illegalized youth born in South America named Delgado as follows: ‘Delgado is Israeli through and through. She speaks fluent Hebrew and celebrates the Jewish holidays’ (Shahar 2005e).

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According to the criteria the committee finally agreed in June 2005, minors could become eligible for Israeli citizenship if (i) they were born in Israel, had lived in the country ever since and resided there, (ii) they were at least ten years old on the day the decision was made, (iii) their parents entered Israel legally, iv) they had attended or had graduated from school in Israel. Furthermore, the parents and younger siblings of these children could become temporary residents; they would have to renew their identity cards annually and would be eligible for social welfare. Their younger siblings could become Israeli citizens only if they agreed to serve in the Israeli army (cf. Sa’ar 2005b). The suggestion of the former Minister of Interior Avraham Poraz, to make serving in the Israeli army compulsory for all applicants of citizenship, was rejected. Nevertheless, the criteria agreed in June 2005 were perceived as ‘stricter’ than those proposed by Poraz, mainly because he had argued in favour of granting citizenship to all children who had lived in Israel for over ten years (cf. Wurgaft 2005c). Another criterion introduced was that of ‘cultural displacement/exile’ (Hebrew galut tarbutit). According to this criterion, a person was eligible for legalization only if he ‘cannot be integrated into the country of his ethnic origin with respect to culture, language and family ties’ (cf. Shahar 2005f). While policy-makers stressed the humanitarian motivations for this criterion, it is apparent that the cultural exile clause was introduced mainly in order to produce a de facto exclusion of illegalized Palestinian children from legalization without directly naming them. Accordingly, it is quite unlikely that a Palestinian child who had grown up in Israel could argue for ‘cultural exile’ in the Palestinian territories, whereas it was easier for an Israeli-born child of Filipino or Chinese parents to do so because of the threat of his or her deportation to the parents’ apparent homeland. The naturalization of some migrant children was therefore, so Kemp argues, ‘skillfully set apart from other “messy phenomena” (Palestinian children)’ (2007: 690). More than any other criterion, the cultural exile clause showed how the debate had become situated politically by being deeply embedded in the politics of fear that the ‘Jewish character’ of the state was in danger. Several months after the bill was passed, the Minister of Interior summed up the legalization campaign with the following words: Not only children who were born in Israel and whose parents entered the country legally see themselves as Israelis for all intents and purposes, and they have no other homeland. Children and teenagers who came to Israel at a young age, grew up in neighborhoods where children from different countries speak Hebrew among themselves, attended preschools and schools where Shabbat was welcomed with hallah, candles and wine, dressed up at Purim, bowed their heads on Memorial Day, and will join the army at age 18 feel exactly the same way. […] Israel, the national home of the much-persecuted Jewish people, should show special sensitivity to the distress of nation-less children. (Quoted from Ha’aretz editorial 2005b)

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In the quotation above, the idea of granting a refuge to children who are ‘innocent’ of illegal actions, in spite of being ‘illegal’, is intertwined with the concept of their being Israeli and even quasi-Jewish. Indeed, the way in which Minister of Interior Pines-Paz describes ‘foreign workers’ children’, they seem to embody the ideal ‘olim chadashim (Jewish new immigrants): rather than forming ‘ethnic enclaves’, they speak Hebrew even ‘among themselves’, practice the religion of the state’s majority rather than those of their parents and prove their Israeliness by joining the army. Furthermore, they share one of the most important features of the hegemonic Jewish Israeli identity, namely collective suffering and the (active) memory of diasporic existence. Accordingly, the humanitarian argument that illegalized children should be incorporated into the national collective is transformed into a moral imperative which grows out of the Jewish historical experience. The debate on granting foreign workers’ children citizenship illustrates both the fluidity and the limits of Israeli citizenship. Thus, while for the first time in Israeli history a bill granted collective citizenship to a group of people who, according to legal definitions, were not Jewish, it did so without really re-formulating the content of citizenship requirements, which among other things remained tied to Jewishness. The legal inclusion of several dozen children and their families by legal regularization was accompanied by the far-reaching exclusion of many others. While in summer 2005, 120 families were awaiting a response to their requests for residency, many more were awaiting detention and deportation (Bergman 2005), which followed in spring and summer 2006 and continued well into 2009, when a new deportation campaign was directed, among others, against illegalized families. Furthermore, by the time the regularization of some families had been enacted, the deportation campaigns had made it practically impossible for migrant workers to comply with the criteria required for the amnesty, namely to raise children until an age at which they became eligible to apply for citizenship. In effect, the regularization campaign functioned as a one-off amnesty alongside a large campaign to deport other families. This was condemned at several rallies and demonstrations which took place after the criteria for regularization were made public. The demonstrations were organized and attended by numerous members of the second generation, both those youths who were eligible for regularization and those about to be deported.26 In a three-day parliamentary debate after the bill for the legalization of illegalized children had passed, Attorney General Elyakim affirmed that Israel had not at all become an immigration country for non-Jews. Rather, ‘the nation’s character is that of a “nation of aliyah” – that is, a nation of return, rather than immigration’ (quoted from Shahar 2005f).

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Conclusion Hegemonic state ideology sharply distinguishes between Jewish persons and their families on the one hand, and Palestinians and so-called foreign workers on the other. While the immigration (or, in the state’s language, ‘return’) of the former is greatly encouraged by the state, Palestinians, and to a lesser extent ‘foreign workers’, are perceived as implicitly threatening the state, and are therefore subject to a regime of strategically selective exclusion. The recruitment and employment of non-Jewish migrants from overseas as state-sanctioned foreign workers has been analysed as being closely related to the ousting of non-citizen Palestinians from an ethnically segmented Israeli labour market. Within the public discourse, foreign workers in Israel appeared as victims (that is, of labour exploitation, the ‘dirty business’ of recruiters and state agencies), perpetrators (being cheaper and more ‘willing’ than the local labour force and therefore undermining local workers’ rights), and subsequently as a ‘problem’ for and a threat to the Jewish character of the state. Their labelling as foreign workers essentialized persons as cultural Others and functionalized them as workers. However, as the Filipino story of migration to Israel has shown, Filipinos entered Israel long before the official recruitment policy of Filipino carers for Israeli private homes. Moreover, even after Filipinos had become legally sanctioned foreign workers, many preferred to enter into a system that the state authorities had rendered illegal but still largely tolerated. In the process of (not only) Filipinos’ recruitment and employment, private manpower agencies have played a decisive role, while the state has acted in a heterogeneous, but only apparently contradictory manner. This heterogeneous character has frequently been explained with reference to contradictory policies of different levels of the state, most importantly a broadly exclusive policy at the national level versus a more incorporative urban policy at the local level, namely in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv, as I shall demonstrate, a large number of (illegalized) migrants succeeded in ‘homing’ themselves by forming families, organizing themselves collectively, claiming their rights and demanding inclusion as residents. As I have argued, this urban policy of incorporation only appears to contradict the national migration regime. Thus, while non-Jewish migrants were officially recognized as residents, they remained a cheap and mobile labour force, largely excluded from legal citizenship. This became especially clear when a substantial proportion of them were deported, following the introduction of a large-scale deportation campaign by the state in September 2002. In 2005, an inter-ministerial committee set out to formulate a new immigration policy and reform Israeli citizenship. One of the outcomes was a new regulation that incorporated a few dozen members of Israel’s first second generation of migrants and their core families, even though, as I have argued, the state’s concept of citizenship remained largely unaltered. Nevertheless, while the reform was part of a ‘demystification of national citizenship taking place in Israel’, as Kemp argues, it was also ‘indicative of the adaptability of the

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nation-state as it seeks to reprioritize ethno-national definitions of citizenship in the face of new challenges’ (2007: 663). Thus, while some ‘foreign workers’ kids’ – at times portrayed as embodying the ideal new Jewish immigrants – were granted citizenship in a one-time amnesty, many others were deported and continue to be excluded from legal citizenship in Israel. In the context of an increasingly violent occupation of the Palestinian territories and the perceived threat to the Jewish character of the state, for the Zionist mainstream the existence of a large number of non-Jewish migrants became a demographic nightmare, with the ‘European example’ of the incorporation of guest workers being quoted as a warning. For more liberal Israelis, migrants often embodied a proof of longed-for normalcy, in that Israel had finally become like other countries (cf. Alexander 2003; Kemp and Raijman 2004; Shuval 1999: 238). As is illustrated by the following quotation, written against the background of the second Lebanon war in summer 2006, this ‘normalcy’ is fragile in nature: We [the Israelis] were drugged by political correctness. The political correctness that has come to dominate the Israeli discourse and Israeli awareness in the past generation was totally divorced from the Israeli situation. It did not have the tools to deal with the reality of an existential conflict. It did not have the tools to deal with a reality of an inter-religious and inter-cultural conflict. […] We were poisoned with normalcy. The State of Israel is fundamentally an abnormal state. Just because it is a Jewish state in an Arab region, and just because it is a Western country in a Muslim region, and just because it is a democratic state in a region of fanaticism and despotism, Israel is in constant tension with its surroundings. On the one hand … Israel cannot live a life of European normalcy. On the other hand …, Israel cannot avoid being a part of European normalcy. (Shavit 2006)

The dilemma between uniqueness and normalcy which is of implicit structuring importance in the public debate and the state’s definitions of the limits of Israeli citizenship and migration policy is expressed here in a prototypical manner. Against this background, migrants’ struggles for inclusion in Israel were difficult indeed. Israeli citizenship has been and certainly will continue to be struggled for in conflict (cf. Kemp et al. 2004). While only a few have succeeded in securing legal citizenship by marrying Israelis, raising children in Israel or even converting as Jews, this book will show how Filipinos and other non-Jewish migrants have collectively carved out lives for themselves in Israel, thereby negotiating rights and deeply transforming the conceptual limits and meanings of Israeli belonging and lived citizenship.

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1.1. Cover of the Tel Aviv city magazine Akhbar Ha’Ir (Issue 8-15 July 2004), featuring a picture by Guy Murad depicting an elderly woman and a Filipina carer window-shopping in Tel Aviv.

Notes 1. Thus, in 1995 an estimated 79 per cent of the Jewish population had been born outside the country or were the children of immigrants (Leshem and Shuval 1998: 3). According to the latest data provided by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2005 the percentage was 67.8 (Statistical Abstract of Israel 2006, Table 2.21).

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2. For an English translation of the text of this law, see the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website at http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1950_1959/ Law%20of%20Return%205710-1950 (retrieved 16 May 2011). 3. Thus, Israel’s apparent uniqueness as a nation state was attributed to the fact that Zionism, as the political movement which led to the establishment of the state, was nationalism ex negativo, i.e. a movement of social liberation that arose largely in response to European anti-Semitism. 4. At the forefront of this apparently new generation of academics were the so-called New Historians, a loosely defined group of Israeli historians whose publications on Israeli history have triggered controversial debates, among them Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev. See Kemp et al. (2004) on the deconstruction of a state-sponsored social identity that has been closely tied to Zionism in Israel in recent years. 5. The Foreign Workers Law of 1991 therefore defines a ‘foreign worker’ as a ‘worker who is not a citizen of Israel or a resident of Israel’ (for an English version of the law, see the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor website at http://www. moit.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/CAD9826B-2D53-4775-BAE3-8AF57531B3B4/0/5. pdf; retrieved 22 November 2009). 6. Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship or ‘1948 Palestinians’ are often called ‘Israeli Arabs’ in Israeli mainstream literature, rather than ‘Palestinians’, in order to stress their (hoped for) detachment from the Palestinian national movement. 7. Strictly speaking, the term Ashkenasim refers to Jews descended from the medieval Jewish communities of the Rhineland, but it is commonly employed to designate Jews of European origin in general. In contrast, Jews of Middle Eastern origin are commonly referred to as Mizrachim (Hebrew, ‘Orientals’). 8. In a comparative study of U.S. cities, Milkman et al. (1998) have shown that the degree of inequality is directly related to the concentration of paid domestic work. With the Gini index at 39.2 per cent, Israel is one of the Western countries with the highest rate of social inequality (UN Human Development Report 2007/2008, online at http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_EN_Complete.pdf; retrieved 15 May 2011). An estimated 30,000 migrants were employed in cleaning 80,000 private homes in the Tel Aviv area in 2003 (Leibovich-Dar 2003). 9. The offsetting of a migrant for an ‘indigenous’ employee has been analysed as an integral part of the racism in ‘Western’ states (cf. Gilroy 2002). Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (1998) conceptualize this phenomenon as an attempt to antagonize social groups specific to a contemporary racism built into capitalist nation states. 10. Bar-Tsuri describes the position of the Israeli labour union towards foreign workers as ‘deeply unclear’ (1996: 46). 11. Interview, 25 July 2004. See also Gottlieb (2002) on this point. 12. Fisher 2004; for the latest data, see the Statistical Abstract of Israel at the website of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics at http://www1.cbs.gov.il/reader/ shnatonenew_site.htm (retrieved 22 November 2009). 13. Personal communication from embassy employees; see also the website of the Philippines Embassy in Tel Aviv at http://www.philippine-embassy.org.il/ (retrieved 22 November 2009). 14. Thus, not least due to the campaigning of Israeli NGOs, Israel was put on a so-called ‘watch list’ of states who fail ‘to provide evidence of increasing efforts to address trafficking’ in human beings in the annual Report on Human Trafficking

42  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

2006 by the U.S. State Department. See the U.S. State Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/ (retrieved 22 November 2009). Ariel Sharon, protocol of government decision no. 2469, 18 August 2002. The official term for forcing someone to leave the country is harkhaka in Hebrew (literally ‘removal’). Nevertheless, the expression used in the quotation by the then acting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was ‘deportation’ (Hebrew girush). In using ‘deportation’ rather than ‘removal’ or ‘expulsion’, I am following the dominant terminology of the public discourse (and the language of many official state documents). The ‘revolving door’ phenomenon has been analysed in other contexts as well, for example, in the case of migration between the USA and Mexico (cf. DeGenova 2002: 436). The name includes a reference to the fact that practically all (non-Palestinian) labour migrants arrive and leave Israel by air. Figure taken from Israel’s Central Bureau for Statistics press release of 28 July 2004, published at http://www.cbs.gov.il/hodaot2004/17_04_198.htm (retrieved 22 November 2009). Originally issued in June 2004, the Endorn report (entitled officially The Mode of Employing Migrant Workers in Israel and Conditions for Issuing Licenses) was adopted on 1 May 2005, despite the heavy criticism of several NGOs. See the joint report by the Hotline for Migrant Workers, Kav LaOved, the Adva centre, the ACRI and the Tel-Aviv University’s Law and Welfare Clinic (HMW et al. 2004). Thus in May 2003, the number of ‘foreign workers’ in the care sector was set at 37,200 permits. Less than two years later, in February 2005, 27,771 of these permits had been ‘used up’ by recruitment agencies for the importation of care workers (these numbers were provided by Efraim Cohen, Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour, at a meeting of the parliamentary Committee on Foreign Workers on 22 February 2005). In 2008, the press reported that the number of foreign workers in the care sector had almost doubled within the past five years and currently stood at 52,000, while the number of foreign workers’ work permits rose to 91,641 in 2007 (Sinai 2008). This first generation of Filipino domestic workers came to Israel mainly in the company of employers who had hired them in countries where the employment of Filipino domestic workers was more common than in Israel at the time, such as the Asian metropolises of Hong Kong and Singapore. According to interviewees, early employers were often either Israeli business men returning home – like the aunt of one of my interviewees, who entered Israel in 1972 together with an Israeli for whom she had worked as domestic helper in Hong Kong for many years – or foreign diplomats who had been transferred to Israel and took their Filipino employees with them. A social worker employed in a municipal centre for the aid of migrants, quoted from Kemp and Raijman 2003: 12. The religious authorities were vehemently opposed to this idea, arguing that it would give the Supreme Court the power to decide ‘who is a Jew’ (see Shahar 2005c). It should be noted that one of the main tasks of the committee was arguably to deal with the reproach made by Israeli and international human and citizen rights organizations that the restriction on the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship

The Israeli Migration Regime  u 43

and residency permits to (for example, non-citizen Palestinian) spouses of Israeli citizens included in the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law passed on 31 July 2003 was discriminatory. Critics included the ACRI, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The media reporting and debate in Ha’aretz on the committee’s work nevertheless focussed on foreign workers rather than the Palestinian issue. 25. When the proposal was first raised, the acting Head of the Population Registry provided the committee with a figure of 93,500 children, who had been living in Israel illegally between 1987 and 2004. In contrast to this apparently highly exaggerated figure, other Ministry of Interior officials spoke of figures ranging from ‘some 2,500’ to ‘some 10,000’ children. These latter figures were generally adopted by the media and throughout the public debate, even though NGO officials and activists pointed to the fact that the Education Ministry statistics listed only 604 illegalized children who met the criteria for legalization proposed by the committee (cf. Shahar 2005a; Sinai 2004b). More than three months after the passing of the bill to grant citizenship to illegalized children, less than one hundred applications for citizenship had been filed, in spite of great efforts by NGOs to publicize the new arrangements (cf. Wurgaft 2005b). 26. One of these demonstrations took place on 3 October 2005 outside the Tel Aviv Interior Ministry (cf. Wurgaft 2005b), another on 27 November 2005 in front of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem (cf. Traubmann 2005). A series of demonstrations were organized by a group of critical educators and students from the south Tel Aviv Rogozin High School (cf. Ellis 2009).

Chapter 2 Transnational Female Lives

At the core of this book are the subjective life stories, narratives and practices of Filipina migrants in Israel. By describing the life stories of three Filipina migrants at the beginning of this chapter, I intend to set the stage for an introductory overview and comparative analysis of Filipina migrants’ lives in Israel. Most of all, I want to draw attention to the complexities of women’s situations, reasons and experiences throughout the migration process. As Lila Abu-Lughod has pointed out, ‘the effects of extralocal and long-term processes are only manifested locally and specifically, produced in the actions of individuals living their particular lives, inscribed in their bodies and their words’ (Abu-Lughod 1991: 150). In telling me about their lives, the women I have interviewed for this book reflected on their past and present choices, and expressed ambivalent feelings and emotions about the meanings and outcomes of their moves. In spite of their specific experiences, conceptualizations and different social, economic and legal positioning, some major common themes and topics emerged. As becomes clear from these subjective life stories, the decision to migrate is typically a difficult one, the adversities one has to overcome in Israel being particularly demanding emotionally and socially and the outcomes uncertain, even in financial terms. Most importantly, Filipina migrants talked about their families and what in the literature has come to be termed their transnational social fields and networks. Migrant women, as this chapter shows, invest immense effort in maintaining social networks across space. The practices that, for Filipina migrants in Israel, constitute ongoing care and social obligations across nation state borders are expressed, among other things, in the living arrangements in diaspora, long-distance communication and the management of the material benefits of migration, most importantly but not exclusively, the sending of money remittances. As Filipina migrants are separated from their loved ones over long distances and for substantial periods of time, their stories are often tragic tales that speak of emotional distress, disappointments and the increasing commodification of social ties. The migration process comes with multiple

46  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

dislocations in both the Philippine and the Israeli social context. By moving to Israel, however, migrant women not only beat the odds involved in living in the Philippines, but actively challenge dominant gender roles and concepts. Maybe most of all, the constitutions of migrants’ social networks, practices and obligations undergo major changes throughout the migration process, a fact only rarely described ethnographically in the existing literature on transnational migration. The transnationality of social practices and meanings, this chapter highlights, is highly contingent.

Three Women’s Journeys to Israel (and Beyond) Just like the stories of women presented by Anna Tsing in her chapter on ‘Alien Romances’ (1993), the following life stories of Filipina migrants in Israel are not typical. Out of a multitude of recorded life stories I chose those of Novelita, Avelina and Mercy not because they are representative, but because they illustrate and reflect the typical issues for and circumstances of Filipina migrants in Israel. Each of the three women became much more than interviewees throughout the fieldwork period, as I accompanied Novelita to her son’s wedding in the Philippines, visited Mercy after she had left Israel for Manila, and wandered with Avelina through Rome, where she lived before she moved on to Canada, separated from her children, whom I met in the Philippines even subsequent to the last time she herself managed to see them. The stories which follow are the outcome of numerous conversations and interviews which took place over a period of at least three and up to five years. In writing about them, I attempt to follow my interlocutors’ own narrative structures of their lives.

Novelita Born in the late 1940s, Novelita grew up with her grandparents in Manila. This is where her parents, who came from Iloilo on the Western Visayan island of Panay, sent her after her father, an engineer, left to work on a construction site in Oman in order to be able to finance the education of his nine children. As a judge in the Philippine High Court, Novelita’s grandfather was an important man in the capital, and Novelita grew up as part of the local intellectual elite. As a student of biology and chemistry, she managed to visit India, Japan and Australia on scholarships. Like many Filipino students in the late 1960s, Novelita engaged politically against the Marcos regime, joined mass demonstrations against the government, and found herself imprisoned more than once. At the same time, she was part of the national folk-dancing company, Bayanihan, which was established by Marcos’ wife Imelda in the mid-1950s as part of a larger Philippine ‘cultural renewal’ movement. Novelita travelled all over Asia and even Europe with

Transnational Female Lives  u 47

the dance company. As we accidentally found out in a Manila bookstore, the chronicle of the company features pictures of Novelita from 1968 in the Theatre de Champs Elysees, Paris and in Madrid, standing in the Palacio de Lilas right next to Prince Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía of Spain (Santos 2004). As the eldest of nine siblings and the only one who had grown up away from the family’s home town, Novelita returned to Iloilo reluctantly after her grandparents died. In Iloilo she soon married the son of a local middleclass family in an arranged marriage, and in the following five years gave birth to four children. Unwilling to give up her independent lifestyle after marriage, Novelita started working as a secretary, first for an influential local politician, and later for a high-ranking official in the Philippine National Bank. Meanwhile, Novelita’s marriage turned increasingly unhappy, and it became clear that her husband was supporting a lover or querida, with whom he had children. Novelita describes him as ill-tempered and at the time an abusive alcoholic. When she decided to separate, he refused to support their children and tried to force her to go back to him. In this situation, going abroad appeared to be the only way out. Thus, even though she had a relatively well-paid job, Novelita’s salary did not suffice to cover her children’s needs, let alone enable her to save for the high college fees in the Philippines. In order both to get away from her husband and earn enough money for her children’s upbringing and education, Novelita therefore decided to look for a job overseas. On her decision to migrate, Novelita told me: I don’t want them [my children] to be ignorant, but educated. To be professionals, to be good human beings and citizens. I had a good job in the Philippines, but my husband was coming all the time and disturbing me. He is a gambler, he is a womanizer, he is also irresponsible – all the time he is drunk – what kind of a husband is that? Did I marry to be crucified? Ma pitom![1] So I prefer to be alone. I use my hands and my talents and my skills, my energy to work to support my children for their needs … I said: you have your skill, you have your brain–- so I go out.2

Novelita’s parents were initially deeply opposed to her leaving, but finally realized that going abroad was the only solution. As a result, in the mid-1970s, Novelita was the first of three brothers and six sisters to go abroad. At first she found work as a biologist in Kuwait. However, she hated living in Kuwait, being segregated from public life and forced to veil herself. An aunt who had left the Philippines for Hong Kong and entered Israel in 1972 as the domestic worker of her Hong Kong employer, an Israeli national, persuaded Novelita to join her. In Israel, the aunt said, she could find a job in a hospital. Novelita recalled her initial reluctance but subsequent decision to come to Israel: ‘Then I think about it. Israel is an experience – another country to visit. Somewhere I haven’t been before. Because I visited so many countries before…’ Accordingly, Novelita entered Israel in 1985 with a group of eleven Filipina women from her home island of Panay, all of them distant relatives recruited by the ‘aunt’ – a kin member certainly rather distant for most of the travellers. The aunt worked as an agent for an Israeli manpower agency, to which the in-migrating women had

48  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

to pay a $500 placement fee in exchange for legal employment arrangements. After her arrival, Novelita did not begin to work in a hospital, as promised, but became the live-in carer of an elderly Alzheimer’s patient in his private home in the northern town of Haifa. Her monthly salary at the time was $300. During our conversations, she remembered her initial time in Israel as being extremely difficult. When the constant quarrels and humiliations with her employer’s family became unbearable, Novelita decided to leave her job. This turned her into an ‘illegal’, since her employer’s daughter had taken Novelita’s passport and now refused to return it. Even though the danger of being arrested and deported was practically non-existent at that time in Israel, being ‘illegal’ meant that, for the time being, Novelita was unable to travel to the Philippines in order to visit her family. Accordingly, she did not return even once for many years. Although at the time her enforced stay in Israel felt like ‘a catastrophe’, Novelita later realized that this helped her to save much more money than she would have otherwise saved and also, as she called it, ‘to concentrate on life in Israel’. Without a legal work permit, Novelita was not bound to one live-in job anymore, but was free to engage in better paying part-time jobs. She specialized in taking short-term care of Alzheimer’s patients and soon, as she emphasizes, became a sought-after Alzheimer’s therapist. At the same time, she started to work for an Israeli recruitment agency and began, just like her aunt had before her, recruiting friends, former neighbours and relatives from the Philippines for work in Israel. At the agency, she met Dror, whom she married in 2004 after many years of struggling for the annulment of her first marriage.3 When I met Novelita in 2005, she had been granted Israeli citizenship through her marriage to Dror. In her large apartment in Haifa she rented out beds to more than a dozen Filipina domestic workers, among them two of her sisters and both of her daughters. In the meanwhile, many of Novelita’s relatives had left the Philippines in order to work abroad. Out of her eight siblings, only two sisters – both of them married to overseas seamen – and one brother (a physician) lived in the Philippines, while all the others had left for the United States, Israel or Europe. Upon leaving the Philippines in the 1970s, Novelita left her children in the care of her mother and a domestic worker, a young distant relative from a neighbouring island, whom she paid for with her salary. At that time, her children were aged five to ten years old, and the separation must have been extremely painful. Novelita recounts that at the beginning of her stay in Israel she was ‘crying six months long’ over leaving her children, and from our conversations it became clear that she still suffered from the feelings of pain and guilt associated with leaving them. Again and again, Novelita emphasized that she had left her children for their own sakes and had done everything possible to minimize the emotional costs of the separation. But I tried to control it [the pain of separation] because I have that dream… – not for myself but for my children. My husband destroyed me, but I have to fight, so that they will be different from me. I never neglected my children. Every Saturday I talked to them on the telephone. Once a week – I asked their needs, what happened, what is their lives, are they sick… I’m calling to them. It is very

Transnational Female Lives  u 49

hard for me, because I’m a mother and I’m away from them. But then I have to suppress my feelings towards them to be sure that they have a good future.

From the money she earned in Israel, she was able to send each of her four children to the most prestigious and expensive college in Iloilo. After finishing college, her eldest son continued his studies in the United States, her two daughters started working in management positions in their home town and her younger son signed up for a work contract as a seaman. Sensing that their mother would not return to Iloilo, however, both daughters started planning to leave the Philippines, dreaming of life in the United States. Not approving of their decision, so Novelita told me, she nevertheless helped them to enter Israel to work as carers. From there, she reasoned that they could later move on to work in the United States. When the two arrived, it was Novelita who had to teach them ‘how to clean toilets and wash the dishes’, as she put it, since they had both grown up with a maid and were completely unaccustomed to doing household work. While Novelita was happy to be finally reunited with her now grown-up daughters, the fact that they had both become domestic workers just like herself, in spite of their good education, signified failure to her. As the two stayed on, the relation between mother and daughters grew increasingly tense, so that two years after their arrival in Israel, the daughters moved out of Novelita’s house in order to share a flat with Filipino friends of their own age. In summer 2005, I accompanied Novelita, Dror, her Israeli husband, her two daughters, a female Israeli friend of Novelita’s and two Filipina friends of her daughters from Tel Aviv to Iloilo, in order to attend her youngest son’s wedding with a local girl. During her ten days’ visit in Iloilo, Novelita very much performed the role of a successful balikbayan [Tagalog, ‘returnee’]: hosting hundreds of guests, who came together for the event in the city’s Grand Hotel; celebrating a grand style marriage in the English language; visiting and welcoming endless flows of neighbours, friends and relatives to her home; distributing loads of pasalubongs (souvenirs) from Israel; planning an investment project in her home town with local officials; and showing her international guests around, herself typically wearing the clothes of a foreign tourist, including sunglasses, touristy T-shirts or ‘traditional’ Batik clothes. In Israel, Novelita had acquired some knowledge of Hebrew in a state sponsored language course, where she also met and formed several friendships with both Jewish new immigrants and members of the international, whitecollar community. As her husband came from a family of Shoah4 survivors and several of her former employers continued to suffer from traumas as refugees from Europe or Shoah survivors, Novelita had grown interested in ‘the history’, she said, accordingly reading numerous books on Jewish history, the Shoah and the Second World War, also visiting Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial site and museum, on several occasions. Moreover, she invested a large amount of energy and time to fill and maintain the position of a popular and respected person of some importance within the Haifa Filipino

50  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

community. Therefore, on Sundays, the regular day off for most Filipina carers in Israel, she was usually busy accompanying Filipino kababayans (Tagalog, ‘fellow nationals’) to get things done at the Ministry of the Interior, recruitment agencies or police stations, advising people about their rights regarding work permits and visa regulations. In summer 2005, she trained to become a travel agent and soon became a broker for a Tel Aviv based travel agency for flights between Israel and the Philippines. She also regularly visited the Philippines Embassy in Tel Aviv and in general attended events organized by various Filipino organizations. In a large cultural show, organized by the Federation of Filipino Communities in Israel (FFCI) with the Philippines Embassy on the occasion of Philippine Independence Day in 2003, her eldest daughter acted the part of the symbolic mother of the Philippine nation, the Inang Bayan – arguably the most prestigious female role. As we sat one night in front of the TV in her parents’ house in Iloilo, Novelita told me that really, her coming to Israel was a ‘return’ to a long lost homeland, just like it was for the Jewish new immigrants. This had to do with her grandmother. When Novelita was young, this grandmother told her stories about her ‘great-great-grandmother’, who had come to the Philippines from Spain in the late sixteenth century. On board her ship to the Philippines, which was a Spanish colony at the time, she fell in love with a Spanish officer. The two married and settled in Iloilo. This legendary ancestress was said to have come from Toledo and, as Novelita realized only after having lived in Israel, must have been Jewish. Not for nothing, so she reasoned, would her grandmother have talked about her longing for ‘Canaan’, which back then sounded to Novelita like a place in heaven. From her grandmother, Novelita also inherited many customs concerning the preparation of food, which seemed foreign to the Philippines but which she later encountered in Israel. Even though at other times Novelita talked about spending her old age in the Philippines, sitting in Iloilo in front of the TV that night, she said she could no longer imagine living anywhere else but Israel. Exhausted from the visit ‘home’ and the many expectations from neighbours, friends and relatives, she missed her everyday life in Israel and was eager to return to her house in Haifa.

Mercy Mercy was born in 1961 in a shantytown in downtown Manila, to poor parents who were part of the large Philippine rural exodus to the capital in search of employment and a living during this period. Both her parents had children from previous marriages, and apart from eight full siblings, Mercy had a large number of half-, step- and adopted brothers and sisters. She grew up in her older sister’s household and had to start working at a very young age. In our first interview, Mercy began to talk about her life by recounting how she grew up beside the large international harbour of Manila. Every day, she recalled, she saw dozens of large vessels leaving for the ‘big world’. One

Transnational Female Lives  u 51

day, she promised herself, she would be on one of them, marry a foreigner and leave poverty behind. Instead, Mercy was forced to get married at the age of seventeen, ‘to the first Filipino guy that accidentally touched me’,5 as she put it. For many years her husband worked abroad as a seaman, and from the money he sent, the couple were able to open a shop selling electronic equipment. Operating such a shop meant a steep upward career move for the family. Soon thereafter, Mercy and her husband were able to move into a better neighbourhood, and for the first time in their lives owned a house. In our conversations, Mercy stressed the fact that it was her, rather than her husband, who managed the shop and kept its books, dealing with both the suppliers and customers. In 1991, Mercy gave birth to their son. Family pictures from that time document Mercy’s social and economic rise: they show her in fashionable dresses in a spacious townhouse, with a green lawn at the front, or in group pictures with friends and family members, having barbecues and going on weekend sightseeing tours throughout the country. In the mid-1990s, however, her business began to decline following the Asian financial crisis and several natural catastrophes. The couple took out loans, but finally went broke. Mercy quickly decided to leave the country in order to get away from her suppliers, to whom she still owed money. Mercy’s husband initially disapproved of her decision to leave, but later consented, since amidst the recession this apparently was the only way to earn some badly needed money. However, soon after Mercy left the Philippines in early 2000, her family’s house and business were mortgaged and, along with the car and other items of value, taken by the bank. Like Novelita, Mercy did not undergo the recruitment process through the POEA legally prescribed by the Philippines state apparatus. Rather, she went ‘shopping’ for a recruitment agency in Manila’s Malate quarter. Without having planned to work in Israel, she decided on a convincing sounding deal with one of these agencies, which took US$2,000 to send her, along with a group of twenty other Filipinas, to Hong Kong and China ‘for holidays’ before they entered Israel with tourist visas.6 In Israel, Mercy did not manage to transform her visa into a work permit, so that after her tourist visa ran out, she had no valid permit of residence. During an interview, Mercy described her first weeks in Tel Aviv as a ‘tourist’: So when I came to Israel, the first time – when I saw the house in Neveh Sha’anan [neighbourhood in southern Tel Aviv] where the agency put us – I said: ‘I cannot live like this’. In one apartment with thirty persons… The beds – it was terrible. And then, nobody accepts us, because we are only tourists. We were looking for another room, but the one that managed the house, she wants only people with visa. Because all the time, this house, the immigration [police] checked. And then we tried in Herzliya [an affluent settlement north of Tel Aviv] and they refused us also. I am crying, because I was always carrying my bags around. I talked to my friend – she is my neighbour in the Philippines – and then I told her: “I want to go back to the Philippines.” But she said: “No, we are here already. Think about the money we paid! Be strong!” But I was crying all the time.

52  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

Mercy proved to be strong and carved out new modes of a livelihood in Tel Aviv, modes which went well beyond the designated role of a ‘Filipina care worker’. After being employed as the carer in the private home of an elderly woman for three weeks, she realized that ‘being a maid’, as she put it, meant nothing to her. After one more quarrel with the employer, she packed her belongings and left, having decided that she could work as an informal trader, as she had done for many years in the Philippines prior to becoming a shop owner. Accordingly, her husband began to send her products from the Philippines which were unavailable or more expensive in Israel, such as specific cosmetics, medicine, foods or jewellery, which she then sold among Filipino care workers in the neighbourhoods where they worked throughout the week. Moreover, Mercy started going out with Yoav, an Israeli man, whose sister Dana she had befriended. When Dana opened an Internet café in Neveh Sha’anan, Mercy started to work for her. Together with Dana, she moved into the small apartment behind the storeroom. The Internet café is where I met Mercy shortly after I began my field research in 2004. Once I had told her that I was doing research on Filipina migrants in Israel, she told me with a smirk: ‘I can tell you everything you want to know. Because I came to Israel not as a caregiver, but as a business woman’. By that time, she soon confided, her life had become ‘a nightmare’. This change for the worse had begun after September 2002, when the newly established Migration Police (Hebrew mishteret hagira) started to patrol the streets of the southern Tel Aviv neighbourhood where she lived, checking papers and arresting ‘illegals’ in the framework of a massive deportation campaign. Due to her ongoing illegalized residence status in Israel, Mercy was forced to adapt each and every aspect of her life to the new situation. In 2004, she hardly ever left the house and, whenever she did, she followed a sophisticated system of rules on how to move, how to dress, and when and with whom to move around. From her ‘trapped’ position in the Internet café, in our conversations Mercy remembered the days before the Migration Police was set up as the happiest time of her life. During the day, she worked in the Internet café and learnt to operate the fax, copying machine and computers. At night, she frequently dressed up and went out partying with friends, flirting with men and generally enjoying life. That time, so she told me, was like a revelation to her: ‘It is only here in Israel that I experience what life is all about. Only here I experience freedom and romantic love’. In Manila, where she had married someone with whom she had never even fallen in love, her husband had controlled every single move she made. Despite that she kept in touch with him and regularly talked to him on the phone. She also sent monthly remittances which he badly needed after the bank took their house and forced him and the son to move into a tiny apartment at the back of a small sari-sari store which provided the family’s living when I visited them in summer 2005. In 2002 Mercy’s life turned into ‘a mess’, as she put it, for yet another reason. She became pregnant and even though she dreamt about having another child, finally decided to have a self-induced abortion. She later deeply

Transnational Female Lives  u 53

regretted this move, explaining that, with a baby, the police would not have been able to deport her and she would even have been able to regularize her ‘papers’ due to the father’s Israeli citizenship. Also during that year, Mercy became a victim of tsismis (Tagalog, ‘gossip’). Like many other Filipinos in Israel, she was then part of a paluagan money circle.7 When it was her turn to receive $2,000 from the circle, another member of the group – Mercy’s friend and former neighbour from the Philippines, Maryann – started what Mercy called a smear campaign. Motivated by jealousy of her well-paying job in the Internet café and her love affair, so Mercy assumed, Maryann accused her of shamelessness and threatened to call her husband in the Philippines to inform him of her love affairs and have her reported to the Migration Police, if she continued to demand her share. As a result, Mercy was excluded from the group without receiving the money she was entitled to. After this incident, Mercy decided to withdraw from her Filipino circle of friends in Israel and ‘concentrate’, as she put it, on staying on as long as possible and earning money in Israel. By the time I met her, Mercy had become a sought-after computer expert in southern Tel Aviv, and the customers, most of them Asian and African migrant residents of the neighbourhood, paid her to teach them how to chat, write job applications for other countries or fill out the Internet form for the annual U.S. greencard lottery.8 While these customers supplied her with everything she needed from outside the Internet café, Mercy practically never left the building and spent a great deal of her days online in front of the computer. Since her sister had recently opened an Internet café in Manila, Mercy’s family in the Philippines regularly gathered in front of the computer there and communicated with her through webcams and online phone programmes. Moreover, Mercy had a number of virtual romances, with, among others, an Indian construction worker employed in Saudi Arabia and a man from Finland, who had promised to marry and take her to Finland. During the first months of 2005, I witnessed the growing emotional, psychological and social difficulties involved in her living in hiding. Living under the constant stress of being detected as an ‘illegal’, unable to move around freely and leave the rather shabby neighbourhood other than late at night and completely dressed up, she eventually found these circumstances so unbearable that in mid-2005 she decided to leave Israel. Before finally leaving, she had talked for months about whether she should indeed return to the Philippines, or rather try reaching Europe illegally. When I visited Mercy at her new home in Manila several weeks after she had finally returned, she deeply regretted her move. By then, she was living with her son and husband in the small apartment into which her husband had been forced to move during her absence and was working in the sari-sari store alongside him. She felt that her son rejected her for having abandoned him, and her marriage had not changed for the better. She felt isolated in the neighbourhood where she lived, because the tsismis had indeed reached it from Israel. Moreover, and unlike Novelita, Mercy was hardly able to fulfil the role of the successful balikbayan, which was nevertheless expected from her, since she had returned without any savings from Israel.

54  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

In short, Mercy longed to return to Israel and, behind her husband’s back, had already planned her return. She knew that due to her prolonged illegalized stay in Israel, she had been banned from re-entering the country for an extended period, which is why her only chance was to re-enter under another person’s ID. Her sister’s ID proved ideal for this undertaking, since the sister not only resembled Mercy but was unmarried, which would subsequently enable Mercy, so she hoped, to get married to an Israeli citizen and obtain permanent residency, even without having to annul her first marriage. The last time I was in touch with Mercy in 2006, however, she continued to live in Manila under precarious economic circumstances, still dreaming of leaving the Philippines once more.

Avelina Avelina was born in 1978 in a rural baranggay,9 in the mountainous province of Tarlac. Her family were farmers, numerous in the Philippine countryside, for whom the neo-liberal restructuring of agriculture during the late 1990s had resulted in a dramatic deterioration of economic conditions (cf. Bello 2004: 33ff.). Avelina was the eldest child of six sisters and brothers. Since her home village lacked a high school, she attended one in Tarlac City and from an early age lived apart from her family in a boarding home. She finished her education as a Bachelor of Science in Education and through her studies became interested in politics. On campus, she became sympathetic to leftist political movements, especially strong among poor farmers in the Tarlac area, and which had followers among the college staff. Nevertheless, when one of these tried to recruit her for the ‘armed struggle’ she refused to join and, since she feared increasing pressure from their side, thought it best for her to leave the country. On another occasion, explaining her motivation to migrate, Avelina said that she first thought about going abroad when her father’s brother, who has lived in Italy for as long as Avelina can remember, came to her parents’ house during one of his annual visits in the Philippines and tried to persuade her father to join him in Rome. Avelina’s father decided against leaving, but Avelina, who was about fifteen years of age, was unable to understand his decision. In contrast to her own family, in which the uncle was the only relative living abroad, many of her friends had numerous relatives abroad. These friends had the financial means, wore branded clothes, listened to popular music and had stories to tell about the world, which Avelina could only dream of. As soon as she finished college, Avelina told her parents that she wanted to leave to work abroad. At first, her parents opposed her plans, but when Avelina promised to use the money she would earn to enable her younger siblings to study, they reluctantly agreed. She had not been particularly keen on coming to Israel, but when one day a Filipina agent of an Israeli recruitment agency travelled through her village and talked about life in Israel, Avelina decided

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that this was the place she was meant to go to. She left her details with the agent and several days later received a call that everything had been arranged for her departure. To pay the agency’s placement fees (about $3,000), Avelina’s grandparents mortgaged their fields and house. During the first year of her stay in Israel, Avelina spent a substantial part of her salary repaying this loan. Like Novelita and Mercy, she too arrived in a group of Filipinos, all of them from Tarlac, who were recruited by the same agent. At the age of twenty-one, Avelina was by far the youngest among them. Upon arrival at Tel Aviv Ben Gurion airport, another Filipina agent picked the group up and brought them to an apartment in southern Tel Aviv, which had been rented for them by the agency. Two days after her arrival, Avelina and the others started working as live-in carers for elderly persons in their private homes, returning to the shared apartment for Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. Avelina soon realized that working with the bedridden man the agency had chosen for her as an employer was physically too demanding. In spite of the risk of losing her legal work permit in Israel, which was tied to this specific employer, Avelina left him in search of another job. The agency that had recruited her refused to help her and so Avelina wandered through the foreign city for two months, growing increasingly desperate and in constant fear of arrest due to her invalid work permit. Accidentally, and through the help of one of her Filipino flatmates, she finally found work in an exclusive old people’s home, as a carer to Mirjam, an elderly woman, who was still rather independent. In spite of living together in a small, two-room flat for years, the relationship between Mirjam and Avelina seemed to be characterized by mutual respect and sympathy whenever I managed to visit them. Soon after she started working with Mirjam, her family’s lawyer managed to fix Avelina’s work permit so that she once more became a legal care worker in Israel. Unlike Novelita and Mercy, Avelina knew no one in Israel prior to her arrival or in the group she arrived with. The group she first arrived and later lived with during weekends soon formed the starting point of her social network in Israel. Shortly after arrival, Avelina started going out with one of the two young men of the group, Allan, and was soon incorporated into Allan’s extensive network of family members and friends in Israel. Since both of them worked in so-called live-in jobs in the homes of their employers for six days a week, they only met during weekends. Shortly after they started going out, Allan and Avelina moved into another rented apartment, also in Neveh Sha’anan, which they shared with several friends of the same age, who like themselves had arrived from Tarlac. In contrast to Mercy, both Avelina and Allan declined to go out to discos on weekends, and considered Filipinos who did so as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘wasting their money’. Instead, they usually stayed in and enjoyed cooking Filipino dishes, watching DVDs and meeting friends. Throughout her stay in Israel, Avelina succeeded in covering her living expenses from the weekly allowances she received from her employer (about $15 per week) and was able to ‘invest’ her complete monthly salary ($550800). Half of it she sent to her mother, who used it to pay for her younger

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sisters’ and brothers’ tuition fees and finance the transformation of the family’s traditional bamboo hut into an American-style villa built of concrete blocks. Avelina saved the other half in a bank account, later using this money to pay an agency to take her to Italy. Two years after her arrival in Israel, Avelina gave birth to their first son. By this time Allan’s work permit had expired. In order not to turn ‘illegal’ herself and to be able to continue working, Avelina decided to send the twomonth old baby to Allan’s sister in the Philippines.10 In 2004, Avelina became pregnant again. She finally agreed to marry Allan in the Philippines Embassy in Tel Aviv, after the two families had met in the Philippines and urged her to do so. In the seventh month of her pregnancy, Allan was arrested by the Migration Police and put on a plane to the Philippines the same day. Avelina moved into the shared weekend apartment of Allan’s sister, sisters-in-law and other extended family members, who assisted her after giving birth to her second son in January 2005. She was again forced to send the child to the Philippines, since her family depended on her remittances and she was now without Allan’s help. Allan, on the other hand, had hoped that Avelina would return to the Philippines with the child so that he (instead of her) could work abroad. In spite of this, when I visited him in summer 2005, he was living in his parents’ house in Tarlac with the two little children and his father, working in the family’s rice-fields. While two of his sisters were working in Israel and one in London, his mother was living in the United States where she had resided for many years. He was angry at Avelina’s decision to stay abroad, suffered from memories of his arrest and deportation from Israel, and was depressed at having to work strenuously in the rice-fields, despite being a registered nurse, a profession much desired on the global job market. Avelina, on the other hand, resisted the idea of becoming a deserted housewife in the empty house of her in-laws. Instead, she decided to move on, to a destination where she hoped she could reunite with her family. Accordingly, in September 2005, she left for Rome, after a lengthy process of information gathering, applications to agencies in London and Italy, and a successful visa application to the Italian Embassy. She did so without even consulting her family, since she feared family resistance to her plans, saying: ‘My family doesn’t know the hard life – not like me, who was the first to go to university and then went abroad. They don’t know anything about my life. How can they tell me what’s good for me?’11 When I visited her in 2006 and 2007, Avelina lived in Rome as an undocumented live-out domestic worker, sharing a shabby apartment owned by her uncle with numerous other Filipino workers. In order to get to Italy, Avelina had spent most of her savings. At the time, she regretted the move, saying that the employment situation was in many ways worse than in Israel. Nevertheless, she hoped for residency status in one of the upcoming legalization campaigns, which would enable her to bring over her children and enjoy the life of a European Union citizen. As a first step towards a family reunion, Avelina succeeded in ‘bringing over’ Allan in spring 2007. Subsequently, Avelina has moved on to

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Canada, where she works as a live-in carer and hopes to be granted a landed immigrant status in the near future. Shortly after her arrival, Allan also managed to enter Canada, where they now live in a shared apartment with another friend from Tarlac, who long ago was also part of their initial group to Israel. Since she first left the Philippines in 2000, Avelina has not been back for a visit for both financial and visa reasons, but says she suffers deeply from her separation from her children. She hopes one day to have a third child, who will stay with her and whose rearing she will experience as a ‘real’ mother.

