The Logic of Emergency and the Emergence of Civic Infrastructures: Services for Women without Status

Women without status in Israel, that do not have access to permanent status and naturalization procedures, live at the periphery of Israeli society and suffer from exclusion, discrimination and violence. The Israeli asylum policy and the ethnocratic Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law put them at risk in the domestic, public, and employment arenas, as they are unprotected by employment laws, and deprived of access to healthcare and welfare services. Nonetheless, the proposed paper explores how emergency policies are leveraged by welfare and healthcare officials and community organizers, to expand existing infrastructures and include women without status. The paper is based on a qualitative research project conducted between 2018 and 2019 in Haifa, a city in Northern Israel, with Palestinian women from the Occupied Palestinian Territories married to Israeli citizens, Eritrean women asylum seekers, and women from the Former Soviet Union, either trafficked in the sex industry or married to Israeli citizens. The paper analyzes the interpretative work performed by service providers, who mobilize institutional definitions and regulations of state of emergency such as intimate violence and children at-risk, to justify intervention. I argue that the complementary infrastructure that emerges is neither congruent with ethnocentric hegemonic discourses, nor strictly subverts racial formations and discourses. Rather, it emphasizes the collaborative work between women without status, state officials, and civil society actors, that emerges where formal policy fails.