Abstract
This paper explores how laws and procedures in Israel concerning various forms of legal status deem women foreigners to be “statusless.” In particular, it examines the treatment of three groups: Palestinian women residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel; asylum-seeking women from Africa; and women from the former Soviet Union who have been trafficked by the sex industry, or who have lost their legal status after separating from an Israeli-citizen spouse. Drawing on various data sources—such as information and case studies published by aid organizations; legal proceedings; discussions held by parliamentary legislative committees; state officials’ commentaries in the media; and interviews with women and service providers—we map the policies that manage the entry and residence of foreigners, and explore their ideological tenets and specific impact on women. We argue that statuslessness is being justified by an ethnocratic discourse that demarcates foreigners as undesirable, and that it is maintained by hobbling existing infrastructures, such as the Convention on the Status of Refugees, family unification procedure, or the Protocol for the Prevention of Human Trafficking—and draining them of their meaning.
Introduction
This paper explores how laws and procedures in Israel concerning the various forms of legal status deem women foreigners to be statusless. Drawing on research conducted in 2018 and 2019 on the ramifications of living without legal status in Israel, this paper focuses on the legal processes that regulate the entry and residence of three groups of women: Palestinian women residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) who are married to Palestinian citizens or permanent residents of Israel 1 ; asylum-seeking women from Africa (the overwhelming majority of whom are from Eritrea); and women from the former Soviet Union (FSU) who have been trafficked by the sex industry, or who have lost their legal status after separating from their Israeli-citizen spouse before completing their phased naturalization process (in some cases due to intimate violence or threats to their lives). 2 We use the term women without status or statusless women to denote women who possess only temporary entry or temporary residence permits, or who have entered or have been living in Israel without a permit and belong to one of the three groups in question. 3 Statuslessness is a pressing feminist concern in Israel, for several reasons. Refugee women and asylum-seekers who live at the margins of Israeli society do not enjoy the gains of Israeli feminism. They encounter exclusion, deprivation, and harm which, had it been inflicted on Israeli women, would have been perceived as pathological (Kritzman-Amir, Ben Dor, and Wurgaft 2013, 334). Furthermore, even when Israeli feminist struggles have focused on statusless women—such as in antitrafficking efforts—the deterrence of trafficking activity was effected through widescale deportation and repatriation of migrant sex workers and victims of trafficking out of Israel, namely by policymaking aligned with restrictive ethnonational migration regime—resulting in a tightening of the borders (Abu and Zarhin 2019, 189; Shamir 2018, 150, 185).
As Esposito et al. (2018) argue, in spite of growing academic interest in the adverse effects of detention and deportation (e.g., Luibhéid 2005; Robjant, Robbins, and Senior 2009; Sobhanian et al. 2006), relatively little attention has been paid to understanding how gender and sexuality—along with race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and geopolitics—play a role in the production of particular subjects as being excludable. The paper contributes to scholarship on the implications of policies concerning migrant women, by addressing the need for a more socially disaggregated data in terms of gender, marital status and nationality, as a key determinant (Kofman 2018). Existing scholarship on women migrants, policymaking and legal status explores intimate labor (Boris and Parreñas 2010) and intimate lives of laborers (Mahdavi 2016); analyzes status distinctions as outcomes of contingent, changing relations of power, including sexuality (Luibhéid 2008); shows the political significance and exclusionary potential of classification and codification of migrants (Robertson 2018); and underscores the conditionality of migrants’ legal status—namely, whether it is (or isn’t) formally defined (Goldring and Landolt 2013). As Ellermann (2020) points out, the study of migration and legality is organized around classifying host countries as either “liberal” or “illiberal” regimes. Our contribution theorizes the production of status in the context of an ethnocratic regime that has both liberal and illiberal tenets at its legal core.
As will be considered more fully in the final section, this paper contributes to existing scholarship on gender and statuslessness in Israel, while providing a broader argument about the role of local norms and legal frameworks of citizenship in active discrimination of statusless women. Results of this research reveal that statuslessness reproduces vulnerability—insofar as the state's institutions expressly abandon statusless women, based on classification mechanisms of active disengagement from certain populations, and regulation that produces suffering. Exploring the regulatory aspect, its ideological underpinnings and impact on women, we ask how policymaking deems foreign women to be “statusless.” The research project draws on various data sources collected between November 2018 and June 2019—such as case studies published by aid organizations; legal proceedings; in-depth and open-ended interviews with statusless women, health and welfare workers, and civil society actors; field notes of the researcher and the program's coordinator; documentation of meetings and events related to our constituency; discussions held by parliamentary legislative committees; and state officials’ commentaries in the media. 4 The research constituency emerged from a grassroots perspective (Toro 1995), in response to appeals and stories encountered in our daily work at the Isha L'Isha Haifa Feminist Center—a veteran feminist grassroots organization that the authors are members of.
Methodologically, the research is based on our local perspective: it is collaborative ethnography, focused on mapping the networks related to statuslessness and gender in our community in northern Israel, and on problematizing institutions and policies and describing social processes while being part of them (Hooks 2015). The data collected for this research project reflects the confluence of personal narratives, everyday encounters, and short-lived collaborations and long-term cooperations with various actors (Marr 2014; Mosavel, Ferrell, and LaRose 2016; Toro 1995).
