Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which recent debates over Israel’s citizenship regime have been projected onto and experienced within the bodies undocumented women. Specifically accusations of strategic pregnancies cast women’s bodies as entities that are simultaneously criminal and humanitarian.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2009, amidst a public debate over the deportation of 1,200 Israeli-born children of undocumented migrants, Eli Yishai, Israel's Minister of Interior and ardent supporter of ridding the country of its "illegal" residents, stated that undocumented migrant women (from South and South East Asia, Africa and South America) were using their children as "a talisman" to secure their continued stay in Israel. In making this accusation Yishai was articulating a moral panic that had developed around this population and around the feminization of non-Jewish labour migration to Israel more generally. Migrant women, according to the narrative, were conceiving and raising children in Israel as a strategy through which they could obtain citizenship, otherwise unavailable to them in the Jewish state. Although neither the women nor their Israeli-born children were automatically eligible for citizenship under Israel's system of jus sanguinis, Yishai and others warned that migrant women were using their pregnancies and their children as an attempt to root themselves in society and claim citizenship on humanitarian grounds.

In this paper I examine the ways in which recent debates over Israel's carefully crafted citizenship regime have been projected onto and experienced within the bodies of undocumented women. Far from simply a discursive process, the configuration of these women's bodies as criminal entities on the one hand and humanitarian subjects on the other has taken form through institutional practices, legal enforcement, and the social relations and political engagements of migrant women themselves.