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From 2005-2013, migrants travelled through Egypt’s Sinai Desert to cross into Israel in search of asylum. The first were Sudanese people escaping conflict in Darfur, with Eritreans arriving subsequently. With no established legal framework for processing asylum claims, Israel’s government prevented these migrants from making formal asylum applications, granting temporary collective protection, and began to use language of infiltration and policies of detention and deportation. In response, irregularised Africans organized a protest movement, claiming the right to a fair asylum process, the contours of which illustrated the complex entanglements of collective affects that were central to making a new political subject. The article asks how experiences of Israel’s border regime disclosed a particular world, how the border was felt in affective encounters and relations through which migrants were hailed as infiltrators. The violence of bordering led to despair, stuckness, and dissipating hopes, but migrants’ shared suffering also produced inter-connection and solidarity in ways that reflected the valuing of established identities as well as being together in difference. Positive and negative affects coexisted, the latter leading not to political inaction but demonstrating the generative potential of loss when it shapes shared affective spaces and expressions of collectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2006, thousands of migrants crossed into Israel after travelling through the Sinai Desert. The majority came from Eritrea and Sudan, seeking asylum from state violence. Israel's government classified them as 'infiltrators' using a law enacted in 1954 to criminalize Palestinians seeking to return to expropriated lands. Drawing on fieldwork in Israel in 2018–2019, the article examines dimensions of a process of political subjectivation among these migrants and citizens in solidarity with them. It is concerned with the performative effects of a struggle migrants waged for refugee status by contesting their construction in government discourse as infiltrators. It argues their claims became refracted through debates over contours of a fissured collective self, which challenged the limits of political community. While their claims disrupted the order's dividing lines, the article argues the latter proved durable, that conditions of possibility for disruptive speech are mediated by overlapping structures of colonialism and racializations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]