Mapping the social and structural terrain has informed the Isha L'Isha Haifa Feminist Center's programming and interventions. This research also evolved to establish what is happening with women of various groups and contexts who have approached our organization, and whose stories share a disturbing commonality—namely, a vulnerability produced by institutional efforts to hobble existing infrastructures that are supposed to protect these women. This vulnerability is commonly defined as “statuslessness”—namely, a formal lack of civil and legal belonging. However, in this paper we argue that statuslessness induces vulnerability—insofar as the state's institutions expressly abandon statusless people. As Biehl (2001) and Giroux (2006) point out, institutional abandonment is based on classification mechanisms of active disengagement from certain populations—as evident in systemic regulation and intervention that produce suffering and highlight the ethical assumption that certain populations are unworthy of compassion and care, and are therefore not the state's responsibility. This paper targets those acts of institutional abandonment and active disengagement.
The overwhelming majority of the reports and studies on statusless women in Israel have each focused on a particular homogeneous group (in terms of ethnicity, nationality, or narrative)—such as asylum-seekers (Arev 2019; Gebreyesus et al. 2018, 2019; Kritzman-Amir 2015; Kritzman-Amir, Ben Dor, and Wurgaft 2013; Kritzman-Amir and Rothman-Zecher 2019), migrant workers (Ben-Israel 2011; Raijman, Schammah-Gesser, and Kemp 2003), trafficked women (Ezioni 2013; Hacker and Cohen 2012; Levenkron and Dahan 2003; Safran and Cheikin 2012; Shamir 2019; Wilamowski 2016), or Palestinians from the OPT (Batshon 2014; Daif 2007; Plitmann 2017). In other cases, studies have focused on a single aspect of the phenomenon—such as statusless women survivors of violence (Dancig-Rosenberg and Levenkron 2015; Tao Webber 2018), artists (Dekel 2016), or mothers (Kfir and Kemp 2016). In this paper, however, we consider the category of statuslessness in all its forms—as embodied by women who bear varying degrees of il/legality—and discuss the effect of laws, policies and regulations on women whose stories of arrival, experiences with the authorities, legal classification, and the community contexts in which they live, all vary.
Our curiosity regarding statuslessness as an emerging category stem from an apparent ongoing effort of state institutions and policymakers to cripple existing infrastructures. While Israel is a signatory to frameworks concerning various forms of statuslessness—such as the Convention on the Status of Refugees and its protocol and the Protocol for the Prevention, Suppression and Punishment of Human Trafficking; and it incorporates family unification procedures or procedures for improving the legal status of foreigner survivors of spousal abuse in its domestic law—it renders them meaningless. Moreover, in the course of the data collection and analysis, it has become apparent how elusive the statusless category itself has become—due to the ever-changing regulations and procedures, and the efforts of human-rights organizations on the legal front (frequently in the High Court of Appeal). Rather than discussing legal status as an essential attribute that is attached to particular bodies, this elusiveness highlights how statuslessness is a process, generated and imposed by ever-shifting relations of power, and legal and social processes that differentiate not only between citizens and noncitizens, but also between certain types of noncitizens (Luibhéid 2008). Theoretically, this paper intersects with a few explanatory expositions in the literature on statuslessness, in a bid to broaden our understanding of how statuslessness is produced, and to provide a broader argument about the role of local norms and legal framework of citizenship in active discrimination of statusless women by applying technologies of deterrence (Abu and Zarhin 2019; Dancig-Rosenberg and Levenkron 2015; Ishii 2020; Lentin and Moreo 2015), based on ethnonational classifications of undesirability (Berda 2020; Davidson 2021; Fassin 2013; Innes 2021; Kedar 2014; Raijman 2010; Raijman, Hochman, and Davidov 2021), while legitimizing neglect and disengagement (Fassin 2012; Halley 2018)—thereby actively reproducing statuslessness (Biehl 2001; Giroux 2006; Luibhéid 2008; Mahdavi 2016). We argue that statuslessness is the outcome of the confluence of these processes.
In the following sections, we explore how statuslessness is produced from a gendered perspective. The first section—“Status and Ethnocracy”—reviews the discursive logic of legal status and belonging in Israel, and its essentialist taxonomies of undesirability and threat, that justify the civic exclusion of foreigners. The second section—“Hallmarks of Arrival and Stay”—maps the legal processes that differentiate between, and regulate, foreigners of the three aforementioned groups, and the particular impact of these processes on women. The following section—“State of Intimacy”—addresses the intersection of statuslessness and intimate violence, as a means of discussing the gendered regulation of women foreigners.
