Abstract
How is life affirmed under conditions of death, destruction, and debilitation? This article addresses this question by looking at the practice of sperm smuggling in Palestine as a life-affirming practice. The practice of sperm smuggling emerges in a context where reproductive injustices against Palestinians are daily occurrences of life under Israeli settler colonialism. The legal, social, and militarized targeting of Palestinian mothers and children, the mass incarceration of Palestinian men, and the attack on infrastructures of livability are Israeli biopolitical and necropolitical strategies of incapacitating the conditions necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of life in Palestine. Against this backdrop, the author argues that the practice of sperm smuggling circumvents settler-colonial efforts to curtail the reproduction of life and inaugurates a practice of life-making and a conception of life beyond its adjudication in the language of “rights.” Critically engaging with the work of Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti, the author argues that sperm smuggling enacts an “affirmation of life” that refuses submission to the totalizing hold of physical, social, and political death.
Introduction
How is Palestinian life affirmed under conditions of death, destruction, and debilitation? What scenes of life emerge amid and in spite of colonial violence and in a context where a population is subjected to a state of capture and incremental genocide? In a place where a settler-colonial regime is determined to paralyze the infrastructures and bodies that reproduce life, both biologically and socially, how does life persevere against all odds?
Leaking out of a body into a candy wrapper, a plastic ballpoint pen, or a bottle, unidentifiable to the lenses of security cameras, hidden underneath layers of clothes subjected to thorough searches, moved past the armed guards and highly securitized gates of the prison to occupied villages and across militarized checkpoints, and finally reaching the fertility clinic before it is hosted by the prisoner's wife's ovum through assisted reproductive technologies—this is the journey of a specimen of semen smuggled out of an Israeli prison, a journey in which the viscous matter circumvents the carceral barriers of the settler-colonial state that subjects Palestinian prisoners to a state of capture. The movement of fluids from bodies to bodies, through assisted human and technological means and across settler security apparatuses is a journey in which precarious bodies, matter, and environments enter into a web of codependency and relationality to sustain life in circumstances where life is made unlivable.
The first reported case of a childbirth from sperm smuggled from an Israeli prison is that of Muhannad Al-Zaben, born to Dallal Al-Zaben and Ammar Al-Zaben in August 2012. The birth of Muhannad, whose father, Ammar, is serving a life sentence in Hadarim prison, represented a miraculous event of defiance in the face of the grim reality of everyday colonial violence in Occupied Palestine. Since then, it has been reported that over 110 children have been conceived in the same way from across different governorates of Occupied Palestine, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the occupied interior.1 What was at first deemed a “miracle” became a phenomenon involving the use of reproductive technology, referred to as tahrib al nutaf, a practice that is recognized socially and legally authorized through religious rulings (fatwas). The most recent case of this practice is the birth of quadruplets to the wife of prisoner Ahmad Al-Shamali, Rasmiya Al-Shamah, who currently resides with her children in Shujaia in Gaza City.2
The article argues that sperm smuggling, more than a defiant reproductive practice, enacts an affirmation of life that refuses submission to the totalizing hold of physical, social, and political death. The practice of sperm smuggling emerges in a context where reproductive injustices against Palestinians are daily occurrences of life under Israeli settler colonialism. The legal, social, and militarized targeting of Palestinian mothers and children, the mass incarceration of Palestinian men, and the attack on infrastructures of livability are Israeli biopolitical and necropolitical strategies of incapacitating the conditions necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of life in Palestine.
The manifold ways in which reproduction is deliberately attacked, this article shows, expose a settler fantasy and a project of eradicating the native's capacity to live on, and serve a particular biopolitical and necropolitical function tied to Israel's colonial project of population management, where the settler ideology of demographic competition frames Palestinian reproduction as a security threat. Concurrently, the article demonstrates how the reproductive futurism of the Israeli state, which, while remaining committed to the reproduction of Israeli Jewish life, simultaneously sanctions Palestinian debilitation and death. This sets the scene for us to understand the biopolitical and necropolitical context for the emergence of sperm smuggling as a reproductive practice that, I contend, should not be reduced to pronatalist ideology vis-à-vis Israeli biopolitics of reproduction.
