Center for Israel Studies

Evangelical Churches and Labor Migrants in a
Jewish State

Adriana Kemp
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
Tel Aviv University
akemp@post.tau.ac.il

Rebeca Raijman
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Haifa
raijman@soc.haifa.ac.il

October 2002

* This research was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation found by The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A preliminary version of this paper was presented The authors wish to thank Tamara Barsky, AlejandroPaz, and Valentin Nabel for their kind research assistance. We are also grateful to Carl Schneider for his careful reading and helpful comments.

"Zionism was and remains a national movement with the goal of establishing the State of Israel. We are Zionists. We love everything about the Jewish people. Our powerful desire for a church visa stems precisely from the desire to help the Jews. Otherwise, why should we be here? We are here to serve the Jewish people. Take my life but do not kill them. That is a divine imperative... common sense finds it hard to swallow this. Therefore, you have to be born again." (Gloria, the pastor's wife, ER Baptist church, Tel, Aviv, February 8, 2001)

Popular versions of Protestantism made their way to the Holy Land at the end of the twentieth century . Indeed, evangelical churches are relative "latecomers" to the Land of Jesus and have arrived in Israel as a consequence of international labor migration during the last decade. Gloria's explanation of her presence in Israel - and her efforts to get a visa that will legalize her status - are an illustration of the dynamics of the localization of global processes through the creation of transnational religious spaces. She and her church illustrate the well-known fact that migrants migrate with their religions: beliefs, practices and institutions (Greeley 1972; Smith 1978; Warner 1993, 1998). These often provide the only alternative spaces for the production of a "sense of belonging" within the experiential context of uprooted-ness, displacement and marginality. However, a less obvious implication of Gloria's plea is that religious spaces may operate not only as an arena for the constitution of new identities in the face of discrimination and exclusion. They may also become a channel for advancing claims on inclusion and belonging within the host society.
Writing on the dislocations between place and culture that constitute the essence of globalization, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1990) argues for the creation of new "scapes" that challenge the equation between national identity and national space. What are the new "sacriscapes", to borrow from Appadurai's terminology, that emerge from the flow of labor migrants and their religions into the political space of an ethnonational state?
In this article we trace the creation of Evangelical churches created by and for Latin-American migrant workers within the context of the Jewish state. First, we relate to the social significance of religious practices and beliefs for migrants' individual and collective identity in the host society. Second, we focus on the translation of Christian Zionist theology into a claim of belonging articulated by migrant believers. In other words, we delve into the modes through which the theological position of Christian Zionism is translated into a sociological position of Christian migrants in a Jewish state.

The article consists of three main sections. The first section describes the context of non-Jewish labor migration in Israel in general, and of the migrant workers from Latin America in particular, in order to understand the emergence of evangelical churches. The second part focuses on the social significance of the evangelical churches in relation to labor migrants living in conditions of extreme marginalization and on the processes of identity formation they ensued. The third part presents the ways through which non-Jewish observant migrants interpret their structural position within the Jewish state rendering their religious beliefs into a claim for social inclusion.

1. Labor Migration in Israel
Labor migration from overseas countries is a relatively new phenomenon in Israel. It started in the early 1990s, when the government authorized the recruitment of a large number of labor migrants to replace Palestinian workers from the occupied territories (Bartram 1998). The deterioration of the political and security situation generated by the first Palestinian uprising -intifadah-- (which began at the end of 1987) brought about a severe labor shortage in the construction and agriculture sectors, in which Palestinian workers had been concentrated since the early 1970s (Semyonov and Lewin-Esptein 1987).
However, it was not until the Israeli government decided to seal the border with the occupied territories, at the beginning of 1993, that the large-scale recruitment of overseas workers began, primarily from Rumania (construction sector), Thailand (agriculture) and the Philippines (geriatric care, nursing, and domestic services).

The recruitment of overseas workers was consistent with the interests of both the state and the employers, as it was considered a temporary, low-cost solution to a temporary problem. The result was that in the 1990s the ground was prepared for the transformation of overseas labor migration from a negligible phenomenon - as it had been until then - into an institutionalized process. As in other countries, the official recruitment of labor migrants brought about an influx of undocumented migrants. Non-Jewish undocumented foreign workers arrive in Israel from almost every corner of the world - though mainly from East Europe, South Asia, Africa, and South America - and are employed primarily in the services sector. According to estimates of the Central Bureau of Statistics, by the end of the year 2000 there were some 169,000 overseas labor migrants in Israel, about forty per cent of whom had work permits, and together with Palestinian daily commuters they made up to 10.6 percent of the total labor force in Israel (Ministry of Labor and Welfare 2001).

The pattern of formal labor recruitment in Israel has placed these migrants in a peculiar situation. Because work permits are granted to employers and not to employees, documented labor migrants become a de facto "captive labor force," with all the flagrant violations of individual and civil liberties this entails. The official recruitment of workers is conducted through manpower agencies and employers, to whom the permits are allocated. By this means the state is supposedly not a party to the employment of the workers and therefore ostensibly bears no responsibility for their living conditions and conditions of employment (Raijman and Kemp 2002).

