"Genocidal Hauntings of Pronatalism" The Dialectics of Assisted Reproduction in Israel/Palestine

This book chapter aims to situate Israel’s “selective pronatalism” on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) within Zionism’s century-old, ongoing history of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in Israel/Palestine, to show the intimate links between abortive social reproduction of the settler colonial regime towards the Palestinian people and its own pronatalist reproductive ethos. This has not only resulted in the creation and consolidation of a demographically Jewish state, often at the expense of Palestinian life, but it has also nurtured the emergence of a thriving (trans)national fertility industry. Using ARTs, including surrogacy, egg donation, posthumous sperm-retrieval, and sperm-smuggling as a feminist lens to unpack broader political economies of life and death in Israel/Palestine, we will argue that reproductive technologies materialise through a dialectical mode of capital accumulation on the one hand and demographic elimination on the other. This dialectical set of relations and practices requires the enrolment of racially stratified bodies, biologies and un/paid reproductive labours of (potential) mothers, surrogates, egg donors, depending on their global bio-availability and position in Israel’s population economy. By bringing in the technologies, labours and markets of life, fertility and biological reproduction in Israel/Palestine into the Marxist feminist debates on social reproduction and value creation under capitalism, we want to emphasise that this process not only necessitates the exploitation of paid reproductive labour and the appropriation of unpaid reproductive labour, but also the demographic and plausibly genocidal elimination of Indigenous life that is deemed ‘surplus’.