Against this backdrop, I argue that the practice of sperm smuggling circumvents settler-colonial efforts to curtail the reproduction of life and inaugurates a practice of life-making and a conception of life beyond its adjudication in the language of “rights” and the “right to life.” To further elaborate on this point, I refer to political prisoner Walid Daqqah's statement that the birth of his daughter Milad, of sperm smuggled from Ayalon prison, constitutes a claim to the “right to life.” I analyze this claim in relation to two scenes: that of political violence and that of reproduction. Taking my cue from Judith Butler's work, I expose the pitfalls of understanding Daqqah's claim to the “right to life” only in relation to the recognition or the suspension of the law, or as a pronatalist call for procreation per se, for these frames disregard the ethical and political dimensions of the practice of sperm smuggling as an affirmation of life. Sperm smuggling as an affirmative act disrupts the status to which Palestinian existence is reduced—namely, the status of living death—and whose recognition as a life is secured only before the law. Sperm smuggling is a practice that mobilizes the collective will to sustain reproductive relations and regenerate life where individual and collective sovereignties are breached and violated on a daily basis. Critically borrowing and departing from feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti's work on the “ethics of affirmation,” I argue that sperm smuggling, as an affirmative practice, is propelled by an ethical, political, and affective force that animates desires and imaginings capable of envisioning new modes of freedom in spite of the debilitating violence of Israeli settler colonialism.
Having Kids while Palestinian
In July 2014, Ayelet Shaked, the then member of the Knesset representing the right-wing party the Jewish Home, went on social media to call for the killing of all Palestinian people. For Shaked, the Palestinian people are the enemy, including the “mothers of the martyrs” who send their children “to hell with flowers and kisses.”3 Palestinian mothers, she added, “should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”4 The statement was published a day before the Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive by a group of six Israeli youths and a few days before the launch of one of the deadliest and most destructive military offensives against Gaza. Shaked became the Israeli minister of justice less than a year later.
Shaked's statement underscores how settler colonial societies like Israel are, to use Achille Mbembe's words, “societies of enmity.”5 The desire to continually invent and fixate on the natives as objects of terror, and the fantasy of genocide that is attached to it, occupy the political and social imaginary of the Israeli settler colonial state. Such a fantasy, latent at times and manifest at others (as in Shaked's statement above), feeds the necropolitical impulses of the state in legal, political, and existential ways. Not only are Palestinians as a wholesale racialized population deemed enemies of the state; the figure of the woman and the child are particular signifiers of the “enemy's” reproductive capacity to live on, to mutate.
While Shaked's call for targeting the reproductive capacity embodied in the figures of the mother and the child is particularly explicit, it is not exceptional. In 2009, a series of T-shirts were printed and worn by Israeli soldiers showing children in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle with the slogan “Better Use Durex” and “The smaller they are, the harder it is.” Another such T-shirt shows a pregnant woman as a target, accompanied by the text, “Two kills, one shot.” The T-shirts were released just after the Israeli offensive against Gaza in January of that year, in which the IDF had cold-bloodedly targeted civilian homes, schools, playgrounds, and UN compounds where children and civilians sought refuge under the pretext that children were being used as “human shields.” The designation of Palestinian children as human shields illustrates how, in the militarized imaginary of the Israeli state, children are stripped of their status as children and are “turned to metal, to steel” that belongs to the “machinery of bombardment.”6
The targeting of the pregnant mother and the child in these examples is part and parcel of a broader settler-colonial project of capturing reproduction through colonial violence. The scale and multiple dimensions of reproductive injustices in Occupied Palestine are complex and shifting, and too expansive to map in detail here. However, I will briefly sketch some of their contours in order to situate sperm smuggling within this scene of reproduction that is heavily regulated, politicized, and made dangerous and precarious.