In contrast to their documented counterparts, undocumented migrant workers arrive haphazardly. They enter the country on a tourist visa valid for up to ninety days, which forbids them to work, and become undocumented by overstaying it. This method is not the only path to illegality. A very widespread way for a worker to become undocumented is to leave the employer to whom he/she is indentured through what has become to be known as the "binding system."
As in most Western European countries, migrant workers in Israel are considered an import of temporary workers and not prospective citizens. They are deemed outsiders in the cultural, social, and political spheres (Baldwin-Edwards and Schain 1994; Schnapper 1994; Weiner 1996). The exclusionary practices of the Israeli nation-state towards migrant workers are salient in particular with regard to undocumented migrants. The fact that they are undocumented makes them not only vulnerable to the authorities' persecution, detention and deportation but also "invisible" in the eyes of state apparatuses in regard to social, political, and civil rights. The lack of legal status and work permits seems to be one, albeit not the only, of the main catalysts for the development of informal patterns of organization in an unfriendly environment. Paradoxically, the lack of state regimentation of working and living conditions among undocumented migrant workers leaves room for the emergence of new ethnic communities as a strategy for survival in a new society. During the last decade three ethnic communities have developed in Israel among migrant workers: Black African, Latin American, and Filipino. The great majority of African and Latino migrants are undocumented and the Filipino community displays a mixed pattern. In the following section, we present a brief overview of the Latino labor migrant community in Israel, the focus of our paper.

The Emerging Latino Migrant Community in Israel
A socio-economic profile of migrant workers from Latin America and of their emerging community will set the background for an understanding of the role of evangelical churches in the everyday lives of Latin American migrant workers (see Appendix 1).
The Latin American community of migrant workers in Israel originates from all parts of the South American continent. Mostly young people (average age: 34), they began arriving in Israel after 1993. Gender groups display significant differences in the patterns of migration by family situation. Particularly interesting is the fact that a high percentage of women migrated alone leaving their children in the home country at the care of family members (25 percent). Likewise, many of the male workers left wives and children behind (15 percent); or both migrated to Israel and left the children with relatives in their countries of origin. The existence of a variety of family models, including families with children, suggests the potential emergence of a community with different needs from those of migrants who were recruited formally by employers and arrived alone. The great majority of Latin American migrants has neither residence nor work permits. Most of our respondents lived in south Tel Aviv, in the vicinity of the central bus station, which in recent years has become an immigrant enclave.
Migrants' educational level and the occupational cost they pay because of migration is also essential for understanding the character and needs of the Latino community in Israel. Latino migrant workers displayed relatively high levels of human capital acquired in their countries of origin (about 12 years of study on average, with some 17 percent holding an academic degree). About half of the Latin American migrant workers held white-collar positions before moving to Israel (15 percent were employed in high-status occupations). Women worked mainly as secretaries and clerks, with only a small percentage employed in cleaning jobs. In Israel, nearly all of them work in personal services (the majority of the women and about half the men work cleaning homes and are dubbed "nikayoneros" - from the Hebrew word for cleaning).

The Latino migrants' willingness to pay the price of occupational downward mobility is due to the large salary differentials that exist between Israel and their home countries. Back home, the average monthly salary earned by migrants was $326 (with women earning only about 60 percent of what the men made). These low wage levels - as compared to an expected average wage of between $1,000 and $1,500 a month for cleaning homes (based on payment of $7 an hour and in accordance with the number of hours worked) - account for people's readiness to pay the cost, not only in type of employment, but also the social and emotional price entailed in migration, this including the cost of "being illegal" and living at the margins of Israeli society .

However, economic inducements alone do not account for the creation of this new migration track which did not even exist ten years ago, connecting remote towns on the coffee-producer area in Colombia or farming villages in the Andes with the Shapira neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. As the "Holy Land," Israel is a magnet for adherents of various religions who want to visit the places sacred to them, including tens of thousands of Christians of all denominations who come on pilgrimage every year (Shoval, 2000; Rinschede, 1992; Shachar and Shoval, 1999). The advent of the new millennium and the concomitant expectation of the Second Coming only heightened Israel's attractiveness for Christians who were regarded by Israeli authorities also as potential migrants. The religious factor played a large part in the choice of Israel as a destination by Latin American migrants: a third of them cited religion as their main reason for migrating, and many of them arrived in Israel as part of a pilgrimage tour as a means of securing their entrance in the country. As will be seen, religious activity and its institutional venues, the churches, act as a major catalyst for the migrants to organize themselves into communities. In fact, the migrants' churches shape an open space, perhaps the only one, in which otherwise "invisible" migrants acquire a public presence of their own.

