When Joson was 1, her mother left to work as a nanny in Hong Kong. Her father departed four years later to work on a cruise ship, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother and other relatives. Three years ago, when she told her parents that she wanted to become an overseas worker so that they could finally afford to return home, her mother dissuaded her from going to Hong Kong; it was too hard there, she told her daughter. Instead, she encouraged Joson to apply for work in Israel, where, among the population of only eight million, there are about 30,000 Filipino caregivers (legal and illegal), almost half of all foreign caregivers in the country, according to Kav LaOved, a workers’ rights organization. Except for diplomacy, caregiving remains the only profession open to Filipinos in Israel.

In the three years since her arrival, Joson has become attached to Israel. A practicing Catholic, she marvels that she gets to live and worship freely in the Holy Land and feels a sense of kinship with Israelis who, like her, are “hardworking and very family-oriented.” If anything, she wants to be more like the Israelis she knows, like her employer’s children, who speak their minds freely. “They will get angry, but after an hour or two, they’re O.K. again,” she said. “Us Filipinos, when we get angry it will take us a few days to forget.” All those bottled-up feelings aren’t healthy, she thinks. But there were times, like now, a few days before Passover, when she couldn’t help keeping her feelings to herself. She saw her employer’s family come together for the holiday and found herself envying them, wishing that she could reunite with her own family. Maybe one day, she thought. “Be’ezrat Hashem,” she said in Hebrew — with God’s help.

Israel’s victory in the 1967 war and its subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza led to the introduction of Palestinian workers to the Israeli labor force. These workers, who were predominantly male, crossed the checkpoints into Israel each morning and were employed, for the most part, in construction and agriculture. By the late 1980s, their number topped 100,000 — about 7 percent of the Israeli work force. But with the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada in December 1987, and the heightened security threat, Israel started to bar the Palestinians from entering the country; their jobs were left empty. The following year, the government decided on a new policy: the importation of migrant workers from developing countries. Slowly, Palestinians began to vanish from Israelis’ view, and in their stead, new populations arrived — people who did not leave the country’s borders at sundown. By 2002, there were 226,000 migrant workers living in Israel.

The most pressing need for workers is in the caregiving profession. In 2009, there were fewer than 250,000 Israelis over the age of 80; by 2059, there will be well over a million, according to one population projection by the Central Bureau of Statistics. Added to that is a serious shortage of working hands: In the 1990s, the ranks of the caregiving sector in Israel were occupied primarily by female immigrants from the former Soviet Union. But that population is now largely retired, leaving a major vacuum.

Women from the Philippines — who were initially brought in small numbers by Israel’s Defense Ministry to care for disabled soldiers — have come to dominate home care in Israel, so much so that the word “Filipina” has become synonymous in Hebrew with “metapelet” — “caregiver.” (I once overheard one elderly woman in Tel Aviv tell another, “My Filipina is from Moldova.”) They may not be a sizable community compared with the more than three million Filipinos who reside in the United States, but their financial contribution to their country is substantial: Last year alone, Filipinos living in Israel remitted at least $125 million back home, according to the Philippine central bank. Like other groups of migrant workers in Israel — the Thai farmhands, the Chinese construction workers — the Filipinos are sometimes described as “transparents,” a community invisible to most Israelis, taking on the work that no one in the society wants to do. Unlike other foreign workers, however, they are embedded deep within Israeli families, helping the most vulnerable members of society — or the most privileged.

This dual presence — transparent yet indispensable — discomfits the national imagination. In a once-popular television series, one character, a Filipino metapelet, was conscripted into the Israeli military instead of her employer’s son (and was later held captive in Lebanon). A 2016 documentary that tracked the rise in marriages of convenience between Filipinos and Israeli men — she gains a visa; he a maid — showed the men trafficking in familiar stereotypes: They praised their wives for being loyal, sycophantic and uncomplaining. Neal Imperial, the Philippine ambassador to Israel, told me that though there are Filipino doctors, nurses and engineers in other countries, their absence from Israeli society “tends to create a one-dimensional view of our people and our country, such that for many Israelis, the Philippines is a nation of caregivers.”