As the extensive work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian demonstrates, rather than seeing women and children as “victims” of the occupation, we need to examine how both the domain of reproduction and children's lives themselves are crucial sites that reveal the logics and operations of Israeli settler violence.7 The bio- and necropolitical capture of reproductive capacities takes various forms across the occupied territories, including military attacks on maternity wards and hospitals in Gaza, the refusal to grant newborns ID cards, limited access to medical supplies, and impediments to movement at checkpoints in emergency situations, including childbirth. All of these practices testify to how colonial violence affects reproduction on both structural and cellular levels.
Moreover, the perpetration of violent arrests and physical assaults, which increased after the First Intifada, has transformed childhood into what Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls “unchilding.”8 Through the discursive designation of the Palestinian child as a “potential terrorist,” children and youth are made to face increasing levels of criminalization.9 In addition, the experiences of evictions, destruction, and death that children are subjected to and made to witness have extensive psychological impacts, leading to high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder.10 In Gaza, the control of calorie intake through the subjection of children to what Israeli military leadership has called a “starvation diet” has stunted the development of children.11 Through this targeting of children and youth, Jasbir Puar argues, the biopolitical strategies of unchilding are geared toward arresting generational time—that is, toward “render[ing] impotent any future resistance, future capacity to sustain Palestinian life on its own terms.”12 Children thus become a locus of the state's effort to maim the capacity to reproduce Palestinian life.
The practice of sperm smuggling must be understood as part of this context, where practices of reproduction and child-rearing are made precarious and are always already suspect in the eyes of the settler-colonial state. Israeli authorities mobilize various legal and political tools to attempt to crush the practice. Children born from sperm smuggling are deemed illegal and illegitimate by Israeli authorities and are denied any identity documents that confirm their existence.13 In most cases, children born of sperm smuggling are strictly forbidden from visiting their fathers, a right children have under the conventions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Moreover, political prisoners who are suspected of sperm smuggling are, according to the Israeli prison services, subject to punishment including solitary confinement and the denial of family visits.14
Biopolitics of Reproduction
The reproductive injustices committed against Palestinians that are aimed at suppressing reproduction through the strategies of “letting die” and “making die” are inseparable from Israel's broader biopolitical strategies of population management and control that inarguably operate along racial lines. The counterparts of these biopolitical strategies that seek to curtail Palestinian reproduction are those that seek to optimize and administer life through government legislation and policies. This is evident in state incentives meant to encourage Israeli Jewish reproduction by ensuring budget allocations, access to health care, assisted reproduction technology, and medical insurance.15 Such incentives are further consolidated through public discourses that frame Palestinian reproduction as a demographic and security risk and the Palestinian “womb as threat to be curtailed.”16 As Elia Zureik argues, building on Foucault's work on biopolitics, Israel's racialized government legislation and public discourses are mobilized to enforce an ideology of fear in which Israeli “society must be defended” and “securitised” against the threat of a “dangerous” Palestinian demography both inside Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.17 Although the question of demography in Israel is framed in terms of “existential” and “security” threats, the preoccupation with population control has roots in the state's continuous efforts, both historically and today, to consolidate its ethnonationalist foundations and its expansionist ideology. Zureik further shows how, since early in the twentieth century, eugenics was central to the Zionist project and was adopted as a science to enforce Jewish racial purity.18 This racial agenda continues to inform immigration policies, reproductive strategies, and citizenship laws. And so, the development of strategies to violently contain the Palestinian population and its reproduction in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories under the banner of “security” while stoking a settler panic over a “demographic intifada” becomes paramount to the state's performance of its “right to self-defence.”19
