What Social Reproduction Theory sees in Gaza and what it misses

A review of Making Death and Life in Palestine: Social Reproduction in Settler Colonialism edited by Tithi Bhattacharya and Susan Ferguson (Pluto Press, 2025), £18.99

This volume is part of a series of publications written from the standpoint of social reproduction theory, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya and Susan Ferguson.1 There are nine chapters. In Chapter 2, Asmaa Abu Mezied analyses Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinian health and education systems, while in Chapter 3, Mai Abu Moghli and Rachel Rosen expose Israel’s targeting of women and children. Chapter 5, by Tal-Hi Bitton, entitled “Decolonialism as social reproductive class struggle”, reviews the development of capitalism and its intertwining with settler colonialism. In Chapter 6, Ferguson traces the history of Palestinian education from the time of the Ottoman Empire through the twists and turns imposed by Israeli control since 1948. Chapter 7, written by Jemima Repo, looks at the impact of checkpoints on male workers’ travel times, the knock-on effects on family life and the added burden placed on women’s shoulders. In Chapter 8, Mai Taha recounts the role of Palestinian women in the 1936 Palestinian Revolution. In the final chapter, Chapter 9, Sigrid Vertommen, Weeam Hammoudeh and Michael Nahman compare the pro-natalist policies Apartheid-Israel has developed for Israeli women with the anti-natalist attitudes to Palestinian women. Chapter 1, written by Bhattacharya and Ferguson, and Chapter 4, by Bhattacharya, outline a theoretical framework for analysing social reproduction in Palestine, with a focus on the impact of Israel’s “death making” policies and Palestinian commitment to “life-making”.

The editors have a clear personal commitment to the struggle for Palestinian liberation and pay tribute to contributors who lost family and friends to the genocide while writing chapters for the book. There is much interesting material in the various chapters. However, I will focus my review on Chapters 6 and 9, followed by a few brief remarks about Chapter 5, on strategies for resistance. I will then examine the editors’ claims about the “indispensable” explanatory powers of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) for understanding what is happening in Palestine in Chapter 4.

Scholasticide and social reproduction in Palestine

Palestine is renowned for its astonishing levels of literacy and commitment to education. In 2022, the World Bank recorded literacy rates of 98 percent for 15-year-olds in Gaza and the West Bank. This reflects how “Palestinians have turned education into a tool for asserting control over life-making and in so doing, fostering hope for future generations”.2 The deliberate intent of the carpet-bombing of schools, universities, children, students, writers and intellectuals from the outset of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023, to destroy the ability of Gazans to continue their everyday lives, was apparent from the earliest days.3 The Israeli attacks on Palestinian education are not new: “Israel has long pursued a policy of containing and obstructing Palestinians’ education” in every way imaginable.4

Education for Palestinians has been shaped by external forces from the time of the Ottoman Empire through the British Mandate and from the founding of the Israeli state to the present. In capitalist states, education systems reproduce class differences while attempting to satisfy the needs of those societies. However, they also create the potential for students and education workers to develop aspirations transcending the needs of the ruling class.5 Unsurprisingly, in the colonial apartheid state of Israel, the education system is shaped by the parameters of a society that oscillates between genocide and repression.

Separate schooling in different languages and with different curricula date back to the days of the British Mandate. The British authorities introduced Arabic as the language of instruction instead of Turkish, the language of the Ottoman Empire. The emphasis was on primary schools and education for the peasantry, with boys learning about crop management and girls “housewifery, infant welfare and sewing”.6 Palestinian public schools were open to all religions, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Baha’i. However, most Jewish students attended private Jewish schools using Hebrew, “many of which fell under the auspices of the World Zionist Organisation’s office in Jerusalem”.7 These schools were more generously funded than Palestinian ones. Ferguson points out: “Hebrew public schools during the Mandate period were answerable to an incipient state aiming to consolidate national power, in part by shaping the citizens of tomorrow”.8

After 1948, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNWRA) took charge of education in the refugee camps, implementing the education policies set by the countries where the camps were based, namely Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The emphasis on primary education remained, and there was little or no teaching of Palestinian history or culture. After Israel’s takeover of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, UNRWA continued to run schools overseen by the Israeli military until 1982, when authority transferred to the Israeli Civil Administration.