Status and Ethnocracy
The increased transnational migration brought about by globalization has not passed over Israel, where the organizing logic behind legal status is one of ethnicity: the regime is founded by, and for the sake of, a single dominant ethnic group that lives both within the country's territory, and outside it (Yiftachel 1999). This ethnic principle is based on the classification of identities by which affiliation and full citizenship are defined. Thus, the State of Israel is not based on a demos—that is, a body comprising all the citizens within a given territory, and only them, but on an ethnos—the group of all those of a particular common origin, namely, Jews. For example, Diaspora Jews who are not citizens have representation through entities such as the Jewish Agency, and the Jewish National Fund; conversely, the Green Line has changed from a sovereign border to a geographical mechanism that separates Palestinians who are Israeli citizens from those who are not—but not Jews (Yiftachel 1999). 5 In order to preserve the Jewish character of the state, the ethnocratic regime adopts various measures to “Judaize” the area, such as stratification of rights: only Jews in the Jewish state are given full rights, while the Arab population is excluded from full citizenship (Yiftachel 1999). This form of partial inclusion—also known as settler-colonial citizenship (Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2015) or conditional citizenship (Hackl 2020)—means that rights and duties are governed by the national interests of the hegemonic group, and is reflected in bringing in settlers who are Jewish citizens of other countries, in a bid to maintain demographic advantage (Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2015). The ethnocentric logic grants non-Jews (partial) rights and (limited) access to resources, on the implicit condition that further civic demands will not be made, and that Palestinian political identity, collective presence, and national distinction are kept well hidden (Hackl 2020). Thus, despite the democratic trappings, ethnic affiliation (rather than territorial citizenship) is the organizing principle behind the distribution of state resources and policymaking, which is determined by the “founding” ethnic group (Yiftachel 1999).
Ethnicity, refugees, colonialism, or immigration reflects the divisive aspect of legal status—by denying social equality, economic opportunities, political participation, and cultural freedom (Bauböck 2006, 15–16). In that respect, controlling migration has come to be seen as a reflection of, and mechanism for, national sovereignty (Luibhéid 2008). This means that—contrary to the notion that an illegal immigrant is a particular type of person—illegality may be perceived as a status created by exclusionary immigration laws and administrative procedures, which define the “illegal alien.” Hence, illegalization (like legalization) is a process, rather than an essential attribute attached to particular human bodies (Luibhéid 2008).
Three laws govern the entry, residency, and naturalization process in Israel, and reflect its ethnocratic nature: the Law of Return 5750–1950, which allows every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and instantly obtain Israeli citizenship 6 ; the Law of Entry into Israel 5712–1952, which sets out the procedures and conditions for visas and residence visas in Israel for those who are not Israeli citizens and do not meet the criteria of the Law of Return; and the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order)[2003] 2022, which restricts family unification between Israeli citizens or permanent residents with Palestinian residents of the OPT by prohibiting the Palestinian spouse from acquiring legal status, for fear that it would create a demographic problem of Palestinians moving into Israel and undermining its ethnocratic character. The latter law also stipulates that the Minister of the Interior shall not grant citizenship under the Citizenship Law, or a residence permit in Israel, to any (non-Jewish) resident of the OPT, or to a citizen or a resident of an enemy state (Dreishpitz 2010).
The absence of an egalitarian notion or practice of citizenship for non-Jews, coupled with the state of Israel's ethnic–religious regime and type of nationalism, means that the presence of non-Jews—be they citizens or foreigners—is undesirable. In a follow-up report to a state audit, the State Comptroller issued a scathing criticism of the authorities’ deliberate failure to formulate policies aimed at attending to the basic needs and rights of foreigners: In Israel today, there are tens of thousands of foreign nationals who are non-deportable. Despite this, the government has not formulated a comprehensive policy for the treatment of foreigners, and the director general of the Prime Minister's Office has reiterated that there is no intention to do so. The lack of a comprehensive policy may even severely hamper any action taken by various ministries to improve the situation of foreigners. […] The government appears to be taking a passive approach that ultimately mainly harms the weakest of the foreigners. The government has not yet taken any real action to ensure the basic human rights of foreigners, in compliance with the provisions of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (State Comptroller Audit, Follow-up Report, 2018, pp. 153–154). [Emphases added—RP]
Hallmarks of Arrival and Stay
Each of the three groups in question in this paper has different arrival characteristics. Each is classified by a different legal framework, and is subject to different regulations with regard to their residence rights. In this section, we contextualize this complexity by examining the indeterminate and emergent character of statuslessness, and map the state's practices that reassert the illegality and precarious status of women of these three groups. In Part I—“Family Unification,” concerning Palestinian women of the OPT—we focus on parliamentary debates over the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Provision) of 2003 and 2022, and legal proceedings, field notes, and grassroots reports that reflect that law's effects on statusless Palestinian women. Part II—“Infiltrators”—pertains to asylum seekers, and depicts the everyday work of welfare agents in the absence of regulations and frameworks for treating asylum seekers. The concluding section—“Trafficking”—analyzes parliamentary committee debates and testimonies of service providers of trafficked women from the FSU.
Family Unification
According to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (1952), Article 7, any Israeli citizen who marries a foreigner may apply for naturalization of his or her spouse—by applying for a “phased [naturalization] procedure” that lasts four and a half years—also known as family unification. Within six months into the process, the foreign spouse is granted an A/5 Temporary Resident's license, that provides access to most of the rights and services granted to permanent residents—including a temporary identity card; access to Social Security and state universal health insurance; and the permission to work, drive, and open a business.
