Fighting for Dignity

Sarah S. Willen

"This book is a story of dignity, indignity, and indignation. Drawing on over eighteen years of ethnographic engagement (2000-2018), including more than thirty nonconsecutive months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tel Aviv, it explores the rhythm, texture, and existential demands of everyday life for a relatively new population of excluded Others in the charged sociopolitical space of contemporary Israel/Palestine: global migrants who have been illegalized and, I argue, "abjected" by the Israeli state and Israeli society. The country's ethnonational migration regime, described more fully below, and the simmering Palestinian-Israeli conflict form the backdrop to the story. At the center of the book is an expensive, heavily publicized, mass deportation campaign initiated by the Israeli government in late summer 2002 described in this book as the gerush--Hebrew for "deportation" or...