Being Filipina in Israel The life stories of Novelita, Mercy and Avelina point above all to the complexities of being a Filipina in Israel and beyond. While Novelita belongs to the first generation of Filipinos in Israel – the pioneers, as they are frequently called by others – both Mercy and Avelina were part of the large influx of Filipinos recruited to work in Israel as carers since the late 1990s. As their stories have shown, they structured their lives in Israel in rather different ways, breaking the limits which the state-sanctioned system of contracted carer had set upon them. Mercy, a business woman in her own terms, resisted the carer-system from the very beginning. In contrast, Avelina was eager not to lose her legal status and worked as a live-in carer even after giving birth, which is certainly not intended for a contract worker in Israel. Lastly, through her long stay in Israel, Novelita has become increasingly Israeli by learning Hebrew, getting married to an Israeli citizen and accordingly being granted citizenship herself. Given the low social status of Filipina domestic workers, she takes care to distance herself as far as possible from this position, describing herself as an Alzheimer’s therapist and, through descent from a mythological Jewish ancestor, positioning herself in line with the hegemonic Jewish majority of the country. Like Novelita, Mercy and Avelina, the vast majority of Filipinos in Israel are female, 85.5 per cent according to official statistics provided by the Philippines Embassy.12 Like the three women I have portrayed here, most Filipino migrants in Israel are middle-aged, with an average age of approximately forty years in both the official statistics (in which respondents were twenty-five to fifty-one years old) and my own survey of thirty-five Filipino respondents (aged twenty-four to fifty-six). The origin of Filipino migrants in Israel is geographically diverse but nevertheless shows specific patterns: they come to Israel predominantly from the central region of Luzon (over ninety per cent in the OWWA and 82.9 per cent in my own sample), often from areas close to Metropolitan Manila (such as Pangasinan, Pampanga, Tarlac, Batangas, Quezon). Apparently this largely resonates with the origin of Filipino migrant domestic workers elsewhere (cf. Gonzales 1998: 43). Many Filipinos in Israel, such as Mercy and Novelita, grew up as internal migrants in the Philippines.

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Like elsewhere, and as becomes clear from the stories of Novelita and Avelina, Filipina migrants are typically highly educated (cf. Parreñas 2001a: 19). In Israel, statistical data indicates that a majority of Filipinos have college degrees or a professional education. Nevertheless, the class background of Filipina migrants is diverse, as illustrated by the examples given above: Novelita clearly stems from a middle-class family of high social standing, which connected its genealogy to prestigious Chinese and Spanish origins; Avelina belongs to the large class of Philippine rural farmers. While her family did possess a certain social and political status – her grandfather functioned as the baranggay captain and managed to gather the financial means to send her to college and overseas, even without access to dollars from overseas employment – my visit to the Philippines made it clear that the family was finding it increasingly hard to make a living from agriculture. Mercy, on the other hand, described and identified herself as part of the urban poor, belonging to the millions of Filipinos who have ‘nothing at all’ (cf. Cannell 1999: 15ff.). She nevertheless made it out of the densely populated, slumlike urban baranggay of her childhood, where a large part of her extended family continues to live. It can be argued that the diversity of the social and class background of Filipino migrants in Israel is the outcome of both the relatively unregulated flow of Filipino migrants to Israel prior to 1995 and a direct effect of recruitment policies. Israeli agents and migrants stated throughout interviews that Israeli recruiters in general do not ascribe too much importance to the educational levels of the applicants as a criterion for selection. Nevertheless, a majority of Filipina migrants experience what Parreñas has called a ‘contradictory class mobility’ (2001a: 150ff.), that is, social decline from a generally middle-class background in the Philippines to a position on the very bottom of the Israeli social hierarchy. Being employed as a domestic worker means working in a job categorized as unskilled and of low social prestige in both the Philippines and Israel. As became clear from the stories quoted above, and was further supported by interviews, the decision to migrate is difficult and involves a whole arrange of possible motives. Rather than merely a question of being forced out of the country by poverty or unemployment, migrating to Israel means having access to strong foreign currency, fulfilling a dream, leaving for political reasons or because of familial pressures and marital problems. The latter resonates with the finding that marital violence and restrictive gender ideologies are a major reason for the migration of women (cf. Moore 1988: 95f.). Contrary to the image of single ‘Filipina girls’ working abroad in both Israeli and Philippine public discourses, Filipina women in Israel are frequently married and/or have children. According to statistics provided by the Philippines Embassy in Israel, 150 out of 282 Filipino respondents were married, in contrast to 126 single and six widowed out-migrants. My own interviews conducted with Filipinos in Israel point to the complexity of migrants’ marital and familial statuses: of forty-nine Filipino interviewees, only eleven were unmarried without children; eleven were married but had had their marriage annulled or were separated

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from their spouses in the Philippines, many of them single mothers of children in the Philippines; nineteen were married to Filipinos, three to Israelis and five to migrant workers from other countries whom they had met in Israel. Out of the married interviewees, twelve had children and/or a husband or wife in Israel. Likewise, both Novelita and Mercy were married and had children prior to their coming to Israel. Each of the women had love relationships in Israel, which in Novelita’s and Avelina’s cases led to marriages and in Mercy’s case almost resulted in the forming of a new family in Israel. Female migration naturally alters the structuring and practices of ‘family’, most of all the idealized type of a nuclear family of common residence nurtured by a male head of household who earns a ‘family salary’. Yet, my data shows that this idealized version of family was only rarely practised by women when they decided to migrate. Moreover, and in contrast to the moralist notion of married Filipina migrants’ ‘broken homes’ dominant in the Philippine public discourse (Parreñas 2003: 40f.), I suggest that migration is a step women may take in order to actively maintain or even create a family. Migration has been analysed as the economic strategy not of an individual, but of a social group. Even though the women portrayed above narrated their moves as individual decisions, Filipinas’ moves have to be seen within the intergenerational context of a family or household unit. As a typical example, Avelina’s grandparents mortgaged their house and fields so that she could leave, while Mercy’s husband contributed his last savings so that she could pay the agency’s placement fee. In Novelita’s family, migration abroad started long before she herself left, and was clearly patterned. While women typically took up care work in Israel, the men signed on as seamen in the U.S. In Novelita’s case, as in that of many other migrants, migration became the intergenerational project of an extended family, frequently spreading to more than two nation states. Their migration moves reflect wider tendencies of Filipinos’ outmigration in recent decades, namely the migration of male contract workers to the Middle East in the early 1970s, the migration of skilled female workers to Europe and the United States at the same time, and finally the migration of Filipina workers to Asian capitals and the Middle East for domestic work. Each of the three women said they had to defend their decision to leave the Philippines, whether to their parents (Avelina), the extended family (Novelita) or a husband (Mercy). Throughout our interviews, I frequently encountered this narrative of ‘reluctant kin’. Like Avelina, Novelita and Mercy, most women did not migrate without having settled conflicts with their relatives over their migrating. Nevertheless, each of the Filipina women portrayed above appears to be ‘strong’ and acting independently within the limits of her position. Thus, Novelita narrates her life story as that of someone who has been an independent, self-reliant woman from an early age. Going abroad to her meant relying on and using her ‘hands’, ‘talents’, ‘skills’ and ‘energy’. While she clearly rejects the role of ‘martyr’ as a wife (‘Did I marry to be crucified? Ma pit’om!’), throughout our meetings she emphasized over and over again the significance of being a ‘good mother’.

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Not least due to the lack of the possibility for divorce and of a social security system in the Philippines, Novelita found herself unable to fulfil this role financially, which includes providing children with an increasingly expensive higher education – a common reason given for migration by both (single) mothers and (eldest) sisters. In stressing that she did everything to be a good mother, Novelita first of all talked about the pain of being separated from her children, but also justified herself as a woman who had emigrated. Practising what has been called ‘transnational motherhood’, she resembles the migrant women analysed by Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) as having to cope not only with the difficulties entailed in moving, but also with stigma, guilt and the criticism of others. As such, Novelita took over responsibility not only for her children, but also for her younger siblings (several of whom she managed to bring over to Israel), for her home town by planning to invest money in it, and for the migrant community and nation, as she saw it; she achieved the latter through her participation in community events and by proudly promoting her daughter as the Inang Bayan of the Philippines Independence Day in Israel. For Mercy, going abroad meant the much longed-for fulfilment of breaking out of a narrow family life and travelling the world. In spite of the many adversities she faced in Israel, she apparently succeeded in leading the life she had dreamt of, at least for a short while. While migrating was hardly rewarding in a financial sense, Mercy longed to return to Israel soon after she was back in the Philippines. In the case of Avelina, an eldest child like Novelita and many other Filipina migrants, her migration enabled her to take responsibility for her younger siblings and her parents from an early age. She thus fulfilled the culturally important role of a ‘dutiful daughter’, acknowledging the unpayable ‘inner debt’ (Tagalog utang na loob, literally ‘debt of the soul’; cf. Cannell 1999: 9ff.) of a child towards her parents. Like Novelita and Mercy, Avelina took a stand against dominant Philippine gender roles in that she delayed her marriage, despite having children, and refused to return just so her husband could work abroad instead of her. She took fundamental decisions about the course of her life by herself, explaining that the experience she had gained by muddling through all by herself enabled her to do this. This indicates that gender roles are being reformulated through migration which often dramatically changes women’s position within a (transnational) family. It is noteworthy that migrant women use the category ‘family’ in often differing and contradictory ways. In Israel, the state prohibits the entry of migrants whose immediate family members (parents, children or spouses) are already present. As has been pointed out in a position paper by Israeli political and civil rights organizations, following an internal directive which remains unpublished, the Ministry of Interior usually revokes the permits or even deports migrants whose family members are found to be living in Israel (Ben Israel and Feller 2006). Accordingly, Filipinos often denied having any family relations in Israel and ‘worked for’ their anonymity, for example, by using their maiden names on entry, bribing agents and officials to list them as ‘single’ in all official documents, and generally keeping relatives secret from

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employers. Accordingly, throughout the research it happened repeatedly that those who had initially been introduced as ‘friends’ or ‘cousins’ actually turned out to be interlocutors’ spouses, siblings or children. Despite this, it became clear that all the migrant women interviewed for this book had their children, spouse or parents in at least Israel and the Philippines. Contrary to the literature on Filipina migrant domestic workers, which often conveys the impression that these are living apart from their families, my research has shown that most migrants managed to have at least parts of what they regarded as their family with them in Israel. In some cases, the geographical position of Filipina migrants’ families had clearly shifted to Israel. For example, Nora, who entered Israel in 1985, married and gave birth to three children during her stay there. Originally she had followed her mother to Israel, and by the time I met her, Nora’s mother had also brought Nora’s sister, several cousins and nieces to Israel. Although most of the women became illegalized during their stays, none of them returned to the Philippines after leaving the country. By 2005, Nora’s father had died in the Philippines, and had it not been for a son from an earlier relationship, whom Nora had left behind in the Philippines, in the definition of transnational family as a family whose core members – that is, spouses, children and/or parents – are located in at least two nation states (Parreñas 2001a: 80), Nora would have been living not in a transnational, but in an Israel-based family. Like Novelita, Mercy and Avelina, many Filipina migrant women narrated their migration to Israel as a cycle of several phases, namely (i) arrival, (ii) consolidation and (iii) incorporation and/or reorientation. Within this cycle, the first period was characterized above all by emotional pain. Many Filipina women told me how, during their first weeks in Israel, they fell into deep depression and could hardly maintain a daily routine while constantly thinking of the loved ones left behind, especially children. The problems that female migrant domestic workers face during the first weeks in the destination country are commonly explained through the notion of ‘cultural shock’ (cf. Jocano 1994). Indeed the main cultural differences that Filipina migrant women reported, which caused them suffering and disorientation during their first weeks in Israel, were the Hebrew language, the Israeli food, loneliness and the Israeli ‘mentality’, which was often described as ‘rude’ and ‘impolite’. Many Filipina migrants mentioned how, during their first weeks in Israel, they had the constant feeling that Israelis were fighting with one another all the time, as they misinterpreted ‘normal talk’ as shouting and fervent discussions as arguments. Nevertheless, the notion of cultural shock does not fully explain the difficult arrival phase which migrant women reported, since it was often characterized most of all by structural causes like illegalization, difficult labour arrangements and neglect by agencies, which forced poor living conditions and employment situations on them, and a general environment of exclusion. Migrant women often defined the period of arrival as one of ‘crying’. As another interviewee, Elena, told me about her first days in Israel:

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Suddenly I found myself here in the country, and I just cry. Really, every day I cry, because I want to go back to the Philippines. It was so hard: you work with an old man you don’t know, and the work is really hard. I did not know this kind of work – you clean, you cook – it’s just ordinary work like in our country. You know, I said to my sister: I will go back even if you spent so much money. I will go back no matter what it costs. But as you can see, I’m still here. Le’at, le’at [Hebrew, ‘slowly, slowly’] you will become like a stone, hard, and you just stay.13

Like Elena, who came to Israel in 1991 from a managerial post in the Philippine Ministry of Agriculture, most migrant women described their arrival in Israel as ‘sudden’ and even shocking, because they had imagined the work and living realities differently. This is especially true for women like Elena, who left relatively well-paid and respected jobs. ‘I could not believe I had become a maid’, said Andrea, a popular radio moderator in her Philippine home town, from a middle-class background, when talking about her first days of ‘crying’ about coming to Israel. So, as also becomes clear from the stories outlined above, each of the women had specific hopes, desires and fantasies upon arrival. In their first period in Israel, these had to be adjusted to reality in a process that was generally described as painful and full of disappointments. The narrative of a sudden arrival in Israel was employed in many of the interviews. Numerous migrant women talked about their ambivalent feelings or their reluctance to go abroad. Even after they had explained the reasons for their migration, during interviews I was often told that the application to work in Israel actually resulted from a ‘joke’ or a sudden mood, that is, it was accidental rather than strategically planned. Elena, for example, told me that ‘it all’ started when her sister came back home to the Philippines on vacation from Israel and Elena half-jokingly remarked: ‘Oh, I would love to come with you to Israel and just leave the Philippines behind’. Shortly after her sister had returned to Israel, she called Elena and told her that she had organized everything for her to come to Israel, and had even paid a deposit to the recruitment agency, which was willing to process Elena’s papers. According to Elena, it was then impossible for her to say ‘no’, because the $500 her sister had paid would not be returned. Far from being unrealistic, Elena’s story resonates with what many women in Israel told me about ‘bringing over’ relatives either against their will, or by persuading them (sometimes by exaggerating the salaries they would earn and stressing the positive aspects of being in Israel), simply because they missed them and hoped for their company. A frequent narrative about going abroad told how women had ‘just accompanied’ their friends or relatives, who intended to work abroad to a recruitment agency, but then ‘found themselves’ being interviewed and chosen as the more suitable candidate. Mercy, featured above, recalled the day she applied for work abroad in several of the numerous recruitment agencies in Manila’s Malate quarter as part of a day of ‘shopping’, which included going into the agencies, strolling through Malate’s large malls and dining out. Filling out application forms for work in Israel felt more like ‘play’; Mercy compared it to filling out a lottery ticket. Like Elena, Mercy and many other women did not mention that in that context recruitment agencies

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often require a detailed curriculum vitae, several passport photographs and photocopies of official documents for applications, making it rather unlikely that one could just ‘stumble into’ the process accidentally. In their stories of going abroad, Filipina women speak about their reluctance and being ‘pushed into things’ by related ‘sponsors’ to whom they feel emotionally and/or materially indebted, which in many respects recalls how women in Cannell’s rich monograph on the Philippine lowlands speak about getting married or becoming a spirit medium (1999: 29ff.). As Cannell points out in her account, the women’s narratives of reluctance need not be interpreted as an intentional strategy. Speaking of oneself as the reluctant object of another’s will and as a person who does not act and speak for oneself points once more to women’s uncertainties and emotional ambivalence with regard to the decision to migrate. Like each of the women portrayed above, many Filipina migrants experienced extremely difficult situations throughout their first period in Israel, situations they had to deal with largely by themselves. However, not least because they overcame these obstacles, Avelina and others described themselves as having become ‘strong’, ‘tough’ or even ‘like a stone’ (according to Elena) throughout their stay. Accordingly, after the difficult period of arrival in Israel, many women described how after several months they realized that they were going to be staying in Israel for several years and had to make the best of it. In the meantime, they had acquired vital information regarding everyday life and employment in Israel. As for Avelina and Mercy, this period was mainly about making friends, going out, and even falling in love. Like each of the women portrayed, many Filipino migrants moved out of the weekend apartment arranged by the recruitment agency and established new households with friends or family members. Moreover, migrant women typically discover and integrate into what was frequently called the Filipino community (see also Chapter 4), which included female networks of strong emotional and social density. Interlocutors who stayed in Israel long enough to look back on this period often described it as one of the happiest of their lives. As becomes clear from each of these three life stories, at a certain point migrant women experience what Parreñas describes as a ‘dislocation’ from the migrant community (2001a: 197ff.). Tensions between migrants typically arise, as in Mercy’s case, in connection with financial matters, and may lead to feelings of alienation. As Mercy had to realize, as well as solidarity and unity within the ‘community’, there is also greed, jealousy and Filipino tsismis. Like Mercy, others described how they then decided to ‘concentrate’, that is, focus on both ‘real’ friends and those reasons for which the whole migration process was originally undertaken. As the end – which in the case of the ‘illegals’, may have come around rapidly – of their stay in Israel slowly comes into view, women may realize that they have not accomplished the goals, in particular financial ones, they had set themselves. Financial strategies and patterns are subsequently re-adjusted. Novelita, for example, started to ‘invest’ in members of her family, whose migration she supported

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financially. Others, like Avelina, decided at this point to ‘move on’ towards another destination country. As shall be further demonstrated in the book, the theme of having to ‘move on’ towards so-called greener pastures was a dominant one throughout my conversations with Filipina women who had been in Israel for some time. Like the initial decision to come to Israel, the decision to leave or to move on was often deeply contingent on women’s incorporation into transnational households and families. These may change profoundly during the migration process, a fact often underrated in studies of transnational families, but reflected in migrants’ changing financial strategies and patterns of communication.

Keeping in Touch across Distance: Communication and Financial Strategies between Love, Debt and Obligation Subjective motives for migration, as I have outlined above, vary considerably and can rarely be reduced to a single cause. Nevertheless, the financial motive for emigrating in order to earn salaries unavailable in the Philippines and gain access to ‘strong’ currencies such as dollars are the most central concerns of Filipino migrants in coming to work in Israel.14 It is the material aspects of having access to, spending and, not least, distributing money that in large part defines migrants’ stays in Israel and has a major impact on their social relations. As I have shown, the actions of migrant women have to be seen as the decision and strategy of a social group rather than an individual. Not surprisingly then, migrant women are expected to share the material benefits of their stays abroad and to support financially those ‘back home’. Even though the sending of remittances will be analysed subsequently as the expression of social relations with relatives and friends in the Philippines and elsewhere, it should be emphasized that the despatch of money is more than a relationship between the sender of that money and the recipient: the Philippine state strongly encourages Filipinos abroad to invest and/or remit money to the Philippines through its mandatory preparation seminars, publications and the promotion of a variety of investment projects and money transfer services in the region of its embassies.15 Large multinational corporations like Western Union, Philippine banking institutes and small family businesses all promote and advertise the sending of remittances as the major rationale for migration.16 Quantitative data collected on Filipino migrants in Israel points to the importance of migrants’ remittances. In the OWWA sample already mentioned, all the responding 283 Filipino migrants stated that they regularly transferred money to family members in the Philippines. Figures for the amount sent ranged from $100 to $1,000; approximately one third of the respondents declared they remitted $300 or $500 per month respectively. Given the fact that the average monthly salary in the sample was $697, respondents paid an average of 56.9 per cent – that is, the greater part of their salaries – to family members abroad. This statistic corresponds with my own ethnographic findings; each and every

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respondent stated they sent cash payments to family members abroad, though with varying regularity and to a varying extent. Migrant women who were unmarried, separated and/or the single mothers of children generally stated that they regularly transferred part of their salaries, most frequently to their mother or the person who was taking care of their children in the Philippines. Apart from despatching funds, these women told me that they used their salary in a diversified way, namely by saving some in a private bank account, spending some for their own expenses, and investing some in saving programmes like the housing-loan project promoted by the Philippines Embassy in 2005.17 In contrast, married migrant women with children sent a greater portion of their salary, typically to their husband. Sandra, for example, who was married with one daughter, sent all the money she received from her live-in job in Israel ($600) to her husband in the Philippines. In order to save the $5 the remittance company charged as a service fee, she remitted money only every two months. When I went to the Philippines in July 2005, she asked me to deliver the money to her husband directly. On the envelope, she instructed him how to distribute the $600: ‘$600: mother – 1,000 [Philippine pesos], mother in law – 1,000, sister – 500, brother Nesly – 200, auntie – 100, niece Leslie – 200, John [her nephew] – 100, Joshua [her nephew] – 100, David [her nephew] – 100, Yaffa [her daughter] – 100’. Sandra explained that her mother, her mother-in-law (who lived with her husband and daughter in a Manila suburb) and ‘auntie’ – her favourite, elderly aunt – received the same sum of money every month. So did her two siblings, her daughter and her nieces and nephews, even though this month her sister received slightly more because she had called Sandra to tell her that she was facing a large bill. She also sent more than usual to her niece Leslie because she had a birthday. There was approximately $530 left for Sandra’s husband Mike after he had distributed the money to the ten other family members Sandra listed on the envelope; from that he was supposed to pay the monthly instalments to finance a car (which Mike needed for his work in the tourist business, $300), the loan they had taken out in order to pay the ‘placement fees’ to the recruitment agency ($200), and parts of their daughter’s tuition fees for a renowned private school ($100). Mike earned approximately $200 per month (a rather ‘normal’ income in the Philippines), and from this money managed to pay for the household’s living expenses and monthly accounts. While Sandra’s family in the Philippines could afford a comparatively comfortable middle-class life (including a private car, private school and their own town house), this lifestyle depended on Sandra strictly sticking to her financial plan and regular transfers of money. In Israel, Sandra managed to cover her expenses from the weekly allowance she received from her employer (NIS 80,18 approximately $18.60) and the NIS 150 (approximately $35) she earned from a part-time cleaning job on her weekly day off. Since Sandra paid $30 for a place in a ‘weekend apartment’ which she shared with Filipino friends in southern Tel Aviv, this meant serious economies on her part. This became clear when I accompanied her to the laundrette one day, where she

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regularly washed her clothes. Proud of her bargaining skills, she told me the extremely low price of each piece of clothing (most of them bought in Israel) that she put into the washing machine. ‘I’m dressed for less than 100 Shekel [$23]’, she finally summed up. She then remarked on her financial situation with both ironic humour and a certain kind of bitterness, given that she had formerly been the manager of a clothing store in one of the most elegant shopping malls in Makati, Manila’s business district. Like Sandra, I found the daily life of migrant women (especially at the weekend, when the temptation to waste money, as they called it, was the greatest) highly structured by monetary considerations and the will to save; accordingly, bargains and prices were a central theme among them. By the time I had personally remitted Sandra’s money to her family, she had been in Israel for one and a half years. From the money I remitted, the final instalment of a loan for her ‘placement fee’ was paid off. Most migrant women, like Sandra, were forced to take out loans of around $4,500 to cover this placement fee. While Sandra owned a house in the Philippines, which functioned as collateral and thus enabled her to take out credit from the bank, many less wealthy women reported having had to borrow from private moneylenders. In the Philippines, the latter generally charge tremendous interest rates of ten per cent (annually, at times even monthly), which is why the repayment of these loans has urgent priority throughout the initial period of migrants’ stays abroad. According to a survey conducted by an Israeli NGO among a hundred Filipino workers in Israel in summer 2006, it took the respondents an average of 7.5 months in Israel to pay the ‘placement fees’.19 This does not include the interest payments involved in borrowing money, which, according to the survey, were at the rate of more than ten per cent per month in one third of the cases (KLO 2006). Among the most extreme cases among my interlocutors’ was Thelma’s, who, six years after her arrival in Israel, was still paying off money to the lender for her placement fee in 1999. On the basis of my research it became clear that the sending of remittances not only depends on the social status of migrant women, but also on the length of their stay. In general, interviewees told me that their transfers of funds to their families or households in the Philippines increased when, typically after a year, they had repaid the loans they had taken out to cover the placement fees. They decreased again once migrants had settled in Israel, created another family or obtained a (legal) status that was more permanent than the B-1 working visa they received as legal carers. This was the case with many early migrant women I met, such as Novelita and Marian. Marian had entered Israel as one of the first Filipinos there in 1979. By the time I met her in 2005, she had long since become a citizen by marrying an Israeli, with whom she had a daughter aged eighteen. She told me that she had stopped sending regular remittances to her family in the Philippines after her daughter was born. Until then, she had sent money to her elder sister – Marian’s parents had died before she emigrated – and had invested in building a house in Manila. Although she did not send regular remittances, she still massively

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supported her family financially. Thus, while she had been in Israel, Marian had ‘sponsored’ (that is, financed the placement fees of) fifteen friends and family members to go abroad. After the destruction by fire of the first house Marian had built in Metro Manila in the early 1980s, she invested one million pesos (approx. $20,000) to build another, where numerous members of her extended family were living free of charge when I visited them in 2005. In addition, Marian was regularly asked by family members to support them financially. She sent them money for urgent medical operations, burials and weddings, and distributed large sums of money to needy family members throughout her visits to the Philippines once every one to three years. In the Philippine context, the generalized reciprocity of extended family exchange networks has often been emphasized (cf. Lauser 2004: 108ff.; McKay 2007a, 2007b; Parreñas 2001a: 109). The sending of remittances has been related to the duty that younger women in particular have towards the members of their family. It is the duty of daughters rather than sons – more precisely, in many parts of the Philippines, the youngest daughter – to take care of their parents or other elderly family members, just as it is the duty of elder siblings to take care of their younger siblings. Many migrant women, especially if they had no children of their own, reported paying for their younger brothers’ or sisters’ tuition fees or marriages. The duty to do so, often mentioned by remittance-sending migrant women during interviews, has been linked in the literature to what is often described as one of the major Philippine cultural concepts, utang na loob. Literally meaning the ‘debt inside oneself’, utang na loob is the sense of gratitude which a debtor can never repay but should always be aware of (Cannell 1999: 9ff.).20 By sending remittances, ‘dutiful daughters’ thus recognize and acknowledge their indebtedness. Nevertheless, one should beware of culturalist explanations – especially with regard to a society as heterogeneous as the Philippines – since the financial and emotional obligations felt by migrant women towards their families back home is by no means unique to the Philippines. Accordingly, Glick-Schiller and Fouron (2001) analyse obligation, rather than love, as the primary family value in Haitian transmigrants’ relationships with ‘their folk’ back home in Haiti. As in the case of the utang na loob concept, the obligation analysed by Glick-Schiller and Fouron in Haiti is not restricted to family members, but extends far beyond family ties, even to the whole nation (ibid.: 77). The patterns of migrant women’s management of their finances can be summarized as follows: regular remittances to typically elderly female family members by unmarried women and/or single mothers, the large remittances of wives typically to husbands, and the more punctual and widespread distributions of money by long-term migrants. This all points to the complexity of migrant women’s financial rationales and strategies, embedded in transnational social fields. Accordingly, knowledge of how to spend money, distribute remittances and invest is of the utmost importance. It was often passed on to ‘newcomers’ either by more experienced migrants or in the media of the Filipino community in Israel. These instructions typically defined being successful overseas in terms

68  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

of being successful financially, namely being able to manage one’s finances in a sustainable way – both economically and socially – and most importantly, to acquire property. While it became clear from interviews that the desire to buy land or property in order to build a house ranks high on the list of migrant women’s investment options, only a fraction succeeded in doing so, typically after many years or subsequent stays abroad. In interviews, women had numerous stories to tell about financial miscalculations, betrayals and family tensions due to the spending of hard-earned money on unnecessary things. When I talked to Marian about the money she had earned, spent and distributed during her twenty-six years in Israel, it became clear that the issue of how to invest the money she earned in Israel and how to meet the financial expectations of her extended family was closely connected to painful memories of family conflicts, wrong or difficult decisions and emotional hardships, which included jealousy, feelings of guilt and disappointment. Coming from a rural family in the Visayan Antique province, Marian and her eight siblings grew up in extreme poverty: not only had a flood washed away the family’s rice-fields but also their mother had died while Marian was still a teenager. By the time I met her, most of Marian’s extended family members had squatted in a slum-like neighbourhood in Metro Manila. Although several members of the family had left the country in order to earn money, Marian said she was the only one who had somehow ‘made it’ abroad and now owned a house, with ‘Western’ (that is, Israeli) citizenship and a stable income. Accordingly, members of her extended family from the Philippines frequently contacted her to request money, and because she was asked for more money than she could possibly give, she constantly had to decide how much to give to whom. When, several years earlier, Marian’s eldest brother had died because the family could not afford an operation in time, Marian realized how much was at stake in her decisions and how much her family depended on her for money. By the time I met her, she still felt guilty because many years previously she had not given her family the feeling that she would have given anything in order to rescue her brother. Marian often told me that she felt the obligation and even the need to help financially. In fact, she was proud to be one of the family’s major supporters. Her role as the family’s major donor had elevated her social position as the youngest of nine children, and many of her nephews and nieces, for whom she had paid tuition fees or given money so they could go abroad, referred to Marian as ‘Mama’ or ‘Nanay’ (Mom) rather than ‘Auntie’ or ‘Tita’ (Aunt). Like many other migrant women who had established themselves in Israel, Marian also lent money to friends and family members without being considered a moneylender (of whom Filipinos have a largely negative image).21 Due to her financial support, Marian had clearly become admired and respected within the extended family, and was acknowledged as occupying the typically male role of a major family breadwinner. On the other hand, she often felt subject to the jealousy and lack of trust of family members, who wondered whether what she sent, gave and lent was really all she could.

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Given these feelings, Marian talked bitterly about the fact that for most of her life she had given away the greatest part of her earnings to family members she sometimes hardly knew, and who in her opinion were ungrateful for the money they received. Marian repeatedly told me the story of one of her young nieces, Helen, to whom she had given $1,500 to cover a placement fee for Hong Kong. Marian had hoped that if she gave her the money, Helen would then be able to earn money not only for herself, but also for her parents, who often asked Marian for financial help. However, rather than using the opportunity to work in Hong Kong in a sustainable way, Marian said that Helen ‘wasted’ both her money and time in Hong Kong and returned to the Philippines after only a year, claiming she did not like the work. At the age of fifty-seven, Marian was still working as a cleaning woman for more than forty hours a week, and lived together with Donna, her daughter, in a two-room apartment in a shabby building in one of Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s cheapest neighbourhoods. Marian’s Israeli husband had died when their daughter Donna was still only four years old. While Donna often complained that she felt ashamed to bring home friends from school because of her apparent life ‘in poverty’, Marian and Donna’s social status was completely transformed during their trips to the Philippines. There Marian felt that family members and neighbours held completely distorted views about her financial capabilities. Although she tried hard to not appear like the typical balikbayan – whom she described as bejewelled and boastful, distributing presents and comparing the good life abroad to the miserable situation in the Philippines – she was expected to share her presumed riches, and when she did not was then met with jealousy, anger and even resentment. As Marian explained, she still felt an obligation to support her family members financially nearly three decades after leaving the Philippines, ‘since I know their misery’. Her awareness of their suffering, and their knowledge of this awareness, implied not only a responsibility but a moral obligation to help. Unlike her daughter Donna, who compared her financial situation and lifestyle with those of her Israeli schoolmates, Marian continued to relate her situation to that of her brothers and sisters back home. Compared to them, Marian told me, she had been ‘successful’ and was recognized as such. According to Marian, her financial independence was credited to hard work and discipline, but also to good luck. Most of all, it had implied taking numerous difficult decisions about how to manage, plan and distribute finances, and how to justify, defend and implement these decisions. To sum up, it can be said that the social benefits and rewards that the sender of remittances receives from the recipients should not be underemphasized. Women, who throughout their stay in Israel are often faced with humiliating working conditions, racial discrimination or exclusive immigration regulations, derive much self-esteem and recognition from the fact that they help to support people who are needier than themselves. To Marian, the ongoing support meant a continued involvement in family affairs and reflected the values she felt were expected from her. In talking about the financial responsibilities of Haitian out-migrants, Glick-Schiller and Fouron have noted that ‘humanity is

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defined by their [the out-migrants’] acts of [financially] helping others’ (2001: 66). From Marian’s stories, one had the impression that for her, helping was similarly connected to her idea of being human. Yet Marian’s story also shows that social relations with family members become increasingly commodified during migrants’ ongoing stays abroad. In order to stay in touch with relatives abroad, migrants rely on communication technologies, which have become widely available and increasingly cheap, but which continue to form a major expenditure for migrant women. Even the most superficial observation of Filipino migrants in Israel will show the importance of means of mass communication in their everyday lives. In Neveh Sha’anan, the south Tel Aviv quarter where a majority of Filipino migrants have their weekend apartments, one is struck by the number of Internet and telecafés, as well as shops with international calling cards, mobile phones and mobile phone accessories. On Sundays, the usual weekly day off for Filipino live-ins, Filipinos queue to talk to family members and friends in the Philippines in front of the public phone booths. At the same time, Neveh Sha’anan’s Internet cafés are crowded with Filipinos writing e-mails and chatting or communicating through webcams or webphone programmes. In writing about Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong, McKay (2007a) has coined the term ‘translocal everyday technologies’ for those technologies that enable migrants to keep in touch with loved ones and maintain everyday sociality across distance. With the help of these technologies, transnational social fields and family ties are not only maintained but actively shaped over sometimes long periods of time. With the availability of translocal everyday technologies, weak or long forgotten social ties can easily be re-activated. Communication with a distant cousin in Rome or a nearly forgotten cousin in London can be re-established in order to get practical information about everyday life, visa regulations or opportunities to work elsewhere abroad. Throughout the Philippines, ‘cellphone families’ is a widespread expression for families with a core member abroad. The role the mobile phone acquires in transnational families becomes clear from Luz’s story, which she told me with tears in her eyes shortly after her return from a four-week vacation to the Philippines. Two years before, her Filipino husband had been deported from Israel and the couple had decided that he would take their two-year old son Vince back to the Philippines with him. This was Luz’s first visit to the Philippines since her husband’s and son’s return: The first two weeks [during my stay in the Philippines], Vince would practically not agree to be touched by me. I spent hours trying to talk or play with him and grew more desperate from day to day. I said: ‘I’m your mommy, I love you’, but he would feel offended. One day he pointed to the telephone and said: ‘You’re not my mommy. Mommy is there’.22

Luz’s story shows that long-distance communication above all entails emotional management. It may bridge the distance, and reassure family

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members and friends that they miss each other. Talking on the phone to one’s loved ones back home was often described as a ‘relief’ by Filipino interviewees. Nevertheless, the creation of closeness over long distances was also experienced as painful. I repeatedly noted that women fell into a sad or desperate mood after making their weekly calls to family members in the Philippines, either because the conversation had been conflict-laden, or simply because they reminded the women that they were far away from people who were emotionally close to them. Another central, rather specifically Philippine practice of keeping in touch across long distances is to send so-called balikbayan boxes (see Illustration 1.2). The term balikbayan (Tagalog, literally ‘homecomers’) was created in the early 1970s by President Marcos, who intended to strengthen ties between the Philippines and its diaspora by stimulating the economic support and financial investment of overseas Filipinos in their economically weak ‘motherland’. Filipino migrants were encouraged to send duty-free gift boxes up to a value of $1,000 to the Philippines (cf. Glick-Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992: 4; Rafael 2000: 207). In Israel, the two local Filipino magazines were typically filled with advertisements for the delivery of these boxes (‘door-todoor’ service), and many Filipino shops offered large cardboard boxes and services for sending them. In practically every shared apartment of Filipino migrants, one could find balikbayan boxes, often half packed, since migrants often collected things they wanted to send over long periods of time. Migrants emphasized that it was not the material value of the box itself but the character of a gift which was important to them. By sending a balikbayan box to specific persons or households, migrants strengthened some social relations which proved one’s ongoing moral commitment, while they ignored others. Each of the balikbayan boxes whose packing I witnessed allowed deep insights into and understanding of the varying degrees of social status, prosperity or misery and tastes of both senders and recipients. In some cases, migrant women explained that the content of their boxes provided substantial support for their families, who were otherwise unable to buy clothes or ‘extravagant’ food like dates or sweets. Women from less prosperous family backgrounds sometimes sent boxes which contained solely hand-medowns from employers and foods. Marian, whose extended family lived in a Manilan slum-like neighbourhood in almost complete dependency on money remittances sent by family members from overseas, jokingly remarked that thanks to her balikbayan boxes, which she filled with her affluent employers’ second-hand clothes, ‘they still can’t afford a warm meal three times a day, but at least they wear Prada and Gucci’. When talking about family tensions and ‘bad’ feelings like envy, mistrust and disappointment in the distribution of finances, many migrants recalled their first visit to the Philippines after leaving to work in Israel. Typically, migrant women undertook their first visit home two to three years after leaving for Israel, after they had managed to repay the loans taken out for the placement fee, and had saved enough money for their visit. As I was

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frequently told, such visits to the Philippines – which generally last from four to six weeks, depending on how long the employer is willing to release the employee – bring enormous costs with them. Migrants were expected to bring gifts for family members and to pay for often large social gatherings, to which relatives, neighbours and friends were invited. Indeed, many chose to connect their visits home with important family events, such as marriages, burials or the first anniversary of burials (an important occasion in the Philippines context). While migrants could not, of course, plan their attendance at burials in advance – and several interviewees reported that they had decided to pay a visit to the Philippines for the burial of their father or mother within hours or days – most visits were planned well ahead. Due to the high costs involved, planning these trips included careful financial considerations. Migrant women often described the first visit home after years of earning and sending money from abroad as a shock. It was only during such first visits, I was told by many, that they first realized that family members had used the remittances they had sent back in a very different way from what they expected or instructed them to do. Moreover, they often found family members to be disappointed with them because they had expected more money, or else they realized that the distribution of the remittances had created family conflicts and jealousies. For example, when Erlisa went home to visit her extended family in the Philippines for the first time, she was deeply hurt by having her attention directed to the neighbours’ houses, which had been renovated with the financial support of emigrated family members, implying – so she felt – that her own family could not renovate the house because her remittances were too small. Like Marian, Erlisa felt she had to explain to her family how hard it was to earn the money she sent back, namely by working at a job in Israel which was in many respects demeaning. But she had the feeling that family members preferred to hear the story of the successful balikbayan and took her narrative of the hard life abroad as an excuse for egoistically retaining her money instead of distributing it to them. Erlisa, like Marian and many others, said she felt extremely desperate after each visit to the Philippines because she saw no way of satisfying her family’s expectations with her financial means. This despair sometimes even forced migrants to go into debt in order to meet excessive expectations, or to cut social ties because they felt unable to meet their obligations to those back home and the latter’s expectations of them.23 As well as the emotional distress produced by the first visit back home, there were often also practical consequences. Most frequently it resulted in a change in the chosen recipient of migrants’ remittances. In many cases, migrants’ visits home led to the transformation or even cutting of social ties to former recipients of remittances who were found to be ‘ungrateful’ or otherwise a source of disappointment. This holds especially for husbands: throughout my research, and in Filipino magazines in Israel, I frequently encountered the narrative of the ‘irresponsible husband’. According to Filipino gender stereotypes, it is the woman who is perceived as the smarter money manager and, in financial

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matters, more responsible and hard-working than men. According to Filipino home truths, once given uncontrolled access to money, men will spend their time hanging around, spending it on drinking, gambling and prostitution. In spite of the fact that they ‘should have known better’, many married women told me that they had still felt obliged, at least initially, to send their remittances to their husbands. Upon realizing that their money had been misspent, they generally redirected it to a female member of the family, typically the mother or the female carer of the children migrants had left behind.24 More generally, migrant women’s visits home often resulted in the feeling that their ‘sacrifice’ in working abroad had actually been economically meaningless, or at any rate that it was not producing the expected financial outcomes. When she talked about the economic consequences of her own migration, Thelma, like many others, appeared at times desperate and depressed. One evening she told me, in a melancholic mood: Sometimes, I think it’s all been in vain. I’ve been here [in Israel] for six years now – and nothing. Before I first went abroad [to Hong Kong in 1990, aged 21] I thought that when I will return after two years, my earnings are enough to build a house, to have a family and all that. I was there for two years or so. But then I went back to the Philippines. I bought two motorcycles while I was working in Hong Kong, for me and my mom. So in the beginning I thought it was good enough. But then, when I stayed there [in the Philippines], after one year, I thought: ‘Oh, it’s not enough’. We still did not have a house, and I was still young and did not yet get married. So I decided to go to Taiwan. I was the only one of the family to support my mother. Every month I’m sending half of my money for her, for my brothers, their children. I had to spend a lot of money. I had to borrow money, because when you go back [to visit the Philippines from abroad], it’s never enough, the ticket, presents… [Thelma goes on to tell how she became pregnant in Taiwan, had to return to the Philippines and left for Israel, in order to be able to support her child]. In order to come here, I invested all of my savings. I took money from friends and for one and a half years I had to repay them. Then I finished [paying back the loan] and I again had to borrow money to go back [to the Philippines]. So when I come back [to Israel], after two years I still have a loan. I then borrowed money for my husband and two others from the family to come to Israel, but the agency – they just took the money and ran away. […] So until now I have to pay back [the loan she took out to pay for the placement fees]. Until now I pay. Six years in Israel, and I still don’t have savings. Nearly fifteen years I’m separated from the Philippines and just work, work, work, and still – nothing.25

Like most Filipino migrant women I met during my research, Thelma, on whose story I provide more details in Chapter 6, had not succeeded in becoming a successful ‘OFW’ according to the lists provided in migrants’ magazines and the instructions given by long-term emigrants. Rather than buying property or investing in long-term projects or a business from which she could live if she returned to the Philippines one day, Thelma had found that going abroad involved high costs, fraud, ongoing debts and the feeling that the money one managed to earn was never enough, and most likely never would be.

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Conclusion As an introductory overview on Filipina women in Israel, this chapter focussed on the practices and social fields of female migrants’ transnational lives. It has shown that women arrive with different levels of transnational obligations and orientations. In general they do not migrate because of abject poverty, but rather have a complex array of reasons including aspirations for a better life, search for a political refuge, and – central to female migration – at least getting away physically from repressive family structures. Nevertheless, the actual process of going abroad is often recounted as one of reluctance. Describing one’s journey of going abroad as a bad joke, rather than a carefully planned undertaking, shows a sense of ambivalence and, looking back, that the decision to migrate also involved feelings of regret. Even when described as individual decisions, migrations were generally organized, financed and undertaken collectively. Migration must as a consequence be seen as involving the economic strategies of entire families or households, rather than just single women acting alone. Moreover, with regard to their family and social statuses, migrant women are hardly the ‘single girls’ they are portrayed to be in the media and public discourses. Furthermore, upon leaving, female migrants hardly break up families – the dominant theme in the Philippine public discourse – but actively strive to fulfil their dream of having a family that is not forced to live separately in order to make ends meet. It follows that rather than acting against dominant concepts of motherhood, marriage and family, going abroad often appears as the only way Filipina women can see of actually fulfilling these social expectations. Nonetheless, gender roles are reformulated at least temporarily and subjectively, as the ‘dutiful daughters’, ‘caring mothers’ or ‘responsible wives’ – who, according to their own narratives, manage to deal with the multiple adversities they face in Israel largely alone – realize their own strength, influence and power, resulting especially from their role as the breadwinners of whole households and families. As migrant women actively strive to re-unite with their families, ‘sponsor’ the out-migration of others and settle themselves in Israel, the structuring and meaning of transnational families and households are subject to major changes. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the migration there is almost always a painful separation from at least parts of what women consider to be their family. Although actively challenged, this separation is maintained by regulations that are aimed at discouraging migrants from having a family life in Israel. It is therefore important to note that transnational households, as Parreñas remarks, ‘should not be praised as a small-scale symbol of the migrant’s agency against the larger forces of globalization, because their formation marks an enforcement of border control on migrant workers. Transnational households signify segregation’ (2001a: 108). In spite of such a segregation, it is important to show migrants’ redefinitions of ‘family’ throughout the migration process,

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their relocation of households, and what one might call the ‘familiarization’ of social ties that takes place within migrant women’s diaspora households. Finally, this chapter addressed the emotional experiences and the everdifficult management of finances involved in migration. The mutual care and responsibility commonly associated with family can easily turn into something which can be perceived as painful and stressful, with demands that are impossible to meet, disappointments and misunderstandings, as well as a certain alienation from persons considered emotionally close. What stands out clearly is the commodification of social ties involved in migrating from a poor country in a state of permanent economic crisis to a country like Israel, where there is a great demand for people who are willing to be carers in exchange for money. During this process, migrant women turn into telephones and money-senders, or fear doing so, for relatives back home. It seems that the money earned by Filipina migrants in Israel is never really enough to meet obligations and familial pressures, let alone to fulfil their dreams. Within this situation, migration becomes an intergenerational and self-perpetuating project of transnational families and emerging subjectivities that often takes on the form – as I shall show – of an ongoing global journey.

2.1. Notes on the door to a shared flat of Filipinos in southern Tel Aviv, January 2008. (Claudia Liebelt)

76  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

2.2. A Filipina’s fully packed balikbayan box, Tel Aviv, February 2008. (Claudia Liebelt)

Notes 1. Hebrew saying, literally ‘what, suddenly’, frequently used in order to express both astonishment and derision. 2. Interview with Novelita, 20 June 2005. The following quotations by Novelita are also taken from this interview. 3. Divorce remains largely unavailable in the Catholic-dominated Philippines. The annulment of marriages is extremely rare and, as I was frequently told, remains an option for ‘the rich’ (those, who can afford bribing officials) or ‘those with good relations’. 4. Hebrew for ‘calamity’, standard term applied to the systematic mass killing of Jews by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and here preferred to the term ‘Holocaust’. 5. Interview with Mercy, 9 December 2004. The following quotations by Mercy are also taken from this interview. 6. As she was told by the agency, if the women entered Israel directly from the Philippines, they risked not being granted an entry visa. However, if they had travelled to other countries, they could convincingly argue that they were tourists, engaged in a larger journey. 7. A paluagan group normally consists of ten parties, who each contribute a certain amount of money each month and take turns to receive the money. Among Filipino migrants in Israel, this system was a widespread practice through which migrants hoped to raise large sums of money by bypassing the banking system.

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8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

But, as Mercy’s story shows, the paluagan system involves considerable risks for its participants. Officially named the Diversity Visa Lottery, this programme grants 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to ‘persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States’: see U.S. State Department website at http:// travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants/types/types_1317.html. A baranggay is the smallest social unit and administrative district in the Philippines, commonly translated as ‘village’ or ‘neighbourhood’; Filipino interviewees likewise employed the Spanish term ‘barrio’. Under Israeli law, legal carers receive up to three months’ maternity leave pay from the National Insurance Institute. If they do not send the newborn child out of the country within three months of giving birth, they lose their legal work permit and become ‘illegal’ – even though in some cases, and up to 2009, having a minor child in Israel also made it impossible to deport a single parent. Interview with Avelina, 13 June 2005. The following quotations by Avelina are also taken from this interview. This and the following statistical materials were provided to me by the OWWA office in the Philippines Embassy. They are based on a questionnaire filled out by 283 Filipino respondents and in the following will be referred to as the OWWA survey. Interview with Elena, 26 June 2005. Filipino live-in workers’ salaries were generally paid in U.S. dollars, rather than in the Israeli currency. In Article 22 of the Labour Code, promulgated in 1974, the obligation of Filipino contract workers to remit parts of their salaries was turned into state law (cf. Tyner 2004: 32). In 1984 the Philippine state introduced a policy of forced remittances under Executive Order 857, which made it mandatory for Filipino domestic workers to remit at least fifty per cent of their earnings. This law was later repealed because of protests by Filipino domestic workers in the diaspora (cf. Constable 1997: 164). Official statistics seem to document the growing success of these programmes. Thus, in 2005, the transfers of funds of an estimated one million OFW added up to $12.3 billion, a figure unmatched in official statistics (cf. Asian Migration News 2006. OFW remittances were projected to reach $13.5B in 2006; online at http://www.smc.org.ph/amnews/amn060115/southeast/philippines060115.htm; retrieved 22 November 2009). Named the Pag IBIG Overseas Program, which required at least twenty-four months of membership with at least $20 as a monthly contribution. In Israel, this programme was promoted by the Philippines Embassy. NIS stands for ‘New Israeli Shekel’, Israel’s official currency. According to the same survey, the average placement fee collected for migration to Israel had risen to $4,256 (KLO 2006), from an average of $2,500 in 1998 (Korkalainen 2000). The collection of placement fees by private recruitment agencies is illegal, but is tolerated by both the Israeli and the Philippine state apparatuses (cf. ibid.). As Cannell (1999) has pointed out, the relationship between the debtor and creditor is one of a continuous social transaction. Whereas earlier structural functionalists saw utang na loob relationships at work mainly in colonial patronclient relationships, the Philippine historians Ileto (1979) and Rafael (1988) treat utang na loob as forming the basis of Filipino power relations in general.