However, since 2003, a Temporary Provision—which is renewed every year by the Knesset (Israeli parliament)—prohibits family reunification when the foreign spouse is a non-Jewish resident of the OPT (Dreishpitz 2010). 8 In its latest renewed version (July 2021), the law explicitly states its demographic–ethnocratic intent for the first time ever (Knesset, 2022). In those instances, Israeli citizens cannot apply for naturalization of his or her spouse. Instead, the foreign spouse receives a stay permit—a.k.a. a District Coordination and Liaison Office (DCO) permit—that is issued by the regional military administration, and is subject to renewal every six months. According to the Population and Immigration Authority's statement of 28 February 2022, approximately 9,000 Palestinian spouses married to Israeli citizens hold a Family Unification DCO stay permit, and approximately 3,000 hold a A/5 Temporary Residency stay permit. 9
Prior to the Citizenship Law 2003 (Temporary Provision), the State of Israel respected the right of all its citizens and residents—Arabs and Jews alike—to be joined in Israel by their respective foreign spouses. However, in February 2002—after the Ministry of the Interior published data that revealed that approximately 140,000 Palestinians had moved to Israel since 1993 under the family reunification procedure—Interior Minister Eli Yishai stated that “it's proof that the [Palestinian] Right of Return is being exercised through Israel's back door” and that it was “alarming and concerning.” Shortly afterwards, a special team was established to examine legislative measures for reducing the phenomenon (Szlecsan and Kadman 2014, 15).
The ethnocratic nature of this legislation has been reiterated on numerous occasions by state officials—such as in the state's response to an appeal to the Supreme Court that challenges the Temporary Provision (Davidov et al. 2005, 648), and in parliamentary discussions on its renewal, or parliament members interviews with the Media. 10
In effect, the law violates the principle of equal rights, and adversely affects one of the most profound and far-reaching decisions in a person's life—namely, the choice of one's life partner (Davidov et al. 2005). Hence, while Israeli society is evolving in terms of recognizing nonnormative cohabitation arrangements outside legal marriage—such as common-law marriages, legal marriages at overseas registrars, same-sex unions, etc.—the Citizenship Law restricts the right of Israeli citizens to marry or cohabit with Palestinian residents the OPT. Since Israelis who marry Palestinians from the OPT are almost invariably Palestinian citizens of Israel, the impression is of a society that legally recognizes the right for intimacy and family only with regard to its Jewish citizens (Davidov et al. 2005, 645–646).
As grassroots reports have repeatedly shown, statusless Palestinian women are obliged to sever all ties from their families and communities of origin and move in with their spouse's community, where they are expected to assimilate—thus heightening their subordination and dependence on their husband (Daif 2007). The acute feelings of frustration, anxiety, and instability are further heightened by the fear of encountering police (even when they hold a valid DCO). As a result, they avoid visiting their families of origin within the OPT, for fear of having to cross checkpoints and being separated from their children, or being stripped of their temporary entry permit. This creates a dangerous space in their marital relationship, which can give rise to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse (Daif 2007). The classification of minority populations as a security risk confers extensive discretion on the national security bureaucracy, and is founded on particularly broad definitions, whereby family affiliation or place of residence are sufficient grounds for defining a person as a supporter of terrorism as Nasreen, one of our interview partners, recounts: I once went – my son and me —my son, of course, has Israeli citizenship, because his father is Israeli. […] I actually had a permit, but at that time the permits were stopped, because the situation had deteriorated at that time. So they would collect people who have permits and put them in vehicles. So I said to myself, “It's true that my son has an ID card, but suppose a soldier asks me for my permit, and my son will probably want to intervene—then God forbid the soldier could shoot him, God forbid. They first shoot—if you want to take the phone out of your pocket, they’re suspicious. So when I go to the Nablus Gate [of the Old City in Jerusalem], I don’t dare take anything out of my bag: if the cellphone rings, I don’t answer. They straight away suspect you. (Nasreen, West Bank).
In our daily work, we continually hear accounts from such women whose spouses deliberately refrain from arranging civil status for them, as a means of control. One Israeli citizen—who is married to a Palestinian woman from the West Bank—even admitted to our project coordinator that he refrained from arranging his wife's civil status as a guarantee, until he made sure that she is not barren (Ayala Olier's field notes). In the absence of legal status and economic wherewithal, few women can afford to hire lawyers to assert their rightful status and rights. Moreover, denial of status in Israel threatens their continued relationship with their children (Daif 2007). In the case of women citizens of Israel married to statusless Palestinian partners—especially with regard to residents of the Gaza Strip where the women are separated from their spouses, who are not entitled even to a DCO permit—the women function effectively as single parents (Plitmann 2017). However, even when there is no abuse (e.g., in cases where the statusless woman seeks a divorce), the statusless woman faces the immediate prospect of deportation from Israel, denial of the DCO permit, and has no rights under the law—such as alimony, division of property and more (Daif 2007).
This vulnerability, that lies at the intersection of gender, personal status, and il/legality, is reflected in a court appeal submitted by the National Insurance Institute (NII) against a previous ruling that forced it to pay child support to the underage daughter of an Israeli citizen and a Palestinian woman from the OPT holder of a DCO permit, who were undergoing divorce proceedings (NLC 592\07 National Insurance Institute V. Gaya Assi (Minor), Nevo (2009), 2009). According to Israeli Maintenance Law, the NII pays child support to Israeli legal residents when the debtor (in this case, the Israeli citizen father), fails or refuses to pay. As the child support payments of underage children are awarded to the custodian parent (in this case, the statusless mother), the NII claimed that it should be exempted, as the law requires that the beneficiary be a legal resident. Interestingly, the NII problematized the payment of child support to a nonresident parent on the grounds that this may be tantamount to de facto residency. In other words, it was proposing that ethnocratic logic outweigh the constitutional rights of the underage child. Moreover, as the National Labor Court ruling stated, the NII's approach contravenes the state's Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. While the court ruled against the NII, and in favor of the child, the statusless mother continues to be treated either as a demographic threat, in line with the NII's logic, or as an inconsequential shadow of her underage, citizen daughter.
