Collective Care and the Politics of Visibility

Abstract

This chapter asks how caregivers unsettle the state’s colonial commitment to a Jewish majority by sustaining collective forms of life, whether through mutual aid, legal defense, service provision, debt relief, or emotional support networks. It foregrounds the dangers of being collectively visible and the comparative racialization of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers whose treatment in Palestine/Israel is heavily shaped by labor exploitation and anti-Blackness. The chapter begins by providing a brief layout of the comparative terrain of migrant activism in Palestine/Israel. It then discusses how migrant communities engage in mutual aid; the ways migrant networks, as horizontal sources of care and solidarity, provide community safety and emotional support; and how workers resist state surveillance and deportation. The chapter concludes by highlighting how contrasting temporal relationships to territory render the presence of asylum seekers “political” in the eyes of the state, and of migrant caregivers, as largely apolitical.