Reproducing the Settler Home

Chapter 3 examines how the normalization of settler sovereignty is the background against which the labors of eldercare unfold in the home. Drawing on employer narratives, government statements, and recruitment agency websites, I highlight two common tropes among employers. The “kinship trope” portrays migrants as “one of the (racial) family,” despite their exclusion from the Zionist collective, while the “development trope” depicts them as agents of economic empowerment and Israel as a bastion of economic entrepreneurialism and gender progressiveness. Both discourses reinforce settler-employers’ position as rightful heirs to the land and disavow indigenous dispossession, even as, at other times, employers also suggest how caregivers’ labors unsettle the home as an exclusionary site of Jewish continuity. In conclusion, the chapter examines how citizenship, as a legal and political concept, can function as a technology of (dis)emplacement.