Infiltrators
According to data from the Israeli Population & Immigration Authority, as of April 2020, approximately 31,000 asylum-seekers—dubbed “infiltrators” by the Authority—are living in Israel. 11 Israel ratified the Convention on the Status of Refugees (1951) and its Protocol (1967), and grants Temporary Group Protection (a.k.a. a Temporary Non-Removal visa) yet has not incorporated it in its domestic law. 12 It should be noted, however, that in Israel, the term “group protection” means only protection against deportation: it does not define the rights that asylum-seekers are entitled to in terms of work, education, and health—unlike official recognition as refugees, which gives them Temporary Resident status, and entitles them to most social services, including public health services (Davidovitch and Gutzeit 2017; Gottlieb, Ghebrezghiabher, and Gebreyesus 2015). In Israel, no substantial or effective effort has been made to incorporate the Convention into Israeli law, to imbue it with substance, or to complement it with an interpretive tool. Private legislative efforts to regulate the rights of asylum-seekers have been repeatedly rejected by ministerial committees, while government legislation has been geared toward deterring asylum-seekers from arriving in Israel. In the absence of clear legislation and policy, all issues pertaining to asylum-seekers have been adjudicated by the courts (Kritzman-Amir 2015, 16–17).
The prevailing attitude in Israeli society toward asylum-seekers is reflected in the delegitimizing term infiltrators—which is used by state authorities, politicians, and the media alike (Arieli 2016; Kritzman-Amir 2015, 21). Most of the 31,000 asylum-seekers in Israel are men who entered Israel through the Egyptian border between 2006 and 2012; 71 percent are from Eritrea, and 20 percent from Sudan (ASSAF). According to the Authority's data from January 2018, between 2014 and the end of 2017, approximately 12,000 applications for asylum in Israel were submitted by Eritrean and Sudanese asylum-seekers. 13 Yet, approximately 800 Sudanese asylum-seekers living in Israel have been granted Temporary Resident visas (A-5)—which they must renew annually, with no obligation on the state's part to make a decision on their application. Of these, only thirteen individuals have been granted refugee status to date. 14 This attitude is reflected in the 2018 Israeli government's proposal to add an override clause to the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty that excludes asylum-seekers from the law.
Currently, the stay permit does not confer social rights or a work permit—indeed, until recently, it explicitly featured the subheading “This license does not constitute a work permit.” The State of Israel has undertaken before the High Court not to enforce the ban on the employment of asylum-seekers who hold this permit (Sadan, Rozen, and Guthmann 2018). Moreover, asylum-seekers do not fall under the aegis of the State Health Insurance Law, and therefore have no access to public health services, except in emergencies (Davidovitch and Gutzeit 2017).
15
Similarly, in matters of welfare, according to the policies of the Ministry of Welfare, asylum-seekers are not entitled to treatment or services—with the exception of minors at risk; women victims of domestic violence; homeless individuals; people with disabilities; and recognized victims of human-trafficking (Sadan, Rozen, and Guthmann 2018). As a welfare worker explained in her interview, services to asylum seekers are justified only in extreme situations: [The Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs] tells me not to treat [these people], you don’t give me budgets, you don’t give me resources—on the contrary, you say “Do it quietly, so no one hears about it.” So how can we make it work? […] There is a very, very big problem here: When you don’t give the parent a livelihood, with reasonable hours, and the rights that she's entitled to because she's a mother, she can’t be a mother and she can’t be a breadwinner. […] Nothing is being done—no kind of program to address these very complex mental problems that they have. […] And what's actually happening here in terms of policy is “Don’t treat them, unless you have to.” (Tamara, welfare worker)
Like male asylum-seekers, women also flee political persecution, incarceration, torture, and systematic discrimination. However, women whose application for asylum is based on gender-based persecution find it difficult to gain protection in Israel under the Refugee Convention, which is formulated in gender-neutral terms. Unlike other countries in the world that deal with refugees, Israel does not make the gender-interpretive adjustments that are customary in other countries (Kritzman-Amir, Ben Dor, and Wurgaft 2013; Kritzman-Amir and Rothman-Zecher 2019).
