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“EVERY SPERM IS SACRED”: PALESTINIAN PRISONERS, SMUGGLED SEMEN, AND DERRIDA'S PROPHECY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2019

Mohammed Hamdan
Mohammed Hamdan*
Affiliation:
Mohammed Hamdan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, An-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine; e-mail: moh_hamdan@najah.edu
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Abstract

This paper investigates the contemporary phenomenon of smuggling sperm from within Israeli jails, which I treat as a biopolitical act of resistance. Palestinian prisoners who have been sentenced to life-imprisonment have recently resorted to delivering their sperm to their distant wives in the West Bank and Gaza where it is then used for artificial insemination. On the level of theory, my analysis of this practice benefits from Jacques Derrida's commentary in The Post Card on imaginative postal delivery of sperm to distant lovers. I use Derrida's heteronormative implication to examine how Palestinian prisoners defy the Israeli carceral system via the revolutionary act of sperm smuggling. The article then argues that smuggling sperm challenges the conventional gender codes in Palestinian society that see women in passive roles. Drawing on Derrida's metaphorical connection between masturbation and writing, I problematize the perception of speech/orality as primary in traditional Palestinian culture. Women, who mostly act as smugglers, become social agents whose written stories of bionational resistance emerge as a dominant mode of representation.

Keywords

genderJacques DerridaIVF resistancePalestinian prisonerssperm-smuggling
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 525 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I am grateful to Professor John Schad, Professor Arthur Bradley, Dr. Lindsey Moore at Lancaster University, and Dr. Nabil Alawi at An-Najah National University for their constant support and generous comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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2 Helen Codd cites other cases of smuggling sperm around the world. In 2002, the New York Post reported that an American prisoner managed to smuggle sperm to his wife by bribing the guards, and this resulted in the conception of their daughter. Codd also mentions that the Israeli man convicted of murdering Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 was caught during the smuggling of sperm to his wife. Moreover, the UK is enlisted by Codd as a country where examples of the same kind were registered, such as the Mellor and the Dickson cases. See Codd, , In the Shadow of Prison: Families, Imprisonment and Criminal Justice (New York: Willan Publishing, 2008), 101–2Google Scholar.

3 In her recent news report, Isra Namey quotes Um ʿAwad al-Saʿīidi, a sixty-four-year-old mother of a Palestinian detainee, as having said that “she was ‘denied all means of communication with our sons, including visits, letters, and they even blocked the use of cell phones between us.’” See Namey, “Gaza: A family's ordeal to visit a prisoner in Israel,” Al Jazeera, 3 June 2016, accessed 13 June 2016, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/gaza-family-ordeal-visit-prisoner-israel-160530082700143.html. This subject has also been covered by other international media such as the BBC and the Washington Post as well as local news agencies including Press TV, Electronic Intifada, Middle East Monitor, and Haaretz.

4 Vertommen, Sigrid, “Babies from Behind Bars: Stratified Assisted Reproduction in Palestine/Israel,” in Assisted Reproduction Across Borders: Feminist Perspectives on Normalizations, Disruptions and Transmissions, ed. Lie, Merete and Lykke, Nina (New York: Routledge, 2017), 213Google Scholar.

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16 For more on the life and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, particularly the ban on communication, see Hilal, Firas Abu, The Suffering of the Palestinian Prisoners & Detainees under the Israeli Occupation, trans. Darazi, Baraah (Beirut: Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies & Consultations), 67–69Google Scholar.

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21 Ibid., 52.

22 Ibid., 59.

23 The kabsūlah, or generally referred to as the Irish “comms,” was also a material medium that developed as a form of communication in Northern Ireland between political leadership outside the prison and the commanding individuals inside the prison in 1981.

24 Nashif, Palestinian Political Prisoners, 63.

25 Ibid., 52.

26 Glenn Robinson argues that the “prison was seen within the Palestinian community as a principal training ground for future activists.” Robinson's words imply that the link between Palestinian political activism inside and outside Israeli jails is never lost, here consolidated by kabsūlah smuggling. See Robinson, Glenn E., Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Solution (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 22Google Scholar.

27 Nashif writes that the prison authorities are keen to forbid inmates from talking, walking, or sitting together. Since these forms of contact can facilitate the passage of information from inside the cells, the authorities use solitary confinement; Nashif, Palestinian Political Prisoners, 47.

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31 Nashif, Palestinian Political Prisoners, 63.

32 In 1992, F. Abu al Haj published his book The Knights of the Intifada: Talking from Behind the Bars in Jerusalem; Nashif, Palestinian Political Prisoners, 64.

33 The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are burgeoning fast advances in fertility treatment. Ruth Eglash and Sufyan Taha report that the first successful IVF treatment took place in August 2012. Since then, about fifteen women in the West Bank and six women in Gaza have given birth via the IVF process; Eglash and Taha, “Palestinian Prisoners Are Smuggling Sperm out of Israeli Jails So Wives Can Have Babies,” Washington Post, 2 May 2014, accessed 1 June 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/palestinian-prisoners-are-smuggling-sperm-out-of-israeli-jails-so-wives-can-have-babies/2014/05/02/f2b7f29e-cc8a-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html. It is also significant to point out here that IVF treatment in Israel is much higher than its counterpart in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. This is due to the Israeli government's concern “with lowering the Arab birthrate as it has with raising the Jewish one”; Portugese, Jacqueline, Fertility Policy in Israel: The Politics of Religion, Gender, and Nation (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), 161Google Scholar.