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21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

Children, for example, are considered to be deeply indebted to their parents for the ‘gift of (their) life’ (Cannell 1999: 9). My survey among Filipino migrants in Israel showed that approximately one third of migrant workers lent out money to cover placement fees for family members. The latter are generally expected to pay the money back, sometimes at high interest rates. While this practice of money-lending within families was often narrated as ‘help’, ‘support’ or ‘sponsoring’ by both lenders and recipients, it nevertheless created family tensions and conflicts. Interview with Luz, 30 March 2005. For similar practices among Haitian transmigrants in the U.S., see Glick-Schiller and Fouron (2001: 33). In her study on Ilocano men whose wives left to work abroad, Alicia Pingol analyses the situation from the opposite perspective, that of the husbands. She shows that for husbands left behind the migration of the wife typically entails a painful process in which masculinities have to be remade, and also in which the migrant’s parents may vie with the in-laws for the care of children and the control of remittances. Interview with Thelma, 25 April 2005.

Chapter 3 Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

As is the case in numerous countries, Filipina migrants in Israel are employed predominantly in domestic work, according to the contemporary Israeli migration regime as actively recruited live-in carers. As such, most Filipinos live in the private homes of their employers and are supposed to be available for work six days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The complex work realities faced by Filipinos in Israel are therefore crucial for an understanding of their everyday lives in Israel. For Momsen, a domestic worker is ‘an individual worker undertaking a range of reproductive tasks for a private household’ (1999: 14, n. 1). Here, the two main characteristics of domestic work are the ‘reproductive tasks’ and the private household as the site where these tasks take place. For a long time, the household has been analysed as a female, private sphere of reproduction and has been opposed to a male, public sphere of production. Feminist scholars have criticized this dualistic perspective and shown that negotiations within the so-called reproductive sphere are not only as crucial as those in the productive sphere, but that the two spheres are intrinsically tied to each other (cf. Moore 1988; Pratt 1997). That the reproductive tasks of domestic work are part of the sphere of production becomes especially clear when this work is performed by paid employees. This realization has triggered a multitude of studies of paid domestic work or services, often from a feminist angle (cf. Anderson 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Momsen 1999). Within a global economy based on an international division of labour, migrant women from the Philippine Empire of Care (Choy 2003) constitute a considerable proportion of the nannies, maids, housekeepers, carers and cleaners worldwide. This fact is reflected in the extensive literature on the topic and research on Filipina domestic workers that has been carried out in Canada (Bakan and Stasiulis 1995; Grandea and Kerr 1998; Pratt 1999; Stasiulis and Bakan 1997, 2005), Hong Kong (Constable 1996, 1997, 1999; McKay 2007a, 2007b), Malaysia (Chin 1997), Singapore (Yeoh and Huang 1998), Taiwan (Lan 2003a, 2003b), comparatively in Los Angeles and Rome

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(Parreñas 2001a) and, alongside other migrant domestic workers, Europe (Lazaridis 2000; Anderson 2000, 2001). As described in much of this literature, Filipino domestic workers in Israel are typically female, culturally foreign, vulnerable to exploitation, and creative in their efforts to actively negotiate, reformulate and change their working conditions. This chapter seeks to investigate these processes by presenting ethnographic material, underlining the specificities of Filipinos’ work in Israel, while also going beyond the description of migrant care or domestic work as structurally oppressive. Rather than portraying Filipina workers as individuals isolated from each other and enclosed in private households dotted all over the country, I shall show how the specific dangers, conflicts and chances implied in domestic work are typically narrated, embodied and coped with on a more collective level. By examining more closely the employment situation of three Filipina carers, I shall provide data on the actual everyday practices of care work and the relation that develops between the typically elderly employers and the Filipina carer. Contrary to many academic studies on the topic, I argue that domestic work – especially in the context of caring – can only be understood in terms of relations between Israeli employers and Filipino employees. These relations are extremely complex, implying ambivalent feelings as well as intimate social ties. While engaged in domestic work in Israel, Filipina migrants become the managers of households, instant mothers, or – like Novelita, who was featured in the previous chapter – sought-after ‘Alzheimer specialists’. Furthermore, I pose the question as to what it means when through their work in often affluent homes, Filipina domestic workers come into direct contact with wealth and the wealthy in Israel. Specific employment situations, as this chapter will show, may be translated into personal influence and power within the migrant community. Finally, I shall show how the culturally embedded narratives of suffering and patience employed by Filipina domestic workers are translated into a discourse in which Filipina migrants become the servants of the Jews, the ‘people of God’ according to practising Christians. Given the double meaning of ‘care’ as comprising both the practical tasks of caring or nursing and the emotional dimension of affection implied in the term, (Christian) Filipina domestic workers in Israel, as they are fond of pointing out, are the ones who really care for the ‘Holy Land’.

On Labours of Love and Members of the Family Research on paid domestic work has shown that employers frequently use the phrase ‘she is like a member of the family’ in order to describe ‘their’ domestic workers. In her study of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, Constable has argued that this common saying ‘has a coercive side to it, […] for it serves to distort working conditions and disguise the exploitative side of the relationship’ (1997: 104). She goes on to describe how workers are

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well aware of employers’ strategic and/or naive uses of the term, which is expressed in many popular jokes that circulate among migrants. While these findings can only be supported by my own ethnographic results, significantly the expression was widespread not only among employers, but – not in jest – among domestic workers as well. Labour control in paid domestic work has long been analysed as a form of ‘maternalism’, since the employer of paid domestic workers is typically female. Yet in an extensive study of domestic work undertaken by Latina migrants in Los Angeles, HondagneuSotelo persuasively argues that ‘maternalism among employers has declined, and most Latina employees say they prefer employers who interact more personally with them’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001: 172). In contrast to the maternalist (unilateral) positioning of the employer as a benefactor, she views personalism as ‘a bilateral relationship that involves two individuals recognizing each other not solely in terms of their role or office […], but rather as persons embedded in a unique set of social relations’ (ibid.). Like the Latina domestic workers studied by Hondagneu-Sotelo, I found that Filipina women in Israel rejected employers who treated them impersonally. Instead, they appreciated it if employers were interested in their lives and showed respect for them as individuals. Even though the relationship between employer and employee does remain unequal and narratives are used strategically by both parties, the emphasis of Filipina care and domestic workers on the emotional aspects of their work has to be taken seriously. As I will argue, this emphasis is often linked to Filipino and Christian norms of ‘pity’ and ‘care’. The location of the work in Israel, the ‘Holy Land’ according to Filipino Christians, plays a significant role here. In this section, I shall focus on caring for the elderly, which is the field most Filipina migrants are or at one point have been employed in.1 Ideally, caring is a ‘labour of love’ for employers and employees alike. In caring work, a relationship develops between the giver and the recipient of care that transcends mere employment. The concept of ‘affective labour’ addresses this relational character. Contrary to ‘emotion’ – an internalized feeling – the notion of ‘affect’ is chosen to describe the substance of embodied interaction and communication entailed in work such as caring (cf. Clough and Halley 2007; Hardt and Negri 2004: 108ff.). This makes it possible to perceive domestic labour as the production of a social relationship. Domestic work relationships between employees and employers have only rarely been studied in relational terms. A rich exception is Hondagneu-Sotelo’s book Doméstica (2001). Even though Hondagneu-Sotelo analyses domestic work in relational terms, her research is mainly based on interviews and not on participant observation at the workplaces themselves. This is most likely because access to workplaces in private homes is restricted and often difficult, as I too experienced during my research. In order to understand the complex and intimate relationships involved in paid domestic work, I shall describe three labour arrangements in greater detail. Thelma, Avelina and Anne, whose work as live-in carers for three elderly Israeli women will

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be discussed, were among the few interlocutors who were both allowed and willing to bring me into the private homes of their employers while the latter were around. Through subsequent visits to each of their workplaces I was able to observe their relations over a prolonged period of time. This fact contributed considerably to a deeper understanding, all the more so since each of the arrangements changed dramatically within the period of research.

Thelma and Savta Tikva Thelma was born in 1968 in the Philippines, the youngest of eight children to parents who separated shortly after her birth. She grew up in poverty in rural Pangasinan and started working when she was thirteen. Her childhood dream was to go abroad, which represents a ‘stepping stone’ out of poverty, as she called it in an interview. At the age of twenty-one, Thelma went abroad for the first time, as a domestic worker to Hong Kong. She later worked in Taiwan and – after giving birth to a child, whom she feared she would not be able to take care of financially by herself if she stayed in the Philippines – she came to work in Israel in 1998. Savta (Hebrew, ‘grandmother’) Tikva, as she calls the old women she legally started to work for as a live-in carer in 1999, was her second employer. Tikva migrated to Israel from Yemen in the mid-1950s, along with her husband and four small children. At our first meeting, Tikva tells me that her family decided to migrate to Israel following the Jewish Agency’s call for ‘return’, hoping to flee from poverty in Yemen. Nevertheless, she recalled that her first years in Israel were characterized by economic hardship and racial discrimination by lighter-skinned Ashkenazi Jews. For years, Tikva lived in the reception camp set up by the Jewish Agency for the ‘Oriental’ (Hebrew mizrahi) immigrants on the outskirts of southern Tel Aviv. During the 1960s, the camp she lived in slowly changed into a poor urban neighbourhood. Tikva’s husband died when she was in her late twenties, so that she was forced to take care of her four children largely by herself. The family’s cottage was regularly affected by flooding, and Tikva never succeeded in finding a job other than cleaning apartments. By 2004, Tikva was suffering from Alzheimer’s and lived together with Thelma in a multi-store house in her old neighbourhood in a two-room apartment her children had bought for her. I was invited to visit Tikva’s apartment one Saturday afternoon by Sandra, who also worked as a carer in the neighbourhood, and was a close friend of Thelma’s. Together with other Filipina friends, the women regularly met on Saturday afternoons at Tikva’s place in order to chat and play cards. Tikva, who only rarely had guests with whom she could communicate in Hebrew, welcomed me warmly and told me that for her as a religious woman it was a duty (Hebrew mitzvah) to take care of Thelma and her Filipina friends, since they were foreigners in the country, just as she herself had been for so long. On that day, Thelma, Sandra, Neth (a carer employed in the same building), Tikva and I played a Filipino card game, ate Jahnun, the traditional Yemenite Shabbat

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dish that Tikva had taught Thelma to prepare, and chatted into the evening. Once in a while, Tikva addressed Thelma in words of the Yemenite Arabic dialect, which Thelma had come to understand. Several months afterwards, Tikva’s mental and physical condition worsened and Thelma, who was deeply concerned about her (and also about losing her permit to stay in Israel if Tikva died), hardly ever left the apartment so that she could care for her. Moreover, Thelma started to reactivate social ties in the Philippines and other countries (Taiwan, Hong Kong), and to save money in order to return to the Philippines or leave to work elsewhere if she indeed became illegal in Israel. Upon another visit I made in July 2005, Tikva had become bedridden and appeared confused. Thelma, who was in a gloomy mood, said she was missing her daughter and was wondering whether she would ever be able to live with her family in the Philippines. In addition, she was very homesick, and talked about how much she missed home and Filipino food, which she was not supposed to eat in Tikva’s kosher household. Nevertheless, when Tikva was in a lucid state of mind, the two still got along well together. Thelma pitied the old woman, who never had any visitors apart from her children and grandchildren. Sometimes, Thelma half-jokingly remarked, they both talked about the ‘good old times’, as if she, Thelma, was an old woman just like Tikva, and Tikva lamented missing the Yemen of her childhood, to which she had never returned.

Avelina and Mirjam Avelina, discussed in the previous chapter, was born in 1978 to a family of rice-farmers in a rural baranggay in Tarlac Province in the Philippines. She came to Israel in 2000 to work as a live-in carer, got married and gave birth to two children, whom she sent back to the Philippines in order not to lose her work permit. When I first met Avelina in December 2004, she was employed in an exclusive old people’s home as the carer of an elderly woman of Dutch origin. Her employer, Mirjam, also had a turbulent life story. She had grown up in the Netherlands and, as a Jew and a leftist, fled from the German occupation to France during the Second World War. In France, she and her husband joined the antifascist resistance movement and helped refugees to escape to North Africa. In the early 1940s, Mirjam and her husband entered Palestine, where they were active in the Zionist movement. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Mirjam gave birth to two children and her husband became a well-known architect. By 2004, Mirjam’s husband had died and she was living in a two-room apartment in the old people’s home, together with Avelina. Whenever I visited Avelina and Mirjam, the atmosphere between the two seemed to be characterized by mutual sympathy and understanding. Mirjam had engaged a lawyer so that Avelina would not be illegalized after giving birth. She had attended Avelina’s marriage and displayed pictures that showed her holding Avelina’s newborn children. Avelina told me that

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Mirjam had also been the one to encourage her to stay in Israel after Avelina’s husband was deported to the Philippines in winter 2004. Apart from the fact that Mirjam wanted to keep Avelina, Avelina was sure that Mirjam would also have stayed had she been in Avelina’s situation. Mirjam served as a role model for her, as an independent and strong woman who had fought for what she believed in and had accomplished something in her life in spite of all the hardships she had faced. In the mornings, Avelina and Mirjam usually took a long walk on the beach promenade beside the home, as did many other Israeli residents and their Filipina carers. While most Filipinas were seen pushing wheelchairs, Avelina was happy and proud that Mirjam was still able to walk. Within the social network of the Filipina carers working in the home, Avelina felt she was envied for having such a good employer. A week before I left for the Philippines in summer 2005, I visited Avelina and Mirjam to pick up things Avelina wanted me to deliver to her family in Tarlac. She joked about coming along by hiding in my backpack and lamented about how much she missed her children. Mirjam laughingly remarked: ‘Come on, one day we’ll visit the Philippines together!’ Avelina then sadly said that maybe she would not return to the Philippines for a long time, just as Mirjam had not returned to Europe for so long. Mirjam’s first trip to the Netherlands since the end of the war, which she had undertaken two years earlier, was referenced by Avelina when she stated that when she finally left, she would probably return likewise disappointed, ‘because it won’t be my home anymore...’ In summer 2005, Avelina had grown so desperate about the separation from her children that she planned to leave for Italy, where she hoped to receive permanent residency status easily, which she needed in order to be reunited with her husband and children without having to live in the Philippines. She concealed her plans from Mirjam, and upon leaving Israel for Italy in September, told her that she was going on a four-week vacation in the Philippines. To me, she reasoned that she was not sure whether she would actually succeed in entering Italy and might indeed return to work for Mirjam. Avelina nevertheless did succeed, and when we met again in spring 2006 in Rome, she was working as an illegalized part-time cleaner and nanny. She then showed me a copy of a long letter she had written to Mirjam, in which she had apologized and explained her motives for leaving, but to which she had not received any answer. She regretted not having said good-bye to Mirjam and even having left Israel at all, since employment and living conditions were much harder in Italy than she had expected. On the other hand, Mirjam was said to be still angry and deeply disappointed, but had employed another Filipina to take care of her shortly after Avelina’s departure.

Anne and Rachel Like Avelina, Anne was employed in the old people’s home beside the beach south of Tel Aviv. Officially, thirty Filipina carers were employed within the

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home, which accommodated approximately 360 Israeli residents, many of whom were rather affluent immigrants of Western European origin.2 Rachel, Anne’s employer, had immigrated to Israel in the early 1990s from Rio de Janeiro. She was one of the first residents in the home, which had opened in the mid-1990s. Rachel was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin and, like Mirjam, was forced to take refuge in France in the second half of the 1930s. During the Second World War, she and her husband experienced an odyssey through Western Europe and North Africa, fleeing from Nazi persecution and trying to enter the USA. In the early 1940s, they made it to Brazil, where Rachel found it hard to continue her pre-war career as a ballet dancer. She came to Israel after her husband died because several of her Jewish-GermanBrazilian friends had decided to spend their old age in Israel. Moreover, she left no relatives behind, since most of them had been murdered in Europe and she had never had children of her own. When Anne first introduced me to her, Rachel was bedridden and in bad physical condition. Throughout the following months, Rachel was repeatedly transferred to hospital for several days, until she finally died at the beginning of September 2005. Anne was one of the Filipino ‘veterans’ in Israel and had first entered the country in 1989. By the time I met her in 2004, she was a well-known figure of what migrants generally called the Filipino community. She came from a middle-class family of plantation owners in Quezon Province and had a bachelor’s degree in political science. Like Avelina and Thelma, Anne considered her employer to be a good one. Anne began working for Rachel in January 2005, after her former long-time employer, another resident of the old people’s home, had died. Anne told me that she had suffered greatly from her former employer’s death, and throughout Rachel’s last months of life constantly feared that Rachel, too, would die soon. Whenever Rachel was hospitalized, Anne stayed with her. She slept on a mat beside her bed and would not leave, even on her weekly day off. When I met her shortly after Rachel’s death, she said she felt emotionally devastated. Since Rachel had not left any children behind, it was largely up to Anne to pack up and distribute the majority of Rachel’s personal belongings. She felt emotionally unable to throw away any of Rachel’s belongings and decided to keep some of her personal photographs for herself. She told me that Rachel, like her former employer, had become ‘something like a mother’ to her. She felt as if she would be the last person to remember Rachel’s life story, and she felt the urge to write about her. While packing up Rachel’s things, Anne thought about packing up her own things too and returning to the Philippines: ‘She was a good woman. I miss her. I don’t want to work for another family, because she was like my family. So I think I will just return to the Philippines’. After visiting Anne, I went to meet another Filipina interview partner, Rose, and told her about the meeting with Anne. ‘Oh yes, I know how she must feel’, Rose said. At the time she was working for Deborah, a Shoah survivor. Rose went on to tell me how Deborah often woke up at night from nightmares and sometimes talked to her for hours about the torture and sufferings she had

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endured in the concentration camp. Throughout these talks Deborah had told her things (about being raped, for example) that Rose was sure she had not even told her own children. ‘I might be the last to know her stories’, Rose told me and added: ‘And I know better German than her children’. The brief account of these labour arrangements between Filipina carers and their female Israeli employers hints at the physical and emotional intensity often implied in live-in caring. Within a situation of bodily encounters, spatial density and continuous presence, Filipina carers and Israeli pensioners had developed intimate and intensive affective bonds. This becomes clear from the daily interaction of the women: Tikva and Thelma playing cards with Thelma’s friends on Saturday afternoons; Anne staying beside Rachel’s hospital bed and grieving after her passing away; and finally, Avelina’s suffering and bad conscience about leaving Mirjam, whom she thought of as a role model. Avelina’s feelings were intensified by Mirjam’s engagement in Avelina’s familial matters, such as attendance at her marriage and the concern about her children. Like numerous interviewees, Thelma, Anne and Rose went so far as to refer to their respective employers as their ‘grandmother’ or ‘mother’, in an arguably much deeper way than the often-quoted expression of domestic workers becoming their employers’ ‘members of the family’ implies. In spite of the intimacy and affects involved, the relationships of course remained structurally unequal labour arrangements. First of all, state law and practices do not take into account the emotional bonds that develop in caring arrangements. For example, Filipina carers often turn illegal and are subject to deportation the moment their employers die, their desire to grieve notwithstanding. Secondly, in spite of their affective involvement, Filipina carers remained alert and aware of the structural embedding and strategic nature of the labour relationship. Thus, Thelma took practical precautions when she felt Tikva was about to die in the near future, while Avelina left Mirjam when she saw a chance to better her own and her family’s situation. Finally, their daily physical and emotional dependence on the care of their domestic workers notwithstanding, employers clearly set the rules of and limits to the arrangement, such as wages, living arrangements and food taboos. While at times it seemed that Thelma was the real boss of Tikva’s household, regularly inviting her friends over to play Filipino card games, Tikva nevertheless retained an upper hand in some respects, as is shown by her order not to introduce non-kosher food into the kitchen. Most importantly, both Mirjam and Tikva had children who regularly checked the well-being of their mothers, at times disciplined the carer and arguably could easily have persuaded their mothers to replace them. Labour arrangements with single elderly women, such as the ones described above, were rated among the most desirable by Filipina migrants. It should be noted that actors in the employers’ social environment could often become a major source of conflict for the domestic worker, even when the relationship between them and their respective employer was described as one of mutual trust, understanding or even love. Live-in domestic workers

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who were employed in families reported being frequently drawn into family conflicts. One of the most common narratives was that of the jealous wife or mother. Mothers often grew jealous of domestic workers when these were employed to take care of small children who grew emotionally deeply attached to them (cf. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997). Wives were likewise potentially jealous, and some Filipina domestic workers felt they were blamed for making advances to husbands, even when they were actually suffering sexual abuse themselves (see also Constable 1996). ‘Additional’ male members in the household where one was employed – whether they were the sons, husbands or fathers of employers – were regarded as a potential threat and burden, so Filipina migrants preferred households without them. Moreover, even when living alone with their respective employers, domestic workers could suffer greatly from ‘problematic’ relatives. In the case of elderly employers, these were typically sons and daughters. As I was told by many interviewees, including Thelma and Avelina, these would pop into employers’ homes once in a while and typically start nagging, about how the household was being run badly, how their parents were not being sufficiently cared for, etc. Filipinos often interpreted this as the children’s attempt to prove their ongoing concern for parents they had long abandoned. The conflict or even competition between carers and employers’ children became particularly intense whenever money was involved: several cases of elderly employers who chose to hand their property down to migrant carers rather than their own children have become public in Israel.3 As in the cases portrayed above, the affective costs and after-effects implied in the termination of caring arrangements were great. When, for example, Avelina left her job, Mirjam was deeply hurt and disappointed, and Avelina herself was plagued by feelings of guilt and regret. After Rachel died, Anne was full of grief and planned to give up paid domestic work in Israel altogether and return to the Philippines (which she still had not done five years later). Similar self-protective promises have been reported by numerous Filipina interviewees. The drawing of protective boundaries becomes important after the termination of emotionally intensive work arrangements. Apart from elderly employers who have died, this emotional intensity was described by domestic workers when they left jobs which had involved taking care of little children, especially if they had left behind little children of about the same age in the Philippines. By putting all their love into the education of their foster children ‘as if it was my own child’ – as it was frequently put – Filipina domestic workers hoped to alleviate the pain they suffered from the separation of their own children. Even when employment conditions in a household had been bad or difficult, domestic workers nevertheless recounted these work arrangements and ‘their’ children with a great deal of nostalgia long after the termination of the job. The warning that one should retain a ‘professional emotional distance’ from employers and their families, which was propagated by many long-term carers, often stemmed from severe disappointments and emotional injuries.

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One Filipina interviewee, Nene, told me the following, after being laid off by her employers of more than eight years: I was really beginning to love them, like parents. The old woman told me, they love me too, that I was like a member of the family, but still they have to separate. They said they cannot prolong my visa. But I know this is not true. Now the family refuses to pay for my social benefits. Is this the way you treat your family? After eight years… I’m so disappointed.4

Nene, for whom the termination of her job meant either illegalization in Israel or immediate departure from the country, said she only now realized what the phrase about being a member of the family really meant. Full of disappointment, she now saw it as a saying without deeper meaning, a strategy ‘to keep the Filipina quiet’, as she put it. Accordingly, she felt embarrassed at having swallowed her employers’ rhetoric. As was the case with Nene, interlocutors often generalized this sort of emotional disappointment, narrating the behaviour of employers as ‘heartless’, ‘ruthless’ or ‘greedy’, as apparently characteristic of Jewish mentality. The stereotypes that some Filipina migrants voiced in such contexts could easily be recognized as anti-Semitic. At times, Filipina carers not only narrated themselves as members of employers’ families, but even beyond that. Thus Rose, introduced above as caring for Deborah, a Shoah survivor, emphasized that she knew more about Deborah than her children did. In similar fashion, Angel – who took care of an elderly woman, whom her mother was legally employed to take care of – stated in an interview: It was a very emotional relationship [between herself and the elderly woman]… You know, when she died [pauses] – I really cried. I cried more than the family [of the employer]. I don’t know, I was there with her, every day. When mommy went to the market, I stayed with her, watching TV, brushing her hair. She brushed my hair also. I had very long hair and she really loved my hair. She didn’t speak, she had Alzheimer’s. But I had the feeling we really understood each other.5

Repeatedly, Filipina carers emphasized that they were actually ‘more than family’ to employers, since they spent more time with them than their actual children, knew better how to interpret their gestures, for example, or simply accompanied them in their everyday routines throughout the final stages of their lives. At the same time, Filipina migrants often expressed their disapproval that, although they were foreign employees, they had become ‘closer’ to their Israeli employers than their own families. Often, cultural explanations were used in order to deal with this apparent paradox. Angel, for example, went on to explain, in the same interview: We [the Filipinas] love what we are doing, where our money is coming from. We’re very committed on that part. If you take care of an old lady, you’re not just doing that, but – come on, you have to give them a bath, feed them, you have to take care of them like of your own mother. The problem with us is that we get very emotionally

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attached. Why do we cry when they pass away? We suffer when they suffer. We don’t know how to separate it. Filipinas, they cannot work without love.

According to Angel and many other interviewees who expressed similar thoughts, giving care to a needy person turned their job into a labour of love. In interviews, Filipinas frequently contrasted the love and care they gave their elderly employers with Israeli grown-up children’s neglect towards and alienation from their parents. Like Latina nannies who criticize the Americanamothers of the children they are employed to take care of as ‘cold’ and career-oriented (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997: 564ff.), Filipinos in Israel criticized younger Israelis’ apparent ‘carelessness’. Angel argued: In the Philippines we don’t have nursing homes. Our old ones – they have homes, they are being taken care of by their families. It is really different – for us, it’s hard to be separated from our families. We are not like the Israelis who leave their parents alone when they are old. If they [the Israelis] could understand that – how hard it is for us to be here – it would be much better.

One need not compare the numbers of nursing homes in both countries or even the ‘cultural stuff’ with regard to care to realize that the narrative of ‘cold’ and ‘careless’ Israelis as opposed to ‘devoted’ and ‘caring’ Filipinos also has to be seen against the background of Filipinos’ social, economic and cultural exclusion as migrant carers in Israel. When Novelita, using words very similar to Angel’s, told me that ‘we in the Philippines don’t have foreigners taking care of our elders – we in the Philippines have families who care for each other’, this rhetoric contrasted with the fact that Novelita herself employed a domestic worker from a neighbouring island who had helped to raise her children in the Philippines, and who was now taking care of her mother while Novelita worked as a carer in Israel. Nevertheless, the dominant language of domestic work in terms of compassion, pity and love on the part of Filipina migrants has to be seen within a specific cultural context. Thus, in her ethnographic account of the Philippine Bicol region, Cannell (1999) analyses pity and compassion (Tagalog damay, ‘to feel with someone’) as central cultural concepts. According to local Christian belief there, to pity the suffering and to care for someone is to become Christ’s intimate, to share his ordeal. The story of Christ’s suffering, the pasyon, which is publicly enacted, pitied and experienced with compassion in an important annual celebration throughout the Philippines, just like the image of Christ arousing pity, is more important than the images of either Christ crucified or Christ risen (Cannell 1999: 165ff.). Pity for those who are suffering therefore translates into compassion and love. This connection is frequently made by interviewees, as exemplified by the response of a Filipina interviewee: ‘Everyday she is crying of the pain. She is very ethical woman. I pity and love her so much’. The relationship between Filipino-Christian values and the narrative of domestic work and caring as a labour of love becomes even clearer when

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we examine the narratives employed by Filipino religious groups in Israel. Within religious communities, especially evangelical churches that have sprung up in southern Tel Aviv to serve an increasing number of Filipino migrants, care work is clearly seen as part of a larger Christian project in the ‘Holy Land’. In an interview, Pat, the Filipino pastor of an independent evangelical church group formed of Filipino domestic workers in southern Tel Aviv, told me in an interview: I feel that my heart is always for Israel. When we pray, every Saturday, we always lift up Israel to the Lord, we really love Israel. And we love the people of Israel. That’s why, when we serve our employers, we serve them like our fathers and mothers, we love them so much. And they feel it also. When you work with unemployed or bedridden employers, it’s really hard work. But hard work is nothing if your employer is good to you. You know, Filipinos are very hardworking people. We can easily adapt to the culture. We eat everything. It is easy for us to adapt. Especially if we love a people like we love the people of Israel.6

The fact that most employers in Israel are Jewish plays a major role for Filipino carers who engage widely in religious practices in Israel. As they went on pilgrimages to Christian Holy Sites in Israel, gathered for bible study groups in their workplaces and weekend apartments, or attended church services, Filipinos described themselves as the servants of the ‘people of God’. By literally caring for and serving Jews in need of care, Filipino Christians interpreted their work as not only economically but also spiritually rewarding, as an act agreeable to God, a form of following in Jesus’s footsteps. Finally, I want to draw attention to the fact that throughout their stay in Israel, and as employees of Shoah survivors or refugees, Filipino carers are in many cases directly confronted with the ongoing sufferings and traumas of the Shoah, anti-Semitism and the Second World War. Like Rose, whose employer Deborah regularly awoke from nightmares, many Filipina carers employed by Shoah survivors had to deal with their employers’ memories and trauma relating to anti-Semitism, racial persecution and the war, which in turn had a deep emotional impact on their own everyday lives. When they talked about their first encounter with the painful, violent and often traumatic past of their employers, Filipina interviewees frequently spoke of an unexpected shock, with which they could not cope. Many carers admitted that when they came to Israel, their knowledge of the Second World War in Europe, the Shoah and anti-Semitism had been rather superficial. When confronted with employers’ emotionally upsetting stories, many felt the urge to understand them better.7 Apparently, Filipina carers’ willingness to understand frequently matched their employers’ preparedness to share. The phenomenon of employers sharing secrets with paid domestic workers which even their closest relatives do not know has been described for other contexts as well (Constable 2003: 137f.). Interestingly, I was frequently told by employers and their families that Filipinos’ apparent neutrality and ignorance about the Second World War in Europe and the Shoah were what made them especially attractive live-in carers

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to Shoah survivors. In contrast, (Christian) East European migrant workers were assumed to be prejudiced and likely to be anti-Semitic. Even though anti-Semitism does exist in the Philippines and Filipina carers were found to be deeply affected by Christian philo-Semitism as well as the usage of antiSemitic stereotypes, within Israeli society their image as neutral foreigners – societal ‘non-persons’, so to speak – seemed unaffected, which contributed to employers’ confiding in them. As Barbara Swirski, the director of the Israeli information and research centre Adva, has pointed out more generally: ‘For a lot of middle class Israeli families, the Filipino caretaker is a godsend. […] It’s such an intimate situation, that there is something appealing about having a foreigner who is neutral and uninvolved’ (Frucht 2002). Among Filipino domestic workers, detailed preferences regarding the ethnic origins of employers also existed, reflecting both Israel’s character as an immigration society as well as Filipino and Israeli culturalist (at times being on the verge of racist) stereotypes. For example, Romelyn told me she preferred to work for ‘European’ rather than ‘Oriental’ employers because she felt they were more civilized. In similar fashion, Marylinn, a Filipina agent who for many years recruited hundreds of Filipinos to work in Israel, said in our interview: ‘…but we also have some problems with Israeli employers. Arab Israelis, or those from Yemen. Ashkenasim [Jews of European origin, broadly speaking] – they are the favourites. Because they are more educated and at least they are clean and neat. And they speak English, most of them…’ On the other hand, elderly Eastern European employers were also considered to be difficult, often unwilling to accept Filipinos’ different eating habits. Even though Filipinos typically held employers in high esteem if they considered them to be ‘morally upright’ and ‘decent’, characteristics often attributed to the religious, in fact they generally disliked being employed in Jewish Orthodox families. Apart from racial discrimination, which Filipinos, as non-Jewish ‘goyim’,8 apparently encountered more frequently within Orthodox households, this was also due to numerous constraints that living in such a household entailed, such as a ban on television and radio, or the compliance with religious food taboos that made it impossible to introduce Filipino food. To sum up, domestic work, which always implies giving care to a certain extent, is affective labour, deeply relational in many regards. Especially in the case of explicit caring, the emotional relationship between the employing person in need of care and the employed carer is viewed as highly desirable by most employers and their families, who prefer to have a ‘loving’, ‘warm’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘committed’ person to take care of themselves or their loved ones. As was pointed out above, the preference for personalistic labour relations and commitments in paid domestic work is typically mutual. Filipino domestic workers wish to have a good employer, who takes them seriously as a person and respects them for the love and care they receive. While domestic work, and especially caring, is narrated as ideally being a labour of love by both Israeli employers and Filipino employees, the analysis of domestic work as a labour of love is nevertheless problematic. It is precisely the blurred boundary between

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labour and affection that makes domestic work so strenuous, difficult and at times even emotionally devastating for Filipino workers. As interviewees made sure I had understood, domestic work is a great deal about trust, intimacy and affective engagement within an asymmetrical power relationship. As the observation of labour relations between employers and employees over a continuous time period has shown, domestic work is as a result also about compromises and negotiations on both sides. As a form of affective labour, actual working relations in caring imply complex and non-unidirectional power relations. This is an important theme of the following section.

Intimacy, Power and Israel Backstage: Filipinos in the Homes of the Rich and Famous The social relations which lie at the heart of paid domestic labour arrangements are complex and cannot be separated from relations of power. In the case of paid domestic work undertaken by Filipina migrants in Israel, these relations are typically between Filipina women who have been forced out of their country for financial reasons and Israeli employers of middle- or upper-class status. Even though the employment of a private live-in carer is subsidized by the Israeli national insurance scheme, it involves considerable costs, which often can only be met by families of middle-class status and above. This holds especially true for Filipinos employed without work permits as private nannies, housekeepers or cleaners, whose employment is not subsidized by the state. Accordingly, many of my Filipino interviewees worked in households of considerable wealth, with some employers who could easily be counted among Israel’s cultural, political and/or economic elites. ‘Unlike the working poor who toil in factories and fields’, HondagneuSotelo (2001: xi) has pointed out in her research on Latina immigrants in affluent Californian homes, ‘domestic workers see, touch, and breath the material and emotional world of their employers’ homes’. As Gamburd writes in her ethnographic analysis of Sri Lankan women in the Gulf, foreign maids are both ‘marginal insiders and intimate outsiders’ (2000b: 102). As I shall argue, Filipina domestic workers’ employment in affluent Israeli homes, and their consequent contact with the emotional and material aspects involved, clearly makes a difference: while on one hand, the confrontation with employers’ wealth and power signifies a sharp divide, often perceived as painful, between their own and their employers’ social statuses and power positions in Israel, this still often results in benefits for the domestic worker. Not only do Filipinos gain deep insights into what one interviewee called ‘Israel backstage’, but in some cases their access to the private spheres of power enables them to use their employers’ status to elevate their own. Following a widespread deportation campaign in 2002, the illegalized status of migrants meant they were at great risk of being deported. As a result, many Filipinos, whose legal work or residency permits had expired,

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sought protection in the private home of a specific employer as live-in domestic workers. Due to the illegality of their working arrangements and the typically high social status of their employers, these ‘hiding nannies’ were publicly less visible than the legal carers. On one hand, this public invisibility was much sought after by illegalized migrants, who took up this work precisely because they wanted to disappear from the public gaze, especially from the Migration Police. On the other hand, public invisibility made them especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in that it entailed a restricted space and increased dependence on employers. It was within these working arrangements that I heard most frequently about the humiliating treatment, exploitative working conditions and denigrating labour rules often emphasized in research on domestic work (cf. Constable 1997; Anderson 2000; Momsen 1999). Without wanting to underestimate these situations, I here want to focus on the meaning of domestic and care work for Filipinos employed in affluent households. Domestic workers of privileged employers may enjoy a multitude of advantages. This becomes clear from the story of Emily, who worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Savyon, one of Israel’s most affluent settlements. Emily, a mother of three in the Philippines, left for Israel in order to engage in domestic work in 1995, after her husband had died and she could no longer raise sufficient money to bring up and educate her three children. For several years, she was the legal carer of a bedridden elderly man, who, according to Emily, treated her ‘like family, more than that even’. After the old man died, Emily remained in Savyon, in order to work as an undocumented housekeeper for his son. On the night of our interview in December 2004, Emily had just been released on bail from the Nazareth detention centre, where she had been detained for several days on grounds of residing in Israel illegally. In contrast to many illegalized arrestees, who were forced either to leave the country immediately or stay in the detention centre until the date of their actual flight, Emily was allowed to spend her last days in Israel without restriction of movement. Her flight was scheduled several days later and, according to the official terminology, was a ‘voluntary leave’ rather than a deportation. This arrangement had been made possible through the intervention of her employer’s lawyer and because her employer was able and willing to put up a guarantee of $3,000 that Emily would leave the country. As an additional courtesy, he had agreed that she could throw her farewell party at his house. So the night before, Emily had invited several dozen of her Filipino friends to a huge farewell party at his elegant Savyon mansion. Coming from a family of poor fishermen from Southern Visayas, Emily told me that in Israel she had had a ‘taste of life in riches’, not only as the housekeeper in an affluent family, but also as her employer’s business partner, as she put it: her employer, a diamond trader, sold diamonds cheaply to Emily, which she then went on to sell to fellow Filipinos in Israel. Through this economic sideline, Emily not only managed to earn some extra money, but also got in touch with some of the leading figures in the Filipino

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community, such as embassy officials, visiting business men and community leaders, who had bought diamonds from her. In fact, Emily subsequently became a community leader herself, namely the president of the Visayas Mindanao Regional Association, appointed by employees of the Philippines Embassy who suggested the founding of that association. Emily’s story shows that employment in an affluent household could bring access to additional financial resources, the legal help of a prominent lawyer and spaces of amenity otherwise inaccessible or out of reach. Another interviewee, Romelyn, regularly attended classical concerts, the opera or expensive restaurants with her employers, an elderly couple of considerable means who were also living in Savyon. Having grown up in the Philippine mountain province, Romelyn had never been to places like these before she started working in Israel. Nevertheless, while she initially remembered her excitement at attending concerts or restaurants that she was otherwise unable to afford, Romelyn soon came to hate these evenings out with her employers. While these meant pleasure and enjoyment for them, after all, for Romelyn they involved work. Hence she soon came to the decision that she was not especially fond of classical music and found the concerts she was forced to attend ‘terribly boring’. Furthermore, she was used to going to bed early and getting up around sunrise, so that going out late at night meant that she suffered from a serious lack of sleep. Yet what disturbed her most was that these evenings out clearly signified the social and economic divide between her and her employers’ situations. Standing in front of the concert hall with ‘all the Filipinas’, who had been forced to accompany their respective employers and, like Romelyn, would have preferred to chat outside rather than entering, made it clear to Romelyn every time that she had become a ‘maid’, a ‘servant’. For domestic workers, spaces and material things commonly associated with social status and pleasure could therefore easily come to signify segregation and humiliation. The common practice whereby employers handed down clothes and other used items to domestic workers is another way in which this ambiguity becomes clear. As I have pointed out in Chapter 2, Marian regularly filled her balikbayan boxes with the hand-me-downs of her affluent employers, saying that ‘they still can’t afford a warm meal three times a day, but at least they wear Prada and Gucci’. Mercy, who was illegalized and worked as a live-out house-cleaner for an extremely wealthy family of Canadian origin, used the elegant brand clothing she received from her female employer to ‘dress up as a business woman’, so that the Migration Police would not recognize her for what she was, that is, an illegalized cleaning woman. So, while for both women, employers’ hand-me-downs served immediate needs and generated social prestige, the way they were used also had negative connotations, which Mercy and Marian underlined with sarcastic humour. Although brand clothing, used electronic appliances and other used items were generally welcomed by Filipino workers, not all used things were and not everybody appreciated these ‘gifts’ in a similar way. The practice of

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handing down items itself, as well as the way this was handled by employers, could easily be perceived as patronizing and humiliating. Thus Lyna, who was given a used computer by her employer’s son, remarked after she had brought it to a Filipino friend’s apartment: ‘This computer is worth nothing. The computer I bought for my daughter [in the Philippines] to use for her college homework is much better. What does he think? That we don’t have computers in the Philippines?’ This highlights the fact that in particular women from the Philippine middle classes, such as Lyna, were easily hurt when they felt they were being treated as an apparently ‘poor Filipina’ by their well-to-do employers. In spite of this, the intimacy of domestic work as an ambivalent ‘labour of love’ could take on forms which are only inadequately described by notions like ‘personalism’ or ‘maternalism/paternalism’. ‘To us, she is like a mother’ was the title used by a major Israeli daily for an article published in 2004 about a member of parliament, Avraham Hirshsohn, whose Filipina domestic worker Guillerma was about to be deported (Falter 2004). The article went on to tell the story of the relationship between Guillerma and Hirshsohn. Guillerma came to Israel in 1990 as the legal carer for Avraham Hirshsohn’s wife, who had contracted Kreuzfeld-Jacob’s disease and died soon afterwards. Hirshsohn continued to employ Guillerma, even though her work permit became invalid after the death of his wife. From legal carer, Guillerma therefore became the illegalized nanny of Hirshsohn’s two sons, aged four and five years at the time. In 2004, Guillerma was arrested and awaited her deportation from Israel. In a desperate attempt to prevent her deportation, the Hirshsohn family approached both the media and the government for help. In the article the younger son, now aged eighteen, was quoted as saying: ‘To us, she is like a mother. Since I can remember, Guillerma was there. She was my second mom…’ And his father added: ‘She is a part of our family, […] we celebrate Shab[b]at together and she lights the candles’ (quoted from Falter 2004). As if to confirm their words, a picture beside the article shows Guillerma and the two sons in casual dress having breakfast together at the family’s kitchen table. In answer to his appeal to the Ministry of Interior to cancel Guillerma’s deportation order for humanitarian reasons, Hirshsohn was told that, even though the case could be regarded as being ‘humanitarian’, it was declined because the public could interpret this as corruption, protektsia in Hebrew (Falter 2004). Nevertheless, by the time I met Guillerma in 2007, she had been legalized and was living in a northern Tel Aviv apartment along with her Filipino husband and their children who had been born and raised in Israel. Hirshsohn was one of numerous figures in Israel’s political, economic or cultural elites who employed an illegalized Filipina domestic worker, and spoke out on her behalf after the introduction of a deportation campaign in 2002. When, in summer 2003, the deportation policy began to be felt in the private households of the affluent, an anonymous group of wealthy employers was said to have started a media campaign against deportations under the slogan dai la busha (Hebrew, ‘Stop the Shame’). In February 2005, the Federation

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of Israeli Chambers of Commerce president Uriel Lynn condemned the deportation of migrant domestic workers, ‘because this policy severely limits Israeli women’s ability to go out and work’ (quoted from Bior 2005). In May 2005, the Israeli ‘cosmetic queen’ and millionaire Pnina Rosenblum started a private media campaign when ‘her’ Filipina housekeeper was subjected to deportation. Alongside singer Chava Alberstein, the actress Gila Almagor and other prominent figures on Israel’s cultural scene took part in demonstrations against the deportation of illegalized migrants and spoke out publicly against the removal of illegalized Filipino domestic workers from Israel, and their homes. The apparent dependence on Filipina domestic workers by Israeli families belonging to the country’s cultural, social and/or political elites is frequently pointed out by both Filipinos and Israelis. Thus, during an official dinner hosted by the Philippine ambassador in Israel, Avraham Poraz, a member of the Israeli Parliament and a former Minister of Interior, was quoted as saying: ‘The (Filipino) nurse who is taking care of my mother is part of our family. We don’t feel at ease every time she takes a day off even when there is a substitute carer’.9 In similar fashion, Filipino carers were described as a ‘godsend’ throughout parliamentary discussions, interviews with Israeli policy-makers and media reports. In a report entitled ‘On behalf of Filipino Labour’, journalist Meir Bleich (2003) reminded the public that the employment of foreign carers enabled the first generation of children who take responsibility for their parents to lead a freer life. Instead of caring for their parents, ‘the Israeli daughter’ was now able to seek employment and ‘emancipation’ (Bleich 2003). The dependence and special role of Filipinos in providing care and carrying out the highly gendered tasks of reproduction in the households of the Israeli elite was subject to the popular rhetoric of Filipino domestic workers: ‘What would happen if all the Filipinas decided to leave Israel?’ This was more than mere rhetoric, as Filipino community leaders publicly employed this narrative of dependence in order to argue for better working conditions and for permission to stay. Working for affluent or influential public figures accordingly served to assure Filipina domestic workers of the importance of their work. I would often find interviewees were proud of the high social position and achievements of their employers. Merliza, for example, was employed as the housekeeper of the mother of a well-known Israeli journalist and historian. When she mentioned the work arrangement during our interview, she also proudly presented several copies of his books which he had given to her. It was through her presence and the stories she had told him, Merliza was sure, that he had lately begun to write about the bad treatment of ‘foreign workers’ in Israel. Like Merliza, Marian showed me the books of two of her employers, as well as a stack of business cards and photographs which showed her employers with ‘important’ business partners, politicians and colleagues, and which were displayed in her home alongside pictures of family members. She was proud of the fact that most of her employers held doctorates and each worked in widely respected professions, for example as a judge, physician, university professor and psychiatrist. All of these people trusted her and gave

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her access to their homes at any time, as she made sure I had understood by holding up the large bundle of keys to her employers’ houses. As another Filipina live-out housekeeper, Nora, pointed out, whenever her employer was on vacation, she took her children to stay with her in the large suburban villa, rather than her own flat in a poor southern Tel Aviv neighbourhood, because she felt safer there. Her employer approved of this arrangement, which she too, interpreted as a sign of trust and closeness. Moreover, having access to the sphere of employers’ private homes, Filipina domestic workers knew, if not ‘everything’, then at least a great deal about their employers’ lives. As has been pointed out above, employers often confided in domestic workers. Furthermore, live-in carers in particular learned the most intimate things by just ‘being around’: about employers’ illnesses and emotional pains, habits not made public or secret love affairs. While domestic workers frequently said they preferred not to get involved in employers’ family affairs but to keep their privacy, the ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ things of Israeli private homes were a frequent topic of conversation among Filipinos. Throughout their storytelling sessions, the failings, secrets or strange behaviour of prominent employers, portrayed quite differently in public, were frequently exchanged and laughed about. This was particularly true if an employer was a high-ranking person and the work arrangement was tense. ‘During the day, he treats everybody as if he’s the big boss’, Romelyn told me and her Filipino flatmates about a wealthy and influential attorney, after an especially strenuous working week, ‘but at night, he wears a diaper so he does not pee the bed’. Rather than actually misusing their knowledge, Filipina domestic workers derived a certain feeling of power from the mere possibility that they could do so. ‘We know what Israel is really like’, a Filipina explained to me during one of these storytelling sessions; ‘we Filipinos know what it is like backstage’. As is made clear by the mental image of a general strike of Filipinos, Filipino domestic workers were very well aware of the fact that the reproductive tasks they performed for their affluent or influential (female) employers enabled the latter to do what they did. Yet, as Filipina interviewees pointed out, the power and influence derived from employers’ dependence on them went deeper than mere liberation from the reproductive tasks of the household. Neth, who was a nanny in hiding in Savyon, told me: You should know one thing: before, the Israelites didn’t eat rice. Only the Southeast Asian countries [did]. But now, they are rice-eaters already. Because of the Filipino maids. If you eat rice all the time your employer asks: ‘Why you eat this?’ So you say: ‘It’s good, it makes you strong’. So they want it also. We changed a lot [in Israel]. The children, I teach them [to eat Filipino food]. When their mother brings them to Eilat, they call me: ‘Where is the soya?’ […] And I talk to them in Tagalog. My [sic!] children here before, the ones I take care of, I’m teaching them Tagalog. We were the ones who also teach the Israelites English. [Pauses] I hope someday there will be a real open-mindedness and heart from the Israelis. They say we are the best care-givers in the world. They love us, especially the old persons.