Schools continued to be underfunded: “Palestinian schools lacked furniture; buildings were not maintained; teachers were underpaid, curriculum was outdated and secondary education neglected”.9 Censorship led to the banning of thousands of books for mentioning the word “Palestine” or showing the colours of the Palestinian flag. Only maps with “Israel” could be displayed. Repression of teachers and students increased. Ferguson concludes that “the Israeli approach to Palestinian schooling certainly involved containing resistance, but it also involved destroying the very promise of education—hope in the future, a Palestinian future”.10 By contrast, the Higher Education Council of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) drafted an education document promulgating the view that education had to serve the needs of Palestinian liberation, including “armed struggle against Zionism and imperialism”.11 The council also initiated the building of universities.

During the First Intifada (1987-93), Israel targeted schooling both on the West Bank and Gaza, with regular closing of schools, invasions, arrests, beatings and shootings. In turn, Palestinians responded by setting up their own makeshift schools that were then banned by Israel, leading to further repression.12 This pattern was repeated in the Second Intifada (2000-5) and again during “Operation Cast Lead” (2008-9). This time, Israel bombed and destroyed “18 schools and six universities, inflicting great damage in another 300 educational facilities”.13

The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, marked a serious defeat for the Palestinian movement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) now acting as Israel’s enforcer on occupied Palestinian land. The political and economic climate had also shifted, with attempts to impose neoliberal policies across the Middle East. The Oslo Accords led to the transfer of responsibility for education to the PA, albeit with any changes still requiring Israeli approval. The PA viewed schooling now “as a means for integrating students into the post-Oslo economy and promoting Palestinian identity—outside the context of settler colonialism”, spelling an end to the aspirations of the 1972 PLO policy.14 “In place of resistance, the new curriculum ‘promote[d] a version of nationalism…that primarily cultivated loyalty to the ruling authority in the West Bank’”.15 Schools avoid the issue of the occupation and teach an agenda reflecting the priorities of neoliberal capitalism. They are still under-resourced, leading to numerous teachers’ strikes and PA repression of teacher activists.16 Ferguson details the regressive role played by the PA in Palestinian education but reminds us that the most important context is the Israeli occupation and that “scholasticide is an Israeli policy”.17

Palestinian genocide versus pro-natalism for Israelis

The entire process of Israel’s genocidal war since October 2023 has been so shocking and painful to watch that it is difficult to single out one aspect for analysis. However, the reality of women giving birth without anaesthetics, the huge increase in miscarriages and the birth of underweight babies, and the fact that women and children made up 70 percent of all deaths in the first six months, must count as among the most egregious features of the war. The shelling of the Al Basma IVF centre, with the loss of 4,000 frozen embryos and 1,000 specimens of sperm and unfertilised eggs, needs to be added to this litany of destruction of the ability of Gazans to reproduce themselves and adds to lack of food, water and shelter—the results of being bombed “back into the Stone Age”.18 The authors of Chapter 9 quote the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) executive director Catherine Russell’s judgement that Gaza is “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.19

Israel, of course, views the ability of Israelis to reproduce completely differently. While racism and the tendency to genocide mean the Israeli government sanctions holding pregnant Palestinians at checkpoints, preventing them from reaching the hospital support they need to give birth, everything is put in place to encourage and support Israeli women.20 Chapter 9 highlights many of the existing measures, and it centres on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). The research here points to the development of a “thriving (trans)national ‘reproductive-industrial complex’ consisting of public and private fertility clinics, governmental agencies, surrogacy and egg donation companies” reflecting “Israel’s selectively pronatalist drive”. This reproductive-industrial complex involves using “an outsourced labour force of Georgian, American, Columbian surrogates as well as Romanian, Ukrainian and Czech egg cell providers”.21 After 2002, eggs from factory workers, students, retail workers and others in Romania were fertilised with sperm flown in from Israel, cryopreserved and flown back to be implanted in Israeli mothers.22 Israeli doctors who opened clinics in remote parts of Romania operated with the oversight and support of the Israeli Ministry of Health.23 A law forbidding cross-religious fertilisation of eggs came into force in 2010.