2. Evangelical churches in Israel
It is difficult to estimate accurately the number of evangelical churches that exist in Israel, since they are mostly the initiative of migrants who are residing and working in the country without a permit and are therefore outside the authorities' sphere of supervision.
Our field work within the Latino migrants' community in Israel shows that there are currently nearly ten Latin American evangelical churches operating in south Tel Aviv, all of them established by religious entrepreneurial migrants upon arrival. The churches vary in size, activity, and denomination - whether Pentecostal, Baptist, Assembly of God, Adventist or groups organized by Messianic Jews - but all are evangelical. In fact, as Freston (1998) points out , the shifting boundaries between religions and denominations makes popular Protestantism in general, and Pentecostalism in particular, a true typological challenge, which merits study in its own right. The fluidity of the boundaries between churches and denominations is very pronounced in the evangelical churches we are studying. They have more than a thousand congregants, about half of them participate regularly, the rest are occasional passersby. Arguably, then, about 7 percent of the Latino migrant workers are active to one degree or another in evangelical churches. This figure is comparable to the membership rate in evangelical churches in Latin America , where a "genuine Protestant revolution" has been under way since the 1960s (Freston 1998: 337; Martin 1990; Corten and Marshall-Fratani, 2001).

The churches' existence is hardly a secret. Some of them are registered as autonomous associations or as the "subsidiary" of a recognized church in Israel. Although the churches do not go out of their way to declare their presence, they are far from being underground organizations. Anyone who happens to walk by during a service hears the soulful chanting that emanates from their open windows. The churches' public nature stands in blatant contrast to the desperate attempts by undocumented migrants to disguise their presence in public arenas and thus avoid attracting the attention of the authorities. The "extraterritorial" status of the migrants' churches confirms the important, if somewhat neglected, fact that the status quo between state and religious institutions in Israel is not confined solely to Jews. It applies to Christian churches too, including those of "illegal" migrants. It is precisely due to the state-religion status quo that migrant churches can provide, albeit for brief and fragmented moments, a safe haven, in both the physical and the spiritual sense, for people who are excluded from every type of public "visibility" in Israel.

Migrants' Churches: Individual and collective identity
The church profile that emerges from the fieldwork we carried out over the past three years is not significantly different from that prevalent in the anthropological and sociological literature (Leon 1998: 163-194; Freston 1998; Martin B. 1995; Lehmann 1996; Mayrargue, 2001). These are community-oriented churches. Acting as magnets for recently arrived migrants, in most cases they effectively establish a congregation ex nihilo from an amorphous and fairly heterogeneous mass of new arrivals. The churches' congregational character is reflected in two ways: first, in their involvement in diverse and comprehensive spheres of activity; and, second, in their declared effort to deal with the day-to-day problems of the migrants and be of relevance to them, while purporting to hold the key to "solving" such problems.

Both the pastors and the congregation members refer to the church as an "extended family." The family is not only an organizational metaphor it is also a primary object for the churches' activities. They hold seminars and workshops for young couples on subjects related to "family life," such as living as a couple, the family from the biblical perspective, introducing children into the world of the ritual, and the like. Church-organized extracurricular activity (welcoming the Sabbath twice each month on Friday evenings, outings around the country, special seminar days, and more) also emphasize the value of family life and communality.
The depiction of the world of the church as a "family" also has a distinct instrumental aspect: it is meant to strengthen the participants' commitment, particularly with respect to filling positions that are required for the church's maintenance. The expectation that the church's activity will be funded by the members of the congregation, and the sanctions imposed on those who are laggards in this respect, further reflect the "family spirit." The evangelical churches that we surveyed are financed largely by means of the "tithe" - a tenth of the donor's income - which is given to the church once a month, and by other donations that are made weekly by the members of the congregation. Once every two weeks, food items are collected for a "family package" (canasta familiar) to assist the neediest members of the "church family."

The meaning of the church as an alternative family is of special significance in the case of labor migrants who are detached from kin networks and family support in the host society. It provides them with a new sense of belonging which helps them to cope with an alien, exploitative, and often flagrantly hostile climate. In other words, despite their extreme marginality and absolute exclusion, undocumented labor migrants develop diverse modes of dealing with reality and confer on it their own particular meaning. Religious practices are one example of this.

How does the church address the migrants' day-to-day life and seek to make itself relevant to them? Latino migrants in Israel repeatedly refer to the church as a "shelter" from the vicissitudes of everyday life. Anita, a migrant worker from Colombia who is a regular worshipper at the CC church, explains that she was drawn to the church as "compensation" for the threatening and alienating surroundings of the area where she lives, near the old Central Bus Station: "There are a lot of drunk migrants from Poland, Romania, Portugal, and Russia. It's frightening," she says, adding, "The CC is like my family in Israel." For Maria, who like many other migrant women left her children back in her home country so that they could have a "better future", the church constitutes "a form of self-help. It gives me the strength to go on."
The church ritual acts as collective therapy and catharsis for the believers. The liturgical practice is highly physical and sensual: the prayers are accompanied by singing and dancing, the worshippers often enter a state of ecstasy leading to physical collapse. Marta, who is an assistant to the female pastor at CC, refers to the ritual in reflexive terms of "theotherapy." However, the ritual practice also has a saliently disciplinary aspect. Apart from its indirect didactic dimension (to "see and be seen"), it makes a direct appeal to the believer and commands him/her to accept God into his/her body and soul. The believer's response to the church's interpellation takes the form of theosomatic physical reactions, such as trance, glosolalia, and falling down. Carmen, the charismatic pastor of KHZ, explains to her congregation that the collapse of worshippers after entering into a trance is due to their acceptance of the holy spirit. "The word kavod [honor]," she says, using Hebrew terms, "means kaved, [heavy], such is the glory of all-powerful God. Therefore, the body of those who respect and accept God falls and collapses."