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So I hope that in the future there will be a great process that they can see how we work – not only for one or two persons but for the big houses, big families. For example, Pnina Rosenblum [well-known Israeli businesswoman], they had two Filipinos working for them, husband and wife. The immigration [police] took them and it was in the TV. So they must open their mind and see what’s really the best, what’s the remedy of this. Because we aren’t doing something [wrong here in Israel]. We are really working hard. Families with three, four children. They could not manage without us. Cleaning, doing laundry, cooking, everything. And the Israeli [workers], when you hire them, they cannot do this. They will just enter [the workplace] and drink coffee, ‘shalom’, kakha [Hebrew, ‘hello’, like this].10

As Neth argues, by working in the confinement of Israeli private homes, Filipino domestic workers – especially those I called the hiding nannies – may be physically excluded from Israeli public visibility and space. Yet, they are actually changing the most basic cultural boundary markers of the society they are working in – food and language. By making the children they help to raise love Filipino food and speak Tagalog, they are doing so in a most fundamental way, yet due to their marginalized legal, economic and social status, from ‘below’ and ‘beneath’ public visibility. A further point frequently made by Filipino domestic workers in non-English speaking countries generally (cf. Lan 2003b) is that Filipinos assist some Israelis to master English, the global language of power. This narrative of a hidden power, typically employed by Neth, functions to restore dignity and social recognition which Filipinas’ social status as women, domestic workers and foreigners from an apparently poor country in a rich one often denies them. It is certainly no accident that this narrative was especially employed by those who worked in more affluent homes. The routine acts of seeing, touching and breathing in their employers’ material and emotional world of wealth – as Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001) has put it – led Filipina domestic workers to reflect on their own position of class and status. Filipina workers clearly preferred wealthy and privileged employers over less wealthy ones. Placement agencies for domestic work clearly understand this and advertize the social exclusivity of their Israeli clients. Marietta described how she strategically searched for an employer who was ‘wealthy,’ ‘educated’ and able to arrange a long-term work permit. She felt that these criteria were best met by diplomats and successfully searched for an American diplomat employer. Marietta emphasized that, before coming to Israel, she was employed as a housekeeper and nanny to the President of Abu Dhabi and had later worked for a Palestinian employer, who was the brother of Jordan’s Prime Minister, and their relatives in Ramallah (situated in the Palestinian West Bank, under Palestinian Authority rule since 1995). After these labour arrangements, and now that she was the leader of two important Filipino community organizations, she felt she could no longer work for ‘simple people’. Marietta was one of six female community leaders whom I interviewed, all of whom were employed in extremely prestigious neighbourhoods with wealthy families in Israel. The fact that Filipina workers who held positions of social prestige and power within

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the Filipino community in Israel were generally employed in elite households is indeed noteworthy. It would certainly be a simplification to say that employment in an elite household necessarily resulted in an elevation of status and power within the migrant community. Nevertheless, Emily’s story illustrates that employers’ social and economic power could indeed have a direct influence on that of their Filipino domestic workers, at least within the migrant community. Another example is the exclusive old people’s home where Anne and Avelina, discussed above, were among approximately forty Filipina carers employed by the inhabitants. The latter each paid enormous sums in order to spend their old age in surroundings that in many aspects resembled an expensive beach resort rather than an old people’s home. Situated beside the Mediterranean, the home housed a large library, swimming pools and a hotel-style lobby with pool tables and a piano. The Filipina carers within the home knew each other well, and whenever I visited, groups of them would sit together, chatting in the lobby or beside the beach, or hold large celebrations such as all-night farewell or birthday parties. Together with their employers, Filipino carers borrowed books from the large English-language section of the library, and attended Hebrew or dancing classes and concerts within the home. According to Avelina, Anne and their Filipino friends employed there, the Filipina workers were divided into two groups. Even though most Filipinos within the home were of either Ilocano or Pangasinan origin – two Filipino regional and language groups known to have a history of conflict and competition with each other – the two groups in the home were not divided along ethnic lines, but into the ‘plastic girls’ and the ‘simple ones’, as my acquaintances (who counted themselves among the ‘simple ones’), told me. According to them, the ‘plastic girls’ pretended they actually lived in the home rather than worked there. From numerous visits and chats with Filipina workers in the home, I learned that many women had taken out loans, not to remit the money to their families or pay back debts to agencies, as some reproachfully remarked, but in order to keep pace with other Filipina carers in ‘dressing up’. Within the home, competition over who was wearing the most fashionable and expensive jewellery, brand clothes and sunglasses had developed, which seemed to mirror processes that had already taken place among the Israeli residents of the home (and from which those who now called themselves ‘simple’ had at one point retreated). As Avelina remarked, Filipina domestic workers should ‘know their place’ and should not ‘imitate their employers’ as the plastic girls obviously did. Nevertheless, the home’s aura of wealth and exclusivity was apparently cherished by both factions of carers, and the ‘girls from the Mediterranean home’, as they were known among Filipina migrants employed in the area, were generally envied for their apparently luxurious lifestyle. To give a final example of the connection between the social statuses of Israeli employers’ and their Filipina domestic workers’, I return to the stories of Merliza and Neth. Ate Merly, as Merliza was known among Filipinos in Israel, came from a poor family and had been forced to start work in a

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factory at the age of fifteen.11 Merliza went to work abroad at a young age, first to Cyprus, then to Israel. In Israel, Merliza became the public relations officer of the Manila Tel Aviv magazine and as such appeared in nearly every issue in photographs that showed her in various exclusive settings. These photographs were taken in the private home of her employer, a foreign ambassador in Israel. Merliza’s career in the migrant community had started when she made an offer to host the daughter of the Philippine Vice President in her workplace while her employer was away on business. The daughter, a Filipino show-biz star and journalist for the Philippine ABS-CBN news channel, who had come to Israel in order to do a TV reporft on Filipina domestic workers suffering from the Middle East conflict, happily accepted the offer to stay in the ambassador’s home with Merliza. During that stay in Israel, Merliza functioned as her informant and later published an interview with her host in the Manila Tel Aviv magazine. Subsequently, Merliza was asked to conduct interviews for the magazine whenever prominent guests from the Philippines arrived (cf. Bloch 2005). Like many of these interviews, my own interview with Merliza took place in the ambassador’s home. While answering my questions, in her employer’s absence, Merliza appeared as the manager of the house, answering the phone, ordering around the Israeli gardener in Hebrew and offering drinks to the visiting anthropologist. As for Merliza, for Neth being a domestic worker in a wealthy household in Israel meant having access to ‘high society’. Among her former employers were, so she proudly told me, the ‘L[…] family from the diamond centre, Israel’s second biggest attorney of law and the M[…] family, the second richest millionaire in Israel before’. Neth managed to persuade these employers to play active roles in the Filipino migrant community. As the former president of the FFCI and later president of the largest group of Filipino Catholics in Israel, Neth collected large donations from her employers for community projects, and in turn recruited them to be present at large celebrations and parties within the Filipino community. The translation of employers’ status into the domestic workers’ own is hardly exclusive to Filipinos in Israel, but has been described for other contexts as well. Elmhirst (1999) describes how female domestic workers from the Third World countryside are considered to become ‘modernized’ through their employment in wealthy urban homes. In a similar fashion, many Ecuadorian female domestic workers in ‘white’ urban, middle-class households apparently regard their employment as a (cultural) ‘whitening’ (Radcliffe 1999). Filipina domestic workers’ narratives of the ‘rich and powerful’ they work for are nevertheless specific, in that they have to be seen in the context of Southeast Asian concepts of power. As Benedict Anderson (1972) has pointed out, these are based on the emanation of power in concentric circles of intimacy, rather than on direct forms of power, such as force. According to this logic, the closer one is to the powerful and the more intimate one is with them, the more their power will affect one’s own status. The emphasis of Filipina domestic workers’ on their closeness to and intimacy with Israeli

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elite families who employed them points in the same direction. While in general, Filipina domestic workers in the private homes of the more affluent neither earned more nor were less subjected to the multiple exclusions of Israeli belonging than other Filipina workers, they nevertheless profited in many regards from their employers’ wealth and status, not least because it often led to an increase in prestige in their own social networks. Finally, the claim that the country’s elite was partially dependent on one’s labour, commonly denigrated as dirty, cheap and unprofessional, functioned to restore dignity and respect and served as a powerful tool for demanding rights, compassion and belonging.

Conclusion Even though contract workers from Eastern Europe (Romania, Russia, Ukraine), India, Sri Lanka and Nepal were also recruited to work in private care during the time my field research took place (i.e. between 2003 and 2005), Filipinos have long since become the prototypical carers in Israel. The image of an elderly person resting on a Filipina’s elbow, as well as Israeli parks where the elderly sit in one corner chatting and their Filipina carers in another, has become a recurrent motif in Israeli films and the arts. An entire ‘language of compassion’, Adi Efrat (2006) argues, has developed around the hiring of migrant care workers, which allows speakers to portray the migrant care regime as an act of charity rather than describe it in a language of social rights. As has been shown with regard to numerous other ‘Western’ states, in Israel too a ‘Filipina’ connotes a female domestic care worker. Here, the period before Filipinos were employed has apparently become close to unimaginable: when, in February 2005, the parliamentary committee on ‘foreign workers’ discussed replacing Filipino carers with Israelis, its chairman Ran Cohen posed a question which remained unanswered: ‘Who at all was taking care of the elderly and disabled before the foreigners arrived?’12 Domestic work involves great dangers, structural abuse and exploitation for those Filipina women who engage in it. Filipina domestic workers in Israel have been found to suffer from underpayment, non-payment of social benefits, passport confiscation, sexual abuse, and frequently dehumanizing psychological abuse and humiliation. Nevertheless, migrant women are not mere passive victims but have developed collective knowledge and strategies to fight abuse and exploitation. Given their precarious position as – in some cases illegalized – migrant, female domestic workers, these strategies generally emphasize the silent or indirect forms of resistance, the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985) so to speak. Most importantly, carers are leaving abusive employers and within labour arrangements generally prefer personal treatment, stressing the need for patience, love and compromise in caring work. As I have pointed out, caring domestic work especially is to a great extent bound up with complex emotions and – in a situation typically of

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spatial density and continuous presence – with relational intimacy between employers and domestic workers. Rather than simply being emotionally laden, domestic work is an affective form of labour that involves emotions on a personal level, but remains structurally unequal. Accordingly Filipina migrants can be deported within hours of the passing away of a beloved elderly person with whom they have spent years of their lives; they can be fired even though (or sometimes because) the children they took care of have come to regard them as their mothers; or they themselves can leave a workplace and thus deeply hurt the person they were taking care of. In order to protect themselves from family conflicts, jealousies and disappointments, Filipina migrants advocate a professional emotional distance, which they nevertheless find hard to maintain in practice. On the other hand, caring is narrated as a labour of love through which one can fulfil Christian cultural norms of pity for suffering, compassion and love that they imply. From a Filipino Christian viewpoint, to take care of needy Jews in Israel becomes an act which is agreeable to God, which follows in Jesus’s footsteps. As the care and domestic workers of the affluent and influential in Israel, Filipina domestic workers acquire an intimate picture of Israel ‘backstage’. The direct and bodily confrontation with wealth in many of their employers’ homes painfully signifies class divisions and global inequalities for Filipina domestic workers, but sometimes also results in advantages and amenities. The widely shared stories of influential employers writing Filipina migrants into their will or turning them into business partners, adopting them or speaking out on their behalf at least hints at the possibility that Filipina domestic workers can profit from employers’ wealth and power. Power is seen to emanate and be negotiated rather than be enforced. Like the ambivalent relationship between the colonized and the colonizing, which Homi Bhabha has attempted to grasp with his notion of a ‘third space’ of resistance (1994: 248), Filipina domestic workers’ practices with regard to wealthy employers move between mimicry and mockery of the ‘master’/’mistress’. The apparent dependence of Israel’s economic, political and cultural elite on the physical, cheap and ‘dirty’ labour of Filipino domestic workers does have an empowering aspect, at least from the emic point of view. Moreover, it affords Filipinos an argument for better working conditions and the compassionate claim towards belonging and more extensive rights. According to their own narrative, Filipina domestic workers within Israeli homes of the rich and powerful change Israel from within, yet – due to their subordinated position – they do so below and beneath public visibility.

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3.1. Filipina caregivers shopping on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street while their elderly employers watch, January 2009. (Gil Tevet)

3.2. Origami paper swan crafted by a Filipina domestic worker during her work as a carer with an elderly man in Israel; as one of numerous paper swans that now adorn Israeli dining rooms, government offices and coffeehouse counters all over the country, it attests to the long and often tedious working hours of Filipina carers, August 2007. (Claudia Liebelt)

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Notes 1. In the majority of cases, the employers were pensioners found to be in need of care by the authorities: out of the 27,763 work permits used for the importation and employment of overseas carers between 2003 and February 2005, 89.2 per cent were given out to pensioners, in contrast to 8.4 per cent to disabled persons and 2.4 per cent to children found in need of a live-in carer (Protocol of the parliamentary meeting of the ‘Foreign Workers’ Committee’ on foreign carers, 22 February 2005). By 2008, the number of permits given to migrant care workers [Hebrew, ‘ovdei si’ud’] had risen to 52,000 (Sinai 2008). 2. Interview with one of the home’s social workers on 17 February 2005. According to several Filipina carers, residents had to provide a very high security payment to be accepted as residents. 3. Another case reported was that of a female Israeli employer, who first joined her Filipina live-in carer in a journey to the Philippines, then invited her to a trip around the world and upon her death left a substantial amount of money to her. Unfortunately, it was not clear whether or not the Filipina would be deported before she could enter into her heritage (cf. Diouf 2005). 4. Interview with Nene, 12 June 2005. 5. Interview with Angel, 2 September 2005. The following quotations from Angel are also taken from this interview. 6. Interview with Pat, 26 August 2005. 7. The need to prepare and train Filipino carers working with Shoah survivors is hardly addressed by Israeli institutions. The only institution that came to my attention in this regard is Melabev, a non-profit NGO for the elderly in Jerusalem, which organizes regular courses for migrant carers working with Shoah survivors (see Melabev’s website at http://www.melabev.org; retrieved 5 August 2007). 8. A rather derogatory term for non-Jews, in the singular form goy or goya (for females). 9. Quoted from the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs’ Press Release, 22 March 2005. 10. Interview with Neth, 29 May 2005. 11. Ate is Tagalog for ‘elder sister’; it is used as a polite form of respect towards female persons older than oneself. 12. See the protocol of the parliamentary committee meeting on 22 February 2005, published on the Knesset website at http://www.knesset.gov.il/committees/heb/ reports.asp (retrieved 22 November 2009).

Chapter 4 On Weekends, Together: The Making and Unmaking of a Filipino Community

In Maid to Order in Hong Kong (1997: 11), Constable reviews the sociological and anthropological literature on migrant domestic labour, and comes to the conclusion that most studies emphasize the oppression and passivity of domestic workers. This naturally has a lot to do with the structuring of domestic work itself: the apparent containment of domestic workers in private homes, its public invisibility and the status of migrant workers as – often illegalized – foreigners who are at least initially ignorant of their destination country’s labour laws, legal processes and institutions for political action or public outreach; all of these factors make it extremely difficult for migrants to socialize, to organize themselves for better employment and living conditions, or indeed reach a wider public for support. More recent research nevertheless showed that female migrant domestic workers do make sometimes enormous efforts to organize and improve their work and general living conditions in the diaspora. For example, Bridget Anderson (2001) has traced the story of domestic workers’ self-organization into a workers’ centre in London, tellingly called Kalaya’an (Tagalog, ‘independence’). Similar processes have been described by HondagneuSotelo (2001: 210ff.) with regard to Latina immigrants organized into the Los Angeles Domestic Workers’ Association and by Constable (1997) for Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. Indeed, as is clear from my account, migrant domestic workers are far from isolated monads, but actively strive to find companionship and friendships, to organize themselves in order to achieve better life circumstances in the diaspora and to appropriate public spaces and debates. Moreover, and in general agreement with the experiences of (im)migrants in other localities, the narrative of ‘community’ is an extremely important one in Filipinos’ magazines, celebrations and my own interviews

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with individual migrants. Following their own narrative, this chapter focuses on Filipinos’ making of community in (and with regard to) Israel. The notion and role of community in relation to ethnic minority, immigrant and diaspora politics has been hotly debated, especially within British academia (cf. Baumann 1996; Gilroy 1982; Werbner and Modood 1997; Werbner and Anwar 1991). As a term that can be traced to Tönnies’ (1887) distinction between society (Gesellschaft) and community (Gemeinschaft), it implies social cohesion, thus potentially essentializing ‘organic’ solidarity among immigrants, and is therefore politically contested and conceptually problematic. Gilroy (1982), however, explicitly challenges culturalist approaches to the study of immigrant groups and argues for the salience of ‘community’ as a notion in the analysis of minority groups, a locus of cultural resistance to the hegemony of the wider society (ibid.: 285). Acknowledging that Gilroy hereby questions problematic interpretations of an assumed ethnic autonomy of immigrant communities as well as an ‘internal colonialism’ exercised towards them within industrialized states, Werbner (1991b) criticizes his ‘somewhat utopian picture of a unified “community”’ (ibid.: 114). Instead, she draws attention to the fact that ethnic communities are ‘imagined communities’, internally divided along the lines of class, centre–periphery relations, or ideology (Werbner 1991a: 20). Moreover, they are imagined by the state, ‘which must reify ethnic segments as perpetual communities in order to control conflict or allocate resources in an “equitable” manner’ (ibid.). Finally, they are also imagined by their leaders, who claim to represent the community and may evoke a ‘fiction of unity’. The task for ethnographic analysis is therefore to analyse the processes which underlie the emergence of local migrant communities and document the uses of ‘community’ by various social actors. Accordingly, I shall show that the Filipino community in Israel is a rather heterogeneous social group, and draw attention to the fact that the phrase was applied to differing, at times competing yet overlapping, collectivities of migrants in Israel. As will become clear, the differences between the British and Israeli cases stand out clearly. So while Werbner (1991a) describes fairly predictable, developmental processes of ethnic associations in Britain ‘from informal to formal, voluntary to professional, local to national’ (1991a: 23), these shifts could hardly take place in Israel, because here Filipinos remain excluded from legal citizenship and are temporalized in their presence. Writing about a similarly exclusive context of Filipino domestic workers in Rome, Rhazel Salazar Parreñas focusses on the internal processes within what she describes as a segregated migrant community of non-belonging (2001a: 197ff.). While she asserts that belonging and support can also be found among Filipinos in Rome, co-ethnic exploitation, mistrust and feelings of dislocation and non-belonging are analysed as the dominant features of Filipinos’ collective structures there. She attributes this to the fact that migrants are segregated from the dominant Italian society through the isolating characteristics of domestic work and widespread xenophobia (ibid.: 201).

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I shall demonstrate how Filipinos’ organization in Israel similarly entails not only the positive aspects of mutual support and friendship, but also social control, the desires of migrants to make money and a general mistrust between fellow nationals or kababayan. Rather than merely organizing themselves into multiple, internally divided collectivities, however, Filipino migrants also attempt to collectively overcome their exclusions in Israel. These struggles are severely constrained by the fact that the Israeli state hardly recognizes Filipinos as a community, not even as a ‘problematic’ one.

Filipino Veteran Stories: Community from Unity to Anonymity The collective migration of Filipino migrant workers to Israel started in the late 1970s, after individual Filipinos entered the country apparently as wives or employees of foreign or Israeli diplomats and businessmen. The collective structures of Filipino migrants in Israel are therefore comparatively recent and in constant flux, due to the character of Israel as a country of transit rather than prolonged residence for Filipinos. Of the forty-nine Filipino migrants interviewed for this book, only eight entered Israel prior to 1990. Of these exclusively female interviewees, one (Marylinn) followed her Israeli husband, two (Neth and Liza) arrived within an organized group from the Philippines via Egypt, and five (Marian, Novelita, Amy, Nora and Anne) migrated individually but followed a female relative (4) or close friend (1) into the country. Each of these women told me her own version of the evolution of a Filipino community in Israel. Several of them claimed that the person they had followed into the country was actually ‘the first Filipina’ in Israel. Novelita, who came to Israel in 1981, following an aunt who had entered the country from Hong Kong, told me: She [the aunt] came here 1972. She was the first Filipina who came to Israel to work. She told me she came here because she used to work in Hong Kong and she met her boss in Hong Kong. And then the boss [left to Israel and] invited her to come here to visit, as a tourist, and maybe work here. Her family [the employers] has money, they are from South Africa. She entered as a tourist, but then she came to like the family, and she stayed to work for them. Then the Israelis saw how she worked, how she cleaned the house, how she cooked for the family. This couple has five children and she did everything for them. So the Israelis start to see how she worked and saw they could become king and queen. So they ask my auntie if she can help them to bring some people.1

Novelita then proceeded to relate how her aunt ‘assisted’ dozens of people from her Visayan home region to come to Israel in order to work for her employers’ friends, family members and acquaintances. She described the process of community establishment as a highly structured flow triggered by an explicit demand for Filipino labour from the Israeli side (who realized that they could become ‘king and queen’ within this arrangement) and the

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initiative of a single enterprising Filipina, in whose genealogical line Novelita places herself. Both elements were recurrent themes in Filipinos’ founding stories of ‘the community’ in Israel. Another, rather different and more epic founding narrative was recounted by Nora, who came to Israel in 1985. Nora said she had heard the story from her mother, who entered Israel five years before her. According to Nora, the Filipino community evolved in the late 1970s out of a core of four Filipina women, who had each married Israelis prior to their move: ‘There was one Filipina in each corner of the country. One in the west, in Tel Aviv, one in the north, in Haifa, one in the east, in Jerusalem, and the fourth in the south, living in Beer Sheva. They started to bring their kababayan over to Israel. That’s how the community started’.2 In this story of how Filipinas came to Israel in large numbers, a founding myth is elaborated, with the dispersal of the founders to the four cardinal points. It is noteworthy that, contrary to Novelita’s explanation, the first Filipinas in Nora’s story are not domestic workers, but the wives of Israeli citizens. As in all the founding stories told by early migrants, the initial arrival of Filipinos in Israel is generally attributed to women who entered the country individually and played an active part in making the community, largely by recruiting kababayans from among their own social networks. Since the number of Filipinos in Israel was relatively small until the late 1990s, the spaces in which one could meet fellow citizens were limited. Those migrants who had entered the country individually attributed great significance to the story of how they actually met their ‘first Filipina’ in Israel. Marylinn, who entered as the wife of an Israeli citizen in 1983, told me: ‘For long, I thought I was the only Filipina in the country. I didn’t meet anybody until after eight months.’3 Marylinn finally got into touch with fellow Filipinos through the Philippines Embassy, whose officials introduced her to other women married to Israelis. Nevertheless, even those who entered Israel as part of a group or followed family members into the country recalled their feelings of isolation and the great efforts they made to meet and make friends with fellow citizens during their first years. Marian, who came to Tel Aviv in 1979, remembered that ‘back then, when you would recognize another Filipina in the street, you start to smile, talk to each other or even invite her over, without knowing her. During those days, all Filipinos in Israel were like one big family, all of us, we were like sisters and brothers’.4 According to early Filipino migrants, a communal life developed around three major sites, namely Filipinos’ weekend accommodations, shopping facilities, and existing Catholic churches. During the early days of the migrant community, the common requirements for renting apartments in Israel, including a legal residence status, a large amount of (cash) security and a bank account, were difficult for Filipinos to organize, and only a few landlords were ready to let apartments to them. Some Filipinos, who managed to meet the requirements and rent an apartment, often made a profitable business out of renting beds to ‘day-offers’ during their day away from employers’ homes.

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Novelita, who entered Israel in 1985, was one of these privileged apartment-holders. Rather typically, she did so in southern Tel Aviv – which continued to be a major area of migrants’ residence in the city during my field research almost twenty years later – due to the availability of housing space and cheap rent. Similar to the arrangements described by Parreñas for Rome (2001a: 221ff.), Novelita would function as a ‘host’ for over a dozen ‘guests’ during weekends, who paid her in dollars for this service, which also included the preparation of food. Another living arrangement was recalled by Marian. Throughout Marian’s first years in Israel, she rented a room in a Tel Aviv pension for her weekly day and night off. In this low-budget pension situated on the corner of King David and Frishman Streets downtown, each of the six dorms was rented out to Filipinos. Within one room, Marian recalled, up to twenty live-in domestic workers were accommodated during their days off on Saturdays and Sundays. According to her, there was a time in the early 1980s when ‘practically every Filipino in Tel Aviv lived there. […] We go to church and once in a while we went to have barbecues in the park, up to forty people. We had a good unity then.’ In 1990, Marian said, the pension closed down after most of the Filipino tenants moved out because they were increasingly harassed by Israeli men in search of sexually available Filipinas. By that time, it had become much cheaper and easier for Filipino migrants to rent apartments on their own. Secondly, existing Catholic churches were central spaces of sociality for early Filipino migrants. Within Israel, there were large Roman Catholic churches in many places where Filipinos were employed, such as Haifa, Jerusalem and Jaffa, the former Palestinian port city which had become a south Tel Aviv quasi-suburb (cf. Levine 2005). Most important among these, the two large Roman Catholic parishes of Jaffa – St Anthony and St Peter – were soon serving the vast majority of Filipino Catholics in Israel and functioned as a magnet for Filipinos in the entire coastal area. As was pointed out by numerous early migrants, the role of these two churches in the making of a community can hardly be overestimated. Even non-Catholics told me that they attended these churches, because they were the places to meet kababayan. Within these churches, also attended by local Arab Catholics, international visitors, as well as Christian labour migrants from West Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, Filipinos soon formed their own lay groups and organized their own events, such as an annual fiesta of San Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino to be elevated to sainthood. As Anne, who came to Israel in 1989, remembers, the two Jaffa churches were where ‘everybody’ met on Saturday nights: ‘Now you have discos, the takana merkazit [Hebrew, ‘central (bus) station’]. But before, it was only the church’.5 Since until at least the early 1990s Filipino migrants did not usually have mobile phones and few employers allowed domestic workers to use their landline phones, communication between them took place largely as face-to-face encounters before and after church services. It was (and, to a certain extent still is) within these churches and their courtyards that weekend tours were organized,

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information exchanged, newcomers introduced, job referrals exchanged, and Filipino food or products sold. Other important meeting places for Filipino domestic workers in the Tel Aviv region during the early days of the migrant community in Israel included specific places of consumption and transportation in the city, such as bus stops (where workers met on their way between workplaces or weekend apartments), shops catering to migrants’ needs in southern Tel Aviv, and allegedly the most important place for bargain shopping in Tel Aviv for Filipinos during that time, the Carmel open air market (Shuk HaCarmel). Situated in southern Tel Aviv, the area around the Carmel market, with its hundreds of small foodstalls, noise, smells and vibrant atmosphere, continued to be a favoured shopping destination for Filipinos who came to Tel Aviv for weekends even during the time of my field research. As Filipinos frequently told me, the owners of the market’s foodstalls reacted quickly to the demands of their new clients and soon stocked products like soya beans and ginger. The first store selling Southeast Asian food products was opened in a side street of the market in 1993. Named Mizrah-Ma’arav (Hebrew, ‘East-West’), the store was popular among Filipino, Thai and Chinese labour migrants, and – due to its chaotic interior – affectionately nicknamed the Balagan Store.6 Moreover, the area surrounding the market soon became one of the most popular areas for renting weekend apartments, especially in the early years of Filipino employment in Israel, due to its proximity to the market as well as good connections with the public transport system. Filipina migrant women who came to Israel prior to about 1990 – the ‘veterans’ as they jokingly called themselves, or the ‘pioneers’ as they were approvingly called by other Filipinos – often remembered their first years in Israel in a nostalgic and romantic way, as the ‘good old days’ of the migrant community. In interviews, terms like ‘unity’ and ‘good communications’ were used in order to describe the sense of solidarity which apparently prevailed among Filipinos then. This was contrasted with the present situation, which was described in terms of anomie and individualization. Filipina veterans in Israel depicted the development of the Filipino community as a process from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or from ‘unity’ to ‘anonymity’. Increasing Filipino gossip (Tagalog tsismis) was the most commonly quoted manifestation of this change. The reasons for this change were attributed to several structural causes. First of all, there was the increased size of the community, which grew from a few hundred Filipinos during the 1980s to tens of thousands in the late 1990s, when the official recruitment policy started and agencies began recruiting Filipino carers in large numbers. The increased size of the community was seen to result in processes of both diversification and individualization: while even the non-Catholic Filipinos in the larger Tel Aviv area had once met in one of the two existing Catholic churches in Jaffa, Filipinos soon established their own religious groups, including numerous independent evangelical churches. As more and more succeeded in renting apartments of their own, larger collective living arrangements like the boarding-house mentioned by

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Marian fell increasingly out of use. When mobile phones spread in the mid1990s – and, as Filipino early migrants proudly told me, they were among the first to use mobile phones extensively in Israel – the need to meet ‘everybody’ personally in one principal meeting place became less acute. Another reason given for the deterioration of what was described as community resonates with a common conservative and pessimistic Israeli discourse about the general decline of Israeli society in the 1980s as a result of economic liberalization, and the mass immigration (of non-Jews) from the former Soviet Union (cf. Shafir and Peled 2002: 308). As a consequence Filipinos shared many prejudices with Israeli employers or neighbours regarding the new ‘Russian’ immigrants who entered the country after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989. At least initially, these immigrants competed with Filipinos in the Israeli labour market and the low-budget rental market in southern Tel Aviv. Dislike of the ‘Russians’, who were granted Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, including numerous social, legal and political rights from which Filipinos continued to be excluded, was widespread, especially among early migrants. The grievances were varied: the ‘Russians’ not only turned up in the Christian churches attended by Filipinos (thus making it clear that they had lied about their Jewishness), but they also brought both criminality and a sense of ruthless profit-making, previously unheard of, to southern Tel Aviv. According to these stereotypes, as both the victims of this process and through Filipinos’ involvement in ‘Russian’ activities, the Filipino community and southern Tel Aviv were perceived to have changed for the worse during the 1990s. Moreover, Filipina interviewees reasoned, the social and ethnic origin of Filipino newcomers was different from that of the early migrants. This argument was tied to a narrative of increased ‘shamelessness’ among Filipinos in Israel, a grave accusation in the Filipino context, where shame has been analysed as a central cultural concept (cf. Rafael 2000). Filipino interviewees attributed shamelessness (Tagalog walang hiya) within the migrant community to two practices, namely sexual shamelessness of Filipinas who flirted, went out with or committed adultery with non-Filipino boyfriends, and secondly, the perceived economic shamelessness of those who made a profit out of kababayan instead of acting according to the expected values of solidarity, mutual help and support. As mentioned above, early migrants stated that a friend or relative was one of, or even the first Filipina in Israel to play a major role in subsequently recruiting Filipinas from her home region. As follows, it was often stated that first the ‘good’ Filipinas from one’s home region arrived, while later on, when Filipinas from other regions started to recruit from their own social networks, the ‘shameless’ ones from other regions entered Israel. However, there was one narrative on which all early migrants, irrespective of their regional background, concurred: that while originally, Filipina migrants came mainly from the provinces, those who later created problems within the community were from urban areas, especially the capital Manila. Early migrants generally reproached the ‘Manila girls’ – who were described as young women with lax morals and little discipline – for going abroad in

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order to enjoy life, and spending all their money on leisure activities in Israel, rather than suffering from the separation from their families and sending large sums of remittances, as they themselves had done. As allegedly spoiled young urbanites, the ‘Manila girls’ were commonly held responsible for the fact that anomie came to prevail. Needless to say, the popular discourse on the ‘Manila girls’ was full of contradictions and telling inconsistencies. Finally, early migrants attributed changes within the Filipino community to structural changes in the Israeli migration regime. The most important change mentioned in this regard was the mass deportation policy which badly affected Filipinos’ capability to congregate publicly, organize themselves and voice collective protest. By the time of my field research, the deportation regime had created a situation in which it was increasingly difficult for Filipinos to stay in Israel for longer than a period of about four years. The deportations in particular affected those who had been in Israel for many years, many of whom had ‘lost’ their legal status. Moreover, women from earlier waves of migration mentioned an increasingly institutionalized and state-regulated migration process that created more obedient and docile workers than they themselves had been. Nora stated to this affect: The Filipinos that come here now, they behave differently, not like us then. They come legally and they only go out on Shabbat [Hebrew, ‘Saturday’] so they won’t lose their visa and become illegal. Then, they paid so much money to come here, so they want to save as much as possible. I only talk to them on the bus sometimes. And then you see them in church, when they talk to you, they look tired, they just work, work, work and send their money.7

The image of the Filipina newcomers, as portrayed by Nora, strongly contradicts that of Filipina newcomers as ‘Manila girls’. Rather than enjoying themselves in Israel, these newcomers seem to embody the perfect carer envisioned by both Philippine and Israeli state policies of migration: instead of creating a home for themselves in Israel, they see their stay as temporary, and try to earn as much money as they can within the shortest time possible. Rather than spending this money during their weekends in Tel Aviv, they save and remit it. Nora’s analysis quoted above resonates with my own observation that after the launching of the large-scale deportation policy, migrants seemed to accept the plan designed for them by the state more closely than before. As can be imagined, this process entailed dramatic changes for the collective life of Filipina migrants in Israel. The narratives of the Filipinas who came to Israel during the early waves of migration should therefore be seen in the light of this policy change. They were voiced by the few women who had managed to remain in Israel for a prolonged period of time. Secondly, they have to be seen against the background of the life stories of women who were in their twenties or thirties when they arrived in Israel, and were in their late forties or fifties by the time I interviewed them. Accordingly, early migrants like Amy and Marian told me that most of the Filipinos with whom they had formed a closely-knit circle of friends during the 1980s had left Israel

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for apparently ‘greener pastures’ during the 1990s in order to work in Canada, the United Kingdom or the United States, or had been forced to go back to the Philippines. During discussions of the ‘better times’, nostalgia intermingled with the feeling of being ‘left over’ in Israel. While Amy remained in Israel because she married a Thai who had become illegalized in the country just like herself and the two saw no possibility of living legally anywhere else, Marian, who had legalized her stay by getting married to an Israeli (who subsequently died), stayed so that her daughter would be able to finish high school in Israel. Even though both women had clearly settled in Israel by the time I met them, they talked about their ongoing stay in terms of ambivalence and reported feelings of exclusion and alienation, not only from the wider Israeli society, but also from the Filipino community. Most early migrants stated that they had actively withdrawn from social activities and community life, not least because they feared other migrants’ jealousy for managing to legalize their stay or otherwise remain in the country. Some women said they had been denounced by kababayan for not being deported because they were actually working as police informers. In this climate of mutual mistrust, fear and the actual threat of deportation, the ‘veterans’ – just like other Filipino migrants in Israel – preferred to stick to each other, rather than mingle and become too deeply involved with what they called the community. At the same time, every single one of eight early migrant interviewees had taken an active part in shaping Filipinos’ communal life in Israel. Amy, for example, became a Catholic Church activist soon after her arrival in the country. By the time I met her in 2005, she held a high-ranking position in one Filipino lay group that had existed for more than twenty years in the St Anthony’s Catholic Church parish in Jaffa. During her first years in Israel, she had been involved alongside Marian with the social activities of the Philippines Embassy, frequently invited the embassy staff, community leaders and delegations from the Philippines to her own private home, and helped to organize events such as the Philippine Independence Day celebrations. Like Amy, Anne was an active church member in the early 1990s and had long been the leader of a regional association formed by Filipinos from the Tagalog-speaking region. By the time I met her, this regional association had dissolved and Anne was now active in the ‘Circle of Friends’ of the local Manila Tel Aviv magazine. As such, she helped to organize events, advised fellow Filipinos on their rights and regularly volunteered to publish articles and poems in the magazines. Neth had long been an active president of the Federation of Filipino Communities in Israel (FFCI). Moreover, she held the presidency of the Filipino Catholic group ‘Couples for Christ’ in Israel. Another veteran and FFCI member was Liza, who had come to Israel in 1983 and had been a founding member of UPIMA, a union of Filipino domestic workers in Israel. Not least due to her close friendship with the Paper Dolls, a Filipino drag dancing group, Liza had emerged as a wellknown figure among Filipinos in Israel; the Paper Dolls are the main protagonists of an award-winning documentary of the same name that won fame throughout Israel and beyond. Marylinn and Novelita had both

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become business women in their own right and had acted as agents for many years, recruiting numerous Filipinos to work in Israel. Furthermore, due to their legal status based on their marriages to Israeli citizens, both were able to engage legally in non-domestic work and in 2005 were employed in travel agencies that specialized in Southeast Asia. In addition, Marylinn had founded and for many years chaired a regional association for migrants from the Philippine Mountain Province. Novelita, on the other hand, acted as a volunteer for an Israeli workers’ rights group and spent hours each weekend accompanying Filipinos to government offices, hospitals and agencies. Finally, Nora was very much preoccupied with her own personal struggle in fighting for her right to stay in Israel by the time I met her in 2005. In the late 1980s, Nora had married George, a Ghanaian, who like her had become illegalized in Israel. With the threat of deportation hanging over their heads, Nora and George succeeded in staying in the country due to deportation halt orders, the outcome of legal interventions by lawyers and several Israeli NGOs, as well as Nora’s own courageous public activity: Nora was constantly busy giving interviews to Israeli journalists, participating in events for the legalization of migrants and, alongside Israeli activists, had even visited the Israeli parliament in order to lobby on the matter. This brief outline of the collective commitment of early migrant women underlines both their considerable engagement in the making of collectivities and for sociality more generally, as well as the large variety of Filipinos’ communal organizations. During the course of their long stays in Israel, each of them became a widely respected elder, known for ‘knowing the ropes’ in Israel. While they had invested considerable time and energy not only in making a life for themselves in Israel, but also in forming and strengthening Filipinos’ collective power in the country, against the background of continuing deportations from Israel they were full of despair over their achievements. The dislocation of early migrants from both Filipinos’ social networks and spaces and wider Israeli society sometimes took very concrete forms: two of eight veteran interviewees – Liza and Neth – were deported from Israel in the course of my field research. Three others – Nora, Amy, and Anne – continued to suffer from a precarious legal status, which they feared could result in their imminent deportation. Several of the organizations that these women had helped to establish – among them the Filipino labour union UPIMA, arguably the most openly ‘political’ institution of Filipinos’ collective action in Israel – had ceased to exist by the time I started my research, as a result of the deportation policy. The rapid deportation of numerous Filipinos, who both verbally and practically challenged Israeli migration policy, was perceived by many as a targeted mission to dissolve their structures of self-organization. To sum up, the stories of early Filipino migrants to Israel illustrate how they managed to appropriate spaces of their own, organize themselves collectively and form a community in Israel. They also highlight the considerable changes that have occurred within the collective spaces and networks of Filipinos in Israel.

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In a situation of increased exclusion, Filipinos’ claims of belonging often took on religious undertones. Among many religious activists, Yoseff, FFCI official and member of an independent Filipino Baptist church in southern Tel Aviv, regularly attended events organized against the deportations and more than once spoke at large public discussions as a representative of the Filipino community. Yoseff believed that Filipino Christians were an integral part of the ‘Holy Land’, and, by devoting their lives to caring for the needy of the country, should be granted all the possible support of the state so they could stay as long as they wanted. In one of the discussion sessions in which Yoseff sat on the podium, which I attended in September 2003, he wore a tie that prominently displayed the Star of David and had a note pinned to the back of his shirt depicting a verse from the Bible in Hebrew: ‘You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 20, 22). Both before and after the event, Yoseff distributed copies of the verse to other participants of the meeting and asked them to attach them to their clothing.8 In a similar tone, most evangelical church leaders proclaimed that Filipinos were the ‘Jews of Today’ and had a mission to fulfil in the ‘Holy Land’ (cf. Liebelt 2008). Reminding Israeli Jews of their moral responsibility as a people chosen by God, many Christian Filipino carers regarded themselves as being at the vanguard of spiritual renewal in Israel. The common culturally and religiously infused claims to and identification with Jewish history and suffering have to be viewed as both political demands for inclusion and affective appeals for compassion. Subsequently, Filipino organizations left much of their more openly political discussions and action to their embassy. The establishment of the Federation of Filipino Communities in Israel (FFCI), under the auspices of the Philippines Embassy in 2002, should be seen against this background.

