Countering Reproductive Genocide in Gaza: Palestinian Women's Testimonies
Sarah Ihmoud
Abstract
Abstract: Palestinian women's ways of experiencing and narrating violence offer important insights into the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Drawing on women's testimonies, I theorize this matrix of gendered colonial violence as Ibaada—Arabic for "annihilation," which refers to the annihilation of the Palestinian collective. Ibaada names extermination of the Palestinian people as the central imperative of Zionist colonialism, in Gaza and beyond, at the same time that it understands it to be a dynamic and multifaceted infrastructure of gendered violence. Palestinian women's stories highlight the calculated infliction of multiple and intersecting forms of physical and psychological terror, pain, suffering, and complex forms of loss onto the gendered Palestinian body and collective as intertwined with dehumanization, territorial dispossession, and the destruction of Indigenous ways of being in the world. I argue that Israel's genocidal project, hypervisible now in the intensification of warfare against the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, but also unfolding across occupied Palestinian territory since the 1948 Nakba, should be understood centrally as reproductive genocide, a systematic assault on Palestinian reproductive health, and an attempt to prevent the reproduction of present and future generations of Palestinian lives. Amidst this tapestry of grief and loss, Palestinian women's stories narrate a collectively forged vocabulary of survival that contests reproductive genocide and challenges colonial structures and discourses, including those of hegemonic Western feminisms, that render the collective experiences of Palestinian women invisible.