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Based on the original statement by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), a group of feminists comprised of Palestinian feminists Leila Sharif, Lama Khouri, and elaborations by Peggy Antrobus (Barbados), María Suarez Toro (Costa Rica and Puerto Rico), Rosalind Petchesky (USA), Paola Melchiori (Italy), Pilar Emitxin (Argentina), and Pregs Govender (South Africa) summarized* what this important feminist gaze about Gaza is all about.

It is easy to lose sight of wars and forget the obvious fact that women and children make up the majority of victims.  That is why we have been inspired by a statement by the Palestinian Feminist Collective, a group of young Palestinian women, activists and academics who live in exile with strong political and family ties to Palestine.

Their Statement is valuable in that it highlights the characteristics of "a project of reproductive genocide," illuminating the internal coherence of the extermination that is being carried out today in full view of everyone and which is linked to many others perpetrated in other eras.

The term ‘reproductive genocide’ used to define it clearly highlights the centrality of the attack on the reproduction of life, allowing us to analyze its internal articulations, it organically connects all the components of the destruction carried out, and highlights its aspect as an organic project, especially a long-term colonial project, already experimented with in some of its forms in other colonizations and potentially valid against the lives of all peoples.

According to the Collective's definition, reproductive genocide consists of "policies, discourses and practices, that delimit, limit, target, or reduce the capabilities, choices, access to life, short-term health, long-term health, and life opportunities of communities made vulnerable by systemic military violence and occupation, siege, colonialism, and/or imperial war."

It is therefore a tool not only of appropriation but also of erasure of a people, which consists in destroying the very possibilities of reproduction of the web of life in all its aspects.

Rosalind Petchesky, a member of the US organization Jewish Voice for Peace, has long developed the analysis—in truth taken up by few—of Israel's policy as one not connected to religious faith, but supported by the ambition to possess the land and control the population. She had therefore already turned a powerful spotlight on the exact extent of the current genocide of the Palestinian people.

In fact, for a long time now, Israel's project has been the eradication of the Palestinian people, of everything that has enabled and would enable their future. It is a project based on ‘balance’ and alternation between biopolitics and necropolitics, between racial supremacy and (false) integration of immigrants (of color) called to Israel, a project in which ‘reproductive politics’ towards the female population is central.

In a reproductive genocide, the female population plays a central role both as as potential subjects of its unveiling, but they are also victims. With the events of the last two years, this is, in fact, plain for all to see.

The Palestinian Feminist Collective, on the other hand, started from a specifically feminist perspective, developed in relation to the concept of 'reproductive justice , the basis of the global movement for rights and “sexual and reproductive justice”, which has been brought to the halls of the United Nations, governments, and the streets of America and Europe. The key idea is that every person, but particularly those who identify as women, has the right to decide about their own body, to choose whether they want to have sexual relations, children, with whom, and when.

What is happening now, however, is only the final chapter in a story that has lasted 76 years.  In the case of Palestine/Israel, it is the continuation of the Nakba, an event that took place over a two year period – from 1947 to 1949 – with the official declaration of Israeli statehood on Palestinian lands, but also an ongoing process of which reproductive genocide is a central feature.

The Israelis were supposed to leave Gaza in 2005. Instead, they planned and structured control over everything that entered and left the Strip, including food, medicine, supplies, building materials, and human beings, including the definition of the daily caloric intake necessary for Palestinians and their ability to seek medical treatment or study abroad.

In short, Israel has established strict control over everything that allows Palestinians to live in their land, and even when it has spared their lives, it has made their lives unbearable through an endless series of vetoes and conditions.

Israel's is a colonial invasion and, at the same time, an uninterrupted process of expropriation of territory. What that country has inflicted on the Palestinians is an enormous trauma that is entering its eighth decade and that it is now ‘perfecting’ to its ultimate consequences. It is a process that reveals how little Israel's policy has to do with religion and how much it has to do with a policy of demographic management/control of the Palestinian population.

Reproductive genocide involves the physical destruction of all places where the population can live or take refuge and, in particular, the destruction of everything that enables its reproduction as a people and its future.

Reproductive genocide combines all those processes that Palestinians call domicide, scholasticide, and soficide: the destruction of homes so that people live among the rubble and without shelter, regularly forcibly displaced by air strikes; the elimination of spaces for learning, education, and the transmission of memory; the destruction of institutions that give people a sense of social connection and belonging to a community—schools, hospitals, libraries, churches, mosques, cemeteries, meeting places.

