Birthing the Nation
In her ethnographic study of Palestinian-Israelis Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, Kananneh discusses in elaborate detail “how men and women view and negotiate their preferences for the ideal family size, happy childhood, safe and controlled sex, and beautiful bodies” (Ghannam 105). Kananneh draws her study from a series of interviews carried out amongst the Palestinians living in Galilee which since 1948 has been annexed within the borders of the Israeli state. Despite Israeli attempts at reconfiguring the demographics of the area, the Galilee remains predominantly a Palestinian area.
Kananneh places the Palestinian experience squarely within a post-colonial framework by tracing the historical roots of the “dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality” that the Israeli state promulgates and “the institutional practices through which ‘development’ functions, at the same time enacting the discourse and creating extended cultural and social relations” (Escobar 428). Apropos to the hegemonic discourse of development theory, Kananneh–as mentioned earlier–also records the Palestinian responses of incorporation and subversion.
Israeli Policies
Kananneh begins by providing a historic account of the emergence of Israeli state policies towards its indigenous population. As Hasso notes in her review, “land and bodies are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (482). Conceived as a state for the Jewish people by the Zionist “settler-colonial movement” (ibid), the maintenance of the “Jewish character” of the state of Israel in the presence of indigenous Palestinian population has necessitated state intervention from the very outset. As Kananneh notes: “The state of Israel is a state by, for, and of the ‘Jewish People,’ whereas the sovereign independent state of Israel would be a state by, for, and of its Jewish citizens. . . This conceptualization of the state heightens its concern for Jewish versus non-Jewish demography” (33).
Against this backdrop, Kananneh begins the discussion of Israeli policies of population control that closely mimic the European technologies that were used “in order to manage and supervise subjugated populations” (KANANNEH 25). “What is the significance,” she asks “of population and reproduction in thinking, creating and sustaining the Israeli nation-state?” (KANANNEH 23). Galilee, as Kananneh demonstrates, is a specific locale where within the broader outline of the state of Israel “the character of the Galilee [is at stake]—pictured by Palestinians as their enclave and by the state and many Israeli Jews as a wild frontier to be settled and Judaized” (KANANNEH 10).
What are the historical roots of this particular form of contest? From the outset, Zionist settlers defined the inhabitants of Palestine “as marginal, as a motley collection of people (rather than as an ethnos or nation), and therefore as movable” (KANANNEH 29). Although displacement remained an option for the Zionist leadership, they were nonetheless sensitive to the international perception of Israel. These demographic anxieties soon found a more appropriate expression in the emergence of a global development theory in 1955 (Escobar 429). As Escobar notes:
. . . a discourse was produced [around the construct of 'underdevelopment'] that instilled in all countries the need to pursue this goal [the creation of a society equipped with material and organizational factors required to pave the way for rapid access to the forms of life created by industrial civilization], and provided for them the necessary categories and techniques to do so (ibid).
The knowledge produced by this discourse could be used to confer “upon situations, behaviors, and so on, a visible reality amenable to specific treatments” (Escobar 431). Furthermore, corresponding institutions and forms of knowledge flourish which “make the exercise of power possible” (ibid). In the case of Israel, the projected demographic preponderance of Israeli Palestinians informs a discourse whereby the Israeli Palestinians are labeled “socially alien” and an “anomalous population” (KANANNEH 49) “whose fertility and reproduction are highly threatening” (KANANNEH 105) thereby necessitating the intervention of the state to inhibit their population growth. As Kananneh remarks, “health care in Israel has long been organized along the putative racial lines of Arab and Jew” (47) favoring different outcomes for either of the groups: encouraging smaller families for the former and larger ones for the latter.
Palestinian Responses
By far the most substantial part of Kananneh work is her detailed account of the Palestinian responses to Israeli discourse. As she notes, “the focus of Zionism on the ratio of Jew to Arab has been mirrored to some extent by a reverse Palestinian calculus and organizations” (KANANNEH 58). This reversal takes the form of inverting the terms imposed by the colonizer, that “in a manner . . . delimits responses and reifies identities” (Hasso 482). In spite of these limitations, Palestinians have developed polymorphic responses and their own discourse on modernity, gender and nationalism. As Kananneh notes: “reproductive decisions play on a shifting combination of socially constructed emotional and material desires. Nationalist framings of reproduction are only one component of this web of longings, albeit one that is not widely recognized (KANANNEH 68).