The development of this trade in fertilised eggs occurred at the time of the Second Intifada, during which Israelis holding up pregnant Palestinian women at checkpoints led to the death of 36 babies. The authors state that Israeli women could be receiving world-class fertility treatment in clinics less than 20 minutes’ drive from such checkpoints.24

Since 2003, it has been possible to harvest the sperm of “deceased, young men, particularly soldiers”; partners and now parents can request this. Up to a quarter of deceased Israeli soldiers have had their sperm retrieved since the war on Gaza. This can be facilitated through a “Biological Will”, permitting “the retrieval of gametes for the purpose of creating genetic offspring.” By contrast, when sperm from Palestinian prisoners is successfully smuggled out to their partners leading to pregnancies, Israeli authorities “have consistently refused to acknowledge these children and their paternity”.25 By 2024, over 110 children had been born this way.

Capitalist relations and settler colonialism

Writing in Chapter 5, Biton places the war on Gaza in the context of its relationship to US imperialism, seeing it as an effort to provide an “Israeli-controlled Gaza as the hub for the India-Middle-East-Europe Economic Corridor” and to offer the United States “a significant countervailing force to China’s international rise”.26 She views Israel as a settler-colonial state, firmly tied to the capitalist mode of production. Biton argues this in opposition to Patrick Wolfe’s concept of Settler Colonialism, which she argues focuses too much on elimination of indigenous people and not enough on exploitation.27

Biton presents the history of the transformation of the mode of production in Palestine towards the end of the Ottoman empire, throughout the British Mandate and continuing with the founding of Israel.28 However, her—in my view—correct argument about the development of the capitalist mode of production leads to an incorrect conclusion: according to Biton, it is exploitation and Israel’s need for Palestinian labour that sets the limits to the logic of elimination.29 As Ramsis Kilani has pointed out:

A critical role in the defeat of the uprising (the First Intifada) was also played by the historical fragmentation of the Palestinian working class by Israeli Settler colonialism and the displacement of millions of Palestinians. The strikes and mass mobilisations from below caused the Israeli ruling class major problems, generating both military and political crises. However, on their own, these struggles were unable to paralyse and fracture the Israeli state, which continued to function thanks to the willingness of Jewish Israelis to replace Palestinian labour and the US’s continued military and economic aid.30

It is the impact of the resistance that has hampered Israel’s ability “to pursue a successful settler colonial project”.31

Biton provides a succinct account of the role of Palestinian women in opposing the colonisation of their land by organising protests and boycotts against the Balfour Declaration, their role in the great Palestinian revolt 1936-9, through the First and Second Intifadas to the Great March of Return and the 2021 Unity Intifada.32 She points to the way in which, in the armed struggle, “a gendered division of reproductive labour within Palestinian national struggle ultimately conformed with wider trends within Palestinian civil society, such that patriarchy permeates the liberation movement’s praxis despite Palestinian revolutionaries theoretically uniting women’s liberation with national liberation”.33 She rightly credits Palestinian women with “the cultivation of a spirit of resistance and resilience, sumud, among Palestinian communities”.34 In addition, sumud unquestionably plays a fundamental role in stimulating solidarity movements around the world.

Biton concludes that “effective decolonial struggle must contest not only political sovereignty but also the very structure of capitalist social relations that both subtend and expand through settler colonial processes”, hence posing the right question without herself proposing how that could be achieved.35 Biton describes the Israeli working class as “reactionary” but also hints at a potential commonality of interest in challenging the settler-colonial project, given how it undermines “both Palestinian and Israeli working-class life-making, albeit in radically different ways”.36 If this is the intent, the argument is strategically misleading. Israel’s relative lack of reliance on Palestinian labour, and the co-opting of the Israeli working class into the Zionist project from the outset, precludes the Israeli working class as an ally in challenging the nature of the Israeli state. Relying on the lens of social reproduction perhaps hampers the possibility of looking at the development of capitalism in the Middle East more widely. This would indicate the potential role of the wider working class as a force able to challenge both Israel and their own reactionary rulers throughout the region.37

How indispensable is Social Reproduction Theory?