The Israeli occupation forces also implement a specific policy aimed specifically at bodies, which includes: psychological warfare, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence against all genders and ages, mass killings and torture of the elderly – guardians of Palestinian culture and heritage –,systematic desecration of the bodies of adults, both living and dead, and children.

The incarceration of children is a central aspect of this policy: suffice it to say that a new law allows for the systematic detention of children as young as 4 years old.

Israel also has a unique practice of post-mortem detention: the bodies of Palestinians are ‘held’ indefinitely even after death, often in detention.

As for reproduction in the strict sense, one needs only consider the conditions of pregnancy and childbirth for Palestinian women who have been under Israeli control for 76 years.

In November 2023, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) warned that an increase in maternal deaths was expected and that Gaza had seen an increase in premature births, stillbirths, and miscarriages.

In January 2024, health workers estimated a 300% increase in miscarriages in Gaza.

These deliberate attacks on reproduction constitute an Israeli version of what numerous regimes have done and continue to do through forced sterilization: the extermination of a people through the elimination of their reproductive capacity.

We know of traumatized mothers in Gaza who have to give birth without anesthesia, of doctors who use the flashlights on their phones to perform operations because the electricity supply has been cut off by the occupying forces. Most Palestinian children in Gaza, when and if they are born, are underweight. 

“It must be said, however, that all this happened before Israeli bombs destroyed any possibility of nourishment and survival with the destruction of markets and agriculture (ecocide) and prevented access to the Strip for humanitarian aid.”

Now, with the massive bombing, the destruction of entire towns and villages, the evacuation of 90% of the population—almost 2 million Gazans—to so-called “safe places,” and the devastation of hospitals and clinics, we are witnessing the annihilation of everything that makes the future possible.

Lama Kouri, a Palestinian psychoanalyst and activist of the PWC, testifies to how many Palestinian women talk about their motherhood in this situation as an explicit act of resistance.

What has just been listed is part of a well-known list of events, facts, and crimes, organized around a colonial project intrinsically linked to the practice, also typically colonial, of dehumanization.

Since October 7, 2023, the dehumanization that Palestinians have suffered under Israeli rule throughout the decades of occupation following the Nakba has been continuous and has always found new ways to manifest itself.

Disinformation campaigns have circulated and continue to circulate in the Israeli mainstream media, such as racist and colonial discourse that points to Arab and Muslim men as guilty, even when they are victims.

 

An example of this is the claim that Hamas raped women during their their attack on Israel on October 6th. These claims, spread by the media especially the NYT, among others, and later shown to be false, were used to justify in part Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

The weapon of false rape accusations goes hand in hand with the celebration of sexual violence and the torture of prisoners. Male hierarchy and domination are instrumental in the execution of this project. Male domination over women sustains and reproduces the system of exploitation, the conceptualization and construction of non-white peoples as “Other”,  the women as legitimate sexual prey, the men as sexual predators and “less than men” compared to conquerors and colonizers.

Another important aspect of reproductive genocide is what is called ecocide: it consists of making it impossible for those who do not die now, under bombs to die from famine, disease, polluted water, destruction of crops, prohibition to fish, etc.

The Israeli military spoke clearly about this from the beginning of the war in Gaza: Gaza was to become a place “where no human being can exist”(Giora Eiland, former general and head of the Israeli National Security Council, October 8, 2023); "Those who return here, if they ever return, will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, nothing at all" (Yogev Bar-Shesht, colonel in charge of civilian administration in Gaza, November 4, 2023).

Ecocide concerns the interface between people and the environment in which they live and aims to inhibit, shatter and disintegrate the continuity of life through the destruction of key environmental elements (not only human and institutional), attacking the symbiotic relationships between human beings and the particular environment that physically, psychologically, socially, culturally  and economically sustains their lives: the ecosystem and economic systems of survival such as farms, businesses, livestock, tools, etc.

In Palestine, all this is implemented through the combination (and reinterpretation) of traditional colonialism of the old school with its modern, technically militarized and heavily armed version, supported by super-modern intelligence technologies.

It therefore operates through well-known and established practices deportation of women and children, destruction of crops, poisoning of water—and a combination of concrete construction (new villages), deforesting and then reforesting.

Behind the mythology of Israeli “good gardeners,” in which many of us grew up, lies the destruction of native trees through the use of bulldozers and massive spraying of pesticides, the planting of alien species, which are more vulnerable to fire, require more water, acidify the soil, and destroy the local economy and practices of agriculture and cultivation that have been tried and tested for centuries.

