“To Create More Life”: Colonial and Anti-Colonial Practices of Sperm Circulation in Palestine

• In Event: Sexual Policing from Colonial Wars to Culture Wars: A SWANA Feminist Approach

Abstract

This paper examines reproductive and sexual politics in colonial and anticolonial imaginations in Palestine through a juxtaposition of the control of sperm in the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and in Palestinian prisoner populations. Since 2002, the IOF has allowed families and wives of dead soldiers to posthumously extract and freeze sperm from their relatives. This practice gained in popularity and received attention outside of Israel in the wake of October 7th, when families sought sperm preservation for their deceased male relatives, both civilian and military, and an animated social media propaganda video on the practice circulated on TikTok and Twitter. This sperm extraction and its use as propaganda ties into what Jasbir Puar (2017) terms Israel’s “complex pronatalist agenda” which promotes scientific advancements for eugenicist sexual reproduction, while Palestinian birth rates come under direct forms of violent control (e.g. holding Palestinian women in labor at checkpoints to force birth in dangerous circumstances). Puar discusses pronatalism in connection to pinkwashing, as an extension of and foil to the forms of homonationalism embodied by pinkwashing narratives. In a related but separate vein, I explore the practice of sperm extraction in connection to Israeli carceral control over Palestinians, and Palestinian prisoner resistance through the practice of sperm smuggling that emerged in 2012. I juxtapose the practices of sperm extraction and sperm smuggling to highlight the centrality of sexual reproduction in Israeli modes of settler colonial control and carceralism, and to probe how such attention to sexual reproduction shapes both Israeli and Palestinian national imaginations.

Sperm smuggling began in response to a ban on family visitation for Palestinian prisoners that exemplifies the broader Israeli fixation on the Palestinian family as a site of carceral control. Children conceived from smuggled sperm represent a resistance to the creation of the prison as a form of birth control; as Layal Ftouni (2024) has argued, this practice should be understood as an “affirmation of life.” In response to this resistant practice, the Israeli state refuses to recognize these children’s connection to their imprisoned fathers, thus denying them family visitation rights and further enacting violence on the family as a site of Palestinian resistance and continuity. Thus in the case of sperm smuggling as well as sperm extraction, the courts emerge as a key site for determining the boundaries and lineages of both settler and indigenous families, highlighting the entanglement of legal/carceral structures with the family and reproduction. The circulation of sperm, both as settler pronatalism and as indigenous resistance to genocidal erasure, exemplifies the central but often under-examined role of sexuality and reproductive control in militarism and carceralism in and beyond SWANA studies, even when translated to its most clinical and de-sexualized forms. In our shared project to expand SWANA studies’ dialog with sexuality studies, this paper offers a window into the legal and national discourses on sexual reproduction through the circulation of sperm and the settler anxieties/resistant formations they embody.

Author

• Samia Saliba, University of Southern California