Performing Unity, Staging Nationalism and Choosing the Ideal Filipina: The Role of the Philippine Embassy and the Celebration of Philippine Independence in Israel State bodies like the Philippine embassies actively encourage Filipino migrants’ continuing identification with and contribution to the nation state, most importantly in their sending cash remittances. The Philippine state’s policies towards Filipinos outside the nation state have been described as strategically selective in that they encourage emigrants to retain ties to the home country, but nevertheless aim to control these rather than ‘over-serving’ migrants’ demands (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004: 1024). Mainly because of political pressure and activism from Filipinos abroad, the legal and political position of the Filipino diaspora has been strengthened by the state in recent years.9 This section examines the politics of diaspora and Philippine transborder nationalism in the specific locale of Israel. In contrast to much of the literature on so-called ‘long

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distance nationalism’ (cf. Anderson 1998: 58ff.; Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001), it does so not by proclaiming a single transborder citizenry or political transnational social field, but by analysing the very specific context of Israel for diaspora politics. In Israel, the Philippines Embassy fostered the formation of an umbrella organization under its auspices and has subsequently encouraged, among other things, large-scale annual celebrations of the Philippines Independence Day. As the description of this celebration in 2005 will show, throughout the event Filipino domestic workers perform a highly visible form of ‘transborder’ nationalism. However, the alliance of domestic workers with Philippine government institutions remains ambivalent, as does the nationalism they publicly engage in. On Labour Day 2002, the committee comprising the first generation of officers of the newly founded Federation of Filipino Communities in Israel (FFCI) was sworn in at the Philippine embassy in Tel Aviv, following an initiative by the Philippine labour attaché. Composed of a multitude of migrants’ organizations, henceforth the FFCI claimed to represent the migrant community. This claim did not go undisputed. However, at a time when Filipinos’ structures of self-organization were dissolving due to ongoing deportations of its leaders, the alliance of Filipino domestic workers with the Philippines Embassy was a strategic one, not to be mistaken for uncritical support of Philippine government policies and state institutions. Due to the latters’ involvement in ‘corruption’ and ‘dirty politics’, many migrants continued to be reluctant to consult and/or work with the embassy, and generally preferred to distance themselves from it. The sixteen Filipino organizations that formed the FFCI in 2002 consisted of nine religious groups, four regional or hometown associations, and three secular groups, among them the union and the Philippine Basketball Association. Its officials were elected annually on Labor Day from among the leaders of its constituent organizations. As my attendance at numerous FFCI activities between December 2004 and September 2005 nevertheless showed, a rather loose network of individuals, only partially congruent with the elected team of officers, was engaged in the organization of FFCI activities and attended its irregular meetings in the Philippines Embassy. In the years that followed, the FFCI appeared in public mainly during the annual celebrations of Philippine national holidays. In a very characteristic way, the website of the Philippines Embassy accordingly described the Filipino community in Israel as ‘vibrant’ and ‘proud of their cultural heritage which they showcase in various activities marking important events in the Philippine social calendar’.10 One of these was the annual celebration of Philippines Independence Day. On a sunny Sunday, a week after the official date of the holiday, 12 June, Filipino community activists and embassy officials gathered outside a municipal community centre in Jaffa to celebrate Philippines Independence Day 2005. As in the Philippines, the celebration began with a parade. Three FFCI officers marched at the front, holding a Philippines national flag. Most participants were dressed formally, the men in the embroidered Filipino

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barong and the women in elegant dresses. The few remaining unionists sported jeans and T-shirts. Behind the flag-holders followed several hundred Filipinos, who belonged to twelve FFCI membership groups: the secular-nationalist Bayanihan (Tagalog, ‘Being a National’) group; the Bolinao hometown organization; the large Filipino-Catholic Couples for Christ movement; the El Shaddai Catholic charismatics; a lay group from the Jerusalem Catholic Good Shepherd congregation; the independent Philippine Iglesia ni Christo church group; the evangelical network In His Care; the large Filipino-evangelical movement Jesus Is Lord; a Filipino-Catholic lay group from Jaffa and another, from Jerusalem; the UPIMA union; the regional Visayas-Mindanao Association; and finally, the hometown group Villa de Bacolor. Some carried their own Philippine national flag and banner, and several groups had chosen a beauty queen, who led the group. At the end of the procession came the remaining FFCI officers alongside the Philippines Embassy staff, though the ambassador was absent due to a temporary recall to Manila. For most residents, this was a normal working day – it was still early in the morning – and there were only a few passersby. Apart from several Israeli businessmen, husbands of Filipina wives and the anthropologist, the parade hardly had an audience. After a circle around the municipal centre’s park, it returned to the stage in front of it, which was richly decorated in the Philippine national colours. Above it, the Philippine national flag fluttered, right next to a large banner of Western Union, the international money transfer company, which, together with the Israel Postal Authority, was the event’s main sponsor. The stage programme started with the Philippine national anthem sung by Miss El Shaddai, one of the elected beauty queens. She stood on top of the stage in a flag dress, a long robe of balloon silk in the colours of the Philippine national flag, embodying the Inang Bayan (Tagalog, ‘mother of the nation’). This was followed by speeches by the female president of the FFCI and the embassy’s General Consul, who also read out a message from the Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs. In her speech, the FFCI president reminded ‘all the Filipinos in Israel to always remember our duties as citizens of the Philippines’. She quoted the motto of this years’ celebration (‘Kalayaan: Isang Pilipinas! Bayan ko, mahal ko!’; Tagalog, ‘Independence: Philippines United! I’m the homeland, I’m the beloved’) and concluded by exclaiming: ‘Be proud, Filipinos!’ The secretary’s speech emphasized the accomplishments of the Philippine government, and the ministry’s ‘assiduous promotion of protection of the overseas Filipino workers’. Several groups performed ‘native dances’, according to the programme distributed among the participants, dressed in ‘tribal’ costumes, which they had been busy sewing during the past days. An especially lavish dance was performed by a group of evangelicals: three groups of dancers symbolized the three major Philippine island groups, dressed in typical costumes. They danced to the lyrics of the Tagalog Christian song The Philippines is for Christ. At the end of the performance, a woman in a flag dress and crown, with a sceptre in her hand, was lifted up on two bamboo sticks, while another

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dancer held up the national flag (Photograph 4.1). Vaguely reminiscent of nationalist sculptures that can be found on Philippine townsquares, as the evangelical choreographer later explained, this image showed how the Philippines could unite into a single nation of Christ by overcoming regional and religious differences and conflicts. In between performances, an Israeli employee of Western Union invoked the company’s support of the Filipino community. Girls in Western Union shirts and caps distributed Western Union shirts, caps, purses and pens as promotional gifts among a very responsive audience. The Roman Catholic priest, of Italian origin, from the nearby St Anthony parish invoked a prayer. Then the embassy’s General Consul introduced the Israeli guest speaker, a member of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality. As FFCI officers told me, they had invited the mayor, who apparently chose to send his coordinator of Foreign Affairs in his place. ‘You obviously do feel at home’, said the coordinator, addressing the crowd in English, ‘and we hope you continue to feel at home. We are grateful for your contribution of your community to Israeli society’. After his speech, the General Consul read out the official Day of Independence Message from the Philippine President, designed for OFW communities worldwide. In it, the president stated that ‘[w]e in the Philippines are proud of your collective achievements and grateful of the numerous philanthropic acts you have extended to our countrymen’. As the lunch break approached, Angel, the editor of a local Filipino magazine and the ‘MC’ of the day, stepped onto the stage and introduced the six female contestants of the Miss Independence beauty contest. These each represented community organizations and could be recognized by their large sashes bearing the names of their respective organizations, three regional or hometown associations and three religious groups. Each contestant had long, straight, black hair, which most of them wore loose. Four women (Miss Bayanihan, Miss Good Shepherd, Miss In His Care and Miss Bolinao) sported long white dresses with the puffed sleeves characteristic of formal Filipina attire. Miss El Shaddai still wore the flag dress. Miss Visayas-Mindanao was dressed in a tight green-silver dress off the shoulder, without question the most daring of the six. During the lunch break, a large buffet with Filipino dishes prepared by the community associations was served, complete with roasted pork skin, rice cakes and Halo-Halo, a Filipino dessert which was especially hard to come by in Israel. From now on, the event took on a more playful character, with parlour games, a raffle draw and the beauty pageant on the programme. The afternoon programme started off with a tug-of-war between the embassy staff on the one hand and the community leaders on the other. Avi, the Israeli owner of the Maharlinka travel agency – commonly recognized by Filipinos as a truly Filipino shop on the Tel Aviv central bus station’s so-called Manila Avenue – participated on the side of the community. The tug-of-war was won by the embassy staff (Photograph 4.2). ‘Of course we had to let them win’, a FFCI officer later laughingly commented to me. After the game, the winners were asked to dance to the sound of electronic disco music. They did so at

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first reluctantly, then in good humour, in front of a cheering crowd. Another highlight of the afternoon programme was the raffle draw. The first prize was a flight ticket to the Philippines, the second one to Turkey. Other prizes included electronic household appliances which were piled up on the stage. The prizes had been donated by a large number of Filipino shops situated mainly in the Tel Aviv bus station and the adjacent southern Tel Aviv neighbourhood, among them recruitment and travel agencies, pawnshops, and money transfer, international calling and electronics shops. Their names were read out by the moderator, and the donors drew the raffles from the tombola. Unfortunately, it later turned out that one of the flight tickets went to a woman who did not possess a legal work permit and therefore could not go. Then the beauty contestants were asked to enter the stage a second time. They now had to present themselves, walking as if on a catwalk and answering a series of different questions, which had been prepared by the jury. The questions they asked touched on personal as well as national issues. For example, Miss Visayas-Mindanao was asked about the role of ‘the modern Filipino woman’. Her answer referred to the important role of a woman as a ‘hardworking’ and ‘loyal’ mother. Miss El Shaddai was asked: ‘Imagine you would travel back in time and land in 1896. The revolution has just started. How would you contribute?’11 Her answer in English came promptly: ‘I would contribute with all my heart, with whatever I could’. The contestants stepped down from the stage, and the jury deliberated. One jury member announced that Miss Visayas-Mindanao (the ‘daring’ contestant) had unanimously received the highest marks for physical appearance. However, Miss El Shaddai (in her flag dress) was clearly everybody’s favourite and was acclaimed Miss Independence Philippines Israel 2005. Accordingly, the FFCI president, Avi, a donor, and the General Consul of the Philippines Embassy presented her with a bouquet of flowers, put a crown on her head and placed a large sash over her shoulder. Miss El Shaddai, accompanying friends told me, was well known among those present. She was said to be a devout Catholic, friendly and quiet. A married mother of three children in the Philippines, she had been working in Israel as a legal live-in carer for six years and usually spent her free time in church. The programme concluded at around three o’clock in the afternoon. Before the community activists started to dismantle the stage and clean up, Andrea, a woman connected to the Manila Tel Aviv, presented her popular song ‘A Week of Patience’ (see following chapter). Some sat on the meadow beside the community centre, where others had spread out articles for sale: salted eggs, vegetables, newspapers and the sweet puto cakes. Then the crowd quickly dispersed, as the carers on their day off rushed to nearby bus stops or caught Sheruts (service taxis) in order to return to their workplaces in time. During the celebration, the Filipino community appeared to be represented by the FFCI constitution: a group of Filipino nationals temporarily residing in Israel, closely allied to and represented by Philippine state institutions. The unity and harmony portrayed throughout the celebration look less resilient

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when examined more closely. Several participants told me in a whisper that they considered it quite unfair that the migrant community, which consisted of hard-working people who had been forced to go abroad out of economic reasons, should have organized and even financed a ‘party’ for the embassy staff, who made a career of going abroad. In addition, many of my Filipino interview partners and acquaintances had not shown up or had indicated that ‘this kind of event’ was not for them when I asked whether they would attend the Independence Day celebrations. Indeed, many Filipinos chose to spend the Philippines Independence Day, which took place on a Sunday, the weekly day off for most domestic workers, just as they would have spent any other day off. In this context it has to be emphasized that only several hundred persons out of 30,000 Filipino citizens in Israel (according to the conservative estimates of the Philippine embassy) participated in an event that claimed to be the annual event of all Filipinos in the country. The fact that not all Filipino citizens residing in Israel were (and are) represented in the FFCI and participated in its activities was considered a problem by group leaders, one that affected Filipinos in Israel as a whole. During an interview with the FFCI president, she talked about this: But you know, my purpose is camaraderie among the Filipinos. Unity among Filipinos is number one. There are still plenty of Filipinos, who persist on working Saturday night. So they don’t even have the time to participate in community events, watch sports… […] So when we do events like the basketball, there is camaraderie, loving, unity among the Filipinos. Sharing [of information, like:] ‘Where are you from in the Philippines’ – like that. That’s a beautiful experience. So we are already here in Israel and I don’t even know that my cousin or my neighbour from the Philippines is here – so through that, you meet. And also we avoid – if there are no activities – boys and girls – you will be in groups, in your apartments. As in Tel Aviv, there are plenty of Filipinos who live there. Maybe twenty in one place. You are chatting and it’s not enough, so they have to ‘chip in’. You will contribute fifty Shekels, I will contribute fifty Shekels – if you are ten boys, we will buy liquor and something to eat. So after that, you are already drunk. There is noise, singing, shouting, you are drunk. Then, the neighbouring Jewish, some won’t understand, they won’t have patience for that, because it’s also their Shabbath. There are Filipinos who will enjoy themselves until two, three in the night. It’s disturbing. Then there are fights and they break beer bottles... That’s one factor why the immigration police knows already where you live, because the neighbours tell them: ‘That place is plenty of Filipinos – I don’t know if they are illegal…’ - It’s a shame, you know?12

By organizing community events like the basketball tournament mentioned here or the Independence Day celebration, the FFCI president intends to chasten what she described as a state of anomie among Filipinos. The ‘shameful’ behaviour of Filipinos who engage in illicit sexual relations, fight, drink and disturb Israeli neighbours in Tel Aviv’s shared weekend apartments is contrasted with the engagement and solidarity that apparently prevail among Filipinos during the FFCI events. Confronted with ongoing deportations and the precariousness of their stay in Israel, Filipino community leaders became

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much concerned about the public image of the migrant community. Rather than the Filipinos apparently causing ‘trouble’ in southern Tel Aviv, the FFCI president and Philippine Embassy officials all envisaged a community whose qualities were embodied in the woman elected as Miss Independence during the Independence Day celebrations described above. The election of beauty queens is never solely about physical appearance, but rather about being beautiful in a broader sense. Being maganda encompasses a beautiful physical appearance as well as desirable social behaviour. As domestic workers told me during the contest, maganda means being truthful, morally upright, elegant, generous and – above all – ‘good of heart’. Beauty contests form a major part of Philippine popular culture and belong to a repertoire of Filipino elite education, strongly connected with the American colonial presence and American values of self-improvement and self-fashioning (Cannell 1999: 218; Johnson 1997; Rafael 2000). As Fenella Cannell (1999) has shown in her ethnographic account of beauty contests in the Philippine lowlands, these often consciously follow international models such as ‘Miss World’ or ‘Miss Universe’. They are deeply connected with cultural imaginings of wealth, glamour and of course beauty, derived from the ideas of the former American colonial power. Far from being a mere mimicry of American models, however, Philippine beauty contests draw on a rich cultural tradition in which the art of making oneself (or others) beautiful is a prestigious value in itself (ibid.: 204; Johnson 1997). As became apparent with the Independence Day beauty contest, the organizations forming the FFCI each chose women who were rather different from each other in terms of the type of female ideal they represented. While religious groups chose conservatively dressed and styled women, regional and hometown associations chose younger, more ‘daring’ and more fashionably styled women. Of these, the judges – all of them representatives of official Philippine state bodies and policies – elected the one woman who apparently best represented their ideal of a Filipina carer abroad: dressed in a flag dress and chosen to represent a popular Catholic mass movement throughout Independence day, Miss El Shaddai not only embodied the Inang Bayan physically through her appearance, but also represented the kind of woman the Philippine president Corazòn Aquino must have had in mind when she called overseas Filipino workers the Philippines’ ‘new national heroes’: rather than being illegalized, separated or a single mother like the greater part of Filipina care and domestic workers in Israel, Miss El Shaddai was a married woman who was known to spend her free time in church and stuck to the script of contract worker found in both Philippine and Israeli migration policies. The performance and rhetoric of patriotism during this Philippine Independence Day celebration were blatant. Throughout the celebration, national images and symbols, such as the anthem, the flag, the Inang Bayan and verbal expressions of loyalty to the nation, were ubiquitous. In the speeches and messages of the representatives of the Philippine state, Filipinos in Israel were addressed as citizens, integrated into the national project of the

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Philippines and taken care of by the state – yet with duties and responsibilities to the nation. In Filipino migrant workers’ own speeches and performances, this theme was reproduced: with the local costumes and ‘tribal’ dances, the homeland was staged as a state with both a rich history and vibrant culture, all in all one that people can be proud to be a part of. Within this context, it is noteworthy that, of all those present, it was the representative of an Israeli state body – significantly the Foreign Affairs coordinator – who pointed out that the event was actually taking place in Israel, and he concluded that the Filipinos who staged this large public event obviously felt at home. While both the Philippines Embassy staff and the community activists participated in this national performance, I argue that their nationalisms derived from different contexts and implied contrasting meanings. For embassy employees, representing the nation was routine, whereas for Filipino domestic workers, presenting oneself as a proud citizen of a nation that had fought for independence throughout its long history was meant to offer a stark contrast to the daily segregation and humiliation encountered in Israel as a foreigner, domestic worker and apparently ‘poor’ Filipino. By collecting money for philanthropic projects in the Philippines or working for progress and change within their specific organizational contexts, Filipino workers’ patriotism can also be understood as a critique of a government that forces its citizens to go abroad in order to make a living. This criticism was at times openly articulated, as in Filipino workers’ frequent accusations of their ‘corrupt’ government. Typical of this criticism is the patriotism displayed in an article published in Manila Tel Aviv by a Filipino domestic worker, who reproaches his or her kababayan for ‘always blaming the Israeli government’ for the ‘bad situation’ in Israel. Rather, if I have to criticize anybody, I will point my fingers to the Filipino leaders for seemingly not doing something in behalf of us Filipino Workers – who give blood and sweat, just to make our life better and our … country’s economy better. When will these RESPECTED LEADERS unite to uplift the economic status of the FILIPINO PEOPLE? Because until now, nothing seems to work towards this dream; they are guilty of the great sacrifices and sufferings of the Filipino foreign workers and their families in waging their luck to a foreign country. That they are answerable to our heroes who sacrificed their everything just to free us from the oppression of our nation. (Welcomed Criticism Column 2003: 57; Manila Tel Aviv 20, 3 October)

By drawing a direct line from the national heroes of the anticolonial struggle to the present-day OFWs, the author here references a popular conceptualization of Philippine migration in the global economy: as a form of ongoing, neo-colonial oppression, in which Filipinos continue to suffer and sacrifice, while their dreams remain unfulfilled, their desire for freedom unbroken. The understanding of the 12 June celebration in Israel as Philippine, state-sponsored diaspora nationalism from above therefore crudely simplifies a complex story. I suggest that the commemoration has to be seen in the context of an ongoing popular veneration of those involved

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in the anticolonial struggle of the late nineteenth century, and of social movements that continue to trace their contemporary struggles back to those. The different positionings and interests of the embassy staff on one hand and the migrant community on the other can also be seen in the Independence Day celebrations. By inviting the embassy staff to participate in a public trial of strength by way of a tug-of-war game, community officials challenged the Philippine government representatives in a playful way. While it was apparently clear from the beginning that the embassy team would win the game, they hereby also won the ambivalent privilege of presenting their dancing talents to the crowd. Community officials thus temporarily reversed the script of the celebration: instead of them performing for the officials, it was now the officials who were performing for them. Similar to the practice of telling jokes about influential employers already described, domestic workers thus applied the ‘weapons of the weak’ and ridiculed power, rather than openly confronting it. This approach to power has to be seen within a cultural context, where power relations are typically viewed as dynamic engagements. As Cannell has remarked on Philippine power relations, ‘there are people “who have nothing” and those who have wealth, beauty and power, but there is always potential for negotiation and persuasion, through which the painful gap between the two may be lessened, and the powerdeficit of the poor, not eliminated but ameliorated’ (1999: 229). The ethnographic description further highlights the fact that the engagement of the Philippines Embassy for its citizens in the diaspora cannot be explained by reference to the strategic nature of the Philippine export policy of migration alone. Philippines Embassy officials in Israel did establish support structures (such as a shelter in the private house of the OWWA officer), and often took a firm public stand against the ill treatment of Filipino domestic workers in Israel. One of the most hotly debated of these interventions was an interview which the Philippine ambassador to Israel, Antonio Modena, gave to an Israeli daily newspaper in June 2005. In the interview, Modena was said to have compared the Israeli Immigration Administration to the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany. He criticized the fact that the Israeli police often made sweeps in the middle of the night, confiscated mobile phones from arrestees and prevented them from contacting the embassy. He was quoted as saying that ‘Just like the Nazis treated the Jews, you know, that’s how the immigration police treat us. […] They don’t think twice about raiding a Filipino home in the wee hours of the morning’ (quoted from Stevens 2005). As becomes clear from the quotation, the ‘we’ here clearly encompasses all Filipino citizens in Israel. Hardly surprisingly, however, the ambassador’s remark on the Migration Police triggered outrage in the Israeli public, and former Israeli Justice Minister and Shoah survivor Joseph Lapid demanded that Modena ‘apologize in public or pack his things and go back home to the Philippines’ (quoted from Stevens 2005).13 Rather than being mere rhetoric, the strong identification by embassy officials with illegalized Filipino domestic workers also has to be seen against the background of shared experiences of discrimination. To this affect I was told by

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different embassy employees that they frequently experienced being mistaken for care or domestic workers, felt racially discriminated against by Israelis just like other Filipinos, and also had to show their permits of residence to officials of the Migration Police who checked them. While many Filipino domestic workers I spoke to during that time generally agreed with what the ambassador had said, and generally appreciated what they perceived as ‘our embassy’s firm stand’ for their rights, they also felt uneasy at the fact that the remark had obviously outraged Israeli politicians and feared that their reactions might create a backlash against the community. In the Philippines, the interview was quoted in the press and triggered a public debate on the situation of Filipinos in Israel. Modena was generally supported and the Manila Times quoted a Philippine senator as saying that he had ‘praised Modena for standing up for the rights of Filipinos, adding he should be hailed as a hero’ (Vicente and Esteves 2005). To sum up, once the deportation campaign started to affect Filipinos in Israel at large, community activists chose to refrain from openly political collective actions, such as rallies or demonstrations, and transferred representation to the Philippines Embassy. In explaining why the community had refrained from taking collective public action against the deportations in 2002, FFCI president Marietta explained: ‘We couldn’t. Because, before we will do something, we have to present it to the embassy. But then, if we have this kind of agenda, they [the embassy] will not let us.’ Nevertheless, Ate Nengneng, as she was widely known among Filipinos in Israel, strongly supported the cooperation with the Philippines Embassy and emphasized the need for Filipinos to stand united in the diaspora. As the coordinator of a Catholic-Filipino lay group in Jerusalem, she was one of those community leaders who spent practically every minute of her free time on Saturdays and Sundays with Filipino friends, and in the institutional context that was referred to as community. During my field research, Ate Nengneng was usually busy organizing and moderating the FFCI basketball tournaments on Saturday evenings in Jaffa. On Sundays, she was involved in the activities of the Good Shepherd Community in Jerusalem, or attended FFCI meetings in Tel Aviv. The transportation costs involved in her travels throughout the country at weekends were paid for from her own income as a live-out housekeeper in Jerusalem. She was constantly contacted by Filipinos who sought her help, advice or assistance. As the FFCI president, Ate Nengneng embodied ‘the mother of the Filipino community in Israel’ (according to the Philippine Ambassador in his laudation upon her resignation) to such a great extent that she was nominated for the 2006 presidential Banaag Award, which has been granted by the Philippine government annually since 1991, ‘for advancing the cause of Filipino communities overseas’.14 In her speech upon her resignation from the post of FFCI president, Ate Nengneng once more evoked the notion of a ‘united community’ of Filipinos in Israel, shortly before she managed to receive an entry visa for the U.S., thereby leaving Israel behind: Let us not forget always to be united in one community […] During the past years, I have seen and you have witnessed the growth of our community. We made our

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lives in Israel a little bit better by uplifting, sharing and assisting our kababayans in time of needs not only here but also in the Philippines. We have done that and we will continue to do it because we are Filipino. Fiends [sic!], let us continue to be an example of harmony. Let us strive harder to make a difference. We are not going to be here forever but let us make our mark, a mark that will be remembered forever. (Quoted from Zuno and Sapyashvili 2006)

Conclusion This chapter has traced the processes of the making and unmaking of a community of Filipino domestic workers in Israel as narrated by Filipino group leaders, activists, journalists and early migrants. Clearly, the Filipino community in Israel has undergone major transformations throughout its short history, from the unified and socially densely knit small group of ‘brothers and sisters’ remembered by early migrants to an increasingly large, self-organized and heterogeneous migrant community. While Filipinos’ spaces for sociality in Israel were restricted to few public places and the church in the beginning, a multitude of shops, regional associations, sporting events and local magazines soon catered to the growing population. This process of making community was almost reversed after the introduction of a far-reaching deportation policy. In its wake, collective structures were shattered, established organizations dissolved, and many of the community ‘veterans’ were deported – or else they decided to leave for yet another destination country. More recently, the Philippines Embassy in Israel organized Filipinos into a community from above by creating an umbrella organization (the FFCI). During events such as the celebration of Philippine Independence, this organization supports a blatant nationalism, although this may be interpreted as ambivalent in nature, as it also highlights what continues to be fought for in postcolonial times. The amount of time and energy put in by Filipino domestic workers to organize themselves, engage in kababayan solidarity and ‘make a difference’, as FFCI president Marietta emphasized in her farewell speech, is remarkable indeed. At least during their brief time off at weekends, Filipino domestic workers are far from being the isolated monads described in the literature. Their claims of belonging and citizenship have their roots in a precarious (legal) position, which makes the clandestine or silent ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985) appear more appropriate than public or openly political acts of resistance. Even though male migrants may have been over-represented within the ranks of Filipino community leaders, the community portrayed above is largely a female one. While the feminization of male migrant communities has been analysed (Rouse 1992), the gender aspect within largely female migrant communities has hardly been explored (cf. Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). It has been noted for other contexts that, in diaspora communities, women often take on the role of the guardians of morality and tradition (Yuval-Davis 1997: 63). While this may hold true with regard to some Filipina domestic workers in

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Israel, especially those engaged in patriotic or religious migrant organizations, many practices and narratives of the women portrayed above point in a different direction: Filipina migrant women in Israel are integrated into sometimes large social fields of fellow female domestic workers, with whom they share weekend apartments, thereby offering a stark contrast to women’s living arrangements in the Philippines. They also become politically active and transform the existing migration regime, at least in the long run. Within the social space of the migrant community, female activists like Ate Merly, Romelyn and Nengneng have gained recognition and respect because of their knowledge acquired in transnational migration routes, their organizational ability and the authority they exercise over their fellow nationals abroad. Rather than big men, they are the big women of the migrant community, engaged in gender-transforming journeys, with aspirations to change the social conditions they live in. Moreover, this chapter has shown that migrants are at least as engaged in the politics of the place of migration and settlement, in this case Israel, as they are in so-called homeland politics. This casts doubt on the idea of a single, political, transnational, social field. Instead, Filipinos in Israel appear as part of a ‘chaordically’ structured loose diaspora network (cf. Werbner 2002), well aware of diaspora politics, migration policies and migrants’ struggles elsewhere, not least informed by their transnational social networks and ongoing migration moves. These, however, are deeply contingent and transformative. Local diaspora politics changes as local policies do, as is demonstrated by the increasing involvement of the Philippines Embassy in community politics in Israel after the adoption of a deportation campaign. Hardly surprisingly, these changes deeply affect migrants’ struggles and their structures of selforganization. In Israel, Filipino migrants were found to be preoccupied with various localizing strategies, rather than the forms of long-distance nationalism described by Anderson (1998) or Glick-Schiller and Fouron (2001). Their politics of diaspora proved to relate to a particular, local discourse, in that they affectively claimed to be the ‘Jews of Today’ while struggling to find their place in the declared homeland of the Jewish diaspora. Finally, and in agreement with much research on minority and ethnic communities elsewhere (cf. Werbner and Modood 1997; Werbner and Anwar 1991), the ethnographic account of Filipinos’ communal life in Israel has shown that what was termed ‘the community’ is an imagined community of several, at times contradictory collectivities of Filipino domestic workers that differ in size, scale and location. Rather than the communitarian spirit often invoked by community leaders and activists, differences between Filipino domestic workers with regard to ethnic or regional origin, class and gender, but also age, political and religious orientation or length of stay in Israel, persist. Within this heterogeneous collective space, decreasing social control, together with increasing anomie, has been analysed as a problem by Filipino interviewees. However, as the following chapter on Filipinos’ central space for sociality – the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station – will show, discipline and social control may be exercised indirectly, for example, through gossip. As will be further illustrated, activities

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that help Filipino domestic workers to ‘forget’, such as malling, story-telling, playing basketball or touring the ‘Holy Land’, should not be underestimated for their potential in forging new collectivities and subjectivities.

4.1. Dance performance by the evangelical In His Care network, Philippine Independence Day celebration, Jaffa, June 2005. (Claudia Liebelt)

4.2. Philippines Embassy officials win the tug-of-war against ‘the community’, Philippine Independence Day celebration, Jaffa, June 2005. (Claudia Liebelt)

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Interview with Novelita, 20 June 2005. Interview with Nora, 16 June 2005. Interview with Marylinn, 29 August 2005. Interview with Marian, 24 August 2005. The following quotations by Marian are also taken from this interview. Interview with Anne, 30 March 2005. Personal communication with numerous Filipina migrants and interview with Gil, one of the two owners of the Balagan store, 26 April 2005. Balagan is Hebrew for ‘mess’. Interview with Nora, 16 June 2005. The verse that Yoseff selected is recited during the Jewish holiday of Pessah in order to commemorate the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. Journalists, activists and even Rabbis regularly quoted this verse in order to remind the Israeli public that solidarity with oppressed strangers was a major religious duty, a mitzvah. Since 2003, the Philippine state has allowed migrants dual citizenship and the right to vote abroad in Philippine elections. According to the Senate President, the signing of the Citizenship Retention Bill in 2003 served as an ‘affirmation to the age-old adage that “once a Filipino, always a Filipino”’ (Levitt and GlickSchiller 2004: 1024). Quoted from the former Philippines Tel Aviv Embassy’s website at http://www. polota.com/FI_profile.htm (retrieved 5 August 2007), which is now defunct. The Philippines Independence Day on 12 June refers to the day in 1898 when Philippine independence was first proclaimed after two years of anti-colonial struggle. Interview with Marietta, 30 January 2005. The following quotations by Marietta are also taken from this interview. After being summoned by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Modena apologized for his remarks (Bahur-Nir 2005). Quoted from the official website of Office of the President of the Philippines at http://www.cfo.gov.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=307 &Itemid=92 (retrieved 22 November 2009).

Chapter 5 Feeling Manila, Living in Hiding and Appropriating the Black Part of the ‘White City’: Filipinos in Tel Aviv

Lunes ng ako a mag sponja Martes ng ako ay magpaligo Mierkoles alaga kay nilabatiba Hwuebes gabundok na labada Biernes mga Kalderoy nagkalam pagan pagkat mag

Mondays, when I’m doing sponja

Amo ay mag sha-shabbath na

the boss is celebrating the sha-shabbath

Sabado Takana ay aking tinungo

Saturday we all meet in the Takana

Tuesdays, I’m giving the old man a bath Wednesdays, time for his bowel movement Thursdays, mountains of laundry Fridays, the cooking pots are shaking because

at pagsapit ng Linggo balik na naman but when Sunday comes, we have to go back to work1 sa amo

Written by Andrea, a former radio operator in her Philippine hometown and since 2003 a live-in carer in Tel Aviv, ‘A Week of Patience’ informs us that hanging out in the takana on Saturday nights is part of the standard weekly routine for Filipinas in Israel. HaTakana, ‘the station’ – the short and Tagalogized version of ha takhana ha merkazit ha khadasha shel Tel Aviv (Hebrew, ‘Tel Aviv New Central Bus Station’, CBS) – has become one of those Hebrew words that Filipinos in Israel have integrated into their vocabulary. When large numbers of Filipino domestic workers stream into the Tel Aviv bus station in the southern neighbourhood of Neveh Sha’anan on Saturday nights in order to spend their short weekend away from employers’ homes, this part of the city resembles a Philippine baranggay, with Pentecostal churches

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opening their gates, street vendors selling Philippine newspapers and snacks, and the sounds of karaoke and the smell of roast pork in the air. As Mark Gottdiener and Alexandros Lagopoulos have put it, ‘the inhabitant of the city does not adapt to an environment, rather, residents play a role in the production and use of the urban milieu through urban practices’ (1986: 7). In this chapter, I investigate Filipinos’ use of the city and show how they transformed the urban space of Tel Aviv, while their own presence there remains precarious. Situated at the heart of Israel’s largest metropolitan area, Tel Aviv today shows strong evidence of world city formations (Alexander 2007: 20; Kemp and Raijman 2004: 35; cf. Sassen 2000). As such it has become the country’s most affluent region and, like similar cities worldwide, this transformation has increased the demand for both highly qualified and low-skilled workers. Apart from the state-recruited contract workers, from at least the 1980s onwards migrants from all over the world have been arriving in Tel Aviv in order to seek jobs in the city’s informal labour market, mainly as domestic workers in affluent homes or as cleaners, cooks and dishwashers in the food industry. In 2003, it was estimated that migrants constituted between eight and seventeen per cent of Tel Aviv’s municipal population. 2 It was further estimated that the majority of Tel Aviv’s non-Jewish migrants were illegalized, including many Latin Americans and West Africans who had ‘overstayed’ their tourist visas, as well as Eastern Europeans, Filipinos, Chinese and Thailanders, who had been recruited as contract workers, but were illegalized for various reasons. Accordingly, it was the urban space of Tel Aviv that was most dramatically affected by the large deportation campaign of ‘illegals’ launched after 2002. Subsequently, as this chapter will show, its southern neighbourhoods transformed into a space of ‘hiding’ – as Filipinos put it, in reference to the Tagalog slang for ‘illegal’, TNT (from tago nang tago, ‘hide-and-hide’). Filipinos can be seen all throughout the city during the week, pushing wheelchairs, walking arm in arm with their elderly employers, or sitting in cafes, parks or in squares, in groups next to the elderly whom they have accompanied. In contrast to the central or northern Tel Aviv neighbourhoods of their employers, however, Filipinos have come to describe its southern parts, most especially the Central Bus Station area Neveh Sha’anan, as their part of the city. Situated between the once thriving Palestinian port city of Jaffa and the newly established settlement of Tel Aviv, Neveh Sha’anan became part of the latter in 1926. In 1950, Tel Aviv and Jaffa merged into a single municipality. In his book White City, Black City (2005), Rotbard analyses the socio-spatial division that has characterized Tel Aviv-Jaffa almost from its beginning. As Rotbard (2005) shows, the powerful master narrative of Tel Aviv as the so-called White City, built in the ‘clean’ and ‘rational’ architectural design of the international style, never fully grasped its urban realities and was confined to a specific part of the city. In contrast to the White City’s bourgeois north, inhabited mainly by European immigrants, was its proletarian and ‘oriental’

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(referring to both its Palestinian and Mizrachi residents) south.3 Constructed as the White City’s Other, southern Tel Aviv and Jaffa soon entered a process of urban marginalization from which they never fully recovered: an outmigration of middle-class residents, a public image of crime and insecurity, infra-structural neglect and a generally low standard of living – in the Neveh Sha’anan area of today caused not least by the constant noise and pollution of the approximately 3,000 buses a day that drive to and from the city’s central bus station located there (Har’el 2004).4 It is this part of the city that became most strongly associated with the so-called ‘foreign workers’ during the 1990s, and after 2000, non-Jewish labour migrants were estimated to constitute up to sixty (Alexander 2007: 93) or seventy (Sinai 2003) per cent of its population. The Neveh Sha’anan area was transformed into what was described by many Filipino interviewees as an important asset in Israel for them, and even in terms of home.

Southern Tel Aviv and the Weekends in Abundance While communal spaces have been established by Filipinos in all major cities in Israel, including Haifa, Jerusalem and Herzliya, southern Tel Aviv is the leading place of sociality and organization for Filipinos: there are placement agencies, shops with products imported from the Philippines, churches, offices of self organizations and Israeli NGOs, including a workers’ centre and an open clinic, and not least the Central Bus Station, a major public transportation hub for the entire country. Many Filipino interviewees reported that Neveh Sha’anan was the first place in Israel in which they had set foot after being collected from the Tel Aviv international airport and brought to a shared weekend apartment rented by an agent. Given the social networks that developed within these apartments and the fact that, because of the Central Bus Station, Neveh Sha’anan was within easy reach of practically anywhere in the country, most Filipinos remained in one way or another attached to the neighbourhood throughout their entire stay in Israel. Accordingly, Filipino carers often spent a great deal of time and money so that they could be in Neveh Sha’anan during their weekly day off. Of the forty-nine Filipinos interviewed for this book, forty had accommodation in southern Tel Aviv, more specifically in Neveh Sha’anan and its surroundings, or adjacent northern Jaffa (three cases). Just one Filipina live-in worker chose not to pay rent (typically $30-70) for a shared apartment during the weekends but stayed in her employer’s house. The remaining eight were employed far from Tel Aviv and had decided that travelling there was too expensive and time-consuming, so they spent their days off in other cities (Jerusalem, Haifa, Netanya, Herzliya). Nonetheless, they had all lived in a shared weekend apartment in southern Tel Aviv throughout their stay or else regularly travelled there in order to do shopping, visit friends, seek help, or attend social events.

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It was in southern Tel Aviv, therefore, that Filipinos spent what they called their weekends of abundance. One Filipina live-in domestic worker, Erlisa, described a typical weekend in southern Tel Aviv as follows: First, on Saturday afternoon we arrive in takana merkazit [Hebrew, ‘Central Station’]. You walk around, see what is new. First you go to the SuperPharm [shop for cosmetics in the bus station], shopping… You see the people singing in Pinoy Pinay [pawn shop in the bus station, offering karaoke]. Then on the third floor, the Bahai Kubo [a restaurant serving Filipino food]. Sometimes you eat Filipino food, drink Filipino beer. Every Saturday it’s the same. I leave the house at my employers in Ramat Gan at 5.30. At night we go to our apartment, buy something to cook and eat. We sleep very late. Sometimes we [go to] sleep at four o’clock in the morning, watching movies, Tagalog films on DVD. Sunday afternoon you go back. I leave the takana at five o’clock.5

Throughout the interview Erlisa mainly used the singular ‘I’ to talk about her experiences and everyday practices, but in talking about her weekends in Tel Aviv, she switched to the plural ‘we’. In Erlisa’s case, the ‘we’ she regularly spent the weekends with included a loose network of female relatives and friends, among them her sister, several cousins and her sister-in-law, with whom she shared an apartment just walking distance from the Central Bus Station. As for Erlisa and many others, the weekend activities undertaken in southern Tel Aviv are mostly communal. Moreover, things ‘Filipino’ or, in slang, pinoy, are of the utmost importance during their weekends off work. Neveh Sha’anan was the place where interviewees bought products imported from the Philippines, chatted with acquaintances along the way, watched Tagalog movies and cooked Filipino dishes, occasionally dining out in the Southeast Asian food court-style restaurant on the third floor of the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. Food plays a central role in the identification, self-assurance and making of community in (not only the Filipino) diaspora. The role of food is even more important in the case of domestic live-in workers, who, during the working week, are often forced to eat the food their employers prefer. Given the culturally different background of Filipino domestic workers’ employers, and the fact that Filipinos were often prohibited from bringing non-kosher food into employers’ households, many reported suffering severely from the diet they had to stick to during the working week. Arguably the most important point is that many households in Israel ban pork, which is a major ingredient of Philippine cuisine. Accordingly pork and other distinctively Filipino-Asian foods featured in the large buffets prepared by Filipinos on Saturday nights. Significantly, the most popular butchery among Filipinos in the Neveh Sha’anan neighbourhood, situated right across the street from the Central Bus Station, bore the name ‘Kingdom of Pork’. In apartments tenants pooled money for meals and shared responsibility for the weekend shopping and cooking on a rota basis. Weekend meals consisted of dishes which, in the Philippines, are prepared for feasts and celebrations, such as pansit (a Filipino noodle dish), pork barbecue or rice

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cake. Indeed, in shared apartments of ten persons and more, there was usually something to celebrate each weekend: someone’s arrival or return from a visit to the Philippines, someone’s successful visa application for another country as well as birthdays, weddings, or national or religious holidays. Moreover, it was common for groups of Filipinos ‘strolling around’ Neveh Sha’anan on Saturdays or Sundays to enter other friends’ or relatives’ apartments and, in accordance with Filipino norms of hospitality, be fed. More than anything else, the notion of the weekends in abundance used by Filipino interviewees therefore applied to the abundance of food. Accordingly, the availability in Neveh Sha’anan of Filipino products in general and of food products more specifically rated highly among the reasons why Filipinos considered the neighbourhood to be a truly Filipino space. While Erlisa, whose weekend routine was quoted above, does not mention religious activities, for many Filipinos these also play a major role during weekends. Practically every Filipino interviewee described themselves as devoted Christians, even though religious practices varied considerably. Hence some interlocutors spent the greatest part of their free time within the confines of a church group – also living with co-religionists, attending church services, going on pilgrimages or taking over tasks in a congregation. As I have shown elsewhere (Liebelt 2010), Filipinos’ religious engagement in diaspora settings typically changes throughout their stay in Israel, as many migrants come to ‘realize’ the special status of the ‘Holy Land’ and their role within it, either becoming a ‘born again’ Christian or else seeking refuge in spirituality. In southern Tel Aviv during the period of my field research, Filipinos were able to choose from a variety of Christian institutions and offers: at the two Roman Catholic Churches in Jaffa, which served the majority of the largely Catholic community, Filipinos had formed numerous lay groups; Filipinos had also established or attended evangelical churches in large numbers; they led Block Rosaries through the neighbourhood or met for Bible study groups in weekend apartments. Evangelical congregations in Neveh Sha’anan included independent, full-gospel churches, as well as local ‘offshoots’ of either Filipino evangelical movements such as Iglesia ni Cristo, or international congregations such as Baptists or Seventh Day Adventists. In the latter, Filipinos worshipped alongside migrants from elsewhere. Typically located in the basements of residential houses or the neighbourhood’s many abandoned warehouses in, for example, Levanda Street, churches prefer to keep a ‘low profile’ in the city and are barely visible from the outside (cf. Kemp and Raijman 2003; Sabar 2008; Vizel 2004). Filipinos described southern Tel Aviv as an urban experience that starkly contrasted with their lives in other parts of the city or elsewhere in Israel throughout the working week. Not only were they confined to culturally foreign, private households alongside the elderly persons they cared for during the week, but this also took place in typically rather quiet, middle-class, residential neighbourhoods. Especially for younger Filipina care and domestic workers, Neveh Sha’anan was a nice change in that it was more lively and

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exciting. It was a place for sociality, where one could recover from work and not worry about crossing an employer’s path, since many Israelis were afraid to set foot in the neighbourhood. As Edna, a live-in carer, who shared an apartment in Neveh Sha’anan with seven other Filipinas, described it: When you are in Rome, be a Roman – so when you’re in Israel, be a Jew. You have to adapt – the way they eat, their greetings, everything. But when we are here in Neveh Sha’anan and in our apartment – we are all Filipino! We eat Filipino food in the kitchen. The sister of Emma [a flatmate] cooks rice, dried fish, salty eggs. […] We are together, most especially on Sunday mornings. It’s such a different world from work. I love it!6

In the case of Filipina domestic workers in Singapore who meet in large numbers on their day off, Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang likewise found that ‘by re-immersing themselves in their “native” culture, these women temporarily reject dominant exclusionary definitions of themselves as domestic appendages of Singaporean households’ (1998: 598). Neveh Sha’anan likewise represented physical removal from employers and from Jewish/Israeli space more generally. However, the urban space of Neveh Sha’anan offered not only an area of retreat for Filipinos, many of whom worked during the week in more affluent neighbourhoods with which Neveh Sha’anan contrasted visibly in its aesthetic, cultural and social structure. Within the process of Filipinos’ ongoing stays and everyday use of Neveh Sha’anan, it also became a space that reflected their successful struggles to improve their lives in the diaspora. This urban appropriation, however, took place under difficult circumstances. The fact that Filipinos in Neveh Sha’anan too were affected by the exclusionary migration policies, racial discriminations and social segregations of the wider society became obvious when in 2002 a deportation campaign profoundly transformed this urban space.

Life in Hiding: The ‘Rooted’ and the ‘Very Savvy’ in Southern Tel Aviv Filipino domestic workers were most seriously affected by deportations when, in August 2003, the Immigration Authority launched Operation Housecleaning, aimed at – as the rather cynical name implies – arresting illegalized domestic workers (cf. Leibovich-Dar 2003). The campaign, widely televised, began with a raid on one of Israel’s richest neighbourhoods north of Tel Aviv, Herzliya Pituah. During the raid, which journalists from all media outlets were invited to observe and document, police officers entered several private homes and arrested eight domestic workers. At the same time, radio and TV spots aimed at intimidating employers of ‘illegal foreign workers’ went on air. While the campaign apparently produced the desired outcome and in the following weeks, large numbers of illegalized workers streamed into the Tel Aviv workers’ centre of KLO after being laid off, nevertheless the targeting of wealthy settlements for police raids

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triggered public outrage. The Council Chair of Savyon, another very wealthy residential area north of Tel Aviv, for example, publicly stated: ‘If they want to expel foreign workers, why don’t they bring a bus to south Tel Aviv and load the workers on it – whoever passes by there can be told to get on and that’s it. They don’t have to come to Savyon’ (quoted from Leibovich-Dar 2003). His suggestion was put into practice soon afterwards, when, on 25 October 2003, a large group of Migration Police officials blocked several streets in southern Tel Aviv – the main residential area for (Filipino) migrants – and arrested dozens, who were then carried away to detention in waiting coaches. In the weeks that followed Operation Housecleaning, southern Tel Aviv became the site of spectacular mass arrests, among them a raid on a Filipino night club (Neah and Nessim 2004), another on a large private celebration on a Saturday night (Neah et al. 2004), and numerous incursions into migrants’ shared apartments in the neighbourhood. Consequently, the neighbourhoods of southern Tel Aviv changed dramatically for those who continued to live there. By the time I resumed my field research in 2005, and as the deportation campaign entered its third year, the arrests had assumed an increasingly grotesque character. When in the same year, acting police commander Eli Barak termed those migrants whom his officials had failed to arrest to date the ‘rooted’ and the ‘very savvy’, he did so in a manner that was both desperate and full of admiration. Being illegalized by the time that the lack of legal status had come to mean an acute threat of deportation – ‘deportability’ (DeGenova 2002) – had deep implications for practically every aspect of migrants’ everyday lives in the city and depended on a sophisticated knowledge of the police officers’ moves. Moreover, given the great risks, emotional, social and economic costs and hardship involved in a life in hiding, as Filipina interviewees termed it, their will to stay was itself proof of the fact that many had ‘rooted’ themselves in Tel Aviv and neither desired nor saw any alternative to staying. The practice whereby some jumped out of windows from great heights in order to avoid arrest points to their intense despair.7 It should be noted that, apart from deportability, the effects of migrants having an ‘illegal’ status in Tel Aviv and in Israel generally were, and are, comparatively few, compared with some, especially Western European, states or cities. For example, Israel does not criminalize the assistance of so-called illegals by officials, including doctors, house-owners or school-teachers. As was often emphasized by Filipina domestic workers, being illegal prior to the period of mass deportations meant a rise in one’s standard of living rather than a decline in that one was free to take up live-out work and demand higher wages. Moreover, the city of Tel Aviv had – prior to the deportations era – established an urban incorporation regime that enabled illegalized migrants to send their children to state schools and kindergartens, have their own establishments registered, and be assisted by municipal institutions. On the other hand, living in Tel Aviv before the time of the mass deportations was often idealized by migrants in 2005. Like Neth, many described it in terms of ‘freedom’ or ‘openness’:

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Before it was so open [to live here without legal status]. It was free travel, here in Tel Aviv … we go to every place, it was so open. […] It was only when the ‘Immigration’ started to deport people that it became so rampant. Now, you’re hiding as if you are a criminal, but you only came here to work. […] You cannot go anywhere, you are always afraid. You have to hide.8

By the time Neth was deported in December 2005, she had managed to stay in Israel illegally for nearly twenty years, ever since the tourist visa that enabled her to enter the country in 1986 expired. In the meantime, Neth had been the president of the Filipino umbrella organization FFCI, had headed a large Catholic- Filipino lay group, had buried her husband in a Catholic cemetery in Jaffa, also managing to bring her four children over from the Philippines. The years of her life in hiding and her treatment as a ‘criminal’, as she experienced it, left their mark on Neth, who returned to the Philippines in a state of mental and physical exhaustion. After over three years ‘in hiding’, in her first weeks in the Philippines, Neth still turned around in panic every time she heard a police siren. Even though she was depressed about her forced departure from Israel, it was clear that no longer being forced to live ‘as if you were a criminal’ was a great relief to her. Most of all, Operation Housecleaning created an atmosphere of rupture and crisis within the migrants’ main residential areas in southern Tel Aviv. As domestic workers were laid off, and found themselves being chased by policemen in the street or left behind by deported relatives and friends, the decision whether to stay or not quickly became a dominant topic among migrants within the neighbourhood. Each week public events, demonstrations and emergency meetings against deportations took place alongside farewell parties for departing friends, relatives or church members and police operations. In a matter of weeks, churches, basketball teams and private kindergartens closed down because too many had been arrested or else decided to leave. Those who decided to stay in Israel soon acquired sophisticated knowledge of how to move, dress, talk and generally live ‘in hiding’. In October 2003, an illegalized Chinese migrant told a journalist from the Israeli daily Ha’aretz about the arrest of a friend: There was no reason for him to be on the street at that hour […] I wouldn’t have gone out like that, and certainly not with all of my work tools. I also don’t sleep at home at all. I sleep in a different place every night. Sometimes I sleep on the roof, sometimes on the beach or in a public park. […] The worst thing is to sleep at home. (Quoted from Wurgaft 2003)

As the quotation makes clear, the extreme restrictions that determined this interviewee’s everyday routines inverted normal life. As a consequence one should not be recognisable as a worker when going to work; one should not be in public spaces during the day, and not be at home at night. These and similar precautions characterize what migrants commonly called the life in hiding and were adopted to different extents and with varying underlying

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logics by each and every illegalized person I encountered during my field research. As ethnographic research has shown, deportability inscribes itself into the most fundamental and intimate bodily practices of illegalized migrants in how they dress, how and when they move around, and how they structure social relations and divide space into ‘dangerous/hostile’ and ‘safe’. In short, what Coutin in her monograph on the Legalizing Moves of El Salvadorian refugees in the United States has called the ‘Art of Not Existing’ (2000: 43ff.) became of crucial importance to migrants’ daily routines. Research demonstrates that for Filipinos in Tel Aviv, this art of not existing was deeply contingent, among other things, upon time and space. Starkly simplified, migrants considered public spaces to be largely ‘dangerous’ and private spaces to be ‘safe’. The most dangerous public space was without doubt the south Tel Aviv neighbourhood of Neveh Sha’anan and its surroundings, where a large number of migrants continued to rent apartments. Here, staff from the Migration Police responsible for the arrest of illegals created what can be described as a topography of fear. According to HMW activists who monitored the arrests and provided (legal) help to arrestees, the most common sites of arrests were indeed migrants’ apartments. In the public space, arrests mainly took place at bus stops, more specifically those of Allenby and Ibn Gvirol Streets in Tel Aviv: the first is situated beside migrants’ major residential area in southern Tel Aviv; the other is located in their main area of employment within central Tel Aviv. Moreover, many arrests were clustered around the public space of the neighbourhood around the Central Bus Station, especially beside institutions that migrants depended on or frequently used, such as the bus station itself, churches, kindergartens, NGO offices or medical institutions. Even though some of these sites were listed as ones at which arrests should not be made, arrests frequently took place there (cf. KLO 2005: 17). Not least, this list indicates a sophisticated knowledge of migrants’ everyday practices on the part of police officers. Likewise, a knowledge of police officers’ moves – also including their identification, their working hours and their actual strategies of arrest – became crucial for illegalized migrants. Even the smallest details became extremely valuable, for example, the information that Migration Police officers are not necessarily uniformed, that they move around in teams and that they use unmarked cars with licence plates that all start with a specific combination of numbers. Information on larger-scale police actions, such as controls on a specific street corner or in a building, spread with incredible speed throughout the migrant community, for example, by sending mobile phone text messages. Police officers’ and migrants’ knowledge and strategies were engaged in a process of constant mutual adjustment: while in 2003 most migrants stated that they were ‘safe’ from Migration Police officers during weekends, several months later many large-scale police operations took place on Saturday nights, so that migrants then rated weekends as the most dangerous period. A few months after the beginning of mass arrests in Neveh Sha’anan, many shopkeepers, employees and other residents of

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the neighbourhood had learnt to recognize undercover police officers and assisted illegalized persons in hiding. The most common strategy reported by Filipinos to avoid arrests was the avoidance of spaces considered as dangerous. Accordingly, live-out domestic workers decided to move out of the neighbourhood into more ‘unobtrusive’ quarters such as the dearer neighbourhoods where they were employed, and such moves also shortened their routes to their workplaces. Even so many could not afford to move or decided against it because Neveh Sha’anan offered the infrastructure and the social networks they heavily depended on. For example, Mercy, one of the women portrayed in Chapter 2, continued to live in Neveh Sha’anan after her tourist visa ran out in 2000. When I met her, she was working in an internet café there, living in the small room at its back. She practically never left the building, and customers or friends supplied her with food from outside the café. An even more extreme example of the physical avoidance of public space was Maria, the mother of an interlocutor. Maria lived alone in a single-room Neveh Sha’anan apartment, which she hardly ever left during 2005. She made a living by taking care of the children of her daughter and of several close Filipino friends during the day. Like Mercy, Maria relied on the assistance of relatives and friends for her shopping. Each of them was told to keep her existence and whereabouts a strict secret. In order to make her apartment look uninhabited, Maria, like many illegalized persons I visited within the neighbourhood, covered its windows with cardboard. Because of not leaving the house and not ‘seeing the sun’, her daughter Nora was convinced that Maria had become depressed. After Maria’s close friend, who lived in a similar situation nearby, was arrested while carrying out the garbage, Maria retreated even more, refusing to leave the house except for rare visits on Saturday afternoons to her daughter’s apartment just around the corner. Few could tolerate never leaving the house for long, especially since the frequent arrests in private apartments in southern Tel Aviv made their definition as a safe space increasingly questionable. After an initial phase of physically disconnecting herself from the world outside the internet café, Mercy did take two part-time cleaning jobs again in late 2004. Whenever she left the house to go to work, she prepared herself carefully. She told me: ‘When I go out in the morning, you will think: a professional woman going outside to a big building [laughs]. When you see me, my dress is like this [points to her blouse] and I make myself very elegant. I am wearing sunglasses and a hat, and I put on all my accessories’.9 The ‘costume’ Mercy donned before leaving the house was first of all designed to conceal the phenotypical features that made her recognisable as Asian, most likely non-Jewish and therefore possibly ‘illegal’. Secondly, by wearing elegant clothes and jewellery – much of which had been handed down to her by previous Israeli employers – she intended to appear like a ‘professional’ woman who worked in a bank or business, rather than one who cleaned private apartments. Indeed, many illegalized persons told me about similar strategies of ‘passing’ that were intended to conceal their