Under these conditions, any consideration of the biopolitics of population optimization calls for an account of how reproduction not merely is about the regenerative force of life but is concurrently tied to the forces of control, debilitation, and thanatopolitics. While this project exceeds my analysis here, it is important to trace how Israel's reproductive futurism, which is understood to be in the service of Jewish life, is simultaneously in the service of Palestinian death.20 As Puar notes in the context of the racial and colonial principles that shape investments in future life in Israel, “to claim unfettered access to futurity is already predicated upon the genocide or slow death of others.”21
In light of these debates, an analysis of reproductive practices in Palestine as life-affirming might be misconstrued as motivated by an ideology of “birthing the nation”—that is, the gendered inscription of reproduction as a woman's national duty against Israel's annihilatory project.22 Yet, as Frances Hasso argues, to posit a Palestinian commitment to reproductive futurity as a project of nation-building is to remain limited by the terms of the Zionist project, which hyperbolizes Palestinian reproduction rates and erases the complexity of the social, psychic, and political factors involved in both reproductive and antireproductive practices.23 In Gaza, for example, Israeli colonial violence could lead women to want more children (given that all children can be subject to imprisonment or outright killing) or to want fewer children (to avoid suffering the loss of a child).24 Thus, to reduce Palestinian reproduction to a pronatalist ideological framework is to miss the complexity of what (anti)reproductive practices mean within this context. Like Hasso, I depart from a monolithic interpretation of sperm smuggling as exemplifying a Palestinian commitment to reproductive futurity and argue that this view submits the practice to the terms of a pronatalist ideology that is nationalist at its core.
The Claim to a “Right to Life”
I'm not scared of this government and its hubris. Not because I'm fearless, nor because I have faith that the preciousness of childhood will be recognized—as you will learn, this racist government has never had any concern for childhood—but simply because I stand above them, ethically speaking, as someone possessed of a right, the right of even the simplest of creatures, which is the right to life. They make death, and I'm the labor of life. And here I ask you, what is insanity? Is it insanity that a child of my age speaks? Or that the Shabak [the Israeli Security Agency] has opened a file on her even before she is born?25
These are the words of freedom fighter, novelist, and author Walid Daqqah, written from behind bars in the voice of his unborn child, Milad. Daqqah and his wife and comrade Sana'a Salameh conceived Milad through sperm smuggling in 2019, after a long battle with prison authorities and a smear campaign against the couple in Israeli media. Milad's conception was met with disdain by the Israeli state, so much so that Israeli Intelligence Community issued a warning against Milad's birth. Daqqah's words about Milad's “right to life,” echoed in many news articles that cover the practice of sperm smuggling, reorient our engagement with questions of rights, life, and reproduction. Pointing to the absurdity of the situation—the absurdity of the speech act of an unborn child, the absurdity of a racist regime that opens a surveillance file for a fetus—Daqqah's statement attempts to distill a fundamental claim that is yet to be realized: the right to life. “They make death, and I am the labor of life.”26
Daqqah is one of over five thousand Palestinian political prisoners, predominantly men, held in Israeli prisons for committing “security offences.” The “security grounds” that allegedly permit arrest and imprisonment range from organizing and participating in demonstrations to throwing stones or killing Israeli soldiers.27 Many of the imprisoned and detained, classified by the Israeli Prison Services (IPS) as security prisoners/detainees, are deprived of basic rights, including the rights to a fair and regular trial and to medical care, and are subjected to inhumane treatment. Additionally, many political prisoners from the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories are held in Israeli prisons in violation of international law, which forbids the transfer of prisoners outside occupied land. Security and securitization become expansive technologies of control systematically mobilized to arrest, imprison, and impose hyperrestrictions, including the rejection of permits for family visits. For those whose permits are granted, visits are restricted to forty-five minutes, and prisoners and their visitors are most often separated by a screen. Despite multiple demands by prisoners, conjugal visits remain strictly forbidden for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.28
What does it mean to claim a “right to life” through reproduction from behind bars? Even just composing a question that brings both the “right to life” and “reproduction” into a single sentence inevitably calls for a critical assessment of rights and reproductive freedoms as modes of inquiry. What makes the claim to life a righteous claim? And how does the claim to a right to life in this context signal an affirmative gesture that traverses the moral codes associated with debates that pit “pro-choice” perspectives against “pro-life” ones? How does this right to life circumvent the biopolitical and necropolitical coordinates of the settler-colonial state?
