This chapter examines British and Zionist demographic anxieties and their eugenicist inflections in Mandate Palestine, which came from different places and had global precursors and diffractions. British authorities frequently expressed concern with higher Palestinian birthrates, which they racialized from early in the occupation. These concerns were balanced by a rarely expressed calculus that recognized limited investment in Palestinian welfare and infant, child and maternal healthcare produced higher mortality rates. The second section explores Jewish and British eugenicist discourse that predates and overlaps with the Mandate period and its iterations among Zionist health workers as they built a Jewish settler-colonial homeland in Palestine. The final section discusses transnational maternalist and breastfeeding campaigns, which were motivated by classed and racialized eugenicist concerns to reduce infant mortality and increase fertility among “white” better-off married women, and the conditions of the appearance of these discourses in Zionist archival records in Mandate Palestine.

This chapter shifts the focus of the book to non-reproductive desire in Palestine by comparatively examining relevant legal genealogies and coexisting layers of law on birth control, especially abortion, using a sweeping historical approach. The purpose is to undermine simplistic reliance on “religion” or “culture” to explain birth control ideologies, practices, and restrictions in historic and contemporary Palestine. This and the following chapter show that contraceptive use was licit and available and abortion, while often “technically illegal,” was always an important method of birth control for women in all communities. Most people made complex or simple anti-reproductive decisions best understood by accounting for personal situations and options, as well as material and structural conditions. The first section offers an abridged comparative overview of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian religious legal traditions on contraception, abortion, and sex. The second examines late Ottoman laws, policies, and priorities as they interacted with birth control practices. The third summarizes British law on birth control in Mandate Palestine. The final section discusses Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian National Authority abortion laws and policies applicable since 1948.

This chapter proposes that demographic competition with Jews has been largely irrelevant to Palestinian reproductive desires and practices since 1948, a year during which they viscerally and universally recognized the importance to Zionism of the double action of “Judaizing” and “de-Arabizing” the land. The operations of Zionist demographic biopower and Palestinian resistance within Israel shift, exist as pluralities in the same time and place, and are never totalizing, as Michel Foucault would have guessed. Representing Palestinians as hyperbolically reproductive has had at least three consequences: First, it projects and magnifies onto Palestinians what are, in fact, Zionist and Western pathologies and anxieties reflected in the policies and priorities of their governments, knowledge industries, and foundations, motivated by geopolitical, ideological, and material interests. Second, it misses the range of socioeconomic, psychic, and contextual factors that have shaped Palestinian reproductive and anti-reproductive desires and practices. Third, it distorts our ability to see the emphasis on creative, political, and social struggle and regeneration in the face of social and political death in the futurities articulated after 1948. Indeed, I found death more relevant than reproduction in my analysis of Palestinian poetry, fiction, and film.

This chapter shows that lack of British investment in healthcare for Palestinians was systemic and endemic to a colonial ecology segmented by nationality, religion, and “race.” Palestinians disproportionately died very young of poverty, hunger, and disease during the thirty years of British colonial rule, a rate overdetermined by colonial austerity in healthcare and infrastructure provision and systemic extraction from the native population. During the same period, Zionist health and science institutions, mainly funded by investments from Western Jewish communities, improved Jewish infant, child, and maternal health in Palestine guided by a racial demographic ideology and social medicine philosophy. Palestinian elites, in turn, recognized that healthcare and health status were crucial to the Zionist enterprise of transforming the demography of Palestine by populating it with healthy Jewish bodies and that this project was vitalized by investments and a colonial civilizational discourse.

This chapter shows how the British logic of “efficiencies and economies,” or fiscal austerity, limited healthcare provision for Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. Palestinian malnutrition and even starvation were widespread, predisposing them to illness and death. Despite acknowledging the structural production of hunger, poverty, and disease, British officials often culturally condemned Palestinians for ignorance, lack of maternal care, parental inefficiencies, and backward foodways. Rarely did British colonial authorities mention colonial extraction and austerity as causes of Palestinian poverty, hunger, or death. Even when they privately argued for more resources for Palestinians, they did so within a civilizational rhetorical frame. Not surprisingly, gendered-racialized dynamics and material tensions were prominent in the archives as colonial authorities governed Palestinian-serving Infant Welfare Centre nurses and midwives but provided little money for healthcare. Many scribbled notes in the archives related to policing the boundaries of registered Palestinian midwives who dared to use specula to examine pregnant women, give injections to the ill, or independently set up shop.

Miriam Ghani makes this point in an interview about her filmic installation “A Brief History of Collapses,” a two-screened, floor-to-ceiling visual memoir produced from the perspectives of two iconic buildings, one in Kassel, Germany, and the second in Kabul, Afghanistan, for Documenta 13. Rather than being linear, she argues, time “bends around the tale or the story’s will” (Ghani 2012). Buried in the Red Dirt shows, to use Ghani’s words, how “past and future inhabit the present” in the paradoxical peripheralization and hyperbolization of Palestinian sexual and reproductive life. It makes the case that racism was central to the colonial and settler-colonial order and to the distribution of health, life, and death in British Palestine. Following Ghani’s approach to reconstructing the Afghan film archive, in 2016 I entered research on reproduction and quotidian death in Palestine “slantwise,” “as if approaching a horse with an uncertain temper” (Ghani 2015, 43, 45).

Buried in the Red Dirt excavates quotidian dimensions of reproduction, illness, death, and birth control, topics peripheralized in the historiography and history of Palestinians who lived under British colonial rule. It also tells a larger systemic story about how colonialism produced suffering and premature death. The book “resists the event,” to use Megha Anwer’s terms, reorienting us to less “colossal” and catastrophic scales of history and experience (Anwer 2014, 2, 7). It emphasizes nonevents such as the structural maldistribution of illness, disease, injury, hunger, and early death because of colonial, racial, and class status, as well as the sexual inequalities that allocate power, resources, pain, and pleasure unevenly. It reminds us that extraction of labor and life are the very grounds of imperialism and colonialism and are always legitimated by racializing the abjected group. It shows the prevalence of Zionist demographic competition in modern Palestine for well over a hundred years, an agenda too frequently paradoxically projected onto Palestinians. In challenging the ideological hyperbolization of Palestinian reproduction, the book also takes seriously Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices. It conveys that political and social regeneration and survival dominated in Palestinian literature and film after 1948, articulated on scattered ground colored by the prevalence of loss, forced dispersal and premature death.

The book does not

This chapter explores Palestinian Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish contraception and abortion practices during the British colonial period and since, despite legal restrictions. It takes seriously the material and personal situations and dynamic cultural milieus that produced non-reproductive aspirations and desires and offered or did not offer sexual and reproductive agency. The first section analyzes abortion prosecutions reported in Hebrew-language newspapers during the Mandate period to illuminate public tensions and actual practices, including sex, that crossed religious and ethnic boundaries, as well as regular interactions between Jews and non-Jews in medical and legal realms. The second section focuses on a failed application by a German Zionist sexology institute to the British censorship board to show a Swiss film advocating medical abortion. It also examines Zionist pronatalist discourse for Jews during the Mandate and the status of birth control for Jews in the colonial Yishuv and early Israel. I show the ongoing coexistence of Zionist pronatalism with Jewish refusal in reproductive realms. The final section focuses on Palestinian infant and child death, contraception, and abortion practices during the Mandate period and since, using archival sources and interviews I conducted with elder Palestinian women and other informants.