What motivates people to make home purchases that seem imprudent in narrowly economic terms, and how does the salience of homeownership debt shape political struggles for social justice? To answer these questions, I draw on my fieldwork among homebuyers in Israel in the wake of the 2011 housing protests. I find that homebuyers’ reliance on credit compels them to operate as investors despite themselves by making homeownership synonymous with achieving security. Homebuyers’ competitive pursuit of security through mortgage-enabled homeownership contributes to the collective insecurity of the middle class. Credit-leveraged accumulation thereby widens the gap between market growth and public welfare, even as they are widely represented as interlinked. This analysis will illuminate the relation of credit and debt to political agency.

Anthropologists have long been studying how people deal with risks and uncertainties and resist those that prove too punishing. They provide the bearings for a distinctly anthropological intervention into a key feature of financialization: the insinuation of finance, and of financial risk management, into household economics. I undertake such a project here through an ethnography of pension practices in Israel. I argue that people's perceived irrationality in their dealings with their insurers is in fact meaningful discontent. People expect to be protected insofar as they act responsibly as savers and citizens. Against this expectation, they are made to bear the risks of financial markets whose growth is won at their expense. I argue further that their discontent is depoliticized when they act from their positions as consumers rather than citizens. Negotiations within this framework deflect attention from the relationship of finance to exploitation.

No abstract

This article draws on fieldwork in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, where nearly half of the residents are immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, and argues that the immigrants-turned-settlers of the 1990s and beyond are the subjects of contemporary normalizing procedures. This renders them the quintessential neoliberal settlers, amenable to market-adjusted fluctuations in settlement patterns that include opportune expansion, depreciation, and dismantlement. A discussion of immigration in Ariel illustrates an ex post facto politics in the West Bank that puts into relief some of the conundrums of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The ethnography establishes that it is precisely through their pragmatism that immigrant-settlers become political agents despite themselves: a conclusion that has serious consequences for the Israel-Palestine conflict in general. [West Bank settlements, immigration, neoliberalism, normalization, pragmatism] The settlement of Palestine/Israel has always been bound up with immigration, with the Zionist ideal of the ingathering of exiles serving as voiceover for Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement, the Middle East, North Africa, and to a lesser extent the Americas and other parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, inhabiting newly acquired lands of the emerging polity. Israeli discourse frames contemporary immigration trends in the spirit of their predecessors, whether prestate pioneers representing exceptional ideological commitment to nation-building or 1950s immigrants from Muslim countries dispersed in peripheries for government-sponsored development projects. Immigrants accordingly feature in public discourse as either the zealous agents or the mobilized victims of political projects. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Ariel-a West Bank settlement of some 17,000 residents, about half of whom are immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (henceforth, FSU)-I argue in this article for a different sort of political agency among immigrant-settlers of the 1990s and beyond. Namely, in contrast to their predecessors, these immigrants figure into larger colonial processes by dint of their pursuit of private interests, while the state facilitates social reproduction and market growth by means of their pragmatism. I consider this a process of normalization and argue that it renders immigrants the quintessential neoliberal settlers, amenable to flexible fluctuations in West Bank settlement patterns that include opportune expansion, depreciation, and dismantlement.Normalization is specific to the recent decades; while immigration to Israel has always been attuned to socioeconomic constraints and possibilities, 1 it is only since the 1990s that immigrants (along with non-immigrants) are constituted as the optimizing

No abstract