Palestine in Focus - Reproductive warfare and 'the right to life' in Palestine
“They make death, and I am the labour of life”. These are the words of Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqa (1961-2024), written in the voice of his unborn child, Milad, who was conceived of sperm smuggled from Ayalon prison. Daqqa's statement is an insistence on life, and the labour that makes it possible, in the face of the death-making worlds of Israeli settler colonialism.
In the second lecture of the Palestine in Focus series, Layal Ftouni examines how Israel's deliberate assault on reproduction (human and environmental), although intensified in the current genocidal onslaught on Gaza, has long been a biopolitical and necropolitical strategy of the settler colonial state. The social, political, and militarised attack on reproductive labor, on infrastructures of life, the targeting of bodies (especially of women and children), this lecture argues, is an attack on Palestinian's capacity to reproduce life, to live on. In the face of death, debilitation, and destruction, Palestinian fortitude ushers in scenes of life that circumvent the settler colonial aggression to curtail life. In this lecture, Ftouni discusses the place of reproduction in the struggle for the inalienable 'right to life' in Palestine, a right that is foundational to the Palestinian struggle for Liberation. Omar Jabary Salamanca will respond to Ftouni's lecture.
Practical
Date: 15 May
Time: 16:00
Place: IISG, Cruquiusweg 31, Amsterdam
Entrance: Free admission, but please send an email to event@iisg.nl if you want to join.
Layal Ftouni is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at the Graduate Gender Programme, and a research affiliate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. She is currently working on an NWO Veni (2022-2025) funded research project entitled Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival. The research explores the politics of life and living at the boundaries with death (both human and environmental) in conditions of war and settler colonialism, focusing on Palestine.
Omar Jabary Salamanca is a FNRS Research Fellow at REPI (Recherche et Etudes en Politique Internationale) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research and teaching focus on histories, geographies and theories of development, political economy and ecology, and science and technology studies in colonial contexts. He is currently completing a book on the political lives of infrastructures in Palestine to be published by Verso Books.