When asked about specific hindrances faced by women asylum-seekers, Tamara, a welfare worker, explains the everyday emphasis of the policy of abandonment: One of the major problems that [Eritrean] women face, is that when they want to go to work, they have nothing to do with the kids. They start very early, [but] childcare opens later, so they have a couple of hours difference to resolve. So they leave [the kids] with an unlicensed nursery, or home. This is a huge problem. When you don’t provide parents with a reasonable occupation with a reasonable income, and reasonable working hours and maternal rights, she can’t be both a mother and a provider. And then, the biggest problem is that they suffer from so many emotional problems—post-trauma, personality disorders, depression, anxiety. (Tamara, welfare worker)
Trafficking
From the early 1990s to 2006, Israel was one of the main destination countries for trafficking of women from the territories of the FSU. The contributing factors of this phenomenon were the disintegration of the Soviet Union, its ensuing economic and social shocks, and the immigration of over a million people to Israel—which facilitated the entry of traffickers and victims alike (Safran and Cheikin 2012). Most of the trafficked women were smuggled across the border with Egypt—lured by false offers of employment such as caregiving and housecleaning—and had no idea that they were destined to be kept in abysmal conditions and exploited by the local sex industry. Their ages ranged between 19 and 33—and about half were single-parent mothers (Levenkron and Dahan 2003; Safran and Cheikin 2012). The peak of the phenomenon was in the early 2000s, when an estimated 3,000 women entered Israel each year, and between 300 to 400 escort agencies and brothels operated in the country (Kupfer 2018). Following a series of successful campaigns, there has been a significant reduction in the number of women being trafficked to Israel (Ezioni 2013 in Wilamowski 2016). However, while the eradication of trafficking has reduced the number of women smuggled illegally into Israel, it has not prevented the emergence of a new pattern of trafficking, based on legal entry into Israel, by means of tourist visas. This is because, since 2011, Israel has had diplomatic agreements with Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Belarus that exempt citizens of those countries of the need for a tourist visa (Mishli, Guthmann, and Rozen 2017).
According to the Knesset's Subcommittee on Trafficking in Women and Prostitution, 404 tourists were denied entry in 2011 on suspicion of human trafficking—but by 2017, that number had jumped to nearly 8,500 tourists from the FSU. In most cases, the women are unwilling to testify, and ask to return to their countries of origin immediately. 19 However, according to concerns raised by participants in a discussion held by the Subcommittee on the Conclusions of the 2017 U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, which examined Israel's efforts to combat human trafficking, human trafficking in Israel has been expanding, rather than diminishing. Israel, it seems, has created a fertile ground for human trafficking, and the Population and Immigration Authority is focused more on expelling detainees from its detention facilities than on investigating the truth and nipping the phenomenon in the bud. As the representative of the US Embassy remarked at that meeting: “We see rulings on trafficking of human beings in other countries, and Israel continues to stand out with lighter sentences than in most other countries.” 20
Despite repeated requests from the committee's chairwoman, MK (Member of Knesset) Aliza Lavie, the Population and Immigration Authority has yet to provide a breakdown by gender, so the precise scale of trafficking in women remains unknown. As Nitzan Kahana, a representative of the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution, noted: We came here [Knesset] in November [2017], we sat here, and were told “Maybe it's going on—we don’t know how extensive it is.” We [returned] in February [2018] and told [you that trafficking in women] continues, [but] we don’t know how extensive it is. […] There's no way that the state has no idea of the extent of the phenomenon, and that the only data is coming from us [human rights agencies].
21
What happens to women who leave the shelter and have no [legal] status? […] The ultimate solution for women who have no other choice, is prostitution, and we meet them at the Mobile Clinic—[they might be] asylum seekers, Palestinian women, or women from the former Soviet Union. […] We made an attempt this year to appeal to the [Humanitarian] Committee, regarding a Palestinian woman who […] was married off to an elderly Israeli man who used her as a sex slave, and she attempted suicide and ended up at a shelter for battered women […] These were definitely humanitarian circumstances, I think, and violence—as also confirmed by the social worker at the hospital and by the shelter—and still we were advised not to appeal on humanitarian grounds, because they said it was hopeless. So we tried to present her as a trafficking victim, because they had actually married her off in order to serve as a sex slave, even though they were married—and that didn’t work, either.
22
The State of Israel has formally defined categories that qualify for services— among them victims of sex-trafficking who are entitled to seek redress through the Humanitarian Commission—and procedures that establish access to care resources, assistance, legal relief, and residence permits. However, in practice, it “puts-into-hibernation” the principles of asylum and of hospitality to the foreigner (Derrida and Rottenberg 2002, 140). Hence, while the Humanitarian Committee appears to provide means for accommodating and supporting statusless, trafficked women, the latter find themselves excluded.
State of Intimacy
This section discusses intimate violence as an illustration of the gendered regulation of statusless individuals, and the procedures that are inextricably interlinked with policies that result in foreign women who are subject to the “phased naturalization” procedure being deemed as statusless. In particular, we explore how the intersection of gender, ethnocracy, and policy brings about a withholding of legal status, and how normative prescriptive notions of what constitutes a life partner, coupled with ethnocratic immigration control, in fact result in denial, rather than provision of recognition.
As various scholars have pointed out, granting legal status based on temporal criteria (namely, on how long the applicant has been married to a local citizen), provides the citizen spouse with a disturbing degree of power and control in the relationship—with particularly dire implications for women (Adams and Campbell 2012; Ammar et al. 2012; Erez, Adelman, and Gregory 2009; Luibhéid 2008; Narayan 2017; Olivares 2014; Villalón 2010). This time-based requirement reflects normative assumptions about coupledom, and constitutes a power mechanism typical of exploitative and ethnocentric mobilities regimes are based upon (e.g., Reid-Musson 2018).
