Between Evil and Hope: Disability Allowances Struggles as a Challenge to Rights.

In this paper I show how both social welfare policy and disability rights discourses have practically neglected the issue of dignified living allowances for disabled people. Through analysis of both Israeli and United States history I show that while welfare policies have usually created minimal pubic assistance programs that grant no economic security of human dignity to their recipients, the disability rights movement have treated disability allowances as a victimizing mechanism that perpetuates the marginality of disabled people, thus ignored a pressing need of many. The paper will propose a view of disability allowances as located with a tension between evil - a pronouncement and perpetuation of the ableist structure of society, and a hope - a response to a pressing necessity, an expression of social responsibility, and a means to redress the continuing wrongs of ableism and to provide economic security and human dignity for PWD. It will suggest that working out the tension between disability allowances as evil and hope, a necessity that is at the same time unavoidable yet undesirable, requires a different view of rights (and similarly of law) - as a process rather then an outcome, as a resource rather than a "thing," as a terrain of ongoing struggle rather than a promise for stability. Rights in this view belong to the contradictory and conflicted dynamics of legal and social relations rather than to abstract theoretical inquiries. And finally, rights in this view are constantly produced and reproduced rather than given. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]