The churches' psychosocial role is emphasized by the sociology of religion and migration literature (Hurh & Kim, 1990; Taylor & Chatters, 1988; Leon, 1998; Patillo-McCoy, 1998). According to these studies, the migrants' attraction to religion should be seen in the context of the psychosocial strategies people resort to in attempting to cope with macrosociological changes. Turning to the churches is portrayed as part of the attempt by status- and power-deprived groups "to restore their lost honor" and as an alternative structure of opportunity in which participation affords status and strength in the community hierarchy (Frazier 1963: 43, quoted in Min 1999: 1374). This is especially so with regard to the church leaders and those who hold key positions in the community's religious life, most of whom are in Israel without residence and work permits, but it is also valid in large measure for the ordinary members of the congregation, whose participation in the church gives them a sense of belonging and comradeship.

The churches' "compensatory" role finds clear expression in the believers' devoted response to their exacting demands. One to three times a week, adherents are required to attend a range of activities, each of which lasts an average of about three hours, usually in the evening or late at night; and strong social control is exercised on the congregation to take part in underwriting the church's operation by paying a "tithe" and making "donations." Given the fact that these are hard-up people who do intensive physical labor for an average of ten hours a day five or six days a week and who conduct their lives in the "underground", their participation in church practice is far from self-evident.
While constructed as a "shelter" or "protected space" for undocumented and persecuted migrants, churches are not altogether insensitive to events in the outside world. On the contrary, the outside world against which the church is supposed to protect the migrants penetrates the church space in the form of the pastoral sermons and the migrants' prayers. The evangelical liturgy is a central element for understanding how the church "speaks" to the migrants and allows them to bring their day-to-day life into the religious arena. Apart from the sermon delivered by the church leader, the evangelical ritual creates a broad platform for the believers' active participation by means of group prayers or petitions, and testimonials.

Petitions, which are prayers on specific subjects that are submitted to the pastor by the believers, generally make public the everyday problems encountered by the migrants: difficulties at work, disputes with the employer or the landlord, worries about the children, and anxieties about deportation and police violence. Such a prayer comes from Lorena, an active participant in the CC church that asks God to make her "invisible in the eyes of the police." Every month the pastor chooses a limited number of petitions for which the congregation is asked to pray. If there is a large number of petitions, the pastor divides the congregation into smaller task groups, which divide the work of prayer among them. In the LLM church, for example, the "opening" petitions of May 1999 dealt with giving thanks to God; liberating the souls of the Christians in the world; and blessing the Jewish people in Israel and praying for their protection from wars and enemies.

Another liturgical practice through which the mundane outside world penetrates the church space is the testimonials. These are delivered by the church leaders or by members of the congregation who are called to the pulpit. As the word suggests, they are "testimony" of the Lord's appearance in the individual's day-to-day life. However, an equally important goal is to bring migrants to the church and persuade them that their participation is "worthwhile." As a member of the ER congregation put it, "Everything we ask from God comes to pass. I asked Him to let me get to the Promised Land, and so it was. In work, too, I asked and I received. About wages, I asked, I received. God is present in the ba'albayit [using the Hebrew word for landlord], in work, in everything that happens to us. The more we earn, the larger the tithe. Those who uphold the word of the Lord, He compensates them doubly. God is the Lord of money, and the money is for spreading His word in Israel, the land of the Gospel" (interview with Juan Pablo, KH).

The believers' remarks reflect their perception that participation in religious life produces immediate results, visible mainly in the economic sphere. This approach, which is not foreign to Latin American migrants, is based on the importation of the "theology of prosperity," which developed as a distinctive element in South American Evangelicalism (Oro & Seman 2000; Mayrargue, 2001). According to this theology, "God is the gold and the silver. He is the key to the gates of the Promised Land. He
helps us in the spiritual world and in the material economic world" (interview with Pedro, ER church).
If religious faith and practice confer meaning on the day-to-day life of people that find themselves uprooted, culturally, geographically, and socio-economically, the church acts as their concrete physical anchor. Churches take on a new meaning for the migrants, different from that ascribed to them in the home country. Whereas back home the church is one of many social spaces in which people can participate, in a migration situation it is one of the few legitimate venues at which undocumented migrant workers can take part and obtain some sort of public acknowledgment and visibility. Thus the church provides a platform for social interaction that is so diverse as to encompass simultaneously the activities of a spiritual center, bank, school, employment bureau, and community center (Patillo 1998). Consequently, it is not surprising that people who shunned religious affiliation in the past turn to the church and in some cases become active in it, in the wake of their migration.