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ethnicized and class positions in Israel in order to appear as Israeli, Jewish and middle-class and therefore as ‘legal’ as possible. Other precautions that ‘illegals’ took when venturing into public spaces were related to their bodily moves. Neth, for example, told me: ‘Every time I go out, I feel so nervous, I feel like I want to run. So I have to concentrate not to run, but to walk as quietly and self-assured as possible. I tell myself that I just go letayel [Hebrew, ‘to stroll, take a walk’]…’10 Neth, like other illegalized interviewees who were devoted Christians, was persuaded that silently praying while walking in public spaces both calmed her down and protected her from arrest. Similarly, Monique told me: ‘When I’m outside, I put my life completely in His [God’s] hands. So I feel prepared for anything that comes, anytime’.11 As these examples show, moving around in the urban public space rendered dangerous by illegalized migrants involves a great deal of bravery, cunning, concentration and – depending on a person’s belief – trust in divine protection. These extremely demanding and emotionally stressful precautions transform apparently mundane activities such as travelling, shopping or going to work into dangerous and clandestine acts, or simply make them appear impossible. Within the process, the urban experience of illegalization inscribes itself into the most intimate aspects and bodily practices of migrants. In contrast to the ‘dangerous’ space of Neveh Sha’anan, most migrants considered their employers’ houses and neighbourhoods in the more wealthy neighbourhoods of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area as safer. Even though Operation Housecleaning was launched, as mentioned, with a raid in an especially wealthy neighbourhood, illegalized domestic workers rightly pointed out that this was exceptional. A case in point is Raquel, who was employed in the same exclusive old people’s home as Avelina and Anne, discussed in Chapter 3. Raquel hardly ever left her workplace, and by the time I met her (at her workplace), she had restricted her social network in Israel to those other Filipina carers employed in the home, generally refusing to take a day off from work in order not to be forced into the risk of arrest that threatened the space beyond the building. Raquel had come to Israel in 1997, when she was twenty-one years old. During her stay, she married a co-national and in 2001 gave birth to a child. She turned illegal when her employer laid her off in the seventh month of her pregnancy, due to her increasing inability to work. When I first met Raquel in 2005, her husband (and other family members who had lived in Israel) had been deported, and she had sent her child to the Philippines with him in order to be able to return to the ‘safer’ work of a live-in carer. When I interviewed her in the one-room apartment in the old people’s home where she lived with her bedridden employer aged 101, she had not left the home for the past three months. Nevertheless, she told me that once in a while, when she was in ‘good mood’ and ‘full of confidence’, she would take a day off, head to southern Tel Aviv on Saturday nights and return on Sundays. In order to avoid public spaces as much as possible, she would travel in a taxi from ‘door to door’ and stay there with friends. Together with

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them, she would spend the weekend eating Filipino food, watching Tagalog movies and chatting late into the night, without ever leaving the apartment. Even though she enjoyed these trips and felt depressed about being ‘caged into’ her workplace all the time, as she put it, she felt relieved every time she returned there. ‘It’s because here I’m safe. I keep telling my [Filipino] friends [within the home] who don’t have papers: we are here in [name of her workplace], we are protected’.12 The old people’s home, an exclusive residence for wealthy pensioners, indeed felt like an extremely protected space, a safe haven so to speak. Among the approximately forty Filipino carers employed, several were illegalized. Even though the management would not admit as much to me, they must have been clearly aware of the situation, and Filipino employees told me that it had succeeded in refusing access to Migration Police officers in the past, or had warned carers to hide when the police were around. In Raquel’s case, the division between the ‘safe’ and ‘protected’ space of her suburban workplace on one hand and the ‘dangerous,’ urban space of southern Tel Aviv on the other (which one entered only in a good mood and with a great deal of courage) was especially stark. Like Raquel, Neth was employed as the live-in housekeeper of an affluent and prominent family and ‘dared’ to leave her apparently safe workplace in Savyon, a wealthy settlement in the metropolitan Tel Aviv area, only once in a while. Also like Raquel, Neth claimed to be extremely nervous during her time out and said she needed the six days of her working week in Savyon in order to recover from the stress of ‘roaming around illegally in [southern] Tel Aviv’.13 Nevertheless, Neth was forced to realize that the security of her Savyon workplace was an illusion when, one day in December 2005, officials from the Migration Police arrested her while she was leaving her employer’s house for one of her weekend trips, after nineteen years of living in Israel without the required documents. It later became clear that her employer had called the police after a fight with Neth over when Neth was supposed to leave work that Saturday night. As this case shows, to hide successfully was not only about being in a space which was considered to be safe, but about ‘safe’ social relations too. In this regard, employers counted as among the most dangerous people for illegalized domestic workers, and cases of employers getting rid of workers who had not complied with their wishes or had demanded their rights by reporting them to the police were common knowledge among Filipinos. In order to commute between spaces considered as safe, Raquel and Neth, like many other illegalized persons, relied on taxis. However, according to the mutual adjustment of migrants’ strategies of outwitting police officers and the latter’s strategies of catching them, taxis too soon became subject to police controls. Moreover, stories of taxi-drivers who were brutal, blackmailed migrants or cooperated with the police were common among Filipinos in Tel Aviv. Indeed, illegalized migrants frequently told me that taxi-drivers had threatened to report them to the police unless they paid extra, and several cases of the physical and sexual abuse of Filipina women

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by taxi-drivers became public. Given these experiences and stories, migrants took care to personalize their relations with the drivers they had to rely on. As was indicated by numerous family pictures in Tel Aviv taxis, as well as being a common joke among Filipinos – that practically all the Israelis whom Filipinas married were actually taxi-drivers – this personalization at times took on the form of love relationships or marriages. Other interlocutors relied on Israeli boyfriends’ cars for movement and protection. For example, Mercy, whose reluctance to leave the internet café where she lived and worked was described above, nevertheless did go out with her Israeli boyfriend in his private car once in a while. Typically, the two would leave the house at night (‘by now, the policemen should be home from work’, Mercy would say before she left the house), and go to places that were associated with the Jewish middle-class rather than migrant workers, such as fancy beach restaurants or suburban shopping malls. Not for nothing did illegalized migrants frequently speak of southern Tel Aviv as a ‘dangerous’ space and of being treated like criminals. The spaces they were pushed into were spaces of exploitation and violence in a wider and concrete sense. This is due to the fact that ‘illegality’ results in the de facto restriction of legal and social security claims, such as health care or rights against employers and landlords, even when migrants are legally entitled to them; Coutin (2000) described this process as an ‘erasure of legal personhood’ (ibid.: 28). An extreme case of the non-enforcement of rights within a space of violence was reported in the media after several suicide bombings hit southern Tel Aviv. Thus, it became clear from conversations with residents and municipal social workers that an apparently large number of injured ‘illegals’ refused to go to hospital for treatment because they feared being reported to the Immigration Authority (cf. Immerglick et al. 2002; Willen 2007c). Moreover, almost every Filipino long-term resident of Neveh Sha’anan had stories to tell about robberies in his or her (weekend) apartment or of carrying their valuables on their body. While each week stories of brutal robberies circulated among migrants on Saturday nights or were reported in the local Filipino magazines, Manila Tel Aviv and Focal, only few dared to report to the police, out of fear of being arrested on the spot. The feeling of being treated ‘like a criminal’ and living in a space where one not only risked being arrested but also physically violated, stemmed from direct encounters with the Migration Police. In 2005, media reports on police brutality during arrests of ‘illegals’ increased following the publication of a picture showing a policeman kicking a handcuffed Nigerian man lying on the ground (cf. HMW 2003: 35; KLO and HMW 2003; Wurgaft 2005a). The finding of the State Controller – that the Immigration Authority had closed numerous cases of alleged brutality during arrests without investigation – triggered another public debate in 2006.14 Even before this debate on police brutality evolved, stories of policemen kicking, slapping and humiliating labour migrants circulated among residents of southern Tel Aviv. Many Filipino interlocutors had witnessed the violent arrests of flatmates,

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neighbours, or relatives. Stories of arrests – typically by a team of policemen breaking into shared (weekend) apartments in the early hours of the morning, checking everybody, arresting those without legal papers and leaving behind disorder and fear – spread alongside stories of successful concealments, the outwitting of policemen and escapes. These stories sometimes acquired the status of urban legends, and in any case clearly added to migrants’ overall feelings of being potentially subject to unregulated violence. Madelyn, whose husband was arrested six months prior to our interview and who had witnessed the arrest of her Filipino neighbours the year before, recalled in an interview: You know, for how many years my husband and I lived like that, all the time being scared to go outside, to go somewhere. […] When we sleep in the house, we are scared that maybe one morning, the police will come and my son will see what the police will do. So it’s good that the police caught him [her husband] in the street. That’s for what we pray before: that if he will get caught from the police, he hopes that [it happens] in the street and not in the house. Because it’s traumatic for my child. Because in the morning, we all the time could not sleep, all the time we think about it – that maybe one day, the police will come to the house, like they did it to our neighbours, shouting, kicking…15

Once an apartment had been raided by the police, illegalized residents who were not there when the operation took place took great care not to set foot into it again for fear of subsequent raids (which were likely to occur if the raid had been the result of information from a police informer). Instead, friends with legal status were sent to retrieve personal belongings, and those who were believed to have been the target of the operation moved elsewhere sometimes within hours. Reflections on who could have reported the apartment to the police started immediately. As became clear from reports on informers who had been detected and public statements by the Immigration Authority, informers were often recruited from the ranks of the community. They were either paid per capita or forced to report on others, after they themselves had been arrested for residing in Israel illegally. Stories of detected or remorseful Filipino ‘spies’ ranked high in the local Filipino magazines16 and were widely talked about among Filipinos. Hardly surprisingly, the existence of informers produced a great deal of mistrust and consequently, migrants restricted their social ties to close individuals or those considered to be very trustworthy. Information on who lived in the same apartment with whom, where one lived and worked, or whether flatmates possessed legal status in Israel was increasingly concealed, and questions about these matters triggered suspicion and mistrust. As interviewees lamented, accusing people of being police informers, or cases of reported blackmailing of illegalized migrants not to report them to the police, became an integral part of the community tsismis (Tagalog, gossip). The arrest of Filipinos in their shared (weekend) apartments was often attributed to intrigue or an act of revenge by a jealous kababayan. As is shown by the rumours within the migrant community about revenge killings

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in the Philippines that allegedly took place on the return of suspected police informers, the accusation that one was an informer was indeed a serious one. In this context, it is important to note that these transformations of the urban space for Filipinos were not restricted to ‘illegals’, but were to a certain extent experienced by most (Filipino) migrants. Filipinos who actually possessed legal status in Israel avoided ‘dangerous’ spaces and passport controls, first of all because one could never be sure whether one’s papers were indeed correct, secondly, because police controls were perceived as an unpleasant hassle or humiliating at least. Controls could take a long time, especially for those who were illegalized but undeportable due to a deportation halt or, under international law (cf. Hammer 1999), their status as the single parent of a child. Elena, for example, possessed a deportation halt document on the grounds of her son’s medical condition. Like interviewees in general, Elena made sure that she never left her house without having all her official documents on her person. Nevertheless, every time she was stopped by a police control, it apparently took the policemen at least an hour to confirm her papers. Sometimes she was asked to step into the police car and join the policemen driving around the city, arresting and picking up other alleged illegals, until they received confirmation that Elena’s papers were valid. Then she was released, often in a different part of the city. During one week in spring 2005, Elena was checked three times by different police patrols. In order to avoid these hassles, Elena said that ever since she had taken great care to hide, but to a lesser extent than before she managed to obtain the deportation halt: ‘It’s not that I don’t go out. It’s small things, rather. For example, if I go to the bus stop, you don’t stand at the bus stop, but you hide. Only when the bus comes, you go out’. In contrast to the social isolation reported by many illegalized interviewees, it is important to note that there were no closed social circles of legal or illegalized Filipino migrants in Tel Aviv. Instead, as the legally precarious position of migrants in Israel suggests, the legal statuses of members within any given group of Filipinos – be it flatmates, families, or church congregants – were mixed and in constant flux. Filipinos without legal status were far from avoided and even though they selected their social ties carefully, they typically continued to be integrated into sometimes large social networks. Ultimately, there was a great deal of solidarity and readiness to help illegalized kababayan. At the height of the arrests, many Filipinos with legal status were kept busy at weekends babysitting, picking up the children of arrestees from kindergarten, going to pack personal belongings in raided apartments, and offering shelter to those who did not dare to return. Filipino regional associations or church groups collected money in order to pay for flight tickets so that arrestees did not have to stay in detention but could leave ‘in dignity’ without being imprisoned, or paid the bail money set by judges from detainees to let them go out ‘on bail’. Rather than a legal transgression that was one’s own fault, ‘illegality’ was largely perceived as the outcome of unjust, discriminatory and inconsistent migration policies and state practices.

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Given the tremendous emotional, social and, not least, economic costs of staying in Israel despite being deportable, migrants constantly questioned whether or not their stay was still worthwhile. Illegalized interviewees and people I talked to during my field research said they were continually reflecting on whether to leave and, if so, when. Many of those who decided to stay emphasized that they had been forced to do so because relatives badly depended on their cash remittances or because they themselves had not yet achieved financial goals. Several illegalized migrants who had lived in Israel for a very long time said that they were horrified at the thought of returning to a country they had left behind long ago. For many, Tel Aviv had become a new home, or at least a home for their children. In particular, religious women such as Neth felt that their continuing residence in Israel, the ‘Holy Land’, was part of a mission, proof of their ongoing commitment to God. As the deportations continued throughout 2004 and 2005, more and more early migrants decided to leave, despite having firmly decided not to do so only months earlier. Within a context of emotional, social and economic misery, many appeared to develop a strong sense of fatalism. Religious migrants especially said that they had put their lives completely ‘in God’s hands’ and were prepared to leave whenever their ‘time had come’. The realization that one’s stay in Israel could end at any moment resulted in what can be termed a temporalization of presence. This increasing temporalization became visible in the urban space. An increasing number of shipping containers sprang up in Neveh Sha’anan; they had been ordered by groups of migrants, who were collectively sending their belongings back to their countries of origin. In contrast, Filipino acquaintances who had apparently been living in furnished apartments before 2003 now had to fit their belongings into a suitcase weighing 25 kilograms, the maximum allowed on board a flight. Accordingly, illegalized migrants’ daily lives became even more frugal after the deportation policy was introduced. Many of them, including Neth and Raquel, gave up their shared weekend apartments and spent occasional Saturday nights on sofas or mattresses provided by friends. Filipinos’ weekend apartments increasingly appeared to be transit stations. A case in point was the apartment of Sandra, who lived with seven other mostly illegalized Filipinos in Neveh Sha’anan. Apart from the furniture provided by the house owner (namely four double or bunk beds, a sink, a stove, a cupboard and a small plastic table with two plastic chairs), the apartment contained hardly anything other than suitcases, half-packed balikbayan boxes, and very basic cooking dishes and utilities, including plastic plates and glasses. The realization that their stay in Israel could end abruptly led illegalized migrants to prepare for immediate departure. Accordingly, Sandra had divided her belongings between her workplace and the weekend apartment, so that she possessed basic items in both locations in case she was arrested at either of them. Finally, illegalization resulted in a transnationalization of migrants’ orientation. Many of those who had been living without the necessary documents in Israel for long periods of time had been unable to return to the

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Philippines for vacation and felt rather detached from life ‘back there’. Now that it became obvious that their stay in Israel was limited, many attempted to reorient themselves towards the Philippines by increased communications or cash remittances. As more and more Filipino friends and family members who had also been in Israel were deported, those remaining found that many of their social networks were forcefully relocated in geographical terms. As the final chapter of this book will show, others oriented themselves towards the ‘greener pastures’ of yet another destination country. In Mercy’s case, living ‘in hiding’ transnationalized her life by practically virtualizing it: since she both worked and lived in an internet café and was afraid to leave the house due to her illegal status, she spent a great deal of her time online. Through the internet, she communicated first of all with her family and friends in the Philippines, via webcam and internet telephoning. Moreover, she formed virtual relationships with men all over the world, among them an Indian construction worker employed in Saudi Arabia and a man from Finland. For hours each day, Mercy would surf the internet, watch Philippine news and read about visa regulations or job opportunities abroad, often instructed to do so by Filipino customers. Her inability to physically leave the house drew her into the virtual world of the internet, where, in contrast to the urban space beyond the internet cafe, there seemed to be no restriction on movement.

The Takana Community of Manila Avenue: Filipinos in the Tel Aviv Mall In 2004, ten years after its opening, the Tel Aviv Mall of the south Tel Aviv Central Bus Station had little in common with the more glamorous ‘temples of consumption’ that were located in central or suburban Tel Aviv. Even official reports by the Central Bus Station’s management spoke of the building as an ‘eyesore’ that had deteriorated ‘to the lowest of levels’, in short, as ‘a neglected place that does not have much of a positive influence on its surroundings’.17 The Central Bus Station and mall presented itself to the observer as an edifice of exposed concrete, rising for five (out of seven) floors above the ground. With a multitude of overpasses, access roads and ramps, the enormous building extended its reach into the surrounding neighbourhood and focussed the hundreds of bus lines commuting between the station and practically every corner of the country in and out of its numerous platforms and bus stops. Inside, the two lowest levels were closed to the public shortly after they were opened because their commercial areas could not be rented out, and passengers and visitors tended to get lost in the large underground space.18 The six floors above the closed zone were composed of mixed commercial areas, with public transport leaving from three of them. The main floor of the bus station’s commercial area was its fourth floor. Here one passage bore the nickname of Manila Avenue.

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Given the generally shabby character of the building, acknowledged and complained about by Filipinos, with masses of passengers lining up for the security controls at its entrances, hastily running through it on their way to or from the buses, and the air filled with noise and pollution, it may seem surprising that this of all places became so popular with Filipinos employed all over Israel. Two Filipina journalists, in an article in the local Filipino magazine Focal, explain: What does this place has [sic] that Filipino [sic] keeps coming back? – The Pinoy ambience, Presyong Masa, Karaoke, Pagkaing Pinoy na ubod ng sarap na luto ni Lyn at ni Kuya Marlon, the American Towels na with so much to offer, Photo Shop na Pinoy na Pinoy ang dating.[19] Mrs. Mercado, 42, a caregiver, said that it is her way of relief as she longs for her family who are back home in the Philippines. Therefore, every Shabbat she spends the whole day in Takana Merkazit with the fellow ‘Pinoy’ to ease the sadness and boredom. […] Ms. Esther dela Cruz, a regular customer of Saloon de Manila, told us that she is their regular customer and that she feels like she’s in the Philippines every time she does her hair here. […] It is very convenient to hang-out for the reason that everything you need are here. There are establishments that are betrothed to serve the Filipino people and that make the Filipino Community active in Takana Merkazit. In the contrary, not everybody consume [sic] their time by having fun. There are some who are seeking for new employer, most often those who don’t have a legal paper or working visa. In Takana Merkazit they can hang around with their comrades who understand their situation and find someone who can assist them. There is certainly no place here in Israel like what we have in Takana-Merkazit. Actually regular business owners who have been in this area for quite some time call this place ‘Manila Avenue.’ They sure are right, after all. (Talana-Rivera and Doctolero 2005)

Filipino interviewees gave similar explanations for spending their time in the Central Bus Station. First and foremost, there was a pinoy ambience, not for nothing described in ‘Taglish’ (a mixture of Tagalog and English language) in the quotation above and apparently closely related to certain shops. Secondly, the takana experience clearly had a lot to do with emotional management, as this was a space where Filipinos who felt homesickness, loneliness and boredom sought ‘relief’ through company and entertainment. Thirdly, ‘everything’ one needed was available in the bus station, making it a convenient place for shopping. Not least, the bus station was a space of convergence that fuelled collective spirit and action. On Saturday afternoons, when the large seven-storey building of the station’s shopping centre re-opened after the weekly Shabbat closure, Filipinos and others streamed in until the early hours, when the discotheque Tambayan (Tagalog, literally ‘hang-out’) underground closed its doors. In order to provide an insight into a rather typical Saturday night experience in the station, I shall quote the following passage from my field notes, dated 28 May 2005: At 4 p.m. I have an appointment with Sandra at the bus station’s McDonalds. In front of the building there are long lines for the security checks, mostly composed of Filipinos. The McDonalds, one of the first stores to re-open on Saturday

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afternoons, is filled with Filipinos, eating soft ice, sitting around, chatting, waiting for acquaintances with whom they have an appointment. There are long lines in front of the public phone booths beside the McDonalds. People have themselves photographed beside its golden double-bow, in groups of friends. Sandra arrives at around 5 p.m. and informs me that Linda and Thelma are supposed to arrive from their employers’ homes by bus later on. We order chips and coke and Sandra tells me about her new employer. […] While we are sitting at McDonalds, acquaintances of Sandra come over, exchanging the latest information. A Filipina has been robbed outside the ‘takana’. A man grabbed her handbag by force, jumped on a waiting scooter and took off. She had just received her monthly salary, which she intended to remit in the bus station. There are no stories of arrests by the ‘Immigration’[20] yet. An hour or so later, Linda arrives with her new Thai boyfriend, who works in a nearby Moshav [Israeli agricultural village]. Thelma arrives and quickly disappears because she has to ‘get some things’, calling cards, a cream from SuperPharm [shop for cosmetics in the mall]. When she comes back, she asks us to hurry up, because she has entered us in the Pinoy Pinay [name of a shop, Tagalog slang for ‘boys and girls’] list for karaoke. ‘I feel so lonely today, I have to sing’, she says. She has just been denied a tourist visa for Hungary, where she wants to visit her boyfriend, whom she met at Frankfurt airport on her way to a vacation to the Philippines some months ago. By the time we reach Pinoy Pinay, the list-place has already been passed over. We stroll through Manila Avenue and pick up flyers. One of the flyers is promoting a bus tour to Haifa and surroundings, another an all-inclusive ‘Filipino’ meal at Bahai Kubo[21] on floor 3 for 25 Shekel. We decide to go. Bahai Kubo is already crowded, with groups of Filipinos drinking San Miguel beer from the Philippines, eating pansit and singing karaoke. Sandra and Thelma study the list of karaoke songs and choose three love songs. The large group of Filipinos next to us has chosen several songs prior to us. The group’s eldest woman sings clown-like, giving the dramatic love songs an air of humour. The group’s younger girls dance with her, one after the other, flirtatiously, imitating sex positions, laughing. The crowd screams, shouts encouragement, laughs. An Israeli in his midtwenties takes pictures with a professional-looking camera. Sandra comments: ‘Oh, they are crazy. But you know, this is what you get – six days of savlanut [Hebrew, ‘patience’] – and then you have to let go on your free day’. Then it’s Thelma’s and Sandra’s turn. They take it seriously and sing with tears in their eyes. At around 10 p.m. [by this time, several friends have joined us in Bahai Kubo] the group decides to continue to Bahai Kubo’s discotheque next door, and I decide to leave. We agree to join the bus tour to Haifa three weeks after, which Maharlinka Tours promotes on Manila Avenue. Sandra, who also leaves, promises to register us on her way out.

Saturday nights in the takana, as this passage demonstrates, comprise a multitude of activities such as shopping, meeting friends, singing karaoke, eating Filipino food and exchanging vital information about new labour or immigration laws, apartments and jobs, as well as the latest gossip. As both the field notes and the quotation from the Focal article above illustrate, there are many shops, restaurants and institutions in the bus station that cater to visitors, not only Filipinos.22 Apart from global or nationwide chains like McDonald’s or SuperPharm, in 2005 most of the shops were small concerns, owned by Israeli businessmen or mixed – typically Israeli-Filipina – couples.

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Many of these gave their shop the appearance of a ‘Filipino’ shop. These retail spaces included recruitment agencies for work as carers, travel agencies specializing in ‘Holy Land’ weekend tours and the Philippines, the Asian food court-style restaurant Bahai Kubo, the Tambayan discotheque on one of the underground floors, and the offices of the Focal and Manila Tel Aviv magazines, where on Saturday nights, Filipinos went to seek information and assistance, hand in poems for publication, or participate in its computer courses or events (‘The most interesting life story competition’). In front of and throughout the bus station, individual Filipinos distributed flyers or sold home-cooked food, burned DVDs of Hollywood or Tagalog movies, and handed out copies of Filipino magazines. The highest concentration of Filipino shops was in the side passage mentioned above, Manila Avenue. On Saturday nights, hundreds of Filipinos promenaded here, sang karaoke, watched Philippine game shows or boxing matches via satellite on televisions set up in front of the shops, or rested on the plastic chairs provided by a pawn shop. Philippine national flags, Filipino shop signs and employees further marked this space as truly Filipino. Filipinos were said to have ‘hung around’ the bus station, gathering at the McDonald’s, also bringing blankets and food to sit on the floor and picnic soon after the bus station opened its doors to the public in 1994. Apparently, it was a Singapore Chinese businessman married to a Filipina who opened the first ‘Filipino shop’ on Manila Avenue. Michael, who came to Israel in 1994 as the contractor of Chinese workers for Israel’s booming construction industry, explained that when he saw Filipinos gathering in the Central Bus Station, the Singapore Lucky Plaza Mall, where Filipina domestic workers meet in large numbers during weekends (cf. Yeoh and Huang 1998: 593), came to his mind. He subsequently imported to Tel Aviv those items that he saw Filipina domestic workers buying in Singapore: jewellery, watches, Tagalog music and movies, and souvenirs. After the opening of Pinoy Pinay, which still existed during my field research, other shops followed suit. Shops which had been present on Manila Avenue before Pinoy Pinay adjusted by adapting their stock to Filipinos’ needs, employing Filipinos, putting up signs in Taglish or displaying the Philippine national flag. As with Pinoy Pinay, most shops in the side passage used Philippine place-names or Tagalog expressions in their names. They also adopted Filipino business practices, such as payment in weekly or monthly instalments or price reductions to so-called hulugan23 members. Shopkeepers, including Michael, described their enterprises as a ‘service’ to the Filipino community rather than economic undertakings. Integrated into the networks of their Filipino friends and customers, they were clearly part of what interlocutors termed the takana community. Many of them sponsored teams in the Filipino Basketball League, co-organized events such as beauty contests, cooking competitions, Christmas and Valentine’s Day parties, basketball tournaments etc., and generally spent much time in the station, even after their shops closed on Saturday nights.

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As the most important space for sociality of Filipinos in Israel, the Central Bus Station was associated with both the positive and negative aspects of ‘community’, such as social control and profit-making. Filipino interviewees frequently associated the social space of the takana with inggit (Tagalog, ‘jealousy’) and tsismis (Tagalog, ‘gossip’). Indeed, during Saturday nights in the Central Bus Station mall, one could be sure of overhearing many tragic tales and strange stories just by strolling through and chatting with acquaintances. There were rumours of the new love affairs of the Filipina employees of Manila Avenue, for example, or gossip that a Filipina had been bewitched by a jealous kababayan, had secretly committed adultery or had become pregnant, though no one knew the identity of the father. This Saturday night gossip spread rapidly throughout the station, reaching those affected via text messages, sometimes in the forms of threats or accusations, or even entering the columns and articles of Focal and Manila Tel Aviv magazines. The social control, emotional pain and psychological stress entailed in the takana tsismis apparently led some Filipinos to avoid the Central Bus Station. Filipino Christian groups that organized events or gathered there felt the need to sanctify the station by praying in or over it, conducting exorcisms, and more generally spreading ‘The Word’. As one of the most frequently used spaces by Filipinos in Israel and consequently one of the most meaningful, the bus station was frequently reflected on by interviewees. Most of all, it was compared to places in the Philippines. On one hand, the outstanding shabbiness of the takana reminded migrants of barrios or baranggays in Manila; on the other hand, it led them to compare the bus station to places in the Philippines which were more elegant, modern and arguably Western. As a space of consumption where large events were staged in order to evoke wealth and glamour, and where women called ‘Manila girls’ became celebrities within the downtrodden and apparently segregated space of the urban neighbourhood, the takana was indeed a space of a similarly ambivalent modernity to Manila for Filipino workers. To explain this, we should look more closely at Filipinos’ relationship to the station and surroundings. Esther dela Cruz, for example, was quoted above telling the Focal journalist that she felt like she was in the Philippines every time she had her hair done in the Saloon de Manila on Manila Avenue. In a similar way, a Filipina interlocutor, Angel, told me: Even during the two years [that I was employed] in Haifa, every weekend I came to Tel Aviv. There’s a fresh air here. In Haifa, it was like a village, too quiet. […] Filipinos love Tel Aviv because all the excitement is here. In Takana Merkazit… – because everything is for us! The music – they play our own music, they are selling our own food. […] The moment you arrive at Takana Merkazit, you simply feel that you’re in Little Philippines.24

Similarly, Filipinos’ talk of the Central Bus Station as a Filipino space was linked above all else to things sensual: the sounds, the smells, the taste of the food, the overall feeling of the place. The Central Bus Station reminded

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Filipinos sensually of the Philippines and did so in a deeply emotional and ambivalent way. Anecita, a Filipino live-in worker employed in a remote southern kibbutz during her stay in Israel, recalled her first visit to Neveh Sha’anan, where she went to visit her daughter who rented a weekend apartment beside the Central Bus Station: ‘So I took the bus to the Central Bus Station to meet her [Anecita’s daughter] there. When I arrived, I was shocked! Men drunk in the street, shouting and fighting. All the dirt, the prostitutes… So I told her: “How can you live here? This is like a barrio in Manila.”’25 By calling Neveh Sha’anan, with the bus station in its midst, a ‘barrio’, Anecita simultaneously incorporates the space into her own repertoire and distances herself from it by saying how ‘shocked’ she was to see where her daughter lived. More than any other Israeli space, the takana area was compared not only to the Philippines, but to its political and economic centre, Metro Manila. In recent decades, Metro Manila, a megalopolis with an estimated twelve million residents, has experienced a rapid technological, social, economic and aesthetic transformation of its urban structuring (Tadiar 2004). Beginning with the dictator Marcos’s ‘slum-clearing’ projects in the 1970s, and followed by Manila’s mayor, Alfredo S. Lim’s ‘scum-cleaning’ campaign during the 1990s, the Philippines’ economic and political elite attempted to restructure Manila into a global city capable of attracting international attention and investments (ibid.: 77ff.). It is here that elegant shopping malls, huge billboards and skyscrapers embody and at the same time promise a clean, exclusive, glamorous and air-conditioned world associated with the rich, powerful and modern elite of the country. Manila is without doubt the Philippine’s most Western urban agglomeration, the centre of show business and the seat of an international consumer culture. As such, and like Tel Aviv in Israel, it is deeply connected to various images, alternative but powerful narratives of its founding and structure, and experiences that differ greatly according to one’s social and political positions. One can assume, to use Rotbard’s (2005) terms, that it is not difficult to detect the Black City of urban social, economic and political exclusion in a city like Manila that nevertheless recently attempted to give itself the image of a White City of global wealth and glamour. Filipino migrants comparing the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station area to urban spaces in Metro Manila must have had this ambiguous modernity in mind. The association of Neveh Sha’anan in general and the takana more specifically with Manila also became clear in migrants’ talk about the ‘Manila girls’. From numerous conversations and interviews with Filipinos of different regional origins, I learnt that the takana was the space of the Manila girls. As Romelyn, who frequently spent time in the Central Bus Station on Saturday nights, described it: What is good about the takana is that it is a place for pleasure. You work for six days and maybe you also suffer at your work – then of course you want to enjoy

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your day off. But sometimes when you see all the Filipinas, how they go there with their Israeli boyfriends and the way they dance and dress – it is also bad. They are mostly girls from Manila, with lax morals. That’s why, when sometimes you walk down the street or you enter the taxi, the Israelis will say: ‘Hey motek [Hebrew, literally ‘cutie’], you want to be my girlfriend? You need some money?’ It is not good, it gives us a bad reputation.26

In a similar fashion, Marylinn, who grew up in the Philippine Mountain province and was employed in a travel agency on Manila Avenue, told me: If you come here [in the Central Bus Station], you can observe the Filipinas with men, and tomorrow you will see them with different men… From the north you cannot find that. They will go along with their own people. Not like the girls from Manila, with the Rumanians, the Turkish. […] And here in the takana there is a competition to show who is who… That’s how it goes. Some dress up a lot, lots of jewelleries, to show who has money, who has not. That’s not good. You can see them sit down with men, drink wine, drink beer. […] It’s pitiful. It’s good we don’t have that among people from our place. We have the word ‘shame’. You know, each one knows each one, so they cannot do it. Only maybe, we have some like that, a few only… 27

Like Romelyn and Marylinn, many Filipinos reproached ‘the girls from Manila’ for shaming the whole community. In trying to find out who Filipina migrants actually had in mind when talking about the Manila girls, I realized that many of those who were accused of being Manila girls were not from Manila at all. Rather than saying that specific women from Manila behaved badly, the popular stereotype of the Manila girls has to be seen within the broader concept of ‘Manila’ as an urban space of lax morals, rogue capitalism, ‘show biz’ and secularism. Within this concept, the Manila girls embodied the dangers and negative aspects of the community: instead of saving and sending money to family members in the Philippines, they wasted it on going out in the bus station and drinking. Rather than remaining faithful to spouses left behind in the Philippines or limiting their social networks to the migrant community, they indulged in sexual relationships and mingled with others. By spending their Saturday nights in the Central Bus Station, apparently showing off with jewellery, shopping and more generally ‘malling’, they also missed church services. Not surprisingly, the takana was therefore contrasted with migrants’ churches in the neighbourhood, where services were conducted on Saturday nights. It can be argued that the zealous attitude with which Filipina migrant women talked of and morally condemned the Manila girls represented a desperate attempt to show that they went to great efforts to lead a ‘proper’ life within the emotionally difficult and excluded situation of a foreign domestic worker pushed into the poor and segregated space of southern Tel Aviv at weekends. Even though she was not from Manila, Andrea, the former radio operator whose song ‘A Week of Patience’ was quoted above, proudly exhibited many of the characteristics commonly attributed to the Manila girls. As part of the ‘Circle of Friends’ of the Manila Tel Aviv magazine, she spent a great deal

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of her time at weekends in the station’s mall, often accompanied by Filipino friends with whom she shared an apartment nearby. For Andrea and her friends, dressing up, putting on make-up and jewellery, and spending money was an integral part of what they called the takana experience. For her, this experience was most of all about ‘malling’ – something she said she used to do in her Philippine hometown during weekends in order to ‘relax’ and ‘refresh the mind’. As a frequent maller, Andrea emphasized that the takana was not even close to shopping malls in her home region: When I first came here, I thought: ‘This is the place they always go to and they are so happy? Oh my god, what happened to the Filipinas, how can they appreciate this? It’s so dirty and shabby… How can they hang out here every Saturday?’ [That was] before… But then afterwards – no more choice – you will meet your friends here and you have all the Filipino shops – so no more choice, you go to Takana [laughs, pauses]. In our place in Pangasinan, there are many beautiful malls, huge, and clean.

As in Anecita’s case, the realization that Neveh Sha’anan was ‘like a [poor] barrio’ had triggered Andrea’s surprise, repulsion and disappointment, followed by the good-humoured resignation to make the best out of the given situation. The realization that the Tel Aviv mall in the Central Bus Station was less beautiful, big and clean than many of the malls in her hometown made her question whether Israel was part of the developed world at all, as she had envisaged it before she migrated. In an interview that took place in a café in the station, Andrea recalled how she arrived in Israel several years ago: I remember my first day in Israel – when I came from the airport, I was in a taxi – and I’ve been in Japan already, so I was expecting also that Israel was like Japan. Because it’s abroad! That’s what you are expecting: it’s nice, it’s clean – and when they send you photos, they send you pictures from all the beautiful places – so when I came from the airport and came here, I thought: it’s not so beautiful. I thought Israel was a very developed country.28

For Andrea, as for many other middle-class Filipina women, coming to Israel was not only about economic need, but also a great deal about imagination – of the ‘beautiful’, ‘modern’, ‘clean’ and ‘developed’ West. Neveh Sha’anan and the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station clearly failed to meet Filipinos’ expectations. As the first space on which many migrants set foot after arriving in Israel, the neighbourhood signified in an instant that the Western urban promise promoted by the pictures that migrants had sent them from abroad remained a promise yet to be fulfilled: the advertisements and billboards that evoked ‘things Western’ as paradise-like in the Philippines; the goods which Manila’s (and other Philippine cities’) elegant and ‘beautiful’ malls displayed and that one hoped finally to be able to buy with the dollars one earned abroad. Again, women found themselves pushed into a space which denied them full participation and incorporation into wealth and glamour, even within an arguably Western city.

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Nonetheless Filipina migrants strove hard to make the best of the situation in which they found themselves. They treated the takana as if it was an elegant mall, transforming their Saturday nights into an experience by dressing up, putting on make-up, living shopkeepers’ narratives of Manila Avenue and of the takana community, and taking an active part in creating it. Moreover, they continued to transmit pictures of what purported to be the West back to the Philippines by having themselves photographed in front of McDonalds or other comparatively ‘Western-looking’ places in the mall. While it was apparently clear to Filipinos – who, during their working week, in many cases had access to the affluent homes of the political, economic and cultural elite of the country – that Neveh Sha’anan and the Central Bus Station were marginalized spaces within Tel Aviv, they had nevertheless clearly and collectively appropriated this specific urban place. By feeling at home in Neveh Sha’anan in affective and sensual terms, their exclusion from the Western promise in the Philippines repeats itself ironically – whereas by coming to Israel Filipino migrants had hoped at last to reach that promise. As in the case of Manila, Tel Aviv was realized as a place full of ambiguities, where the Black City of social, economic and political exclusion was all too close to the White City of slum-cleared and ‘scum-cleaned’ global riches. By 2005, Manila Avenue and the Central Bus Station bore startling similarities with urban spaces where Filipino domestic workers come together in large numbers in other destination countries throughout the world. Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Rome are similarly described as meeting in large numbers in the public space (often connected to public transportation networks and shopping facilities) on their weekly days off, bringing blankets to sit on, selling home-cooked food, distributing local Filipino magazines and exchanging vital information. In Rome, Filipinos have long gathered at the Termini train station and specific underpasses (cf. Parreñas 2001a), while in Hong Kong and Singapore, Filipino domestic workers generally meet in the public space of the downtown business area (cf. Constable 1997; McKay and Brady 2005; Yeoh and Huang 1998). Filipina domestic workers, according to Yeoh and Huang, assert their cultural rights on their day off in the public space of the financial area in Singapore through a ‘routinized colonization of public space’ (1998: 598). These ‘colonised’ sites, as Parreñas (2001a: 202ff.) has argued in the case of Rome, are ‘pockets of gathering’, segregated social spaces recognized as public by de jure definition and public access, yet not so public in practice. As I encountered in Tel Aviv, the pockets in which Filipino domestic workers gather, as observed by Parreñas in Rome, were tied to a loose social network of migrants and functioned according to specific cultural rationales and structurings. As culturally appropriated spaces, the meeting places of Filipino domestic workers are typically politically contested, especially when they are situated within an urban centre such as downtown Singapore or Hong Kong (cf. Constable 1997: 539f.; Yeoh and Huang 1998). In contrast, and very much in accordance with a general, non-policy response of the Tel Aviv municipality

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towards migrants in the southern part of the city (cf. Alexander 2003: 130), the Central Bus Station’s management neither encouraged nor hindered the establishment of a Filipino space within the bus station. Indeed, in 2004 it even planned to create an ‘ethnic centre’ for Filipino (as well as Russian and Ethiopian) customers on the second floor of the station (personal communication; CBSM 2003). This step can be interpreted as an attempt to regain aesthetic, economic and generally spatial control over the mall’s space while at the same time serving the needs of its most dedicated users.

Conclusion Rather than adapting to the urban space of Tel Aviv, Filipinos – as urban residents have generally done – transformed parts of the city through their own cultural practices. They did so most visibly in southern Tel Aviv, more specifically the neighbourhood of Neveh Sha’anan around the city’s Central Bus Station. Here, Filipinos, alongside many other marginalized residents, both Jewish and not, have ‘homed’ themselves within a space that can be described as rather ‘unhomely’; the Neveh Sha’anan area has been analysed as the black part of the White City Tel Aviv, where processes of social, economic and political exclusion are highly notable and visible. Nevertheless, Neveh Sha’anan came to offer a space of sensual belonging for Filipinos. This space of belonging was challenged when altered migration policies placed many of its residents under the threat of deportation. Subsequently, southern Tel Aviv turned into a dangerous space, a topography of fear for Filipinos, who could never be sure whether their permits to reside and work in Israel would be regarded as valid by the Migration Police officers who roamed its streets in search of ‘illegals’. As a consequence, migrants’ movement within the city as well as the urban space itself were transformed, with the latter turning into a zone of transit rather than of settlement. However, in spite of the often violent arrests and deportation of thousands of migrants, the dissolution of community structures in southern Tel Aviv and its ongoing urban segregation, Filipinos continue to gather there in large numbers. This is especially true with regard to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, commonly called takana in tagalogized Hebrew. More than any other space in Israel, the Central Bus Station is one of sociality for Filipinos, in which both the positive and negative aspects of what migrants called the community became clear: while on one hand it stimulated solidarity, enjoyment and company, on the other it also entailed a great deal of social control, enacted not least through gossiping and jealousies. Moreover, migrants associated the social space of the takana with the ‘Manila girls’, who appeared to be the embodiment of a caricature of American glamour, liberty and wealth in the Philippines. In the highly contradictory narrative on the Manila girls, the takana acts as a symbol of the dangers and evils of migration and the migrant community in general, such as ‘shameless’

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behaviour, competition and jealousy between kababayan, as well as their boastfulness and material orientation. In this respect, the takana is a deeply tragic social space. Indeed, it was described thus by Filipina interviewees, who spoke both of their emotionally ambivalent weekly return to the bus station’s mall, and its ‘bad’ influence on their own attempts to lead a proper life in the midst of ‘sin’ and ‘temptation’. Most of all, Filipinos, whose extensive malling has resulted in the description of this practice as the national sport of the Philippines, perceived and used the Central Bus Station as a shopping mall. Yet, given the shabby appearance of the bus station in a marginalized quarter of the city, and with their ‘own’ more elegant malls in the Philippines and the image of a wealthy, clean and developed West in mind, the takana – and arguably Filipinos’ whole being in southern Tel Aviv – turns into a farce. Just as in the Philippines, their participation in a Western lifestyle in Israel remained nothing but a promise. This realization, as I shall go on to show in the next chapter, is not the least of the reasons why many Filipinos – who in Tadiar’s words ‘want to partake of the “American Dream”, when in fact they are already a constitutive part of that dream’ (2004: 28) – decide to move on in search of much heralded greener pastures.

5.1. In front of the Tel Aviv New Central Bus Station on a Saturday night, August 2007. (Claudia Liebelt)

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Notes 1. ‘A Week of Patience’, written by Andrea in early 2005 and transcribed and translated from Tagalog by her for me on 13 August 2005. During my research, I attended several performances of the song by Andrea, for example, during the celebrations of Philippines Independence Day 2005, described in Chapter 4. 2. In 2003, Tel Aviv-Jaffa had a municipal population of 359,000 and a metropolitan population of 2.54 million (Alexander 2003: 68). For 2005 estimates, see Alexander 2007: 91, fn. 13. 3. On urban history and social segregation in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, see also Levine (2005) and Marom (2009). Notwithstanding the exclusion of Palestinian citizens from the Israeli state and society, Israel remains a society of systematic ethnic stratification, in which an Ashkenazi family background, as opposed to a Mizrachi one, typically translates into a higher socio-economic status, including better access to education, upward social mobility and employment (Shafir and Peled 2002; Kemp et al. 2004). 4. On processes of urban segregation with regard to Neveh Sha’anan, see Alexander (2007), Ben-Adiva (1998), Rotbard (2005) and Schnell (1999). 5. Interview with Erlisa, 2 June 2005. 6. Interview with Edna, 3 July 2005. 7. The case of a Filipina who suffered serious injuries from jumping from the third floor out of fear of the Migration Police made the rounds among Filipinos in December 2004 (cf. Aquino 2004). On 30 August 2003, the ‘World News’ program of TV Channel 1 Israel broadcast a report on ‘foreign workers’ jumping from windows out of fear of being arrested. According to the report, by that time approximately thirty people were being treated in Israeli hospitals for injuries they had received from such ‘window-jumping’. 8. Interview with Neth, 23 April 2005. 9. Interview with Mercy, 9 December 2004. 10. Interview with Neth, 29 May 2005. 11. Interview with Monique, 23 May 2005. 12. Interview with Raquel, 23 June 2005. 13. Interview with Neth, 29 May 2005. 14. Annual Report of the State Controller, no. 56 A, Immigration Authority, Ministry of Internal Security, 8 May 2006. 15. Interview with Madelyn, 23 November 2004. 16. In summer 2005, Manila Tel Aviv magazine, for example, dedicated three cover stories to the topic (vol. 80, 81, 89; cf. Eitan 2005a, 2005b). 17. Cf. CBSM 2003. 18. Interview with CBS management official Tsvika Sharon, 30 June 2004. 19. Mixture of Tagalog and English language, saying: ‘The Pinoy ambience, prices for the masses, Karaoke, Filipino food, which is so delicious, cooked by Lyn and Brother Marlon, the American Towels [shop] with so much to offer, Photo Shop which has such a Filipino atmosphere…’; ‘na’ is an emphatic marker in Tagalog. 20. The Migration Police, a special police unit responsible for the arrest and deportation of undocumented migrants, is commonly called ‘Immigration’ among English-speaking migrants. 21. Bahai Kubo are the traditional Philippine houses made of bamboo and palm leaves; the restaurant’s name comes from its palm-leaf umbrellas.

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22. Apart from Filipinos, Russian-speaking and Ethiopian immigrants also use the Central Bus Station as a space for sociality, in different yet partly overlapping zones. 23. Hulugan is a payment in instalments for regular customers. Payment in instalments is common in the Philippines and is especially suited for live-in workers, many of whom try to get by on the weekly allowances they receive from their employers, sending their salaries to relatives in the Philippines. 24. Interview with Angel, 2 September 2005. 25. Interview with Anecita, 15 January 2005. 26. Interview with Romelyn, 21 August 2005. 27. Interview with Marylinn, 29 August 2005. 28. Interview with Andrea, 13 August 2005.

