Household Resistance and National Love Available to Purchase

Drawing on workers’ stories, chapter 4 focuses on the household strategies caregivers use to navigate exploitation and unsettle their roles as non-Jewish temporary workers in the home and state. It highlights migrant caregivers’ tactics for contesting, coping with, and resisting the difficult relationships and working conditions they often enter into when they are first hired, focusing in particular on the strategies of creating indispensability, employing strategic deference, engaging in avoidance, directly challenging employers, and quitting.

The chapter also examines alignments between migrant caregivers and the state, suggesting how resistance to economic austerity measures does not necessarily result in a rejection of settler colonialism. The analysis locates some workers’ articulated pro-Israel stances in relation to Christian Zionism and the comparative status of Israel as a “second tier” migrant-receiving state. Throughout, the chapter highlights how workers forge relationships that require employers to take workers’ needs into account.