The constitution of the church as a "protected space" and its increasing appeal to previously non-observant people, reflects in more than one way the structural position of undocumented labor migrants whose access to the public sphere is limited almost exclusively to those social spaces they have created by themselves. These spaces of "cultural autonomy" provide the micro-social arena for the development of distinct identities that lie outside the range of direct supervision of dominant groups. In this sense, the church space corresponds to the sociological definition of the term "free space," as it appears in the literature on social movements. As Evans and Boyte put it: "Particular sorts of public places in the community[…] are the environments in which people are able to learn a new self-respect, a deeper and more assertive group identity, public skills, and values of cooperation and civic virtue" (1986: 17, quoted in Polletta 1999: 3). In other words, migrant churches as "free space" are an institutional expression for the "weapon of the weak" and reflect the fact that the authorities' methods of control are not one-directional and all-embracing (see Scott 1985).

However, the establishment of a "protected space" has another aspect, which is not taken into account by those who emphasize its empowering capabilities: an empowering space is not necessarily a space of resistance. It can provide a platform for raising claims for inclusion within the dominant group which are not in conflict with hegemonic definitions of membership and belonging. As Lehmann poignantly points out, "strategies devised for coping with an inegalitarian and exclusionary structure - such as the creation of free spaces - are not necessarily equatable with subversion or a challenge to the existing reality" (Lehmann 1996:1-22).