In their book Frames of War, Butler raises the question of a “right to life” in connection with reproduction to signal a certain reluctance on the left to think about the discourse of life given its predominant framing through the prolife and prochoice opposition.29 In attempting to address this apprehension, Butler brings the two scenes, that of reproduction and that of war, together as a way to retrieve thinking about life that complicates the notion of the “right to life” as a universal given.30 In their critique, Butler argues that no entity, human or nonhuman, has ever been granted a “right to life” by virtue of its aliveness. There is no mere life that is ontologically granted protection; rather, life always already enters the political and social field and is conditioned by it. Rather than claim the “right to life” for mute embryos, Butler urges us to think beyond the moral domain that sees embryos within the frame of ontogenetic personhood and to consider life as pervasively social and political—that is, as dependent on social and biopolitical relations that sustain or delimit reproducibility. This, Butler warns in earlier work, should not deter us from struggling for bodily autonomy and self-determination, be it in relation to reproductive freedoms or in conditions of political and economic duress under occupation and colonization, but should encourage us to acknowledge the public dimension of our embodiment, which is inevitably bound to others and to modes of governmentality that can sustain but also violate us.31
In extending this discussion to the conditions of war and political violence, Butler contends that no “right to life” as a universal given has ever been able to ward off violence, injurability, and death. Rights are granted and stripped away by operations of governmentality that instrumentalize bio- and necropower to decide who lives and who dies, whose lives are secured through protection and whose are not. Butler is therefore interested in disarticulating the struggle for the universal “right to life” from antiwar politics and the critique of political violence, for the former, Butler contends, can slip into a struggle for legal and political protections. As important as they are, rights reduce our understanding of what life is and can be, making this complex question a matter of its standing before the law. This is in no way meant to undermine the importance of struggling for legal and political rights; Butler instead seeks to expose the paradox at stake in doing so. In the context of Palestine, it does not require a leap of imagination to account for the instances when the law (both state and international law) is complicit in the exercise of state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians through occupation, dispossession, statelessness, imprisonment, death, and the debilitation of life. Despite the appearance of numerous accounts of its violations of human rights and international law, Israel continues its settler-colonial project against Palestinians with international impunity. These violations, and the fact that Palestinians are deprived of a recognized legal and political status in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories and are regarded as second-class citizens in Israel, inevitably call for a struggle for rights, if not the right to have rights. Nevertheless, if we understand the claim to the “right to life” only in terms of the law or its suspension, we are missing the political and ethical stakes of what it means to affirm life otherwise. We are also missing the claim to justice that is invoked in the Arabic word for right, haq. Walid Daqqah's letter, originally written in Arabic, refers to Milad's haq fi al-hayat (right to life), where haq signals a call for truth and justice that is not, per se, answerable through the law. The extralegal meaning of the Arabic word haq as truth and justice gestures toward an ethically and politically immanent view of rights that, although it can be central to the struggle for justice in legal terms, exceeds the limits of the law.32
When considering reproduction through sperm smuggling as a claim to a right to life, I want to make two key points. First, it would be misguided to consider the practice of sperm smuggling as bound to prolife discourse. Daqqah's claim to a right to life is not a claim for procreation per se. But in the broader register of a life made unlivable, it is an insistence on life that takes place in the shadow of the prison and the broader social context that supports reproductive relations in spite of settler-colonial efforts to curtail it. The stories and news of sperm smuggling trickling out to communities across Gaza, the West Bank, and the occupied interior have consolidated new social bonds and created conditions that sustain the proliferation of the practice. From the involvement of doctors and nurses at fertility clinics like Al Razan in Nablus and Al Basma in Gaza offering IVF treatments pro bono, to forms of sociality and collectivity organized around the social reproductive labor of bearing children, forms of communal kinship have emerged that exceed heteronormative units of reproduction and the family. Second, the claim to a “right to life” is not a claim to rights as much as it is a claim to a life that traverses the threshold of unlivability, an insurgent Palestinian life, so to speak. The claim to a right to life here is a performative claim that speaks in multiple tongues at once. It addresses the international community in its universalizing language of rights, from which Palestinians continue to be denied access, while also refusing to treat the struggle for life as strictly bound to the premises of rights and the law.
