TRAPPED IN RESISTANCE: COLLECTIVE STRUGGLE THROUGH WELFARE FRAUD IN ISRAEL

What is it about?

In this paper, I draw on 49 in-depth interviews with Israeli female welfare recipients to investigate whether their seemingly unrelated individual acts of non-compliance with welfare laws are connected. I show that although the fraudulent behavior of these women encompasses a political claim against the Israeli welfare state—and constitutes acts of individual resistance—it has an extremely weak connection to any coherent ideological perspective or collective practices of social support. The women’s system of social support is severely restricted due to the Israeli welfare state’s fraud investigation tactics of home visits and obtaining information on recipients through informants, which shape and fragmentize the women’s collective practices. As a result, the women are trapped in individual resistance, and the potential of their acts to generate any social change seems quite slim.

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Why is it important?

This paper aims to return the analytical focus to the collective aspects of individual non-compliance acts and to examine the dynamics that support or hinder collectivity as a proxy for the socially transformative potential of individual acts of resistance through welfare fraud. Thus, it supports the contention that struggles must take a collective form in order to generate change (e.g. Piven 2006; Tarrow 2011; Handler 1992; McCann and March 1996; Rubin 1996) and stresses the collective aspects of individual fraudulent behavior. At the same time, it illuminates the state's generally ignored role in the formation and fragmentization of these collective elementsElaborating on the connection between these individual acts and collective action and exposing the dynamics that shape the collective practices that bind these individual acts, this research deepens and reformulates current resistance theory; moreover, it expands its explanatory power by incorporating an understanding of the role of the state in the formation and fragmentization of collectivity and, accordingly, the state's impact on the potential of this form of resistance to evolve into social change.