According to United Nations satellite studies, 35% of Gaza's agricultural land was already desertified before October 7, 2023, and now the same is happening in the West Bank. Before that date, desertification was caused and accelerated by bureaucratic vetoes on moving, farming, fishing, working, and living in certain areas, justified by intelligence precautions.

In the last 22 months, new practices have been added to the classic ones of destruction: bombing, the production of debris causing toxic chemical pollution, dioxin, rubble, the dispersion of sanitary materials and radioactive waste produced by prohibited experimental weapons. Experts from Queen Mary and Lancaster Universities working on the "Climate and Community" project have calculated that Israeli bombings on Gaza - in just the first two months of the genocide - had a force three times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

As a result, the water, when available, has become undrinkable, the air unbreathable, and any form of agriculture is now impossible. In addition, climate change has been exacerbated and dependence on foreign aid continues to increase. Now even the entry of foreign aid is impossible. All this is intended to bring communities to the brink of collapse and force them to leave.

This genocide is, after all, like many others, an economic project: the conquest of land and its riches. Before Trump made this obscene project public, it was already known that, from a real estate point of view, Gaza, which is located near the sea and offers wonderful views, is a very attractive area, potentially generating enormous profits. 

Emptied of its Palestinian population, of the wreckage and rubble left behind by Israel's atrocities, in the greedy Zionist imagination, Gaza could be rebuilt along the lines of Miami Beach. Some Zionist speculators in the United States and Europe were already selling land located in Gaza.

The elimination of Palestinians from Gaza would also allow for the  construction of a canal (Ben Gurion Canal) as an alternative to the Suez Canal, connecting Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.  This would offer the possibility of enormous profits for the companies involved and advantages for the governments of Israel and its closest ally, the United States, in their rivalry with China for control of maritime transport and global trade.

What is happening in Palestine sheds light on the many invisible genocides in the world: "Reproductive genocide is in fact a central aspect of colonialism, it is essentially against life, against the life of the planet and against human life, and aims to eradicate it. In this sense, it is part of a broader struggle against populations, for social, cultural, and territorial sovereignty". (Leila Sharif).

The genocide taking place in Palestine exposes the centuries-old complicity of Western governments, their multinational corporations, and billionaires in countless genocides of indigenous peoples, in “regime changes” of democratically elected governments, and in coups carried out by fascist dictators and armed groups financed to protect their “strategic interests” and their reckless destruction of the global ecosystem.

The genocide in Palestine clearly highlights the ways in which those who own the means of communication, surveillance technologies, weapons, including nuclear energy, work to break the overall spirit of a people through a specific form of destruction.

In this war, Israel is experimenting with new technologies of warfare and extermination "from a distance," to be resold to states in the North and South of the world. One of the main sectors of the Israeli economy is, in fact, the production of weapons, surveillance systems, AI, and sophisticated and technologically advanced policing methods. These technologies (and training in their use) are exported all over the world, including to countries in the global South. Dependence on these Israeli technologies for their own power is undoubtedly one of the reasons why many governments have not cut ties with Israel, despite the genocide in Gaza.

At the same time, there is the determination of the Palestinians to live; their refusal to stop having children, their refusal to die, their refusal to abandon their homeland, their identity and their humanity: Palestinian mothers and fathers scrambling through rubble and bombs to find food to feed their families, even if it is animal feed; Palestinian male political prisoners who smuggle their sperm out of prisons to make biological reproduction possible across impossible borders; healthcare workers who continue to try to save lives, save pregnancies when and where they can, risking and too often sacrificing their safety and their lives; Palestinian artists who continue to create visual art, poetry, music, dance, and even comedy in the midst of horror. And truth telling journalists.

We have to realize that despite all forms of genocide,  Palestine has not yet been destroyed. As long as people live, love, and care for children, reject Zionism, reject genocide, Palestine will live.

That is why the resistance of Palestinian women, which also explicitly involves “motherhood as an act of resistance” and the persistence of daily resistance by their bodies, has a special meaning.

Sometimes it  seems that we have no power. Yet we see in the Palestinians the affirmation of (their) right to a life in their territory and its web of life.  The various demonstrations of solidarity around the world by millions of people, beyond all divisions, is a reaffirmation of our common humanity.

Looking into each other's eyes, we remember who we are, we reconnect and recover the power of love, the essence of our dignity, the individual and collective birthright of humanity and the web of life - it is a part of the planetary family.

*A summary by Paola Melchiori, revised or in collaboration with Maria Suárez Toro and Peggy Antrobus