Chapter 6 Global Dreaming

‘…the imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for action’. (Appadurai 1996: 7) Pinay’s dream of being saved from a fate of ‘fish and rice’ and ‘camotes and bananas’ indicates a desire for other tastes, for pleasures beyond subsistence. It is a dream for a life that exceeds her existence as a function of necessity. This uncommodified activity of dreaming is what makes Pinay go, and go on. (Tadiar 2004: 141)

In Modernity at Large, Appadurai (1996) argues for a new age of global imaginations, dominated by the transnationally structured flows of mass media and mass migration. These imaginations often relate to a modernity which in many postcolonial societies lies elsewhere (1996: 9). As an example, Appadurai chooses the Philippines, a nation of ‘make-believe Americans’ (ibid.: 30), whose ‘mimicry’ of American pop music and ideals of beauty apparently gives proof of postcolonial dominance. Appadurai’s description corresponds with many interpretations of Filipino culture.1 Throughout numerous ethnographies, the Philippines appear as either completely Americanized, apparently lacking a culture of their own, or as an assemblage culture, recently described in terms such as ‘hybrid’ or ‘creole’.2 The former view of an Americanized Filipino culture has become a dominant discourse in the Philippines too. According to the renowned socialist writers of Philippine history, Renato and Letizia Constantino (1978), it is the outcome of a ‘colonial mentality’, a kind of cultural minority complex in relation to the culture of the American colonizer, which is perceived as superior. The latter interpretation of Philippine culture as something ‘hybrid’ or ‘creole’ has likewise been attributed to foreign influences as well as to the country’s geographical location in the South-East Asian seas, where centuries-old trade routes and movements of people caused different cultures to meet and intermingle (cf. Wolters 1999). As an example of Filipinos’ apparent hybridity, Andrea Lauser chooses Philippine cuisine to illustrate how numerous foreign

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influences – such as Chinese, Spanish, and American – mingled to become ‘truly Filipino’ (2004: 70ff.). Within this image of a salad-bowl culture, Filipinos are said to have developed a ‘migration mentality’ similar to that of Caribbeans or Latin Americans (Cahill 1990: 34ff.; Lauser 2004: 68). Salazar likewise naturalizes migration as part of the Filipino ‘consciousness’ as a ‘people constantly on the move across land and beyond’ (1987: 466). In her ethnography of Bicol concepts of power and beauty, Cannell (1999) shows that even though local, cultural concepts are indeed deeply influenced by Filipino imaginings of American wealth and glamour, the interpretation of the Philippine lowlands as the apparently ‘culture-less’ heartland of Filipino Americanization has to be questioned. She argues that it is the ironic appropriation of apparently foreign cultural elements that is the main characteristic of local culture, one engaged in a process of constant negotiation and movement (cf. ibid.: 223; in a ‘battlefield of meaning’, as one might put it, with Gramsci). Like Cannell, Tadiar (2004) points to the blurred boundaries of mimicry and irony at play in what has been described as local (Philippine) culture. Rather than a sign of mere (American) hegemony, Filipinos’ ‘mimicry’ of (American) pop culture is a more complex process, which can also be understood as a form of agency with the potential for resistance (ibid.: 3). In her book Fantasy Production, Tadiar understands the Filipino imagination of America not only as a culturally organized social practice (cf. Appadurai 1996), but as an intrinsic part of the political economy of the nation state, situated within a global capitalist order (2004: 4). She argues that Filipinos’ dreams of the good and modern life in the West and the hope of sharing in it must be seen as ‘deeply implicated in the dreamwork of the capitalist interstate world-system. Such dreams are symbolic enactments of practices of imagination that effectively operate in and as the political and economic organization of the Philippine nation-state’ (Tadiar 2004: 5). Filipinos dreaming an American or Western dream may eventually realize that the historical and ongoing capitalist exploitation of the Philippines contributed to making this dream come true – yet predominantly elsewhere and for others. Hardly surprisingly, this leads more and more women to leave the Philippines and seek their share of global riches elsewhere. Mass media, urban planning and state policies, which play an active role in the emigration of a large part of the population, have turned the Philippines into what Tadiar calls a country of misplaced dreams (ibid.: 1). Whether misplaced or not, this final ethnographic chapter will show that dreams and imaginings play a major role in Filipinos’ migratory moves. As ‘texts’ of conflicting messages, migrants’ dreams point to what may be (Schnepel 2001: 211). They are global in that they relate to a different life elsewhere. Accordingly, I address migrants’ narratives and practices of global dreaming. I shall do so first by showing that Filipina women who come to Israel narrate their move not only as a step dictated by economic necessity, but as a way of travelling and acquiring rights and liberties they feel they lack at home. In Israel, the ‘Holy Land’ for Christians worldwide, religious activities such as pilgrimages play

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an important role in Filipinos’ projects of migration. Secondly, I investigate the narrative of Israel as a stepping stone towards more desirable countries, as well as Filipinos’ practices of moving upwards within a global hierarchy of desirable destination countries. In the process of ‘homing’ themselves in Israel, while simultaneously realizing that their stay there is temporally limited due to an exclusionary migration regime, ‘home’ becomes an increasingly ambivalent category for many. Along the way, transnational subjectivities and everyday cosmopolitanisms are forged that continue to affect women, even though individual journeys might come to an end.

Migrants/Tourists/Pilgrims Travelling the ‘Holy Land’ Raquel, who had been working as a live-in carer in Israel for eight years when I interviewed her, explained why she came to Israel: Because we are Catholic, we always used to read all the names and places of Israel. From the time I was young, I was already dreaming about Israel, the ‘Holy Land’. So for me as a Catholic, it was important to experience to live in the place. To see the historic places in Jerusalem – I was very excited. In my first four years here, I didn’t do anything but go around on weekends, on special holidays – we have organized tours. […] In my first years here in Israel, it was my cousin who organized the trip. We rented a sherut [Hebrew, large service taxi] and went – maybe eleven, twelve persons. I never experienced going to an organized trip with the church. But we went a lot. […] I just knew then that all the historical places – I can see them while I’m here. So by that time I was very excited.3

Filipino migrants typically narrated their migration to Israel as both the outcome of economic rationales and a desire to travel, to see the ‘beautiful places’ and experience the ‘Holy Land’ which, as Christians, they felt emotionally close to and somehow familiar with from early childhood. When Raquel left what she described as a conservative middle-class home in a Philippine small town in order to work in Israel, she was aged twenty-one and had just finished college. For her, coming to Israel meant an opportunity to ‘experience life’ away from an at times over-protective family. Since her elder sister and several cousins were already in Israel, Raquel soon possessed an extended social network of friends. She was convinced that in Israel she was leading a life unavailable to her in the Philippines, living together in a shared weekend apartment with her boyfriend, who later became her husband, going out on Saturday nights, earning and spending her own money. Later in the interview Raquel also mentioned financial needs, income disparities between Israel and the Philippines and other economic motivations that had made her come to Israel. Nevertheless, she emphasized her move as an ‘experience’, a long dreamt-of journey. In order to realize this journey, Raquel had to become – to disguise herself as – a labour migrant: ‘You know,’ Raquel said, ‘we Filipinos – that’s the only way we can travel and see the world. We have

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to sign a contract to work in order to see the place.’ In 2005, however, Raquel was talking to me from a position of rather restricted mobility. At the time of our interview, her husband, her sister and numerous other friends with whom she used to spend the weekends had been deported. She herself had ‘lost’ her legal work permit after her first employer had died, and consequently had hardly left her place of work in order to evade the Migration Police. As a result, even though Raquel and her friends had temporarily managed to lead a life of working travellers, the visa restrictions and regulations she implicitly mentioned in the interview had pushed her back into the role of a ‘migrant’ rather than a ‘tourist’ or a ‘traveller’. As in Raquel’s case, travelling the country plays a major role for Filipino care and domestic workers, at least during their first time in Israel. Throughout organized group tours during weekends, Raquel – and many others who mentioned ‘seeing the Holy Land’ as one of their major motivations, if not the prime motivation for coming to Israel – could translate their wish not only to earn money but, by going abroad, also to ‘experience life’ and travel into action. Filipino migrants are pilgrims or tourists not only in the metaphorical sense employed by James Clifford to deconstruct the so-called ‘travel myth’ (1997: 34); they may regard themselves as such even before they actually embark on the journey, and, in a very concrete sense, perform the role of being tourists and pilgrims by collectively travelling around the country. Every weekend, travel agencies, Filipino magazines, regional associations and church communities organize ‘Holy Land’ tours or pilgrimages, promoted by their organizers with posters, ads or flyers. Even though these tours involve a considerable amount of time and money for Filipino care and domestic workers, I hardly met anyone who had not participated in at least one of them. As they travelled in large numbers to Bethlehem at Christmas, to Jerusalem during the Christian Holy Week in spring and almost everywhere from the northern Golan Heights (for skiing) to southern Eilat (for swimming), Filipino migrants came to know the ‘Holy Land’, actively engaging with its (sacred) geography from a position that clearly transcended their roles as carers and domestic workers in Israel. Since these journeys and pilgrimages are remembered and transported by pictures taken along the way, they function to reproduce Filipino migrants’ out-migration as a form of travel, indeed as the only possible way of travelling there is. Each weekend, when Manila Avenue was crowded with Filipinos malling on their day off, its two travel agencies competed in promoting their Holy Land Tours. These tours were typically connected to a Christian, Philippine or Israeli national holiday and had a seasonal, regional or thematic focus. The tours moreover, included several stops and as a result a little bit of everything: a visit to at least one Christian holy site, the experience of nature, shopping opportunities in a city, and – even during tours organized by church groups, that is, pilgrimages in the strict sense of the term – a fun aspect, such as riding in a boat or cable car, swimming, or floating on the water of the Dead Sea. As an example of such a tour, I shall describe the Philippine Independence Day Galilee Tour organized by the Maharlinka travel agency

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in which I participated on 11 June 2005. The tour had been promoted under the motto of Lakbay sa Holy Land (Tagalog, ‘Travelling in the Holy Land’) in the Manila Tel Aviv magazine and on flyers distributed in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station for several weeks before it actually took place. Like many other participants, I registered to participate during a Saturday night stroll through the Central Bus Station two weeks earlier, alongside three Filipina acquaintances (Thelma, Linda and Sandra, who are mentioned in the previous chapter). Similar to other tours and pilgrimages, the Independence Day Galilee Tour (which actually took place a day before the Philippines Independence Day) was a day tour and began early on a Saturday morning in front of the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. On my way to the station at the crack of dawn, I received a text message from Sandra, in which she explained that she was unable to come (‘hi they call me n they r exited pls. join them they cook filipino food i’m sorry i earned 500nis 2day kaval [from ‘chaval’, Hebrew for ‘a pity’] f i go well c u nxt wik ok enjoy’). Upon arrival, I found out that Linda received a similar message from Thelma the night before and still managed to replace her with Joyce, one of her weekend flatmates in southern Tel Aviv, and Joyce’s two-year-old son Rowen. Two large travel coaches left the bus station shortly after 7 a.m. There were three tour guides, Avi, the Israeli travel agency owner, and Miki and Mercy, his Filipino employees. Apart from Avi, me, the Israeli bus drivers, five Thai men (boyfriends of Filipina travellers and their friends) and three Israelis (also the partners of Filipina travellers), there were seventy-two Filipinos. Shortly after leaving the bus station, Miki, the Filipino tour guide in our bus, welcomed the participants and introduced the schedule of the tour. First of all, we were heading for the Baron’s Garden, a park in the Galilee, where one could take ‘beautiful pictures’, as Miki assured the crowd. Then Miki asked a woman sitting in the front row to say a prayer. Using Miki’s microphone, she recited the Our Father, also thanking God for being able to experience the ‘Holy Land’ that day and asking for God’s blessing for the trip. Avi and Miki distributed sandwiches and cola cans among the passengers. Shortly afterwards, Miki made another round with candies and collected NIS80 (approximately $18.60) as the fee for the tour. Finally he introduced me as a student who was doing research on Filipinos in Israel, and I distributed a questionnaire among the thirty-five Filipino passengers on the bus.4 The group was made up of thirty-two females and three males between twenty-five and fifty-one years old (with an average age of thirty-nine years), and most of them came to Israel within the past four years (twentyfour out of thirty-five had done so, with an average of three years stay in Israel). While only two had been in Israel for ten years or longer, another two had just entered the country. Of the thirty-five respondents, twentyeight declared they had been on similar tours before, some of them indicating many: ‘Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Jericho, Dead Sea’, ‘Five, already aside from this tour today I have been in Jerusalem, Jordan River, Dead Sea, Bethlehem, Bet Shemesh…’, or ‘many times, Mt. Hermon, Bahai Garden, Jerusalem,

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Dead Sea etc.’ The travel destinations given in the answers resonate with the top destinations mentioned by other Filipinos, as cities strongly associated with the life of Jesus – Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem – ranked high in the list of Filipinos’ travel destinations. Two major topics of response emerged from the answer to the question as to why they had participated in this particular bus tour. First of all, twentytwo out of thirty-three respondents indicate that they wanted to ‘see’ or ‘visit’ the country in general, or the travel destinations (Nazareth, among others) in particular. Ten (out of thirty-three) respondents included either the word ‘holy’ or ‘biblical’ in their answer. As in the response, ‘I want to see the holy place where they announce that Mary will be having a baby’, many of the responses speak of their excitement to see the sites they had dreamt or heard so much about. Secondly, the tour was envisaged by Filipino respondents as a social event in which they could relax from the working week. Accordingly, enjoyment was a theme mentioned in twelve responses. Moreover, several travellers pointed to the collective character of the tour and mentioned that they were going with friends. Others hoped to find friends during the tour, such as one woman who wrote ‘I had nothing to do in the house, I feel alone’. Most participants, however, had undertaken the tour alongside friends (at least twenty-seven out of thirty-four respondents) or relatives (at least four out of thirty-four). While the travellers were filling out the survey, the buses drove north to the foothills of Mount Carmel, towards a botanical garden called The Baron’s Garden. As the group walked through it, hundreds of pictures were taken. Groups of travellers posed for each other on the neatly cut lawn or beside sprinkling fountains and blossoming flowers. Joyce had her picture taken with and without her little son Rowen, and Linda wanted me to take a picture of her with and without her Thai boyfriend. Like many travellers, Linda had bought a single-use camera for the trip the night before on Manila Avenue. Back on the bus, Miki distributed promotional flyers: an advertisement for another trip by Maharlinka travel agency several weeks later (three days to Turkey), a voucher for the Bahay Kubo restaurant in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station and a flyer announcing the opening of a new shop on the bus station’s Manila Avenue, the Mabuhay Center. Miki then came around with a box of self-burned DVDs of Tagalog and Hollywood movies, of which he sold dozens. After arriving in Nazareth, the group walked towards the Roman Catholic Church of the Annunciation. I accompanied Joyce, her son, Linda and Marylinn, whom I met and talked to during the bus ride. While Marylinn and Joyce were reluctant to enter the Roman Catholic Church because they were evangelicals, Linda, a Catholic like the majority of Filipino travellers, was excited to see it. This church was erected over the spot, where according to Roman Catholic doctrine, Jesus’s birth was announced to Mary by the Holy Ghost; given the widespread and fervent devotion of the Virgin Mary among Filipino Catholics (cf. De la Cruz 2009; Wiegele 2005: 123ff.), it was among the prime sites of Christianity and many had yearned to see it for long.

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Inside the church, the group quickly dispersed. The Filipino travellers individually prayed, lit candles, wandered around the immense building, touched the altar stone with the Latin inscription verbum caro hic factum est (‘Here the Word became flesh’), talked to the priest, and took more pictures. Upon leaving the church, the crowd appeared enchanted, and many happily chatted, exchanging stories about Christianity and the church. A Filipina traveller remarked: ‘Oh, I feel so blessed. It is such a privilege to be in this holy place!’ Even Marylinn, who in the end also entered the church, said she felt impressed by its size and atmosphere. Linda, happy to have discovered a mosaic presented by the Philippines in the churchyard, next to those donated by other nation states with Catholic populations, all depicting Mary’s Annunciation, asked me to take her picture. From the church, the group continued into the adjacent, open-air vegetable and souvenirs market. Two women discovered that a Palestinian trader was selling beans which resembled a species favoured in the Philippines. ‘For three years, I didn’t eat these beans’, one woman happily exclaimed, and called others over. Full of excitement, many bought large plastic bags of beans. Some sent text messages to their flatmates in Tel Aviv to tell them that they would be cooking beans upon their return at night. A jewellery store and a shop with Christian souvenirs were also favoured. Marylinn bought souvenirs worth several hundred shekels, many of them at exaggerated prices. She explained that she needed souvenirs to send to her family (‘They already ask for it’) in a balikbayan box she was currently packing. While some of the items might have been available and even cheaper in Tel Aviv, it was important to her that the ones she now bought were actually from Nazareth, a holy place. Back on the bus, Avi, the organizer, suggested a spontaneous trip to the Bible Land museum. He said that it was a ‘fascinating experience’ and cost only 45 shekels (approximately $10.50). He proposed a vote of hands. Of the forty-one travellers in the bus, only eighteen were in favour of going, and the trip was cancelled. ‘Too expensive’, both Joyce and Linda remarked. By now it was early afternoon, and the buses stopped at a picnic area in the Galilee hills. The large party split into small picnic table groups. Groups of friends started unpacking their baon, packed lunch, including meat dishes, boiled rice and soft drinks in large quantities. Single travellers were invited to join, and Joyce, me and Linda invited Chris and her Israeli boyfriend to join us. Linda and Joyce knew Chris a little, because she was a weekend neighbour in southern Tel Aviv. While eating, they asked Chris how she had come to Israel and where she worked. Chris told us that she had come to Israel ten years ago, after working in Taiwan and Saudi Arabia for many years. She had married early, but her husband had died soon after the marriage. In Taiwan, she fell in love with a Filipino colleague in the factory where she worked. As soon as she had the chance to leave – first for Saudi Arabia, then for Israel – she did so. Her partner returned to the Philippines instead. For nearly ten years, Chris sent practically all of her earnings to him and hoped he would build a house there

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for them. She also financed his sisters’ and nieces’ entry to Israel, and two years ago finally managed to bring him over to Israel too. He, however, had fallen in love with someone else, and they had separated. In the meantime, Chris’ present boyfriend had got up and played at a distance with Joyce’s son. Fighting back her tears, Chris went on to tell us that, after she and her former boyfriend separated, she felt as if she had wasted her life and sacrificed all these years abroad alone ‘for nothing’. She fell ill, was hospitalized and for weeks was ‘on the edge between life and death’. The bus trip today, she confided in us, was part of her effort to enjoy life again. The man who was accompanying her now was a recent acquaintance, but she considered marrying him in order to obtain Israeli citizenship. As Chris talked, we silently listened, also making efforts to comfort her (‘you can never trust these men’), and Linda advised that it was always best to keep some money aside for oneself. When Chris spoke about her wish to leave for Canada and start anew, the conversation shifted towards the discussion of visa regulations, recruitment agencies and costs of living in Canada. As I returned to the bus, Avi, the bus drivers and Israeli partners of Filipinas were sitting in the loading area of one of the buses, drinking Turkish coffee. They too talked about visa regulations and marriage, and one of the drivers recounted the story of how he married his Filipina wife in Cyprus, including the ‘hassles’ they encountered with the authorities. The group’s next stop was the ‘Wedding Church’ at Kafr Kanna, an Arab village in the Galilee. Inside the church, believed to be erected on the site where Jesus, according to St John’s gospel, performed his first miracle and turned water into wine during a wedding, Avi recounted its story by reading aloud from a book entitled Pilgrimage and Christian Sites in the Holy Land: Promotion Sites. After the visit, the group again entered a nearby souvenir shop. Many Filipinos bought bottles of wine and Linda told me she wanted to give one as a matana (Hebrew, ‘gift’) to her employer, in order to thank her for giving her more time off so that she could go on this tour. From Kafr Kanna, the buses continued to an agricultural settlement close to Mount Tabor. Urged on by Miki, the bus driver played Tagalog songs. The atmosphere was increasingly lively, with people laughing, chatting, singing along, also exchanging sweets and soft drinks. ‘Oh, this for sure is the land of milk and honey’, Joyce laughingly remarked as we drove through the beautiful hills of the Galilee, referring to our next destination, a honey farm in a moshav, an agricultural village. At the back of the bus where we were sitting, a conversation about Israel developed. The landscape and villages passing by were compared to places in the Philippines. Some Filipinas were astonished at the large fields and plantations beside the road. ‘I didn’t know they also have so much agriculture here’, one Filipina employed in downtown Tel Aviv remarked; ‘I thought the economy depends on industry only…’ ‘We also have beautiful places in the Philippines’, I was assured by my co-travellers. Joyce, who said she had never really travelled in the Philippines apart from the route between her

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northern home province and Manila, dreamt about travelling through the whole country after her return, as she was doing now in Israel. Upon reaching the moshav, a local farmer welcomed us and guided us through the village into a showroom, where he explained the production process of the two major local products, silk and honey. He began by wishing the crowd a ‘happy Philippine Independence Day’ and proudly pointed to the self-painted Philippine national flag he had hung up beside the entrance. After the presentation, people bought local products made of honey: cosmetics, candles and food. ‘Oh no’, Joyce remarked to me upon leaving the shop; ‘I already spent something like five hundred shekels today…’ By this time it was about four o’clock, and many fell asleep during the ride back. I sat next to Joyce, who appeared to be in a melancholic mood. She did not feel like returning to Tel Aviv and starting another six-day working week as a part-time cleaner. She worried about her future as the single mother of a child who was illegalized in Israel. She told me that she could not possibly return to her family and hometown in the Philippines with a child ‘from an Indian’ without being married. This was especially so, she feared, since her son had the dark complexion of his father, whom Joyce left prior to giving birth. She said that now the day trip was ending, her everyday worries which she had hoped to escape returned and made her feel suffocated. However, the tour had inspired her, and she planned to send a letter to her family that very night explaining her situation and asking for forgiveness and advice, accompanied by the souvenirs she bought for them and the pictures she took. For other women the tour had a similar effect, as many prayed for healing, visas or more generally the solution of problems at the holy sites they visited. Requests made at these, so they believed, would surely be granted. We reached the Tel Aviv central bus station in the early evening. As usual on Saturday nights, the station was crowded with Filipinos, who arrived from their workplaces, strolled around the takana, met friends and went shopping. Before the group dispersed into the crowd, mobile phone numbers of new acquaintances were exchanged, and some continued into the mall. Linda and Joyce, the latter carrying a sleeping Rowen in her arms, walked back to their apartment which was just around the corner. This tour was in many respects similar to others I attended. In order to participate in the tour on which many spent a week’s salary or more, Filipino domestic workers decided against staying at their employers’ houses and earning extra money. They typically undertook the journey at specific points during their stay in Israel – shortly after arrival or before leaving the country – or out of an emotional or psychological need (because one needed to ‘relax’ or felt lonely and hoped to make friends). Indeed, these were emotionally intensive social events. As the description shows, feelings of sharing and camaraderie prevailed and women who hardly knew each other shared intimate details of their life stories, reflections and dreams. While the landscape passed by, passengers were collectively making sense of Israel, comparing the country to the Philippines, reflecting on its position in

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the Western world and/or the Middle East, and wondering about their own roles and options within it. As a powerful break from everyday routine, the weekend tour made Joyce reflect on her life, gave her hope and initiated an effort to approach her parents and family in the Philippines. The items bought and the pictures taken in grand style during the trip served not only as souvenirs and as proof that one had actually been there; they were also a means to strengthen social ties by buying pasalubongs, gifts for those back home. As I was frequently told during interviews, it was not least due to the souvenirs and pictures of the ‘beautiful places’ in Israel remitted by migrants during home visits or in the balikbayan boxes they sent back that many others decided to travel to Israel themselves. The pictures taken during tours often reflect a touristy gaze, depicting travel groups in front of famous buildings and beautiful landscapes, engaged in tourist activities such as camelor boat-riding, sometimes in specifically Middle Eastern settings. For example, Filipinos had themselves photographed as Palestinians dressed up in kaffiyeh headscarfs, which are sold to tourists by numerous street vendors next to the prime Christian sites in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. As the choice of single-use cameras indicated, the pictures taken during weekend bus tours were often the only ones that migrant domestic workers took during their stays abroad.5 As a result the images of Filipinos in Israel are mainly those of tourists, not of workers, a fact not to be underestimated if one acknowledges that migration is a great deal about imagination. As a tour organized by a travel agency rather than a regional association or church group, the one described above was heterogeneous with regard to its participants’ regional origins and religious affiliations. While its organizers had decided mainly to serve the Catholic majority of Filipinos by visiting Catholic Churches and Holy Sites, these tours often appealed to those like Joyce or Linda, who were not part of a religious community in Israel. Religious groups – both Catholic and evangelical – organized pilgrimages throughout the year, especially during the Christian holidays. Among them was a Catholic lay group called Pilgrimage for a Cause, which from the travel fee raised money for Catholic social welfare projects in the Philippines. Most significant during these pilgrimages was the celebration of Mass at a Christian holy site. The experience of Israel as the holy land becomes even clearer when I describe the final organized bus tour I went on, that of the Filipino evangelical Jesus Is Lord movement. One of the largest evangelical churches in the Philippines, Jesus Is Lord has established several congregations in Israel, as well as in most countries where Filipinos are employed in significant numbers. In Israel, the group arranged several excursions a year, among them an annual baptism in the Jordan River. Like the Pilgrimages for a Cause, the Jesus Is Lord pilgrimages were accompanied by a pastor, Justina, who had been sent by the Philippines mother church to Israel, but who throughout the week worked as a carer just like her congregants. The pilgrimage I describe started one hot August night from outside Justina’s apartment in southern Tel Aviv and lasted until the afternoon of the following

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day, a Sunday. As with other tours, the atmosphere on the bus ride was lively. All the travellers except for me, an elderly Israeli man who, according to church members, had become an associated church member, and Yitzhak, the group’s regular bus driver, were Filipino congregants of Jesus Is Lord, seventy-seven in number, including six men. Most seemed to know each other quite well, and many had been on other pilgrimages with the group before. On the bus, people chatted happily, sang, shared food and – inspired by Pastor Justina’s occasional explanations and invocations – prayed or talked about spiritual experiences. At ten o’clock our bus and a second, which had picked up church members from southern Israel and Jerusalem, reached a camping ground on the shores of Lake Galilee, where the group would spend the night. As one of the first actions to be taken after leaving the bus, two church members raised the Filipino national flag on the shore between two trees. Family baons were unpacked, and groups dispersed to the picnic tables on the beach. Barbeques were set up, and individuals went round the different tables with plastic plates in order to taste the food, get to know newcomers or chat with old acquaintances. As became clear, many church members shared weekend apartments with fellow believers and joined such pilgrimages together. Shortly before midnight the church service began. The group formed a circle, and one person accompanied the two-hour service on an acoustic guitar. The service itself consisted of the usual elements of evangelical worship: singing, giving testimony, a sermon, prayer and talking in tongues.6 During the testimony, Amelia talked about how she regained a work permit and turned legal after more than a year in hiding. In her interpretation, God tried her but in the end rewarded her for being ‘loyal and rigid’. Now she wanted to share her experiences with the others, especially the ‘illegals’, she said, in order to serve as an example for God’s strength, and to give hope to them and encourage them. After the sermon (Matthew 5, ‘Blessed be those who suffer’), Pastor Justina distributed letters in Hebrew addressed to Israeli employers, who were asked to give their ‘foreign workers’ time off early the coming weekend because they wanted to participate in a workshop that would ‘strengthen their love of the land of Israel and improve their skills as caregivers’. Justina both organized the workshop and initiated the translation of the letter (which she herself drew up) into Hebrew. Only a few church members laid down to sleep after the service was finished at around two o’clock. Otherwise, women came together in small, story-telling sessions (kuwentuhans or salaysayans in Tagalog), and shared their experiences during the working week, of racial discrimination or personal dramas, often packed into jokes and accompanied by giggling or laughter. Soon before sunrise at five o’clock, another service started. This one concluded with prayers and blessings for the church, ‘Brother Eddie’,7 the Philippines and the ‘Holy Land of Israel’. To her call for God to bless Israel, Pastor Justina added the hope that both the withdrawal from the Gaza strip and Islamic terror would be prevented.8 In the two hours or so that remained before the groups’ departure to the Jordan River, the participants

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again congregated in small groups, talked about problems with employers or work permits, exchanged information on legal matters and told jokes against their employers, Israeli neighbours or politicians. Larger groups formed around those who knew how to tell dramatic stories about sexually molested kababayan, acquaintances who were deported against their will, or church members blackmailed by recruitment agencies or money-lenders. Repeatedly, Filipinos emphasized the importance of values such as savlanut (Hebrew, ‘patience’), endurance, love and care, ‘in spite of it all’. Over and over I was told: ‘We really love the Jews’, ‘We are happy to serve them’, ‘Blessed are those who serve the people of God’, etc. Shortly before the buses left, some collected pebbles or bottled water from the Lake of Galilee as material tokens of a place that is considered holy. Just before noon, the buses departed for a kibbutz that has established a baptismal site on the shore of the Jordan River.9 Those who were about to be baptised (the vast majority) were each handed a white christening robe and received instructions from Pastor Justina on the procedure. Justina then entered the water with an assistant, and those who were to be baptised lined up on the shore. One after the other, they entered the water and prayed alongside Pastor Justina and her assistant, who then pushed their heads gently into the water. Many of those who were baptised talked in tongues before diving into the water, shouting, weeping and screaming. As small groups of newly baptised women wet to the skin hugged each other, sang, cried or exchanged stories of love and faith, there was an atmosphere of emotion, intimacy and sisterhood. Two hours later, the group returned to the buses. Again, a picnic with prepared dishes was held on a small patch of grass beside the car park. Then, the group boarded the buses and returned to the Lake of Galilee for a boat tour. As soon as the group was on the boat, the Israeli captain hoisted the Philippine national flag and played a tape of the Philippine national anthem. Many put their hand on their heart and sang along. Disco music followed and the atmosphere became lively, with people dancing, singing and taking pictures. An Israeli on board sold ‘Holy Land’ souvenirs – a poster of Lake Galilee, on which all the Christian sights were marked, necklaces with a silver cross, or the star of David. At this point Filipina women laughingly told me: ‘Now you can see, we come to work here, but really, we are tourists!’ On Sunday afternoon at five o’clock, the bus arrived at the Central Bus Station in south Tel Aviv. Most of the women changed buses at this point in order to return to their employers’ houses and start the working week. During tours organized by both religious and secular groups, Filipino care and domestic workers experience their being in Israel as a deeply affective and embodied performance. Travelling in the ‘Holy Land’ becomes a shared act of worship, of reflection on Israel, imbued with feelings of love for the land and its people. In spite of experiences of discrimination which are also reflected upon, being in Israel in this context is narrated as a blessing and a privilege. As such, it implies moral responsibilities and religious duties: both spiritually and materially, one must share one’s good fortune with those who are less

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fortunate. Filipina travellers do this by engaging in transnational philanthropy (as in the Pilgrimage for a Cause through the sponsoring of a church in a Muslim dominated region of the Philippines, South Cotabato, for example), or by investing considerable money in buying pasalubongs for those back home. As Pnina Werbner remarks, ‘during pilgrimage, pilgrims shed their mundane persona, often through metonymic giving to the poor or at a sacred site, while they return bearing symbolic substances imbued with the sacred power of the ritual centre’ (1998: 95). Both the shopping for Holy Land souvenirs and the collection of pebbles or the filling of bottles with water from the Sea of Galilee must therefore be seen in the context of Filipina Christians’ experience of Israel as a sacred landscape. As Werbner argues, pilgrimages imply a threefold renewal: apart from pilgrimages’ most basic renewal, that of the spirit, pilgrims also undergo ‘a renewal of personhood through contact with the sacred, and a renewal of community through the bearing of what has been in contact with the sacred centre home into the structured, mundane world’ (ibid.: 95). In the evangelical baptism in the Jordan River – which implies a form of being born again for them – Filipinos perform bodily a renewal of their personhood. Yet in a figurative sense, this renewal is also at work in their narratives of themselves as ‘tourists’ or ‘pilgrims’ rather than ‘migrants’ or ‘workers’. After the emotionally intense experience of the Holy Land tour, Joyce was able to write to her parents as a new person who acknowledges the mistakes she had made, reflects upon and is able to explain her difficult situation, and asks for advice and assistance. During these tours and as devoted Christians, many Filipino domestic workers in Israel create and act within what Raijman and Kemp (2004) – drawing on Appadurai (1996) – have called a ‘new sacriscape’ (ibid.: 163), that is, a transnational space of religious meaning and action. By travelling through Israel, Filipino Christians – some of them belonging to Christian Zionists groups such as Jesus Is Lord – appropriate the land as part of a sacred landscape. These emotionally and religiously laden, collective undertakings create and shape the community of the travellers. As noted above, heterogeneous groups of Filipina women of different regional origins, class status and/or religious denominations mutually share food, intimate life stories and emotionally intense experiences. Even though the social ties created during these tours may be weak – as is the case with tours organized by travel agencies, for which otherwise rather unconnected women come together and then depart – they may well be transformed into strong social ties persisting over long periods of time and in transnational space, such as those with pilgrimages undertaken with fellow congregants. While Filipina domestic workers find themselves dispersed across Israeli private homes all over the country throughout the week, during these journeys, they act collectively as Christian pilgrims and activists, Filipino (transborder) citizens and tourists. As such, they are taken seriously not least by those Israelis whom they encounter during the trips. Rather than the victimized, passive, poor Filipinas of the dominant public image in Israel,

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Israeli practices towards them now carry different meanings, albeit largely based on economic interests. This becomes clear from sale offers designed to suit their preferences, the playing of the Philippine national anthem on the boat, or the congratulations for the Philippines Independence Day by the Israeli Moshavnik, who even painted and hung up a Philippine national flag prior to the group’s arrival. The tourist/pilgrim distinction becomes increasingly fluid during these journeys which are neither merely sightseeing nor religious pilgrimages, but comprise elements of both. Following Victor and Edith Turner’s notion that ‘a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist’ (1978: 20), this dyadic relationship has been written about widely. In the case of Filipinos travelling in the Holy Land, the pilgrimage and touristic elements of these tours can hardly be distinguished. As pilgrims, they visit Christian Holy Sites and learn about Israel, realizing their own role as carers as part of a larger religious act or mission. As tourists, Filipino travellers engage in ‘Orientalist’ practices just like tourists from elsewhere in Israel: riding camels, having themselves photographed dressed up as Palestinians, or writing notes for the Jerusalem Wailing Wall. In contrast to most tourists and pilgrims to Israel, however, Filipinos stay on. As they are keen to point out, they know Israel more profoundly than most Holy Land tourists or pilgrims. In contrast to ‘the rich’ who come to visit the holy sites or to travel in Israel, including from the Philippines, they are relatively free to return to sites whenever they want, able to attend Bethlehem not only during Christmas (as thousands of Filipinos each year do), but also on other days during the year, when it is more accessible and calmer. In weekend tours through Israel, Filipina care and domestic workers are able to transcend by performance the category of ‘migrant’ that the migration regime assigns to them. This transcendence is temporary however. Just as Filipina care or domestic workers travelling in the ‘Holy Land’ are tourists and pilgrims who, according to Raquel, have to ‘disguise’ themselves as migrant workers in order to be allowed to travel in the first place, their socially, economically and legally precarious position in Israel constantly pushes them back into the position of ‘migrants’. As for Raquel, who described her initial years in Israel as a joyful time of travelling and the realization of personal dreams and liberties, after several years in the country, the departures of friends and family members, as well as her own confinement due to an illegalized status, signified to her that the ‘greener pastures’ had come to lie elsewhere. Many Filipina women decided to move on, realizing that Israel was not or no longer the place where the things one dreamed of achieving by travelling could be attained. They moved, as I shall show, within a subjective, yet clearly patterned pathway that from Israel typically led to Western Europe or Northern America.

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Reaching the Greener Pastures Beyond Israel Of course, if you want to have greener pastures, you have to move.10

The nomadic image of the ‘greener pastures’ was frequently invoked by Filipina domestic workers, typically in a self-ironical and slightly sarcastic way. Romelyn, who had worked and lived as a domestic worker in Dubai and Hong Kong for many years before coming to Israel, gave the above quotation. As a typical Filipina globetrotter, an unmarried woman about fifty years of age, Romelyn emphasized the travelling aspect of her migration moves. In an interview, she told me: ‘Because if you are coming around a lot, like me, you also enjoy [laughs]. So when I said: I want to go to Hong Kong, it was also for travelling. It is interesting, because if you are in Hong Kong, you can also travel to Macao. You can even go to China for one day’. Like numerous Filipina women I interviewed in Israel, after several years in the country, Romelyn planned to move on and narrated her stay in Israel as a ‘stepping stone’ towards even more ‘Western’ and ‘developed’ countries. The wish to leave Israel became especially acute after the mass deportation campaign in 2002 signified to many, whether illegalized or legal, that their stay in the country was temporary and could be forcibly ended at any time. As interviewees saw friends and relatives being deported after having lived in the country for many years – apparently under the illusion that they were able to stay, according to the reproach of many of the newcomers – knowledge and strategies of how to leave and where best to go before one turned ‘illegal’ moved to the centre of migrants’ discussions, planning and practices in Israel. ‘Why sit down and retire in the Philippines while you’re still capable to work?’, Romelyn argued, as did many women, who saw their chance of finding employment in the Philippines after they had returned as depressingly small. Rather than return to (and ‘sit down’ in) the Philippines, one could take up ‘just one more’ labour contract instead, or leave to yet another country. This holds especially true for women who have spent a great deal of their lives away from home, either as ‘intervallers’ – leaving the Philippines again and again in order to work abroad – or as ‘globe-trotters’ like Romelyn, who move from one country to another, feeling increasingly alienated from family members ‘back there’ in the Philippines. Instead, these women have often created a life of their own in the diaspora as members of globally mobile circles of friends or transnational (church) communities, an ‘imagined global community’ (Parreñas 2001b). Much of the anthropological literature on (transnational) migration has discussed the bi-directional moves of migrants, typically between a Third World country of origin and a First World country of destination (Constable 1997; Glick-Schiller and Fouron 2001; Gmelch 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Parreñas 2001a). In contrast, the experiences and practices of migrants who move on and on rather than back and forth have been written about much

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more rarely. One exception is Ong’s research on Chinese transnationalists (1999), who, as she shows, are directed towards a multiplicity of geographical destinations, have developed culturally infused norms of globality and move alongside global family networks. Thus Ong writes: Under these [modern nation-state] conditions Chinese transnationalists seek to elude the localizations imposed on them by nation-state regimes by, above all, moving between national spaces, playing off one nation-state regime against another, seeking tactical advantage – knowing that it is easier to become a citizen here than there, that there are more legal and political rights in country X than in country Y, and so on. (Ong 1993, quoted from Nonini and Ong 1997: 23)

As I shall demonstrate, Filipina migrants similarly move between nation states, seeking foreign passports and sharing sophisticated knowledge of various national incorporation regimes, legal regulations and strategies of ‘playing’ these ‘off’ against one another. Nonetheless, they lack some of the essential resources of the economic elite described by Ong. Rather than collecting different passports and easily jetting off around the world, Filipina women typically labour hard and long in order to move around. As North America and Western Europe – typically the ultimate ‘dream’ destinations for Filipina domestic workers – adopt ever stricter border controls, legal regulations and requirements for becoming a citizen, Filipinas’ movements towards ‘greener pastures’ take on an increasingly dangerous, time-consuming and cost-intensive form. Due to the practical impossibility of entering the European Union, the USA or Canada directly from the Philippines, most Filipinos are forced to follow global routes through a number of nation states, each ranked according to what I call a global hierarchy of desirability, in order to finally reach these locations. As I shall show, Filipinas’ subjective rankings of countries of destination differ mainly according to differences in wages and legal regulations, but are also related to imagined factors within a globally manufactured dreamwork. In the case of Israel, which clearly occupies a middle position in this hierarchy, we have seen that this imagined attractiveness is infused not least by the dream of being in the ‘Holy Land’. Of the Filipino domestic workers interviewed for this book, many had lived abroad before coming to Israel, typically as so-called factory girls or domestic workers in Asian metropolises such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, and/or Middle Eastern countries, most frequently Libya, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Jordan. Moreover, most of them conceived the dream or concrete plan of leaving Israel in order to work elsewhere abroad. This is illustrated in the findings of a survey conducted during one bus tour. In this survey, sixteen out of thirty-five Filipino respondents (45.7 per cent) said that they had worked abroad prior to entering Israel. Of these, six stated that they had worked in two other countries, and two had worked in three countries before coming to Israel. The countries mentioned in this context were Taiwan (seven cases), Saudi Arabia (four cases), Hong Kong (four cases), Singapore (three cases), Cyprus

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(two cases), and Brunei, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (one case each). In addition, more than half of the respondents (eighteen out of thirty-four, 52.9 per cent) stated that they had close family members elsewhere abroad, and in their explanations listed predominantly Western countries or capitals (Spain, Switzerland, USA: eight times each; Hong Kong, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Canada: five times each; Italy, Paris: three times each; Japan, Singapore, UK, Australia: twice each). For example, one woman who had worked first in Saudi Arabia, then in Taiwan and Hong Kong before coming to Israel stated that she had close family members in ‘Canada, Italy, Paris, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan’. As I have shown in Chapter 2, transnational family ties play a central role in Filipinas’ migratory moves. When asked about their personal plans for the future, respondents were divided into those who said they wished to return to the Philippines (twenty out of thirty-one respondents, almost two-thirds) and those who indicated that they wished to move on to another country (eleven out of thirty-one, just over one-third). Of the twenty who wished to return, seventeen were married and/or had children in the Philippines with whom they wished to re-unite. Those who expressed the desire to move on were typically unmarried or separated, had family relatives elsewhere abroad, and had been in Israel for longer than those planning to return. Eight of the eleven who wished to ‘move on’ had a specific destination in mind for their on-migration: Canada in six cases and England/London in two. Among other answers, these women wrote: ‘I want to go to a country, where I can practice my profession [clinical psychologist]’; ‘I have plans to go to England so I can learn, I can study, to improve my ability’; ‘I want to go somewhere, where I can have a chance to bring my children’, and, ‘I want to go where I can have my own business’. Most outspoken in her wish to make a life elsewhere abroad was a single mother of four children from Manila: ‘If given the chance, I want to migrate to Canada together with my family. Philippines will always be a thing of the past. Going back to the country will always be for vacation purposes’. These answers illustrate the major reasons behind the desire to move on. Accordingly, women hoped to live abroad with their families, especially their children, instead of being denied a family life as in Israel. Moreover, they wanted to make a career for themselves or practice their profession, rather than be compelled to live as a care or domestic worker with no chance of professional progress in Israel. As is also clear from these answers, migrants typically compared Israel with other destination countries, either those they had previously worked in or those they hoped to reach. Compared to countries where Filipina migrants had previously worked, Israel was generally appreciated: in the survey, it was favoured over other destination countries because of a better salary (in six cases), its status as the ‘Holy Land’ (in five cases) and the social benefits workers were legally entitled to (in three cases). Moreover, they liked working in Israel because ‘Israelis are good’, ‘There are so many Filipinos here’, and ‘If you have a plan to enter another country it is easier to apply to Israel first’ (one answer each). On the other hand, Israel was devalued as a destination country compared to other countries because

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of the mass deportations, the danger of Palestinian suicide bombings, and racial discrimination. In spite of a generally positive rating of Israel, many respondents to the survey and most interlocutors were convinced that there were much better places for Filipinos to live in. Avelina, one of my interviewees, explained why, for her, Israel was a typical ‘stepping-stone’ country: I don’t like to stay here [in Israel] for life. It’s not my dream country, not the place I want to be. It’s only for Israeli, for Jewish people. Canada, Italy – they are big countries – why not be there? But here, it’s the only place of the Jewish, so better leave it to them. Here – this is just a stepping stone to go to another country. If you want to have citizenship, it’s not the right country, they will not approve it. Then, in another country you can bring your children. So why not go there? The one reason why the Filipinos come here, it is about the money. And then, in Israel they give the permit, so it is already one hundred per cent sure that you can work here. In Italy, you go as a tourist – but what if they don’t give you a permit? Then, the education doesn’t matter here – even if you are only elementary graduate – the agencies don’t care. As long as you have the money, you can come. In Italy, you need to go as a tourist. If you are a nurse or a doctor, you can go to England or Canada from here. They [Filipinos trained as nurses or doctors] use it [Israel] as a stepping stone. Only the others want to stay [in Israel]……11

Clearly, the considerations that led Avelina to consider whether to stay in Israel, return to the Philippines or move on to Canada or Italy were extremely complex. Driven by her objective ‘to have citizenship’, as outlined before, she finally reached Italy several months after this interview, later making it to Canada with her husband. From interviews and ethnographic research carried out over a period of three years, two major patterns to Filipinas’ global movements emerged. First of all, there were the ‘intervallers’ who had been to several countries in order to work, but had spent sometimes considerable periods in between work contracts in the Philippines; typically they wished to live in the Philippines, but had again and again encountered economic problems which forced them out. Secondly, there were the ‘globetrotters’ who had left the Philippines many years before and had only returned for short visits thereafter. Instead, they moved from one country to another, or at least planned to do so. Nevertheless, the reasons for women’s out- or on-migration typically changed considerably throughout their journeys and life courses. For example, one of my interviewees, Thelma, clearly began her global migration career as an intervaller, but by the time of our interview had become more of a globetrotter. This is what she told me about her first move abroad: My first stepping stone in going abroad was my brother’s sister-in-law. She went to Hong Kong. I was only maybe twenty in that time. When I heard she left, I had in my mind: ‘Oh, I would also like to go…’ […] We were poor, we didn’t have television. We just went to the neighbours to watch TV. So I was dreaming of also having these things in my life. I also wanted to see how the world is like. Until now, I’m still dreaming to see the world! [laughs] Then I went there [to Hong Kong] in January 1991. My mom

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could not afford my studies in university. I wanted to be someone, something, but she could not afford that. So I had to go abroad… 12

Thelma returned to the Philippines after her first contract as a domestic worker in Hong Kong ended, but within less than a year, she had decided to leave again: ‘I thought: “Oh, it’s not enough”. So I decided to go to Taiwan. […] By the time I was in Taiwan, I brought my sister and my sister-in-law. It was their stepping stone also’. In Taiwan, she worked in a factory and fell in love with a Filipino co-worker. She became pregnant, was laid off and forced to return to the Philippines. She remembered the time after delivering her baby: When I was in the Philippines, I thought: ‘What will be the future of my daughter? My savings [from Taiwan] will go down, it’s not good. I have to move. I have to find someone.’ The first thing is, I went to Manila and looked for a job abroad. I met a Filipina who was supposed to fly that day, but they cancelled the flight. […] She was supposed to go to Israel. I told her: ‘I want to go to Israel also!’ She told me that the salary was so nice there and that it’s close to Europe. And I thought: ‘It is in the scriptures also’. So I gave her my biodata and I gave her two hundred dollars to bring my biodata to the agency.