Beyond the performative claim of a right to life, the practice of sperm smuggling as well as the reproductive relations that break through the colonial violence of capture and occupation, I argue, are affirmative acts that emerge from conditions of reproductive debilitation. The bodies, environments, and social bonds that sustain the reproduction of life are particularly precarious and vulnerable to political violence, as I have sketched above. One might ask: Why insist on bringing a child into a context in which colonial wounding and death-worlds structure the everyday under settler colonialism? But one might also reverse the question and ask: What becomes of a place and a struggle if one succumbs to death as a totalizing reality? One might also ask: What underlying assumptions of a sovereign-like intentionality to reproduce life do these questions evoke, in a place where neither individual nor collective sovereignties are honored? Attending to sperm smuggling and the reproductive relations that sustain it as affirmations of life opens up the discussion to the ethical and political stakes of the practice where affects, desires, and imaginations can envision “future anterior freedoms” unimaginable in the midst of a life made bare.33 These future anterior freedoms, to borrow from Alexander Weheliye's work, are found in the freedom dreams and minor rebellious acts that prefigure and envision liberation from the here and now.
Affirmation of Life
At its core, affirmation is a vitalist project of envisioning life otherwise, and the affirmative subject is one who can mobilize, in Spinozist terms, his or her potentia to overcome suffering, hurt, and injustice. Although the concept of affirmation primarily comes from a Spinozist-Deleuzian genealogy of thought, it has also been taken up in feminist philosophy, especially in the work of Rosi Braidotti. For Braidotti, affirmation is an ethical and transformative relation to life that can be realized by activating untapped resources, including desires and imaginations.34 She understands potentia as the power of becoming through which the subject's ontological desires for freedom from the weight of negativity are activated. According to Braidotti, every event whose destructive force might be bent on annihilating life “contains within it the potential to be overcome and overturned. Its negative charge can be transposed.”35 Such a transposition is a part of life's processes but also a deliberate endeavor that the affirmative subject can undertake.36 In other words, affirmation takes place on a continuum where intensities, movements, and relations emerge as part of life's processes and exceed the finite body but nevertheless require a radically immanent and embodied subjectivity capable of actualizing passions and forces beyond the destructive charge of negativity. Ultimately, affirmation, for Braidotti, is the ethical capacity to overcome pain and suffering, moving toward joy and vitality.37
For Braidotti, reworking the negative charge of violent events means shifting our imaginary beyond the suffering individual or collective ego that gets stuck in a perpetual cycle of making ethical and political claims that depend on its being a subject of injury. While I am somewhat lured by the powers of Braidotti's ethics of affirmation, I am startled by affirmation's “ethical abandonment” of vulnerability not just as a condition of being human but as a social and political condition induced by violence and deprivation. Braidotti's affirmation, as she claims, is located in an engagement with life as zoe—that is, in her Deleuzian view, life as immanently vital and generative, a force that includes but exceeds the human. Her attachment to life as zoe is posited against what she regards as an increased engagement in political philosophy with a political ontology of life that is structured by vulnerability, death, and dying.38 In expressing a theoretical disagreement with what she calls a “fixation” on Thanatos in political theory (as in the work of Mbembe and Agamben), Braidotti throws the baby out with the bathwater. By abandoning the subject of injury and the analysis of state power's capacity to govern life and concurrently let die or even kill, she lets historical and current forms of injustices that expose us to states of wounding disappear from view. Or, at best, she regards them as part of life's processes. Moreover, the presumption that suffering can be overcome and transformed into joy and vitality, as a deliberate endeavor of the affirmative subject, disregards the messiness and intensities of grief, anger, pain, and hope that can animate us in different ways, leading us to act, ethically and politically, in spite of and in the face of wrongdoings committed against us. Thus, the universalizing tendencies of Braidotti's ethics of affirmation present us with an indifferent account of the political, understood both in terms of state power and its instrumentalization of violence and as an animating force that propels subjects and communities to refuse the terms of their subjugation.