Data acquired by civil society organizations reflect the gendered effects of the naturalization process for foreign spouses in Israel. According to a Population & Immigration Authority reply to a request by Isha L'Isha Haifa Feminist Center under the Freedom of Information Law 5758–1998, 80 percent of the applications for family unification are submitted by women. Concurrently, the Forum of Shelter-Operating Associations report that 12 percent of women staying in shelters for victims of domestic violence throughout Israel are statusless—namely, ineligible for (full) health services, and not allowed to work. The Forum further notes that existing professional solutions and tools for dealing with violence against statusless women are inadequate. Statusless women remain at the shelters longer than average, and even though their assailants are usually Israeli citizens, they are not entitled to the full range of institutional assistance that is offered to citizen victims—such as income support, alimony, or health insurance. Mothers of children who are registered Israeli citizens are entitled to certain rights, but find it very difficult to exercise them (Hasson 2017). This state of affairs, whereby the citizen spouse is given full control over his wife's naturalization, can go on for years. Every year, in the run-up to the visa's renewal date, the potential for control increases, insofar as the citizen has the option, entirely at his whim, either to renew his spouse's status, or to delay or prevent the application—thus rendering her an illegal resident, stripped of all social rights, and subject to immediate deportation (Dancig-Rosenberg and Levenkron 2015, 370).
Recent developments in procedural mechanisms for dealing with statusless women survivors of intimate violence reveal how their normative interpretation by authorities exacerbate the women's acute vulnerability, rather than reduce it. In 2007, Israel enacted a special regulation that allows statusless women who have suffered physical abuse by their Israeli-citizen spouse to apply for legal status independently of their marital status (Tao Webber 2018).
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In practice, however, Israeli authorities have made it difficult for immigrants who leave their physically abusive Israeli spouse to remain in the country. By adopting a misguided and overzealous interpretation of the 2007 procedure, the Population & Immigration authority have set an impossibly high standard for the women to meet to prove their connection to Israel and their assimilation within it (Tao Webber 2018). As Yael Gold, CEO of the Fight Against Violence Against Women Association, pointed out in a meeting of the Parliamentary Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women and Gender Equality in December 11, 2018: We have children born in the [women's] shelter who are not registered anywhere. We have stories about […] fathers who don’t register the[ir] children at all, which is a new [phenomenon]. We have a young woman who has been in the [naturalization] process for five years, her daughter is now five years old, but we can’t locate the father: he doesn’t come for a paternity test, and no one seems to care that he doesn’t. There are children and women going around who don’t have a passport, an ID card…–nothing.
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As Dancig-Rosenberg and Levenkron (2015) argue, marriage for those undergoing phased naturalization is in fact, a relational triangle, rather than a couple: the abusive husband, his statusless victim, and the state. This triangular relationship—dubbed migrational violence by Dancig-Rosenberg and Levenkron—is a situation whereby a statusless woman in a violent relationship is at the mercy not only of her spouse, but also of the state's bureaucratic mechanisms. In these moments, her violent partner's advantage lies in his status as a citizen, whereas the woman's actions are constrained by his potential violence, which is enforced by state's institutions. In this way, the state becomes an active accomplice in the woman's victimization (2015, 347, 365).
Hence, the family unification framework grants control over migrant women not only to the citizen spouse, but to the state, as well. For example, even when a woman is entitled to legalize her status by virtue of being a victim of trafficking, the Population Authority prefers to process her status through the phased naturalization procedure, if she is married to an Israeli citizen—thus exposing her to a new type of vulnerability. This is apparent in the account by Tanya—a woman who had been trafficked, underwent rehabilitation, became pregnant by an Israeli citizen whom she met during the rehabilitation, then obliged by the Population Authority to submit to the phased naturalization procedure, rather than as a recognized trafficking victim, because she was cohabiting with an Israeli partner: [Because of] all kinds of documents that you fill out [the Population Authority learned] that I have an Israeli spouse—the father of [our] girl, and we are still in touch, and all that. So they said “Great.” So instead of giving you [legal] status, because of everything you went through here [in the sex industry], and how the [traffickers] brought you here, and “We [the State of Israel] will take some responsibility for it,” [they tell me] “Go work out your [legal] status based on the guy you are in touch with.” [A decision that is] based on cohabiting together with him. And I didn’t want that […] I don’t want to be dependent on anyone. […] [But] they left me no choice. (Tanya, FSU)
Do you include [Palestinian women who are married to Israeli citizens] in this category of women who suffer from violence, and can proceed according to this protocol?
We don’t work according to the Citizenship Law [pertaining to Palestinians]. Citizenship law is something else, I work according to the Law of Entry [pertaining to asylum seekers]. It's not the same.
OK, so now I know which law you are working under, but you haven’t answered my question. These women: Do you use this [humanitarian] protocol in their case, so that they can continue?
Ma’am, can you define for me which women you mean?
Women from the Occupied Territories who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel, for example—who have no [legal] status and are present and come and complain [about intimate violence], or have the [legal] status of …
I understood, ma’am. We have a different committee for those who—-Palestinian women, not just women, Palestinians who go up to the Humanitarian Committee in these special cases.
So this protocol is not applied to these women?
It's separate. There is a different Humanitarian Committee for Palestinian women.
Why? […] I don’t understand why does this particular protocol not apply to them, and with the same committee. Why?
There is a temporary order, it's not the same. They are a different population. 25
The classification is expressed through a neutral functional typology—“They are a different population” states the Deputy Director of the Population and Immigration Authority, applying what Fassin (2013, 158) defines as “racial pragmatics”—namely, the application of a neutral functional typology to a description that is both generalizing and stigmatizing, and fed by ethnocratic ideology. Reconfiguring migrants in this way is designed precisely to dehumanize, to ensure that the immigration officer or official is not imagining an encounter with a person, but is making an unbiased assessment of risk based on standardized data and procedures, underscoring how banal professional practices produce bordering effects (Innes 2021, 973). Here it involves the differentiation of women according to “threat,” and redirecting Palestinian women to a different Humanitarian Committee while draining it of its meaning.
