To deport or to ‘adopt’? The Israeli dilemma in dealing with children of non-Jewish undocumented migrants

Abstract

This article analyses the unprecedented decision taken by the Israeli state in 2005 to legalize the status of non-Jewish undocumented migrants’ children. In explaining how the plight of culturally assimilated non-Jewish children succeeded in penetrating the hermetic ethno-religious definition of citizenship in Israel, the article focuses on the subtle yet critical influence of kinship on modern state-making and the affective fashioning of national belonging. By insisting on treating culturally assimilated non-Jewish children as Others, Israel increasingly ran the risk of unveiling the feeble construction of the Jewish nation in terms of kinship as ‘one big family’. The Israeli media increasingly began to question the refusal of the state to recognize children who were evidently ‘Israelis in every way’. Such a development, as some Israeli politicians undoubtedly realized, could have potentially been more detrimental to the mythological foundations of the Jewish state than the ‘adoption’ of a few hundred non-Jewish children.