“They Make Death, and I'm the Labor of Life”: Palestinian Prisoners’ Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life

How is Palestinian life affirmed under conditions of death, destruction, and debilitation? In a context where a population is subjected to a state of capture and incremental genocide, what scenes of life emerge amid and in spite of colonial violence? 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. It is 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 fluid from body to body, through assisted human and technological means, across settler security apparatuses, is one in which precarious bodies, matter, and environment enter into a web of codependency and relationality, to sustain life in circumstances that make life unlivable.

The first reported case of a childbirth from sperm smuggled out of 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, north of ‘Tel Aviv’, represented a miraculous act 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  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 the practice is the birth of quadruplets to the wife of prisoner Ahmad Al-Shamali, Rasmiya Al-Shamah, who currently resides with her children in Shujaiya in Gaza City.

Palestinians are deemed to be the enemy of the settler state, with the figures of the woman and the child becoming signifiers of that enemy's reproductive capacity to live on and mutate.

More than a defiant reproductive practice, sperm smuggling 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 (managing life) and necropolitical (managing death) strategies of incapacitating the conditions necessary for the sustenance and reproduction of life in Palestine.

Having Kids While Palestinian

In July 2014, Ayelet Shaked, then member of the Knesset representing the far-right 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.” 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.”  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.” The desire to continually invent and fixate on the natives as objects of terror, and the fantasy of genocide attached to it, occupy the political and social imaginary of the Israeli settler-colonial state. Such a fantasy—sometimes latent and sometimes manifest, as in Shaked's statement— feeds the necropolitical impulses of the entity in legal, political, and existential ways. Palestinians, as a racialized population, are deemed in wholesale to be the enemy of the settler state, with the figures of the woman and the child becoming signifiers of that enemy's reproductive capacity to live on and mutate.

Colonial violence affects reproduction on both structural and cellular levels.

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 worn by Israeli soldiers depicted 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 mercilessly 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 regime, children are stripped of their status as children and are “turned to metal, to steel” that belongs to the “machinery of bombardment.”

However, rather than seeing women and children as mere “victims” of the occupation, we need to examine how children’s lives, and the domain of reproduction more broadly, are crucial sites that reveal the logics of Israeli settler violence. 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.

Children born from sperm smuggling are deemed illegal and illegitimate by Israeli authorities and are denied any identity documents that confirm their existence.

Moreover, violent arrest and physical assault of Palestinian children by Israeli occupation forces, increasing exponentially after the First Intifada, have given rise to what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian  calls “unchilding.” Through the designation of the Palestinian child as a “potential terrorist,” children and youth are subjected to increasing levels of criminalization. In addition, the eviction, destruction, and death that children experience and witness have extensive psychological impacts, leading to high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder. In Gaza, the control of calorie intake through the enforcement of what Israeli military leadership has called a “starvation diet” has stunted the development of children. The targeting of children and youth, Jasbir Puar argues, is a biopolitical strategy geared toward arresting generational time.  It is a strategy aimed at “render[ing] impotent any future resistance and future capacity to sustain Palestinian life on its own terms.” Children thus become a prime locus of the Zionist entity’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 because they 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. 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, according to Israeli prison services, political prisoners who are suspected of sperm smuggling are  subject to additional punishment, including solitary confinement and denial of family visits.

Biopolitics of Reproduction

The reproductive injustices committed against Palestinians to suppress reproduction 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 settler 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. Such incentives are further consolidated through public discourses that frame Palestinian reproduction as a demographic and security risk, with the Palestinian “womb being  a threat to be curtailed.”

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. 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 regime's continuous efforts  to consolidate its ethnonationalist foundations and expansionist ideology since before its founding. Zureik further shows how eugenics was central to the Zionist project as a science to enforce Jewish racial purity, since early in the twentieth century. This racial agenda continues to inform immigration policies, reproductive strategies, and citizenship laws. The development of strategies to violently contain the Palestinian population across the different territories, while stoking settler panic over a “demographic intifada” and under the banner of “security,” becomes paramount to the entity’s performance of its “right to self-defence.”

And here I ask you, what is insanity? Is it insanity that a child of my age speaks? Or that the Shabak has opened a file on her even before she is born?

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,” which is the gendered inscription of reproduction as a woman's national duty against Israel's annihilatory project. Yet, 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. The latter hyperbolizes Palestinian reproduction rates and erases the complexity of the social, psychic, and political factors involved in both reproductive and anti-reproductive practices. In Gaza, for example, Israeli colonial violence could lead women to want more children (given that all children can be subject to imprisonment and outright killing) or to want fewer children (to avoid suffering the loss of a child). To reduce Palestinian reproduction to pronatalist nationalist ends disregards the place of agency as it is entangled with ideological, social and affective registers central to anti/reproductive practices.

The Claim to a “Right to Life”

I'm not scared of this state and its haughtiness. 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?

These are the words of freedom fighter, novelist, and author Walid Daqqah, written from behind bars in the voice of his then unborn child Milad. Daqqah and Sana’ Salameh, his wife and comrade, conceived Milad through sperm smuggling in 2019, after a long battle with prison authorities and a smear campaign in Israeli media. Milad's conception was met with disdain by the Israeli regime, so much so that the 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, re-orient 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.”

Daqqah is one of over five thousand Palestinian political prisoners, predominantly men, held in Israeli prisons for committing “security offences.” The “security grounds” that permit arrest and imprisonment range from organizing and participating in demonstrations to throwing stones or killing Israeli soldiers. 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 medical care and a fair and regular trial, and often subjected to inhumane treatment. Additionally, many political prisoners from the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories are held in Israeli prisons in violation of international law. Security and securitization become expansive technologies of control systematically mobilized to arrest, imprison, and impose hyper-restrictions, including the rejection of permits for family visits. For those whose permits are granted, visits are restricted to forty-five minutes. 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.

What does it mean to claim a “right to life” through reproduction from behind bars? 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?

The claim to a right to life 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.

In the context of Palestine, it does not require a leap of imagination to account for the instances when both international and state law become complicit in the exercise of colonial violence against Palestinians through occupation, dispossession, statelessness, imprisonment, death, and the debilitation of life. Despite countless well-documented cases of violation of human rights and international law, Israel continues its settler-colonial project against Palestinians with international impunity. These violations, alongside 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 within the occupied interior, 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 miss the political and ethical stakes of what it means to affirm life otherwise. We also miss 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 which, although it can be central to the struggle for justice in legal terms, exceeds the limits of the law.

When considering reproduction through sperm smuggling as a claim to a right to life, we can raise two key points. First, it would be misguided to consider the practice of sperm smuggling as bound to pro-life 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, supporting 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, new 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 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 and the reproductive relations that break through colonial capture and occupation are affirmative acts that emerge from conditions of reproductive debilitation. 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?

It is the symbolic significance of sperm smuggling, rather than the figure of the child, that conjures the possibility of a future of freedom from the colonial present.

Against the Zionist entity’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. Capture takes different forms: 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. All of these forms of capture are circumvented but ultimately not yet overcome. They are circumvented through a breaking out, through a leak that disorients the violent events of incarceration and settler colonialism, by way of a cut through the enclosure, creating an opening toward a futurity that the Israeli regime is adamant about foreclosing.

In her analysis of the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza from her book The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar 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. 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?” 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.

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 Judith 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. 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 which is on the horizon.