3. Christian Zionists in a Jewish State: Claiming legitimacy through religion
"Shake off the dust and bless this house! That is the message I convey to the members of the congregation. How wonderful it would be if the government were to take notice that we, the Christians, love Israel. That we are your only friends. If we only had a visa, we could convey to the whole world a message of love for Israel."
(Gloria, pastor's wife of ER Church).
Although Christian Zionism is an important principle in evangelicalism it becomes a crucial one for labor migrants in Israel. As it will be shown, the strong emphases put on Christian Zionism by the pastors and congregants from different churches becomes a way of legitimizing their presence in a Jewish state and a means by which migrants' claims for inclusion in the host country are channeled.
Our main argument in this section is that with their Christian belief in the Return to Zion as a prologue to the advent of the messiah, and their concomitant identification with the Jewish people's right to the Land of Israel, evangelical migrant workers are challenging the basic assumption prevalent in Israeli society, according to which only a Jew can be a Zionist. How is the theological position of Christian Zionism translated into a sociological claim for inclusion that seeks to overcome the marginality of non-Jewish migrants into a Jewish state?
When asked to define the main goal of his church, the pastor of the ER church declared ardently that "its purpose is to encourage Christians in the world to pray for the people of Israel, to connect with the tradition of Israel and to become acquainted with the reality in the Land of Israel." In fact, he imparted to us not only his personal belief but the main tenets of Evangelicalism, which are based on Christian love for the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, where Jesus was born and buried.
The desire to work for Israel as Christians was a recurrent motif in all our meetings with church leaders. It is also a recurring element in the collective prayers and petitions of the church members in which their desire to support the Jewish state and to help solve the conflict in the Middle-East is overtly articulated as the migrants' raison d'etre in the Holy Land.
Evangelicals consider themselves bound by the Old and the New Testament, believing that Jesus was the messiah but also being committed to the Jewish tradition and heritage. They define themselves as Christian-Jews. The blurring of the differences between evangelical Christianity and Judaism is given expression both in religious practice and in the believers' narratives of identity. The church setting is permeated with a mixture of symbols drawn from Judaism and Christianity. Hanging next to one another above the main podium of the ER churches are a Star of David, a menorah, and a crucifix. There are usually readings from both the Old and the New Testament during the service, in an effort to examine how the prophecies of the earlier book are fulfilled in the later one.
Religious boundaries are also constantly blurred in the celebration of religious holidays. Evangelists celebrate Jewish and Christian holidays alternately. In the KHZ church the pastors and some of the worshippers wore a kippa (head covering) and draped a talit (prayer shawl) over their shoulders during the ceremonies. Jewish songs are often sung during Mass (a favorite is "Hinei ma tov umana'im" - "how good and pleasant it is" for brethren to sit together), in the original Hebrew, if possible. If the congregation is unfamiliar with the Hebrew text, the words are projected in transliteration on a large screen.
The fact that a collage of Jewish-Christian practices takes place in Israel adds a surplus value to them. Apart from the "informative" aspect borne by syncretic practices, the significance of Christian Zionism in Israel is not circumscribed to theology but rather derives from the congregants' situation as undocumented migrants facing arrest and deportation. On the one hand, the dissolving of the boundaries enables the migrants to express their identification with Judaism and with the fate of the Jewish people over the centuries as part of their Christian faith; while on the other hand, it enables them to justify their presence in Israel as a kind of "right of return," to which they are entitled by their common heritage with Judaism. This logic is manifested in the way many members of the LLM church defined their identity: they claimed to be descendants of the Spanish marranos (Jews who formally converted to Christianity under pressure of the Inquisition but secretly continued to observe their religion). The KHZ' pastor emphazises repeatedly in her sermons the presumed "marrano" origins of the church members as one that should entitle them to residence. Their migration to Israel is then legitimized on the grounds that they are Jews whose Judaism was disavowed and are now reclaiming it.
The translation of theological beliefs into a quest for belonging is not detached from the ambivalent attitude of Evangelicalism towards Jews and Judaism. Church leaders emphasized time and again that the church thrust is not to judaize Christians but rather to christianize Jews. This is more clearly expressed in the missionary activities geared by the churches to convert Jews which did not spare the authors of this article either.
"The paradox," the pastor of ER church explained to us, "is that the people of Israel does not recognize the revelation of its own Bible because it does not recognize him [Jesus] as the messiah." Evangelicals feel that they bear responsibility for healing the Jewish people, purging it of evil, and leading it out of darkness. That responsibility looms far higher in Israel due to their belief that the building of the Third Temple and the war of Gog and Magog will usher in the return of Jesus and the conversion of the Jews. Hence their benediction: "Let us pray for light on Israel. O Lord, God of Israel, we ask for peace, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God of Israel, illuminate our hearts with the light of Jesus."
Similarly, the lighting of the first candle of the Hanukkah festival was interpreted as symbolizing Jesus Christ's presence in the Land of Israel: "The Jewish people today exists in darkness, and it is up to us, as believers, to serve it as a light and illuminate the points of darkness. For that, we need prodigious spiritual powers. Spiritual power brings light." In the pursuit of that goal, the most prominent members of the church, those with international reputations, are enlisted.
The ambivalence toward Judaism and the quest to save Jews from themselves is not novel as a theological stance. However, it gains an instrumental value for Christian labor migrants in Israel. As the leader of the ER church expressed it, "We [the heads of the evangelical churches] have a special mission in Israel... We want Jews to come to our church and see that we identify with the Jewish people and are not troublemakers."
While the above mentioned examples reflect the Evangelicals' attitude toward Judaism, the churches' performative repertoire is replete with examples of identification with the State of Israel and their support for Zionism. One example is the Israeli Independence Day celebrations that were held in the KHZ and ER churches. In both cases a grandiose event was held, which included dancing with Israelis and community singing. Similar celebrations are not held in the churches to mark the independence days of the members' home countries. The organizers of the Independence Day festivities in the churches say that they are an expression of the churches' solidarity with Israel. Their presence in Israel, they explain, imbues the evangelical principle of "love of Zion" with a unique meaning; not only does it enable the believers to return to the Jewish roots of Christianity - which would not be possible to the same degree in Latin America - it also "reinforces" their belief that they will become better "Ambassadors of Zion" in their home countries in Latin America.
Their identification with the fate of the Jewish people is apparent from remarks made by Gloria, the wife of the pastor of the ER church. In 1999 she devoted herself to sending press clippings and photographs about Israeli soldiers who were killed in Lebanon to churches in Latin America. It is essential to familiarize people with the Israeli reality in order to create identification and closeness with the Jewish people in Israel, she explained. These "spiritual consignments" are part of what Levitt calls "social remittances" in which migrant communities are involved. Through them, migrants create a transnational network of ideas, practices, identities, and social capital, which blur the boundary between home country and country of destination (1998: 76-7). Social remittances are carried by migrants on their trips back and forth between the two countries or, alternatively, are disseminated by means of technological devices such as the Internet, letters, telephone calls, and video cassettes, which evangelical migrants are very adept in using. On Gloria's last visit to her home country, Chile, she spent much of her time lecturing on Israel in various public forums, including evangelical media.
The translation of the Christian Zionist theology into a sociological claim for inclusion made by Christian migrants in Israel carries political implications which, in the local context, cannot be ignored. If evangelical theology seeks to "update" Jewish symbolism and intertwine it within the semiotic world of Evangelicalism, the Israeli context in which Christian migrant workers articulate their beliefs - the context of the Israeli-Palestinian national conflict - "localizes" the pro-Jewish theology and instills it with a political significance which is not neutral regarding the national conflict. This was made manifest in January 2000, when Israeli right-wing groups held a mass rally for a "united Jerusalem" outside the Old City's Jaffa Gate, in the presence of the mayor. The demonstration was organized by an association called "One Jerusalem," most of whose founders are from the United States and some of whom are engaged in Christian fundamentalist activity. Prior to the demonstration, supporters were urged to sign a petition "to save Jerusalem" and "preserve it under the sovereignty of the State of Israel." We received the petition via E-mail from one of the leaders of the Latin American churches, and they also disseminated it within their communities and among their acquaintances.
About a month later, shortly after the elections for Prime Minister, we interviewed one of the church heads who told us in no uncertain terms of his preference for the right-wing candidate, Ariel Sharon. "Our position regarding Jerusalem is the position of the Tanach [the "Old Testament"]. It is God's will that Jerusalem be and remain united," he asserted, referring us to Zechariah 12:2. "The Evangelicals are in favor of Israel, while the Catholic Church is in favor of [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat," said Pedro, from the ER church. According to the pastor, his support for Sharon also reflects the opinion and wish of millions of people around the world, who pray for a united Jerusalem.
The "Zionist" solidarity displayed by evangelical migrants is buttressed by Evangelicalism's theological attitude toward "Islam." The collective prayers, which are a type of communal narrative articulated within the church space itself, often disclose a hostile approach to "Islam" and "Arabs," with no clear distinction always being drawn between the two. "Arabs" and "Islam" are invoked as stereotypical concepts that are synonymous with "terrorism" and are the embodiment of "the Other" in Judeo-Christian civilization. The attitude toward Muslims elicits a theological explanation - "the existence of the Arab nation stems from Abraham's mistrust of God" - and reflects an unequivocal hierarchical differentiation between a "true" religion such as Evangelicalism and a sect, since Islam, in this view, "is a sect and not a way of life."
The negative stereotyping of Arabs is rarely based on personal acquaintance. There are very few contexts in which migrants meet Israelis, still less members of Israel's Arab population. The only direct contact that the representatives of the migrants' churches have with Arabs is in meetings with Protestant pastors who are Arabs, at clerical events or in conferences held in Jordan and Egypt, where Evangelicalism has grown in recent years as a result of missionary activity.
Christian Zionist theology thus becomes not only a basis that legitimizes the presence of undocumented migrant workers in Israel; it also legitimizes a particular type of religious nationalism whereby migrant workers find themselves taking a stance on contested ostensibly "local" issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the right to the Land, the return to Zion, and the status of non-Jews in Israel. Evangelist migrant workers and their churches may be calling into question the foundations of Israel as a Jewish immigration state and society, though they pose certainly no challenge to its Zionist character. The migration of Evangelicalism to the Holy Land in the late 1990s thus serves as a clear instantiation of the "glocalization" (Barber 1995) processes underway in the late modernity whereby new hyphenations are being produced and articulated. The mixture between religious and national identity introduced by non-Jewish Zionist in Israel during the last decade is a case in point.