Against the Israeli state's repeated investments in Palestinian death, fast and slow, the smuggling of sperm is a gesture in which the prisoners, their wives, their children, and the social relations organized around them obstinately affirm life in this extraordinary state and by extraordinary means. The different forms that capture takes—capture as incarceration; capture as colonial violence's hold at the most intimate and molecular levels; capture as the arrest of movement behind bars, through separation walls, and across checkpoints; capture as entrapment in the alternation between life and death—are circumvented but ultimately not yet overcome. They are circumvented through a breaking out, a leak that disorients the violent events of incarceration and settler colonialism, a cut through the enclosure that creates an opening toward a futurity that the Israeli state is adamant about foreclosing.
In her analysis of the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza, Jasbir Puar, in her book The Right to Maim, argues that the debilitation of Palestinian bodies and infrastructures, a biopolitical strategy of the Israeli occupation, is aimed at the capture not only of life but of resistance as well.39 For Puar, debilitation encloses the Palestinian population in a state that is neither life nor death. This state of neither/nor becomes a “chronic state of being” that forecloses futurity. However, Puar also asks, “What are the productive, resistant, indeed creative, effects of [Israeli] attempts to squash Palestinian vitality, fortitude, and revolt?”40 While her work ultimately does not attend to this question, I take it as a key point of reflection in this essay. Rather than an effect of Israeli attempts to squash Palestinian resistance, sperm smuggling is an affirmative practice that is born from within conditions of woundedness and out of Palestinian fortitude, simultaneously. It is a creative practice that attests to the valence of minor rebellious acts that Israel's inhuman biopolitics have failed to squash.
The rhetoric of futurity in Palestinian public discourse, which hails children born of sperm smuggling as “ambassadors of freedom,” might be read in Lauren Berlant's sense, as indexing a cruelly optimistic attachment to a fantasy that assigns the figure of the child the position of the bearer of a future of freedom.41 The figure of the “ambassador of freedom” might also be misconstrued as the messenger of a scripted future, as a positive investment in birthing the nation. I contend, however, that it is the symbolic significance of the practice of sperm smuggling, as an affirmative ethical and political practice, rather than the figure of the child per se, that conjures the possibility of a future of freedom from the colonial present. The life of an infant, a life deemed impossible under conditions of incarceration and occupation, is socially upheld as “a life that will have been lived” in dignity and freedom. This is what Butler calls life's “future anterior”—that is, the presupposition that “this will be a life that has been lived” and therefore will be a life recognized as a life and sustained as such.42 The child who is conceived against all odds and in spite of conditions of debilitation belongs to a growing generation, one that for Palestinians signals the possibility of a freedom that will have been lived and that is on the horizon.
Acknowledgments
This article was written, submitted, and reviewed before the current Israeli genocidal onslaught on Gaza and the intensification of the brutal attacks on reproduction. As scholars invested in the question of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and while we are committed to writing, speaking, teaching, and learning about Palestine, we are today faced with the contradictions, if not at times, futility of producing scholarly and intellectual work in the midst of the horrors of death and destruction. For a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. I would like to thank the editorial team, Samera Esmeir, Susana Draper, and Ramsey McGlazer for their thoughtful comments and Breana George for her patience and support. The research is supported by a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Notes
Butler, Frames of War, xxvii.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Palestinian Children”; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Politics of Birth”; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood.