In their introduction to the volume, Bhattacharya and Ferguson refer to the iconic figure of Dr Hussan Abu Safiya leaving Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza in 2024, slowly walking towards an Israeli tank.38 As I write this review, Palestinian activists are campaigning internationally to have this same doctor released from Ofer prison, where he is now in danger of dying from Israeli torture and mistreatment. Amnesty International appealed for his release, pointing out:

His arrest and ongoing arbitrary detention without charges or trial—based on the abusive Unlawful Combatants’ Law—is a reflection of Israel’s systematic targeting of Palestinian health workers and the decimation of the healthcare system in Gaza in order to inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians.39

The millions who make up the international Palestine solidarity movement have been all too aware of the targeting of schools, hospitals, ambulances, medical staff, housing, water infrastructure and agricultural land, the essentials of “life-making” in Gaza. This is what prompted the South African government to bring its charge of genocide to the International Court of Justice on 29 December 2023.40 There has also been extensive coverage of the targeting of Palestinian journalists (and Lebanese journalists in Israel’s war on Lebanon) to prevent Palestinian reporting of the genocide while journalists from elsewhere are denied access to Gaza.41 Prior to the present Israeli war, there was extensive documentation of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, how Gaza was turned into the world’s largest openair prison and of Israel regulating the entry of food into the Gaza strip to keep it to an existential minimum. Visits to the West Bank broadened the understanding of the reality of Israeli occupation and established relationships and celebrations of Palestinian culture. Numerous films by Palestinians portray their lives and the constant threat of death. Millions “know” this reality and have been protesting with demonstrations, student occupations, boycotts, sending flotillas to Gaza with aid, targeting arms factories and, in the case of Italy and Greece, preventing arms shipments to Israel. The question is whether the framework of SRT adds an overlooked dimension to our understanding of Palestine.42

Bhattacharya and Ferguson introduce the term “life-making” to describe social reproduction:

SRT concerns itself, on the face of it, with life-making in capitalist societies. It proposes that capital’s very existence depends upon the daily and generational reproductive work that working class people do—most of it performed outside the immediate circuits of commodity production—to ensure a steady flow of labour power is made available for capitalists to exploit.43

This is presumably a reference to domestic labour. They continue:

Yet, the system can only thrive if it undermines and depletes such work to keep the value of labour power as low as possible. Capitalism thus has a doubled relationship to those who do the work of social reproduction, it degrades them whilst being dependent on them. It is precisely SRT’s revelation and exploration of this dialectic that makes it a compelling lens through which to study occupied Palestine.44

Social reproduction of the working class not only involves domestic labour in the “family”; it includes education to provide a workforce with the right skills, healthcare to ensure workers are fit to be exploited and social care to give workers some reassurance about their old age.45 This is usually provided by the state or private capital. There is clearly a drive to reduce the portion of surplus value that goes towards social reproduction in institutional settings (state or private) and the same drive to keep wages down and increase productivity plays out in those settings as in other parts of the capitalist mode of production.46 The conditions of all workers are degraded in the process. Women workers, who form the majority in low-paid jobs in social care, health and education, are most subject to worsening conditions.47 The drive to change the balance of value going to the working class in the form of wages as opposed to the capitalist class in the form of profits, is exerted across capitalist society precisely because capitalism is based on competitive accumulation.

Domestic labour is not directly subject to these pressures, although housing conditions, the number of hours women work, levels of pay, stress from working conditions, length of commuting, numbers of children and the like bear down on women and work in the home. In addition, bringing up a family being bombed and starved in Gaza or in the West Bank under apartheid Israeli occupation, is not the same as in London, Washington or Johannesburg.

“Life-making”, debility and species-being

A central feature of the book is the emphasis on the term “life-making”. In Chapter 4, Bhattacharya claims: “Social Reproduction feminists have exercised the formulation ‘life-making’ to identify the multiple ways in which human beings labour to transform nature and their surroundings to maintain themselves and satisfy their needs”.48 The role of labour and the interaction with nature is a cornerstone of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ understanding of human existence. Engels developed this idea in explaining human evolution in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in 1876. The concept of labour power is of course central to value theory and Marx’s analysis of capitalism. In the context of Palestine, Bhattacharya appears to be using the concept of “life-making” to explain the difference between the lives of Israelis and Palestinians that she discusses in her essay, as well as the connection between Israeli genocide and the “ongoing Nakba” in Palestine.49 She argues that in contrast to limiting discussion “of Israeli violence to just expulsion, murder and war…SRT and its expansive concept of life-making allows us to document the multiple ways in which the Zionist state tries to prevent Palestinians not only from staying alive, but also from staying human”.50

