Description
Building on decolonial and feminist theories of reproduction, this paper centres the claims of Syrian Christian migrant workers from India in Israel to social citizenship thereby unsettling the exclusivity of the Jewish nation-building project in Israel. Syrian Christians are a minority from Kerala, India who stake claims to upper caste roots having allegedly converted by St. Thomas from Brahmin ancestors. Owing to state investments in education and healthcare, Kerala has historically experienced high human development growth with sluggish economic development and high unemployment rates, which prompts a third of its people to seek low-skilled, and more recently high-skilled migration for social and economic mobility. The Kerala-Israel migration corridor is relatively new but diverges from hitherto migration experiences to the oil-rich GCC states in terms of offering relatively liberal worker rights conditions. Besides the legal imperatives and economic motivations, migration regimes in Kerala inclusive of local churches and community organisations capitalise on the spiritual centrality of the “Holy Land” as an important determinant for Syrian Christians to take up jobs in Israel. This paper will take a closer look at the quotidian navigation of identity and faith by Syrian Christians and resistance to racialised and sexist stereotypes of the settler employer.