One response has been the internalization of development theory so that “in view of the economic difficulties facing Palestinians they should have fewer children so as to be able to educate and modernize them” (KANANNEH 62). This process is further strengthened by the Palestinian reinterpretation (in marked opposition to the Israeli essentialization of Palestinian fertility) of “reproductive control as a measure of modernity or, alternatively, Arab authenticity” (KANANNEH 106). Furthermore, the penetration of health services (“medicalization” (ibid)) has also reinforced greater reproductive control.
This discourse though dominant is by no means hegemonic (KANANNEH 121) and a counter-narrative also thrives on and draws upon a “mythic and hierarchically gendered past” (KANANNEH 61) to justify a higher birth rate for Palestinians as well as the preservation and promulgation of such practices as polygamy. (The book is replete with individual accounts and illustrations that very effectively underline these contests.) As Kananneh remarks, the result of both these responses have been the unwitting acceptance of Israeli agenda in “closely associating nationalism with reproduction and women” (KANANNEH 63) thereby firmly placing the political contest in the women’s wombs or “encod[ing] women’s bodies for state power” (KANANNEH 65). Crucially, this discourse enables women to be active participants in the construction of nation and reproduction (KANANNEH 65-66), although they can only become the true “mothers of the nation” by bearing boys for the national cause (KANANNEH 71).
While many Palestinians in Galilee resist Israeli domination, they are nonetheless awed by “Israel’s technological superiority” (KANANNEH 81). Family planning here becomes the practice that defines modernity, and reproductive measures are often used to stratify Palestinians in the Galilee along progressive-modernist/archaic-traditionalist cleavages (KANANNEH 87). Kananneh’s research reveals that whereas the drive for modernization in the Galilee occurs in a global context, nonetheless, the responses conceived are local and bear specific markers. She notes that while the appeal for equality and egalitarianism implicit in global consumerism (KANANNEH 94) has been attractive to many Palestinians, it has—rather than produce a homogenizing effect—created “specific new local modernities” (KANANNEH 172). However, the opposition to this discourse is often expressed in a “modern nostalgia that is strongly gendered and raced” (KANANNEH 102).
The effect of this discourse is most pronouned in the negotiated meaning and role of the clan (KANANNEH 128). Two contradictory impulses have arisen: one that asserts lineary and rootedness (KANANNEH 126) as a specific response to the contest over land with Jewish Israelis and one which condemns the clan as an archaic artifact and one that is dominated by females and deeply dependent on female productivity (KANANNEH 128). Internally, the discourse also reaches within clans to divided them along reproductive lines of modern or traditional.
As Ghannam and Hasso note in their respective reviews, the one shortfall of this study is the lack of any class signifiers. How are the responses to modernity shaped by class and income disparities, and how would such differences account in the conception of the localized modernities? Aside from this shortcoming, Kananneh’s work is well conceived and very insightful in directing the historian towards a better understanding of how specific communities perceive, interpret and deploy responses to discourses and technologies of power; and also the expansion of the narrative to include the inscription of the communal memory and responses to certain events framed by these constraints. The glimpse of the internal dynamics of the community and the constant and often contradictory negotiation and assertion of identity also serves as a warning to careless generalizations, or worse still, essentialization and imputation of communal descriptors that are embedded in an Orientalist past. Furthermore, in a field as contested as Palestinian history (where the non-availability of archives, the diaspora, and other political realities) impinge on the writing of history, such insights are very useful.
Bibliography
- Escobar, Arturo. “Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention of Management in the Third World.” Cultural Anthropology. 3.4 (1988): 428-443.
- Ghannam, Farha. “Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel by Rhoda Ann Kananneh.” Journal of Palestine Studies. 32.2 (2003): 105-106.
- Hasso, Frances S. “Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel by Rhoda Ann Kananneh.” Gender & Society. 17. 3 (2003): 482-483.
- Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann, and Hanan Ashrawi. Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. California series in public anthropology, 2. Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.]: Univ. of California Press, 2003.
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