The woman later asked Thelma to give her another $1,400 for the agency, but disappeared with the money. Instead of suing her, Thelma relied on another contact to leave for Israel and paid another $4,700 to an agency in order to work there. About four months later – her daughter was barely seven months at the time – Thelma was told that the agency had found her a job in Israel, and accordingly she left the Philippines again. By the time I met her in 2005, after six years in the country, Thelma, like many of my Filipina interviewees, was dreaming of leaving for the United Kingdom. At the time, she was working as the live-in carer for an elderly woman, whose health was deteriorating rapidly. The moment her employer died, Thelma knew she would turn ‘illegal’ and would either be forced to continue living in Israel ‘in hiding’ or to leave. Since Thelma also knew that she would not be able to find a job in the Philippines upon her return but was responsible for supporting her mother and daughter, she planned to take the necessary steps to leave before it was ‘too late’. She reasoned: I love Israel, it is very nice. Only the policy, especially the immigration policy, that’s not so good. But you know, the weather is great, I love it, it’s not cold like in Canada. In wintertime, you just wear a sweater and it’s OK. […] But still, I want to leave to another country. I don’t want to go home. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to go home, but I know that it would be too hard. I have to support my family. Also for me, I wouldn’t know what to do there. It’s much better to stay here. If the police wouldn’t catch, I would stay here. But with the police catching, it’s better to move…

While Thelma narrated her first move abroad to Hong Kong mainly as the outcome of the wish to ‘be someone’ and to turn her (material) dreams into reality, her second move followed the realization that the money she had earned abroad was ‘not enough’. Her third move abroad – to Israel, after she was forced to leave Taiwan – came quickly and mainly out of financial necessity. Now that

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she planned her next move, possibly to the UK, the financial necessity was still acute. Nevertheless, apart from the financial need, the feeling of not knowing what to do in the Philippines also played a role in her decision to move on, this time even before returning to the Philippines. As her remarks indicate, after so many years abroad ‘home’ had become something ambivalent to her, a place where she wanted to be – and should want to be – but at the same time she did not really want to return there for good. In 1999, Thelma entered Israel as part of a group of twelve people whom she had not known before but who had been recruited by the same agency. In 2005, of these twelve, apart from Thelma, only two were still working as legal carers in Israel, while seven had been deported to the Philippines, one had left in order to work in Italy, and one had become illegalized and was living in Israel ‘in hiding’. Many of Thelma’s more recent Filipino friends in Israel had decided to leave during the past year, after the implementation of the deportation policy. Apart from Italy (attractive for being the centre of Roman Catholicism and hosting a large Filipino community, to which many were connected by familial ties), and Canada (reputed to grant citizenship within a relatively short period of time), the UK was the most frequently chosen destination country. Therefore, Thelma reasoned: I have to move [to another country] also. I don’t want to go home like that. […] I would like to go to England, but it’s too expensive. They take 5,000 dollars, the agency. Not including the ticket. If I go there directly [from Israel], maybe I have a chance. It would be good if he [her Hungarian boyfriend] invites me [to Hungary]. Then they would see that I came to the European Union before. I just want to visit also. I was dreaming of the UK. But it’s hard, because I didn’t study and I couldn’t apply as a nurse. The agencies, they won’t take me.

Clearly, Thelma’s wish (‘dream’) to enter the UK for work – or even only for a visit – could only be realized with great difficulty. Since she was not a trained nurse – nurses were actually recruited to work in the UK, as agency owners and embassy staff assured me in 2005 – the only two ways to enter the UK in Thelma’s eyes were either to pay $5,000 to an agency to ‘take’ her, or to move to another ‘stepping stone’ country between Israel and the UK, such as Hungary which had a less restrictive immigration policy and lower wages, but was a member of the European Union. Consequently Thelma applied to the Hungarian Embassy for a visa, stating that she planned to visit her Hungarian boyfriend (a man she had met at the airport in Frankfurt on her way to a vacation in the Philippines). Thelma was refused a visa, however, and by the time I lost contact with her in 2006, she was still in Israel, intending to take out a loan in order to pay an agency to arrange work for her in the UK. As was the case for Thelma, recruitment or placement agencies play an important role for Filipina migrants’ global moves. They structure these moves not only by promoting specific destination countries, but by ‘opening up’ countries in spite of restrictive regulations by preparing migrants for interviews in embassies, arranging the paperwork, designing ‘successful’ curriculum vitae,

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and sometimes bribing officials. In Israel, the market for agencies and agents promoting other destination countries among Filipino domestic workers boomed once deportations increased. Agencies with significant names like Moshe Canada or Global Relocation promised to bring Filipinos to countries where there was no Migration Police, where salaries were even higher than in Israel and where one would be granted citizenship in practically no time. Among the numerous agencies that placed their advertisement in the local Filipino magazines Manila Tel Aviv and Focal was a company called Shulamit Grosbard Ltd. In its advertisement, the company offered an ‘International Visa Consultants & Relocation’ service for working in England and the ‘Canada Live-In Care program’.13 Concerning Canada, the agency wrote: ‘Nannies needed immediately: Good pay, landed immigrant status given after 2 years, References of nannies already sponsored, Must have valid visa, Minimum 2 years of College Required’. The Moshe Canada agency promoted even more destination countries. In its regular advertisements in Manila Tel Aviv during 2004 and 2005, it offered ‘relocation’ to the UK, Canada, Ireland, the US, Australia and Russia. In the ads, each country was described with a short profile listing the requirements for Filipino applicants. Russia was implicitly promoted as ideal for those who were illegalized in Israel, being eligible ‘for all caregivers, irrespective of your status in Israel’. In order to advise Filipinos about which country to choose and how to get there, agencies held preparation seminars, which, although expensive (about $20 per night), were usually attended by large numbers of Filipinos. As mentioned, Filipinos’ moves and dreams of moving reflect a global hierarchy of destination countries. Within this hierarchy, Israel was clearly above other destinations in the Middle East and Asia, but equally clearly below Western Europe and Northern America. The prices charged illegally by agencies in order to enable Filipinos to enter and work in various destination countries clearly reflect (and reciprocally structure) Filipinos’ hierarchy of destination countries: of the three top destinations from Israel, in 2005 Italy was the cheapest (about $2,000 for legal and $4–4,500 for illegalized Filipinos), followed by Canada and the UK (at least $5,000 for legal Filipinos for both countries and $6-8,000 for illegalized Filipinos in the case of the UK).14 In spite of these large sums, going to each of these countries straight from the Philippines in 2005 was either considerably more expensive, took a much longer period of time, or was simply out of reach due to a lack of ‘experience’ in care work, which most recruiting agents apparently required for such ‘top end’ destination countries. The unofficial prices of destination countries for Filipino migrants depended mainly on i) the migrant’s status, such as educational attainment, experience in care work or legal status; ii) the country’s general economic, imaginative or social attractiveness / position in the global economy; and iii) the geographical positioning of the migrant. The migration chains of Filipino interviewees described above –the typical chain being Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Arabic-speaking Middle East or Cyprus, then Israel, and later Canada, the UK or Italy – were not least an outcome of these

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costs, since Filipinos first went to comparatively ‘cheap’ countries in order to subsequently finance their moves to more ‘expensive’ ones. In order to progress up the ladder of attractive destinations, Filipino migrants invested large sums of money and calculated in terms of years and even decades of their lives. Filipinas chose specific educational courses that were known to be attractive on the global market, when they planned for their lives abroad. As can be understood even from a short stroll through downtown Manila – where numerous billboards promote college courses in nursing with symbols of the West, such as US dollar bills, the New York Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower in Paris – education in the Philippines has become a qualification enabling travel abroad. During my research I encountered persons who had taken up a college place that promised a good chance of being accepted for work abroad, even though they anticipated not being able to practice the skills they had acquired once they were there. One of my interviewees in Israel, Lyna, a middle-aged woman who had worked in Libya and Saudi Arabia for several years before moving to Israel, told me about her recent interrogation in the US Embassy in Israel, where she had applied for a visa: ‘I told them: “Only I will just see America, to fulfil my dream.” Because that’s why I chose to be a nurse, to fulfil my dream, to see America’.15 One of the most blatant examples with regard to this ‘education for travel’ are doctors in the Philippines who return to college in order to take up nursing, because Filipino nurses are more sought after in the global market.16 Apart from designing their own lives to fit the prerequisites for global travelling, some Filipino migrants planned their migration moves intergenerationally. Novelita, one of the three women portrayed in Chapter 2, illustrates this; she had dreamed of living with all of her four children in the USA where both her sons were already resident. She advised her two daughters who were currently living with her in Israel to plan their moves to the USA as follows: ‘So I said to them: “The first step is to go to Israel. And then, if you want to continue, you can go to Canada. And only then you can go to America”. Then they will be ready for this, they have the experience’.17 If her daughters stuck to this plan, Novelita reasoned, they would all be able to live in the USA with Western (that is, Israeli, Canadian or even US) passports in about ten years time. Another interviewee, Grace, like most Filipina globetrotters, not only invested a great deal of her life but also a large proportion of the money she had earned abroad to keep on moving. In order to get to Cyprus from the Philippines in 1992, she had paid $2,000 in placement fees to an agency, for which she took out a loan at a high rate of interest. In Cyprus, it took her more than three years to repay that loan. As soon as she had done so, Grace started saving money in order to leave for Israel. To get there she was obliged to pay $3,200, and even though she had saved as much money from her salary in Cyprus as she could, she still had to borrow in order to cover these expenses. After seven years in Israel and thirteen years away from the Philippines, and even though she said she had saved hard during all these

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years, Grace still did not possess her own house and ‘a piece of land’, which she had hoped to buy after five or six years abroad. Instead, she had lost her legal residence permit, and the money she had saved was barely enough to cover the placement fee for Italy, where she planned her next move, avoiding the Philippines because of the ‘shame’ implied in a deportation without any substantial savings after so many years. As for other Filipina transmigrants I encountered during my research, on-migration for Grace appeared to be a necessity to fulfil her (economic) dreams, but it had also acquired a meaning in itself. Aged forty-seven and unmarried without children by the time of our interview, Grace said there was ‘nothing really’ that drew her back to the Philippines. Like Romelyn who was quoted earlier, Grace reasoned that she was too old to return ‘home’ and start a family, but also too young to retire, that is to ‘sit down’ in the Philippines. Instead, she argued that she could still earn some dollars and continue ‘seeing the world’. In Israel, Romelyn and Grace were both part of large social networks of Filipino friends. While Grace got to know most of her friends with whom she shared her weekend apartment during her stay in Cyprus, Romelyn’s circle of friends was mainly composed of women who, like her, had worked in Hong Kong before coming to Israel. As both women’s circles of friends were slowly relocating to Italy, investing in the on-migration there was not only an economic decision, but also a social one. This was especially true for migrants who were organized in densely knit and transnationally active groups such as evangelical churches. Rather than merely being part of household units and families in the Philippines, they were involved in wider transnational social networks, within an imagined global community of Filipina transmigrants.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated the enormous role of forms of collective imagination as the stimulus for Filipinos’ migration to Israel and beyond. Rather than being a mere mimicry of the former US colonial power or the outcome of an assemblage culture, Filipina migrants’ global dreaming about their migration to Israel and their migration moves towards supposedly ‘greener pastures’ has been shown to be tied to the desire to partake in global capitalism, see the ‘Holy Land’ and experience the world. Within a global migration regime in which there are great differences between nation states in granting legal, social, political and economic rights to migrants, most Filipino women need to ‘disguise’ themselves as labour migrants if they wish to travel. As the ethnography demonstrates, migrants put into practice their dream of being in the ‘Holy Land’ not least by undertaking pilgrimages and travelling on weekends. In these excursions, predominantly Christian Filipino migrants emotionally relate to Israel as a sacred landscape, enjoy being tourists and fulfil obligations towards those left behind in the Philippines by acts of charity and

182  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

sharing. Especially in the context of religious pilgrimages, Filipina migrants narrate their presence in the ‘Holy Land’ as a mission; they claim to love Israel and see their work of caring for the sick and elderly as a spiritual act which is agreeable to God. Filipino women’s performative (de)constructions of their lives as pilgrims and tourists rather than as migrants in Israel carry deep implications for their construction of selfhood and subjectivity. Nonetheless, except for the few who choose to stay on illegally or who manage to regularize their stay in Israel through marriages, conversions or the legalization of children born in Israel, at some point in their stay in Israel, Filipina migrants need to realize that their sojourn is limited by restrictive migration policies. As the second part of this chapter has shown, many women as a result dream of moving on to yet another destination. Indeed, they often do so, either as ‘intervallers’ who first return to the Philippines in order to leave it again after realizing that the migration move has not produced the desired outcomes, or as ‘globetrotters’ who use Israel as a ‘stepping stone’ typically towards Western Europe or Northern America. Grace, Romelyn and the other globetrotters clearly contradict the public image and female ideal of Filipina migrants as martyrs sacrificing themselves for their families and returning home as soon as possible. In Chapter 4, I have described how Filipino community organizations celebrate and stage the female ideals of the Filipina ‘dutiful daughter’, ‘sacrificing mother’ or ‘responsible sister’. From my ethnographic analysis, however, it is clear that these ideal-typical descriptions fail to accurately portray the lives and practices of many migrant women. Moreover, and in spite of cultural norms and social obligations to family members back home, many Filipina migrants narrated their moves abroad as a way of being independent, or even of finding a career. Those among my interviewees and survey respondents who had done so were without exception female, older than average, mostly single (mothers) or separated wives, and reluctant to leave Israel except for the ‘greener pastures’ of another country. For them it became clear that the migration move also and very importantly meant escaping the social control of one’s family, abusive husbands or a life confined by traditional gender roles and expectations. Likewise, Parreñas has pointed out that women hesitate to go back home not just because of poverty. Research on various groups of migrant women indicates that women achieve a certain degree of gender liberation upon migration because of their greater contribution to household income and greater participation in public life. […] Like other migrant women, Filipina domestics fear that returning home will diminish their advances. (Parreñas 2001b: 1140)

Given these advances and the realization of Filipina migrants that the money they earned abroad was never really enough to meet their social obligations and alleviate the pressures back home, their concept of ‘home’ changed greatly the longer they stayed in Israel. As for Thelma – who was quoted as saying ‘I don’t want to go home. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to go home…’ – ‘home’ for many of these women becomes an ambivalent place

Global Dreaming  u 183

that they were not sure they wanted to return to as long as they stayed on in Israel. Many, as the ethnographic account has shown, have for that reason attempted to ‘home’ themselves in Israel by leaving live-in work, renting their own apartments, having families of their own, establishing churches, and collectively organizing in Israel. In contrast with the discourse witnessed in the Philippines, they even described Israel as a home away from home. Nevertheless, as my field research continued into years two and three after illegalized migrants began to be deported from Israel in large numbers, I found that there were fewer and fewer Filipinos around who had ‘homed’ themselves or were ready to describe Israel as their home. Among the few to remain was Nora. A Tel Aviv resident since 1985, married in Israel and the mother of three teenage children who had been born in the country and, due to their illegalized status, had never left it, she told me in an interview: Sometimes before, they [the Migration Police] come to our house and break the door [down]. The children get nervous. We are so fed up. Sometimes, I tell the children: ‘We have to go away, they don’t like us.’ But then, when I start to pack the things, they start to cry. It is like in a soap [opera] here. I’m putting the things [into the suitcase], and they are taking them out. But really – I don’t even know where to go. [pauses] This is my home now…18

As Israel became an increasingly ‘unhomely’ space for Filipinos, those who saw no future in their country of origin and were seeking a place of belonging were pushed into a transnational space, a global community of Filipina globetrotters. The tragic aspect of this process was summarized by Marietta as follows: There are so many who are already twenty years here [in Israel]. But until now they are workers. They are illegal, like Nelly [a common Filipina friend who was recently deported]. She was like a [Filipino] pioneer here. But what’s the result? She was arrested. Like this. [snaps her fingers] You can call this, with an Israeli word: chaval [Hebrew, ‘a pity’]. We’ve been working here, but still, it’s useless. There’s nothing like the sacrifices we had and there’s no return for that. It’s chaval. You just finish your visa, only one day – and if you’re arrested – finish. You will be in jail. That’s why other Filipinos grab the opportunity – if they have been working for four years already and their visa is still going on, they are applying for other countries. Like London or Canada. Because in Canada it’s easier, after three years there, you already have your residence. And also in London…19

As President of the Federation of Filipino Communities (FFCI; see Chapter 4), Marietta was one of several highly publicized Filipinos in Israel who spoke out for Filipinos’ right to stay and for a halt to deportations, as well as for their social, legal and political integration. In summer 2006, she nevertheless decided to leave and followed her daughter to the USA. For those who had the financial means, ability and knowledge to ‘grab the opportunity’ and leave – while many others were deported to the Philippines – Israel increasingly became what conservative policy-makers had intended it should be: a place where Filipina

184  u  Caring for the ‘Holy Land’

migrants came to work as unorganized and docile live-in carers for several years of their lives, without creating lives for themselves. As Schnepel (2001) has pointed out, dreaming is not a political act per se: ‘to remain dormant in the realm of dreams belongs likewise to the politics of dreams, as does the provision of tools and means to create the lulling dream worlds by those in power’ (2001: 203, my translation). With reference to Lienhardt (1961), he argues that dreams, as conflicting messages, are part of the dialectics of agency and passio, which are ordered hierarchically. Accordingly, ‘agency can unfold only (and only then) in the incorporative framework of a previous experience of passio [Latin, ‘passion, suffering’; C.L.]’ (ibid.: 213, my translation). By being martyrs, who from the emic viewpoint patiently suffer and give all their love to caring for the ‘Holy Land’, Filipina domestic workers employ these dialectics. From their segregated position as foreign female domestic workers, they imitate power rather than openly contest it. Through malling – even when it is ‘only’ the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station – elegantly dressing up, travelling in the ‘Holy Land’ and finally moving up a global hierarchy of desirable countries, Filipina women are global players in a literal sense and develop new subjectivities. In the wake of this process, Filipina migrants’ moves take on the form of self-sustaining, global journeys. Like Dominicans, Filipina migrant workers – at least the typically unmarried, separated or unhappily married women described in this chapter as globetrotters – appear as a result to be ‘natives’ of transnational spaces (cf. Sorensen 1998). As such, I argue, they are negotiating lived citizenship on a global scale.

6.1. Filipinos writing requests for the Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, April 2005. (Claudia Liebelt)

Global Dreaming  u 185

6.2. Shepherds’ Fields near Bethlehem at Christmas 2004. (Claudia Liebelt)

Notes 1. The United States bought the Philippines from Spain in 1898 for approximately $20 million and remained as the colonial power until 1946, interrupted by a short interval of Japanese occupation during the Second World War (1942–45). In 1946 the Republic of the Philippines was founded under the auspices of the U.S. Large foreign debts, remaining U.S. military bases and bilateral trade agreements point to the ongoing dependence of the modern Philippines on (not only) the U.S. economy, which has led many to speak of a neo-colonial situation (cf. Bello 2004; Constantino and Constantino 1978). 2. Cf. Cahill (1990), Lauser (2004) and Wolters (1999). 3. Interview with Raquel, 23 June 2005. The following quotations by Raquel are also taken from this interview. 4. Since the questionnaires were in English – which I assumed most Filipino co-travellers would have no difficulties in understanding – and several questions were rather specific to the Philippines, I omitted the Israeli and five Thai men also present in the bus. I already knew both Avi and Miki from hanging around their travel agency in the Tel Aviv bus station; they knew of my plans to conduct a survey and supported the idea. Most travellers started filling out the questionnaire immediately. Questions and answers were discussed with friends and/or the person sitting next to respondents. Filling out the questionnaire proved to be thought-provoking for many, and throughout the day Filipinos came up to me to discuss the phenomenon of Philippine migration, to share their personal stories or to ask about my research findings and assumptions. 5. Single-use cameras were hardly in use when I conducted additional research on pilgrimages in Israel in 2008. By then, most Filipino pilgrims brought along

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

digital cameras, and many recorded their pilgrimage on a camcorder, if not their own then one they had borrowed for the day. For a description of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in Asia, see Anderson and Tang (2005) and Freston (2001), among others. Like many evangelical church services of Filipino groups, this one was conducted predominantly in English, with testimonies and prayers held mainly in Tagalog. Eddie Villanueva, the Filipino founder of Jesus Is Lord. Jesus Is Lord members expressed strong anti-Islamic sentiments and were vehemently opposed to the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip that took place shortly after the excursion described here. Cf. the Kibbutz’s website at www.yardenit.co.il (retrieved 22 November 2009). Interview with Romelyn, 4 July 2004. Interview with Avelina, 13 June 2005. Interview with Thelma, 27 April, 2005. The following quotations by Thelma are also taken from this interview. Stasiulis and Bakan call the Canadian ‘Live-in Caregiver Programme’, developed in 1992, a form of ‘institutionalized discrimination against foreign domestic workers’ (1997: 121). In contrast to the often idealized descriptions of recruitment agents, they state that those who enter within the framework of the programme ‘endure two years of virtually indentured labour’ (ibid.: 123). Within three years of arrival, they are entitled to apply for permanent residence in Canada and, if successful, obtain the right for so-called ‘landed’ immigrant status (which excludes them from the right to vote and to hold certain civil service positions). These costs, recalled by numerous Filipino migrants – including two working for recruitment agencies, typically in agreement with each other – are charged by recruitment agencies illegally, and are therefore unofficial. Interview with Lyna, 13 June 2005. Lorenzo et al., for example, quote a report by the Philippines Hospital Association according to which an estimated 80 per cent of all public sector doctors in 2004 were currently training or had already retrained as nurses (2007: 1410). Interview with Novelita, 20 June 2005. Interview with Nora, 16 June 2005. Interview with Marietta, 30 January 2005.

Conclusion

Many of the Filipina women interviewed for this book were engaged in global journeys towards more encompassing incorporation, rights and citizenship. If not to find the famous ‘pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’, Filipina women leave their homes in search of a better life, social and economic security, political participation, and the fulfilment of dreams. As female ‘working class cosmopolitans’ (Werbner 1999), they embody subjectivities beyond the (theoretical) divide between parochial migrants and bourgeois cosmopolitans that has dominated much of the relevant literature thus far (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 16f.; Hannerz 1996; cf. Clifford 1997). From at least the 1970s onwards, they came to Israel as one of more than one hundred nation states in which Filipina women seek employment abroad, typically in work rendered female within a gendered global economy, in this case the giving of care. As the ‘Holy Land’ for predominantly Christian Filipinos, and due to its recruitment policies, Israel became a major destination for Filipina migrants in the late 1990s. As care workers, Filipinos in Israel formed part of the growing population of so-called ‘foreign workers’, whom Israel recruited in large numbers from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere in order to meet demands created in large part by the removal of Palestinians from the low-wage sector of its ethnically segmented labour market. In many respects similar to European guest-worker regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, the Israeli foreign worker regime is based on the temporalization of the presence of migrants, who are essentialized in their status as foreigners and their function as workers. In spite of this, Filipinos succeeded in outsmarting state migration policies, as they continued to enter Israel on tourist visas, avoided typically more oppressive live-in work prescribed by the state-sanctioned employment system and created spaces of their own, especially in the southern parts of Israel’s large coastal city, Tel Aviv. There, political and migrant activists, as well as municipal actors concerned with the image of the city as cosmopolitan and liberal, created an urban incorporation regime that in many respects contradicts the exclusionary national migration regime (cf. Kemp and

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Raijman 2004; Alexander 2003, 2007). Nonetheless, legally Israel remained a country not of (im)migration but of (Jewish) return, in which Filipinos, alongside other so-called foreign workers, are treated as a cheap and flexible labour force. Separated from loved ones back home, taking care of the elderly in culturally foreign households for six days a week and largely excluded from legal citizenship, Filipina care and domestic workers found that life in Israel includes ruptures and hardships. For Parreñas (2001a), exclusion or ‘dislocation’ lies at the heart of the migration experience of Filipina domestic workers. In her comparative study of Filipina migrants in Rome and Los Angeles, she analyses four major forms of dislocation: first, one that appears vis-à-vis the nation state, in which Filipina migrants experience only partial citizenship; secondly, in terms of family life, where migration regimes force Filipina migrants to maintain transnational households and suffer from family separation; thirdly, through the experience of what Parreñas calls a ‘contradictory class mobility’ (2001a: 3), that is their engagement in socially devalued, low-wage labour, in spite of their often high educational attainments; and finally a dislocation from the migrant community itself, in which the dialectics of solidarity and profitmaking result in alienation from other migrants. In this book, I have shown that Filipina migrants in Israel are excluded from full citizenship, are denied a family life and their reproductive rights, and at times suffer from their vulnerable and marginal social status, as well as a migrant community that can easily turn into an oppressive tool of social control. Nevertheless, the ethnographic account has also shown that Filipina migrants in Israel have succeeded in appropriating collective spaces of their own, have struggled for their rights and better living conditions and – especially in the southern neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv – have created a place of emotional belonging and attachment, ambivalent though it may be. By having families in spite of legal restrictions, renting weekend apartments, forming friendships and organizing in churches, regional associations or sports clubs, Filipina migrants became de facto residents of Tel Aviv, and have accordingly created partial urban incorporation. While Filipina migrants are aware of their marginalized position and sometimes describe themselves as their employers’ ‘maids’ or even ‘slaves’, the culturally infused and dominant narrative of being the loving carers of the ‘people of God’, the ones who really care about the ‘Holy Land’, calls into question the description of Filipina migrants as merely Servants of Globalisation (Parreñas 2001a). Whether they are seen as strong women who have beaten the odds by leaving behind poverty and restrictive gender regimes in the Philippines, as Christians on a divine mission, or as customers or tourists within a capitalist global economy, Filipina migrants not only keep their options open (cf. Glick-Schiller et al. 1992: 12) but also actively negotiate power, belonging, and even citizenship on a global scale. Filipina migrants’ transnational migratory moves have to be seen as a form of labouring for social, political and legal rights and lived citizenship across the borders of the nation state.

Conclusion  u 189

The recently renewed interest in citizenship comes when the concept of the nation-state citizen is itself increasingly questioned by its weakening compared to transnational economic institutions, human rights regimes, and political entities (cf. Carter 2001; Ong 2006). The creation of ‘denizens’ (Hammar 1990) within these nation states means that there is an increasing number of residents whose rights can easily be revoked if the political climate changes. Against the background of the exclusion of subjects from legal, economic, social and political membership and participation, feminist researchers have criticized existing notions of citizenship, showing how they are mediated by the conditions of global capitalism, racism and sexism (cf. Pateman 1988; YuvalDavis 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). Moreover, normative claims for transnational, world, cosmopolitan or global citizenship have increased in recent years (cf. Bauböck 1994; Carter 2001; Ong 1999; Sarvasy and Longo 2004). However, much of the literature on these emergent forms of citizenship, as Stasiulis and Bakan (2005) rightly assert, tends either not to elucidate the problem of the legal juridical status of such citizens, or simply to assume that mobile persons possess dual or multiple legal citizenship (ibid.: 141). Like the Filipina domestic workers interviewed by Stasiulis and Bakan (1997, 2005) in Canada, I show that for Filipina migrants in Israel, securing one’s legal status even temporarily, let alone acquiring legal citizenship abroad, involves a great deal of knowledge, financial means and – so I was told – ‘guts’, or is simply out of reach. From an analysis of Filipina domestic workers’ integration into legal regimes, rights and practices, Stasiulis and Bakan come to the conclusion that existing notions of citizenship fail to explain this lived reality, but are idealtypical and ideologically constructed at best (1997: 117; 2005). Accordingly, they argue for the understanding of citizenship as a negotiated relationship: The view of citizenship as an ideal type associated with one type of state tends to limit our understanding of forms of inequality and modes of contestation for rights by groups which lack rights-bearing forms of membership in the territorial nation-state where they are working and residing, often for considerable lengths of time. In the view argued here, global processes of negotiation, mediated, contested or limited by the restrictions of gatekeepers to citizenship, and the reality of an uneven hierarchy among states in the world system, become central features. (Stasiulis and Bakan 1997: 116f.)

This view, I argue, makes it possible to situate Filipina migrants’ practices and narratives in Israel and beyond within a wider analytical framework. It allows us to understand Filipina migrants’ moves – which often take the form of global journeys through a number of nation states – as a way of negotiating political, economic, social and legal rights and belonging across nation states and on the global level. With regard to labour rights, for example, it has become clear that there is a multi-layered, global rights regime, which includes the regulations laid down by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), Israeli state laws, and international conventions sanctioned by bodies such

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as the United Nations or the International Labour Organisation; Filipina migrants depend on it to protect themselves and push for greater entitlements, but sometimes also avoid or sideline these regulations, stressing Christian values like patience or affectively appealing for public compassion. Far from negotiating citizenship in a merely legal realm, the very movements of Filipina migrants must be seen as moves towards greater social and economic security and political participation within a global hierarchy of desirable destination countries, based on nation states’ positions within the global economy and their practical accessibility for them. Nevertheless, obtaining (legal) citizenship in an affluent Western state clearly matters in that it promises the realization of much of what has been described in the previous chapter as Filipina migrants’ global dreams and desires. In Israel, the adoption of a deportation campaign in 2002 marked a rupture in the migration regime, signifying to migrants that what they had wished to achieve with migration was more and more difficult to come by in Israel. As the veterans or pioneers of the migrant community were deported, collective spaces of action dissolved and migrants increasingly turned to the complex knowledge of how to move on and where best to go, the women I interviewed for this book looked across the world. While Filipina migrants in Canada who experience immigration law as arbitrary, unfair and discriminatory turn to what Stasiulis and Bakan call a ‘dissident transnational citizenship’, based on collective strategies of local resistance (2005: 157ff.), in Israel many hope to evade these difficult and risky struggles by moving on towards a supposedly better destination country, which ironically in many cases is Canada. As part of an imagined and practised global community, Filipina labour migrants negotiate citizenship as the outcome of collective practices and demands, yet they do so as subjects, who cannot be hindered or halted by restrictive border controls, gender regimes or citizenship laws. Nonetheless, these restrictions and controls can turn labour migrants’ transnational projects into extremely risky, time-consuming and painful experiences. As things go wrong, regulations change and social ties become increasingly commodified, Filipina migrants spend a great deal of their lives – typically those that are considered the best years, between the mid-twenties and the late fifties – on hold, waiting for visas, saving money to cross borders, trying to bring over children or ‘hiding’ from the Migration Police. This enormous destruction of precious lifetime, together with the violence, fear and tragedies implied in transnationalism, are the result of contemporary migration regimes. Rather than being a ‘generically modern condition’ (Nonini and Ong 1997: 27), this is specific to Filipina domestic workers as part of the millions of female (and feminized male) migrants from the global South who perform reproductive labour (constructed as women’s work) in the global North. As the Philippine sociologist Neferti Xina Tadiar puts it: We wear the cheap economic value of this territory where we are from on our skin, on our lips, as the profile of our face, as our physical size. The lack of geopolitical

Conclusion  u 191

power of that country of our origin is inscribed by all the borders we cannot freely cross. The limits to our movements posed by our own embodiments of a suspect nation. (Tadiar 2004: 144)

This does not mean that Filipina migrants are necessarily victims or should be analysed as such. Nor is the complex, overlapping order of the global economy something which simple centre-periphery models can explain; nor do Filipina migrants passively accept economic misery, oppressive gender regimes or a ‘fate of “fish and rice”’, as Tadiar (2004: 141) wrote in the quotation cited above. Akin to the Latin American migrants whom Sarah Mahler has described as American Dreamers (1995), Filipina migrants are global dreamers hoping to find ‘greater safety and economic opportunity than in their home countries. These dreams drive them to achieve despite the obstacles they encounter, and though most fall short of realizing these dreams, they do not see their efforts as vain. Rugged individualists, they keep the frontier open’ (Mahler 1995: 5). In the case of Filipino domestic workers in Israel, this is not the US frontier, but a place that is presumed to possess ‘greener pastures’, elsewhere. In the final chapter, Filipina migrants were described as such dreamers, whose collective imaginings of Israel as the ‘Holy Land’ and of other destination countries provide a great stimulus for migration. As GlickSchiller and Fouron argue, dreaming – especially the kind of day-dreaming that Filipina migrants so frequently talked about during interviews and conversations – has a great deal to do with utopia and nostalgia (2001: 264). As such, it is a powerful tool, a form of knowledge, first, in the nostalgic sense, of a better past that one is striving to revitalize, and, second, in a utopian sense, of what might be. Situated in the socially segregated Tel Aviv neighbourhood of Neveh Sha’anan, the internet café where Mercy, alongside many other Filipina migrants whose stories have informed this book, chatted with friends and family members dispersed all over the globe, searched for job offers worldwide, informed herself about visa regulations and salaries elsewhere, and filled out the lottery applications for the US American green card, was a place where the ambivalence of migrants’ situations became both visible and real. Not for nothing had Mercy suggested (and succeeded in) giving it the prosaic name of World Citizenship for Everyone.

Glossary

A. Hebrew (official language in Israel) ‘aliyah

Jewish immigration to Israel, literally ‘rise, ascent’ Hebrew Labour ‘avoda ‘ivrit mess balagan pioneer/pioneering chalutz/chalutziyut deportation girush derogatory term for non-Jews (sg. m/f) goyim (goy/goya) migration hagira expulsion, literally ‘removal’ harkhaka the Filipino Plan (name of a government HaTokhnit HaFilipinit policy) labour migrants mehagrei ‘avoda migrants mehagrim obligation, duty mitzvah eastern, ‘oriental’ mizrachi (Jewish) new immigrants (sg. m/f) ‘olim chadashim (‘ole chadash/ ‘ola chadasha) foreign workers (sg. m/f) ‘ovdim zarim (‘oved zar/ ‘ovedet zarah) Saturday shabbat Closed Skies (name of a government shamaim sgurim policy) station takhana central (bus) station takhana merkazit Jewish emigration from Israel, literally yeridah ‘descent, decline’

194  u  Glossary

B. Tagalog (dominant language in the Philippines) balikbayan baranggay

returnee, literally back-to-the-land smallest social unit and administrative district in the Philippines, commonly translated as ‘village’ or ‘neighbourhood’ compassion, to feel with someone damay Mother of the Nation Inang Bayan martyr mother inang martir fellow national kababayan beautiful maganda gift pasalubong Filipino (slang) pinoy lover or mistress of a married man querida story-telling session salaysayan gossip tsismis inner debt, literally ‘debt of the soul’ utang na loob shamelessness walang hiya

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Index

abuse: sexual, 11, 87, 141; illegality, 93 accomodation: in Phillippines, 52, 56,65; in employers’ houses, 82, 97, 99, 132; during weekends, 51, 108–10, 132, 145 affective labour, 1, 9, 81, 91–92, 102 age: of children left behind, 48, 87; of employers, 140; of employers’ children, 87, 95; Filipina migrants, 55, 57, 69, 73, 82, 100, 126, 161, 163, 173, 180–81; eligibility for regular ization campaign, 36–37; sibling relationships, 67; when getting mar ried, 51, 60 agencies, see recruitment agencies agency, 1–2, 11, 20n5, 74, 160, 184 America, see United States Anti-Semitism, 35, 41n3, 88, 90–91 Appadurai, Arjun, 159–60, 171 Aquino, Corazòn, 15, 121 autonomy of migration, see migration, autonomy of Balikbayan, 49, 53, 69, 72; boxes, 71, 94, 145, 165, 168 beauty contests, 118–19, 121, 149 boyfriends, in Israel, 111, 141, 147, 151, 161, 163–166, 178. See also sexuality Canada, emigration to, 57, 113, 166, 175–80, 183, 186n13, 189–90 Cannell, Fenella, 58, 63, 67, 77n20, 89, 121, 123, 160

care work, 1, 7, 13, 42n20, 79–93, 101–2, 104n1; as ‘labour of love’, 81, 89, 91, 102. See also domestic work; chains of care Catholicism, see Roman Catholicism chains of care, 5. See also care work Christianity, 25, 80–81, 89–91, 102, 109, 111, 115, 133, 139, 149, 160–68, 170–72, 181, 187–88, 190. See also churches of migrants in Israel; Evangelicalism; Roman Catholicism churches of migrants in Israel, 90, 109– 10, 115, 117, 131, 133–34, 136– 37, 144, 152, 162, 168–69, 186n6. See also Evangelicalism; Roman Catholicism citizenship: as negotiated relationship, 2, 4, 184, 187–191; dual, 128n9; in Israel, 1, 23–26, 33–39, 42n24, 43n25, 111; transborder,4, 116, 171 ‘Closed Skies’ policy, 31. See also Israeli migration policies commodification, 1, 5, 45, 75 communication, see transnational com muncation conflicts, with employers, 61, 87, 102. See also family and conflicts, migration and marital conflicts; remittances and familial conflicts Constable, Nicole, 1, 80, 87, 90, 105, 154 Contemplaciòn, Flor, 12, 14 cosmopolitanism, 32–33, 161, 187, 189

210  u  Index

debt, 64, 67, 72–73; inner, 60, 63, 67, 77n20; Phillippine state, 13, 185n1. See also loans demography, 24, 30–31, 33, 39. See also demographic balance; demographic threat. deportability, 135–37. See also deporta tion; illegalization; Israeli migration police deportation: campaign in Israel, 29–33, 37–38, 42n15, 52, 92, 95–96, 112–113, 135–145, 154, 173, 176, 190; experie nce of, 56, 93, 112, 114, 136–37, 181; fear of, 55, 113–14, 137, 141-42, 154, 156n7; protest against, 37, 43n26, 96, 124, 136. See also deportability; illega lization; Israeli migration police diaspora politics: by Filipina domestic workers in Israel, 126, 134; Israeli, 24, Philippine, 71, 77n15,106, 115– 16, 122, 126 division of Labour, 9, 28; international, 1, 5, 8–9, 13, 79 divorce: unavailability of, 60, 76n3. See also marriage, annulment of domestic work, 7–8, 41n8, 79–102, 105– 106; gender, 7–8, 11, 79–81, 96; in Israel, 27–29, 32, 42n21, 80, 82–102; resistance, 102–2. See also care work dreams/ dreaming, 3, 5, 48–49, 58, 74–75, 82, 122, 155, 159–61, 164, 167, 172, 174, 176–82, 184, 187, 190–91 economic crisis, 13, 16, 51, 75 education (and migration), 46–47, 49, 54, 58, 60, 87, 121, 156n3, 176, 179–80, 188 employers, 27, 80, 86, 88, 91–92, 96, 98– 99, 101, 104n3, 111, 113–14, 139, 169. See also conflicts and employers; family, domestic workers as members of the; family, of employers in Israel; households, of employers in Israel. ethnographic research, xi–xiii, 5–6, 16–18, 46, 81, 163, 185n4 Evangelicalism, 90, 110, 115, 117–18, 133– 34, 168–71, 181, 186n6. See also churches of migrants in Israel; Chrsitianity

exploitation, of migrant domestic work ers, 5, 38, 80, 93, 101, 141 family: alienation from, 75, 89, 173; con flicts, 58–59, 68–69, 71–72, 78n21, 102, 182; domestic workers as mem bers of the, 80–82, 85–86, 88, 93, 95–96; economic support, 63, 66, 141, 167, 183, 188; Filipino, 12, 15–16, 21n12, 47, 51, 54, 59, 89; Gender norms, 6, 9–10, 15, 68, 74; in Israel, 24, 36, 49, 59–60, 82, 85, 91, 96, 98; migrants’ middle-class background, 58, 62, 65, 85, 153, 161; migration, 6– 8, 16, 59, 74; of employers in Israel, 48, 55, 87–88, 90–97, 100–1, 104, 107; separation from, 48, 56, 61, 83, 112, 175, 188; ties/ networks, 55–56, 60, 63, 67, 70, 174–75, 178; transnational, 53, 56, 59–61, 64, 70, 74–75, 174–75. See also generation, intergenerational strategies of migration; households, marriage Federation of Filipino Communities in Israel (FFCI), 50, 95, 100, 113, 115–121, 124–25, 136, 183 feminist research, 6, 9, 79, 189 feminization: of migration, 5–9, 12, 14–15, 125, 190; of poverty, 6 fieldwork, see ethnographic research Filipina migrants: as caring, 12, 15; as heroes/ heroines, 5, 12, 15, 21n13, 121. See also Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) financial: needs, 60, 82, 92, 161, 177–78; outcomes of migration, 45, 60, 63–64, 73, 144; strategies of migrants, 56, 63–75, 94, 166, 180, 189. See also loans, poverty food: Filipino, 83, 91, 97–98, 110, 132–34, 140, 148, 150, 153, 163; Israeli, 61; sent to the Philippines, 71; sharing of, 169, 171; taboos in employers’ households, 86, 91, 133 ‘foreign workers’: deportation of, 135, 156n7; in Israel, 23, 25–35, 38–39, 41n5, 42n20, 96, 187–88; in Tel Aviv, 131; in the Israel care sector, 101, 104n1

Index  u 211

friendship, 49, 53–54, 61, 63, 105, 107–8, 112, 138, 174, 173, 181, 188 gender: global economy, 5–6, 9, 187; ideologies, 6–7, 9, 58; (traditional) roles, 4, 6, 9, 11, 15, 46, 60, 72, 74, 182. See also migration and gender; domestic work and gender; house hold and gender; inequality and gender generation: first/second of migrants in Israel, 33–34, 37–38, 42n21, 57, 96; intergenerational strategies of migra tion, 20, 59, 75, 180 gossip, 53, 63, 110, 126, 143, 148–49, 155 Hong Kong: research on Filipinas in, 7, 70, 79–80, 105; migration to, 13, 47, 51, 69, 73, 82–83, 107, 173–77, 179, 181; Filipinas in, 15, 42n21, 105, 153– 54 households: domestic work, 7, 79–80; gender, 7, 10, 79, 96; migration, 6–7, 59, 74; of employers in Israel, 80, 83, 86–87, 91–93, 99–100, 133–34; of mig rants in Israel, 63, 75. See also trans national households houses: building of, 66–68, 83, 165; of employers in Israel, 97–98, 100, 139; renovation of, 72 illegalization, 2, 61, 88, 139, 145; of chil dren, 32, 35–37, 43n25, 167; numbers of migrants, 30, 43n25; of migrants, 29–32, 34, 38, 52, 61, 84, 92–96, 101, 105, 114, 121, 123, 130, 135–145, 172– 73, 178–79, 183. See also legalization immigration, see migration inequality: gender, 9; economic, 7, 28, 41n8, 102 Israel: as ‘Holy Land’, 1–2, 80–81, 115, 127, 133, 144, 148, 160–75, 181, 184, 187–88, 191. See also Israeli, Israeli labour market Israeli labour market: as ethnically seg mented, 26; migrants in the, 11, 26–33; Palestinians in the, 18, 26– 27, 38, 187; women in the, 28 Israeli: food, 61; mentality, 61; migration police, 51–53, 56, 93–94, 98, 113,

120, 123–24, 135–38, 140–43, 154, 156 n7, 157n20, 162, 177, 179, 183, 190; migration policies, 23–39, 58, 110, 112, 114, 121, 134, 144, 154, 177, 182, 187. See also Israel; citizenship in Israel Italy: emigration to, 54, 56, 84, 175–76, 178–79, 181 jealousy, 9, 53, 63, 68–69, 113, 149, 155 Kemp, Adrianna, 25, 36, 38–39, 171 labour, see affective labour, care work, domestic work, Israeli labour mar ket labour-export policy, 12–14, 123 labour union: in Israel, 41n10; of Filipi nos in Israel, 113–14, 117 Law: of Entry, 25; of Return, 24, 35, 111 legalization (of migrants in Israel): 31, 34– 37, 43n25, 56, 95, 113–14, 182. See also illegalization loans, 51, 55, 65–66, 71, 99, 178, 180. See also debts ‘Manila girls’, 111–12, 149, 151–52, 155 manpower agencies, see recruitment agencies marriage, 6, 47–50, 53–54, 58–60, 67, 72, 74, 76n3, 83, 86, 114, 141, 165–66, 182; annulment of, 48, 76n3; Filipina Israeli, 39, 54, 66, 69, 107–8, 141, 148, 166; migration, 6, 14. See also divorce, unavailability of; migration and marital conflicts migration: autonomy of, 3–5; gender, 5– 11, 15, 46, 58, 60, 74, 125–26, 182, 191; Jewish to Israel, 23–26, 30, 37– 39, 41n1; marital conflicts, 6, 58; pov erty, 6–7, 12, 51, 58, 69, 74, 82, 182, 188; public debates on, 23, 25, 28–30, 35, 38–39,42n15, 43n25, 58, 112, 115, 121, 123–24, 128n8, 135, 142; reasons for, 6, 45, 58, 60, 62–63, 74, 92, 155, 175–76; regime, 2–4, 12–16, 20n4, 23– 25, 31, 38, 79, 112, 161, 172, 174, 181, 187–88, 190; unemployment, 13, 27, 29, 58. See also Israeli migration poli cies; on-migration; Philippine

212  u  Index

migration policies; return migr ation; transnational migration motherhood, 10–11, 15–16, 48–49, 57, 59– 60, 74, 89; single, 59, 121, 167, 182 Neveh Sha’anan, 51–52, 55, 70, 129–34, 137–41, 144–45, 150–54, 156n4,191. See also Tel Aviv Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs): in Israel, 16–17, 29, 31, 34, 41n14, 42n19, 43n25, 66, 104n7, 114, 131, 137 Ong, Aihwa, 4, 8, 174, 189–90 On-migration, 3, 173–182, 190 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW), 13–16, 21n9, 21n10, 73, 77n16, 118, 121–22. See also Filipina migrants

recruitment agencies, 14, 16, 28, 31–32, 38, 51, 54–55, 61–62, 65, 77n19, 131, 148, 170, 177–80, 186n14. See also place- ment fees regime, definition of, 2, 4, 20n4 religion, see Christianity, Evangelicalism, Roman Catholicism remittances: sending from Israel, 45, 52, 56, 64–69, 71–73, 144, 145; familial conflicts, 72–73, 78n24; Philippine state, 4, 12, 21n10, 77n15, 77n16, 115 reproduction, 6–8, 30, 79, 96–97, 188, 190 return migration, 9, 49–50, 53, 70, 73, 83– 85, 136, 144, 167, 175–77, 183–83 Roman Catholicism, 16, 76n3, 108–10, 113, 117–19, 133, 136, 161, 164–65, 168, 178. See also Christianity, churches of migrants in Israel.

Parreñas, Rhazel Salazar, 8, 10, 13, 58, 61, 63, 74, 106, 109, 154, 173, 182, 188 philanthropy, 118, 122, 171 Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), 12–14, 16, 21, 51, 189 Philippines: and migration, 4, 6, 12–16; Embassy in Israel, 30, 41n13, 50, 56– 58, 65, 77n12, 77n17, 94, 108, 113, 115– 127, 128n10; migration policies, 12–14, 77n15, 115–16, 121, 160; nationalism, 15, 115–27. See also labour-export policy Philippine Independence Day, 60, 116–25, 128n11, 163, 172 pilgrimages in Israel, 2, 90, 133, 162–172, 181–82 placement agencies, see Recruitment agencies placement fees, 31, 48, 55, 59, 65–69, 71, 73, 77n19, 78n21, 181 police brutality, 142. See also Israeli migration police poverty, 6, 12, 51, 58, 68–69, 74, 82, 182, 188

salaries, 47–48, 55, 62, 64–65, 77n14, 77n15, 174–75, 178–80 sexuality: and female migration, 7, 11, 15; in diaspora, 111, 120, 152. See also abuse, sexual; boyfriends, in Israel

racial discrimination, 41n9, 69, 82, 90–91, 124, 134, 169, 176, 189 racialization, 6–7, 11–12

United States (USA), 10, 12–13, 26, 59, 121, 151, 191; colonial influence/domina tion, 12–13, 121, 159–60, 185n1; emig-

Tadifar, Neferti Xina, 8, 15, 150, 155, 159– 60, 190–91 Tel Aviv: southern, 32, 51–53, 55, 65, 82, 90, 97, 109–11, 115, 119, 121, 129–42, 152, 154–55, 165, 168, 187–88, see also Neveh Sha’anan; Central Bus Station, 126, 129–33, 137, 145–55, 157n22, 163– 64, 167, 170, 184; urban incorporation, 32–33, 38, 136, 187–88; urban space, 130, 134, 139–45, 149, 153–54 transborder citizenship, see citizenship transnational: migration, 1, 3, 9, 25, 46, 173–74, 190; social field, 2, 45, 67, 70, 116, 126; communication, 9, 70–73; mothering, 10, 60; households, 10, 64, 74, 188; families, 60–61, 64, 70, 74– 75, 175; migration routes, 126, 188; networks, 45, 126, 181 Tsing, Anna, 5, 46

Index  u 213



ration to, 124, 172, 174–75, 179–80, 182–83; green card lottery, 53, 191

victimization: of foreign workers in Israel, 38; of migrant women, 1, 5, 11, 101, 171–72, 191 visits home from Israel, 49–50, 58, 62, 67, 70–73, 84, 145, 147, 168, 175, 178

Werbner, Pnina, 106, 126, 171, 187, 189 zionism: critique of, 41n4; Israeli citizen ship, 35; Christian, 25, 171; Israeli state, 24–25, 39, 41n3