Jess Ghannam, quoted in Puar, Right to Maim, 150.
Times of Israel, “Gaza Mother.”
Zureik, Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine, 4–5, 144–45. See also Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.
The term “reproductive futurism” was introduced by Lee Edelman in his 2004 book No Future to signal how an imaginary figure of the child is a conservative fixation that consolidates a particular sociopolitical vision and form of futurity tied to the heteronormative family. This, he further states, is pitted against a queer and reproductive rights politics depicted as antifuture and antilife. Edelman's emphasis on the figure of the child, according to Puar, writing in 2007, misses the mark by collapsing sexuality with a “thin biopolitical frame of reproduction” (Terrorist Assemblages, 211), without taking into account that the child is just one figure within a broader biopolitical assemblage. The challenge, she argues, is to see how biopolitical strategies demarcate populations on the bases of sexuality and of race, not only according to who can reproduce and who cannot but also according to who can and who cannot regenerate life and have access to the means of regeneration. This then turns certain populations into those destined for decay, with no future. In the context of Palestine, where Israeli biopolitical strategies take slow or incremental genocidal form and the biopolitical strategies of reproduction include the social, political, and militarized targeting of reproductive labor, infrastructures, and bodies framed in the discourse of demographic competition and threat, it is both biological and social reproduction, as well as Palestinians’ capacity to regenerate, that is being curtailed.
Salameh, “Free Walid Daqqah.” The text by Sana'a Salameh in which Walid Daqqah's letter is cited was originally published in Arabic on 7iber platform (“سلامة،” وليد دقة: أن تكون ندًا”). The quotation of Daqqah's letter here relies predominantly on the English translation by Mondoweis, where the article was republished, except for the passage in bold, which is the author's translation.
Addameer, “Statistics,” September 19, 2023, https://www.addameer.org/statistics.
While the phenomenon of Palestinian sperm smuggling deserves more academic attention, the very few articles available have either situated this practice in the context of a study of assisted reproductive technologies or have taken a deconstructive approach to analyzing the practice. Sigrid Vertommen discusses how Israeli settler colonialism shapes the politics of assisted reproduction technologies in Palestine and Israel. She especially exposes the different treatment of Israeli prisoners and Palestinian political prisoners, given that the former are allowed conjugal visits, while the latter are not. Vertommen also discusses the limited availability of reproductive resources and access to assisted reproductive technologies among Palestinians in comparison to Israeli reproducers. Mohammed Hamdan analyzes sperm smuggling through a Derridean deconstructive approach, showing how prisoners’ sperm becomes a “supplement to originary presence,” where children born from sperm smuggling are traces of their absent fathers. The child, for Hamdan, manifests political prisoners’ absence/presence and in doing so represents their return as social and political subjects of the Palestinian struggle. I build on this existing literature, while also taking a different angle of analysis, considering how sperm smuggling is situated within debates on the “right to life” and can be read a life-affirming practice. See Vertommen, “Babies from Behind Bars”; Hamdan, “‘Every Sperm Is Sacred,’” 528.
For further analysis on the meaning of haq in Arabic in relation to “rights” as a legal term, see Esmeir, Juridical Humanity, 26–27. Samera Esmeir explores the meaning of haq, drawing a distinction between haq as articulated in positive jurisprudence and haq as articulated in natural law through an analysis of Amin Shmayyil's introduction in the first issue of the Egyptian legal journal Al-Huquq, published in March 1886.
See also Judith Butler's reading of Braidotti's ethics of affirmation in “Reflections on Ethics, Destructiveness, and Life.”
Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself.’”