4. Conclusion
What are the new "sacriscapes" that emerge from the flow of labor migrants and their religions into the political space of an ethnonational state?
This article adduces two main arguments concerning the nature of collective spaces opened by and for disenfranchised migrant workers and the nature of the challenges they pose to the nation-state in the global era. Our first argument is that evangelical churches in Israel become the only public space where undocumented migrants living in conditions of extreme marginality acquire a public presence of some sort, within the limits of the emergent migrant community. Much of the attraction that evangelical churches hold for Christian migrants workers in Israel, as well as the socio-therapeutic function they fulfill, lie precisely in their ability to exploit the "status quo" that exists between them and the state. According to it, Christian churches are posited as "islands" that are protected from the supervision of the authorities. They become "protected" or "free" from the state's scrutiny thanks in no small measure to their ability to take advantage of existing institutional arrangements with the authorities, which oblige the state to protect other religions, or at least not to interfere with them.
Do they therefore serve as an arena of contestation and resistance? Our contention is that the connection between "protected spaces" and "spaces of resistance" is an empirical rather than a conceptual question. Its elucidation thus necessitates a dual examination: first, of the role played by migrant churches in the creation of new collective identities, and, second, the modes through which migrants translate their theological beliefs into a sociological claim for inclusion and membership.
This duality is particularly interesting in the case of evangelical churches established by migrants in Israel: as migrants' churches, they seek to serve a community of believers who come to the church in the hope of finding compensation for loss of self-respect and social status, and a physical and spiritual shelter from the persecution of the authorities. The church setting opens a new space for participation as well as for the articulation of a collective identity for uprooted migrants. Within the church bounds they cease to be "aliens" or "illegal" and reaffirm their belonging to a larger and inclusive family of Christianity.
At the same time, by invoking a pro-Zionist form of Christianity, evangelical migrants are justifying not only their presence as "foreigners" in the Jewish state but also claiming to be included in as members of the Israeli society. Indeed, Christian Zionism as deployed by migrants in Israel acquires a unique significance. Whereas abroad, Christianity is used to legitimize pro-Zionist attitudes and perceptions, in Israel Zionism is adduced to legitimize the Christian presence in a Jewish state. Thus, the discursive practices of Evangelical migrants in the Holy Land offer an original reading of the "law of return": who is entitled to return to Zion and on what grounds? In this sense, evangelical migrant workers' bring into the local sacriscape a new prototype of "national-religion," one fraught with challenge but which seemingly, and for the foreseeable future, is not subverting the hegemonic definitions of Israel as a Zionist state.