Discussion and Conclusions
Statusless Palestinian wives of Israeli citizens, women asylum seekers, and women from the FSU who have been trafficked in the sex industry or have left their Israeli spouse due to intimate violence, are among the most vulnerable groups in the Israeli society. However, the lack of formal status and civic belonging does not explain the logic of abandonment that is evident in policymaking, legislation, litigation, and public debates we have analyzed. Rather, we argue that statuslessness induces vulnerability—inasmuch as the state's institutions expressly abandon statusless people based on classification mechanisms of active disengagement from certain populations, and regulations that produce suffering (Biehl 2001; Giroux 2006).
Among the most powerful classification mechanisms are those based on regulating the entry to, and residence in, Israel—such as the asylum policy, the Citizenship Law, the Temporary Order (2003), and the Entry into Israel Law. The systematic hobbling of existing provisions for administering vulnerable foreigners—such as the Convention on the Status of Refugees, its protocol and the Gender-Related Persecution Guidelines; family unification procedures; the Protocol for the Prevention, Suppression and Punishment of Human Trafficking; and the 2007 procedure for improving the status of foreign-born survivors of spousal abuse—produces statuslessness and precarity.
Draining these frameworks of their meaning—either by failing to implement them (as in the case of the lack of asylum policy), or by interpreting them according to an ethnocratic logic (as in the case of trafficked women or foreign spouses who are survivors of intimate violence), as reviewed in this paper, expose statusless women to significant risks in terms of their rights as parents, in the workplace, and in their relationships with men. They encounter exclusion, discrimination, and harm, and do not enjoy the protections afforded under women's labor laws, affirmative action, or special consideration, due to their lack of legal status (Kritzman-Amir, Ben Dor, and Wurgaft 2013, 334). In instances of intimate violence, spousal immigration control underscores racial and national privilege and restriction, which continue to generate yet more instances of statuslessness, and iterates normative family and marriage discourses. Here, the distinction between “married” and “unmarried” becomes a powerful means of social ordering—one that naturalizes the distinction between “legal” and “illegal,” based on relationship duration, which allows the state to regulate legal status through intimate bonds (Luibhéid 2008). The messiness of intimate lives, however, is not recognized by policies that further exacerbate challenges that migrant women and their families have to face, and that legally produces illegality, statelessness, and abuse (Mahdavi 2016, 22, 39).
Faced with the constraints imposed by the liberal norms of the Convention on the Status of Refugees, family unification procedures, or the Protocol for the Prevention of Human Trafficking, Israel uses technologies of deterrence and racial exclusion (Lentin and Moreo 2015). Such treatment is frequently achieved through neglect, stagnation, or the conferring of indeterminate status, whereby undesirables are rendered invisible (Fassin 2012). Following the discussion by Lentin and Moreo (2015), Fassin (2012), Ishii (2020), Mahdavi (2016), and Luibhéid (2008) of statuslessness as a product of technology of deterrence that maintains precarious social and juridical status, the perspective brought here intersects a few explanatory expositions on statuslessness in the literature, in a bid to broaden our understanding of how statuslessness is produced. Specifically, we argue that statuslessness is an emergent process that is produced through policymaking, applied through technologies of deterrence and of hobbling of existing human rights frameworks, that produce and reproduce the discursive effect of legitimizing abandonment, discrimination, and neglect. Hence, we argue that statusless is the outcome of the convergence of a national security-driven rhetoric, an active refrain of using existing frameworks for granting legality to legitimize the discrimination of statusless women, and to classify them as an undesirable and abandonable population. Furthermore, our contribution theorizes the production of status in the context of an ethnocratic regime that has both liberal and illiberal tenets at its legal core. Hence, subsequent research trajectories that could further mobilize our knowledge on statuslessness from a gendered perspective include: connecting the Israeli case to other regimes around the world that have both liberal and illiberal tenets at their legal core; and studying policymaking, regulations, and services for sexual and gender minorities among migrants in Israel.
Fassin's concept of compassionate repression, which refers to regulations and procedures that arise from a dialectic of hospitality and hostility toward foreigners, corresponds to the contradiction we discuss between a formal humanitarian legal framework and a concurrent rejection of non-Jewish immigration (2012, 135). It is frequently achieved through neglect, stagnation, or by conferring an indeterminate status, whereby statusless women are neither guests nor enemies, and subject to a furtive hospitality that confers them with no rights (Fassin 2012, 136). In the Israeli ethnocratic context, the humanitarian framework always yields to the national security (or threat) paradigm. The convergence of ethnocratic and security-driven rhetoric and the active refrain of using existing frameworks for granting legality, legitimizes the discrimination of statusless women, and their classification as an undesirable and abandonable population.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to our interview partners for generously sharing their experiences and insights. We are particularly thankful to Amalia Sa’ar and Efri Weisberg for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version, and to Meirav Ben-Zeev for her invaluable expertise. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their helpful feedback.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Women's World Day of Prayer.