Bhattacharya uses the concept of “debility”, developed by Jasbir Puar, to explain the way in which the Israeli state constantly undermines Palestinians’ ability to live, whether it is by restrictions on mobility, taking land and water, destroying Palestinian agriculture, and undermining the Gazan fishing industry, as well as ensuring differences in the education systems for Palestinians and Israelis. Puar develops the concept to capture the way in which the lives of oppressed people, whether through colonisation or systemic racism such as in the US, are impoverished and restricted as well as subject to state violence.51

The term “life-making” is also used by the editors to introduce Marx’s writings about human labour and species-being:

SRT, however, does not just theorise the depletion and alienation of life-making forces. It recognises and celebrates the fact that although capital relies on workers’ social reproduction, life and life-making exceed capital. Celebrates because it is in that excess that resistance lies. Marx guides us in this reasoning when he explains in the Paris Manuscripts that, even to complete the most basic tasks, humans employ intentional practices, adhering to aesthetic standards.52

Bhattacharya’s argument that “life and life-making exceed capital” flows from Marx’s discussion about the nature of human labour, as opposed to the instinctual labour of, say, a spider weaving a web, and from Marx’s view that the realm of freedom begins “only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends”.53 She contends that, even under capitalist conditions, we catch a glimpse of this possibility: “Within the overall context of systematic alienation, we still nourish our plants, animals, and children; we make art and have great sex—all forms of labour that we engage in with relative freedom”.54

Most Marxists would endorse Bhattacharya’s understanding of the difference Marx makes between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity, as well as her contention that human beings assert their humanness beyond capital’s requirements.55 Our housing association has recently introduced small allotments on my housing estate in response to demands by residents. It is a joy to see the care and attention devoted by neighbours to growing food and plants. However, there are several dangers of “celebrating” life-making in this way. It can lead to skating over the fact that such activities still take place in a society based on exploitation and oppression—and hence alienated conditions. Furthermore, the home and personal relationships are the main locus of violence and the abuse of women and children. This is as true for Palestinian women as women elsewhere, and there is evidence that imperialist aggression and the genocide have led to an increase in violence against women and children.56 This is not, of course, to minimise the widely documented sexualised violence performed by the Israeli Defence Forces.57

The purpose of the distinction Bhattacharya makes is to highlight the resilience of Palestinians in the face of apartheid and genocide. Observing the way in which Palestinians continue to live and go beyond “just existing” through art and writing and making music, dancing and playing games, and a myriad other ways, is a humbling experience, something recognised throughout the Palestine solidarity movement. To this should be added the efforts made in the Palestinian diaspora to bring their culture to a wider audience and record it, against Israel’s determination to erase every trace of Palestinian existence. Bhattacharya rightly concludes that “Palestinian struggle resonates today with a wide swathe of the oppressed who see their own struggle, or their humanity, being articulated in that of the Palestinians”.58 However, anyone committed to ending women’s oppression should not ignore the real-life pressures and contradictions of women’s lives within the Occupied Territories.

Marx locates our species-being in our struggle to change the world. He insists not only on the necessity of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism through workers’ self-activity but also that it is only in this way workers can rid themselves of the “muck of ages” and make themselves fit to run a new society.59 It is not enough simply to celebrate Palestinian everyday life and struggle. We need to develop the “anti-colonial politics” to which Bhattacharya refers and find the connections between Palestinian resistance, the overthrow of the Israeli state embedded in the Western imperialist project in the Middle East and the role of working-class self-emancipation to which Marx points.60

Conclusion

The editors contend that SRT is a compelling lens through which to study occupied Palestine. The different essays do bring home the horrors of the genocidal war on Gaza and the contrast between the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, while emphasising the importance of Palestinian resistance. However, Israel is central to Western imperialist domination of the Middle East, and Israel has its own perspective of regional domination.61 SRT, with its particular focus, lacks the full kit of conceptual tools required to analyse imperialism and the drive to war currently reshaping the Middle East and devastating the ability of millions to reproduce themselves. SRT narrows the focus and removes the total context from view. This in turn can hinder the development of the politics we need.

Sheila McGregor is a long-standing member of the SWP and member of the International Socialism editorial board.

Notes