References

Appadurai, Arjun.1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.
Public Culture 2(2):1-24.
Baldwin-Edwards, M. and M. A. Schain. 1994. The Politics of Immigration:
Introduction. In M. Baldwin-Edwards and M. Schain, eds., The Politics of Immigration in Western Europe, pp:1-16. Essex: Frank Cass & Co.
Barber, Benjamin. 1995. Jihad Versus MacWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are
Changing the World. New York Times Books.
Bartram, David.1998. Foreign Workers in Israel: History and Theory. International Migration Review 32 (2): 303-325.
Chaves, Mark and Lynn M. Higgins. 1992. Comparing the Community
of Black and White Congregations. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 31(4): 425-440.
Corten, Andre and Ruth Marshall-Fratani. 2001. "Introduction". In Corten, A.and
R. Marshall-Fratani, eds., Between Babel and Pentecost. Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, pp:1-21. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Escobar, J. Samuel. 1997. Religion and Social Change at the Grass Roots in Latin
America. Annals, AAPSS 554: 81-103.
Evans, Sara and Harry C. Boyte. 1986. Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic
Change in America. New York: Harper and Row.
Droogers, Andre. 2001. "Globalisation and Pentecostal Success". In Corten, A.
and R. Marshall-Fratani, eds., Between Babel and Pentecost. Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, pp:41-61. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Frazier, E. F.1963. The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books.
Freston, Paul. 1998. Pentecostalism in Latin America: Characteristics and Controversies. Social Compass 45(3): 335-358.
Gifford, Paul. 2001. The Complex Governance of Some Elements of African
Pentecostal Theology. In Corten, A. and R. Marshall-Fratani, eds., Between Babel and Pentecost. Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, pp:62-73. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Greeley, Andrew.1972. The Denominational Society: A Sociological Approach to
Religion. Glenview, IL.: Scott, Foresman and Company.
Hurh, W. M. and K. C. Kim.1990. Religious Participation of Korean Immigrants in
The United States. Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 19: 19-34.
Kemp Adriana, Rebeca Raijman, Julia Resnik and Silvina Schammah-Geser. 2000.
"Contesting the Limits of Political Participation: Latinos and Black African Migrant Workers in Israel", Ethnic and Racial Studies 23(1): 94-119.

Lampe, Armando 1998 "The Popular use of the Charismatic Movements in Curazao", Social Compass 45(3): 429-436. Lehmann David 1996. Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America. Cambridge, MA.:Polity Press. Leon, Luis1998. "Born Again in East L.A.: The Congregation as Border Space" in R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner (Eds.) Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 163-196. Levitt, Peggy, 1998. "Local-Level Global Religion: The Case of U.S.-Dominican Migration", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1): 74-89. Marshall-Fratani, Ruth. 2001. In Corten, Andre and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.) Between Babel and Pentecost. Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Pp:80-105. Martin, David 1990 (1989). Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin, Bernice 1995 "New Mutations of the Protestant Ethic among Latin American Pentecostals", Religion 25: 101-117. Mayrargue, Cedric. 2001. In Corten, Andre and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.) Between Babel and Pentecost. Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Pp:274-292. Min, Pyong Gap (1992) "The Structure and Social Functions of Korean Immigrant Churches in the United States" International Migration Review 26(4): 1370-1394. Oro, Ari Pedro and Pablo Seman 2000. "Pentecostalism in the Southern Cone Countries: Overview and Perspectives", International sociology 15(4): 605-628. Patillo-MaCoy, Mary, 1998. "Church Culture as a Strategy of Action in the Black Community", American Sociological Review 63: 767-784. Polletta, Francesca 1999 "'Free Spaces' in Collective Action", Theory and Society 28: 1-38. Raijman, Rebeca, Kemp, Adriana , Schammah-Gesser, Silvina and Julia Resnik. 2001. Searching for a Better Future: Latino Labor Migration to Israel. Discussion Paper 105. Tel-Aviv University: Golda Meir Institute for Social Research and Labour. Raijman, Rebeca and Adriana Kemp. 2002. State and Non-State Actors: A Multi-layered Analysis of Labor Migration Policy in Israel. Public Policy in Israel. Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Schammah, Silvina, Rebeca Raijman, Adriana Kemp, and Julia Reznik. 2000. "'Making it' in Israel? : Non-Jewish Latino Undocumented Migrant Workers in the Holy Land", Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe, 11(2), 113-136. Schnapper, Dominique. 1994. "The Debate on Immigration and the Crisis of National Identity". In M. Baldwin-Edwards and M. Schain (Eds.). The Politics of Immigration in Western Europe. Essex: Frank Cass & Co. Pp:127-139. Schnell, Ytzhak.1999. Foreign Workers in South Tel-Aviv-Jaffa. Jerusalem: Florsheimer Institute for Policy Research (in Hebrew). Schuck, Peter and Rainer Munz, 1998. "Introduction" in Peter Schuck and Rainer Munz (Eds.) Paths to Inclusion: The Integration of Migrants in the United States and Germany, New Yok, Oxford: Berghahn Books: VII-XXII. Scott, James C. 1985 Weapons of the Weak - Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Smith, Timothy L. 1978. 'Religion and Ethnicity in America", American Historical Review 83: 1155-1185.

Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu, 1997. "Changing Parameters of Citizenship and Claims-making: Organized Islam in European Public Spheres", Theory and Society 26-4, pp. 509-527. Van Dijk, Rijk A. 1997 "From Camp to Encompassment: Discourses of Transsubjectivity in the Ghanaian Pentecostal Diaspora", Journal of Religion in Africa 27(2): 135-159. Warner, R. Stephen 1993 "Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States", American Journal of Sociology 98(5): 1044-1093. Warner , R. Stephen 1998"Immigration and Religious Communities in the United States." R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner (Eds.) Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 3-34. Weiner, M. 1996. "Determinants of Immigrant Integration: An International Comparative Analysis" in N. Carmon (Ed.) Immigration and Integration in Post-Industrial Societies: Theroretical Analysis and Policy Related Research. London: MacMillan Press .