34 Derrida “reputedly had a long-standing relationship with the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, with whom he had a son, but he remained married to Marguerite until his death from cancer in 2004”; Shakespeare, Steven, Derrida and Theology (London: T&T Clark International, 2009), 19Google Scholar.

35 Derrida, The Post Card, 25.

36 Ibid., 25. Derrida's emphasis.

37 Ibid., 27.

38 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 4Google Scholar.

39 Ibid.

40 Derrida, , “Circumfission,” in Jacques Derrida, trans. Bennington, Geoffery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 202Google Scholar. Emphasis in original.

41 The term “Occupied Palestinian Territories” refers to the lands that were occupied by the Israeli military after the Six Day War between Israel and neighboring Arab countries in 1967, and are still recognized by the UN as occupied. Hereafter I will use the abbreviation “OPT.”

42 Tessler, Mark A., A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994), 708Google Scholar.

43 Ibid.

44 Derrida, “Circumfission,” 153. Emphasis in original.

45 Ibid., 72. Emphasis in original.

46 Al-Quds News Network, 18 February 2015, accessed 22 February 2015, http://www.qudsn.ps/article/61351.

47 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 155.

48 “Islam recognises that sex [natural coitus] is a gift from Allah but insists that it may only take place within a marriage. Marriage and family are the basis of Islamic society” to which the OPT culturally belongs. The Prophet Muhammad states that “no institution in Islam finds more favour with God than marriage,” in Mayled, Jon, People and their God (Cheltenham: Nelson Thomes, 1999), 76Google Scholar.

49 Inborn, Marcia C., “Masturbation, Semen Collection and Men IVF's Experiences: Anxieties in the Muslim World,” Body and Society 13 (2007): 41Google Scholar.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 42.

52 Inborn, “Masturbation,” 39.

53 Khuri, Fuad I., The Body in Islamic Culture (London: Saqi Books, 2001), 83Google Scholar.

54 Ibid., 84–85.

55 Sayfuddin, Murad and Muhametov, Abdullah-R, Love and Sex in Islam: The Collection of Fatwas and Articles, trans. Smirnova, Irina et al. (Cairo: Publishing House Ansar, 2004–11), 44Google Scholar.

56 See Inborn, Marcia, Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Systems (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

57 Musallam, Basim F., Sex and Society in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 33Google Scholar.

58 Naela Khalil, “Fatwas Allow Artificial Insemination for Wives of Prisoners,” Al-Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East, 11 February 2013, accessed 3 March 2015, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/fr/originals/2013/02/palestinian-women-impregnated-smuggled-sperm.html#.

59 Inborn, , Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt (New York, London: Routledge, 2003), 97Google Scholar.

60 Nidal Al-Mughrabi, “Smuggled Sperm Brings Baby Boy to Gaza Prisoner's Family,” Reuters, 10 January 2014, accessed 15 February 2015, http://www.reuters.come/article/2014/01/10/us-palestinian-israeli-prisoner-idUSBREA090Q220140110.

61 Grey, Mary, The Spirit of Peace: Pentecost and Affliction in the Middle East (Durham: Sacristy Press, 2015), 14Google Scholar.

62 Ibid.

63 Shehadeh, Raja, Journal of a West Bank Palestinian (New York: Adama Books, 1984)Google Scholar, viii.

64 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 156.

65 Naela Khalil, “Fatwas.”

66 T. F., interview with the author, Jenin City, West Bank, 22 April, 2018. I have only used the prisoner's initials at his own request.

67 Bradley, Arthur, Derrida's Of Grammatology: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 104Google Scholar.

68 Ibid., 106.

69 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Confessions (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1996), 416Google Scholar.

70 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 151.

71 Donnison, “Palestinians Born.”

72 Ibid.

73 Jad, Islah, “Patterns of Relations within the Palestinian Family during the Intifada,” trans. Abu Hassabo, Magida, in Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank, ed. Sabbagh, Suha (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998), 55Google Scholar.

74 Rubenberg, Cheryl A., Palestinian Women: Patriarchy and Resistance in the West Bank (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 51Google Scholar.

75 Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 89Google Scholar.

76 Rubenberg, Palestinian Women, 166.

77 See Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), 422Google Scholar.

78 Stanley Cohen and Daphna Golan, “The Interrogation of Palestinians during the Intifada: Ill-treatment, ‘Moderate Physical Pressure’ or Torture,” Jerusalem: B'Tselem, March 1991, accessed 14 August 2016, http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/199103_torture.

79 Some Arab critics, notably the Saudi Abdulla al–Ghadhami, suggest that speech is a manifestation of femininity whereas writing is that of masculinity. Al-Ghadhami believes that “since woman is meaning and man is utterance, it is necessary that language belongs to man, and not woman … and woman has never spoken as a linguistic agent”; al-Ghadhami, al-Mar’a wa-l-Lugha, vol. 1 (Beirut: The Arab Cultural Centre, 1996), 8. On the other hand, it is also important to remember that within the specific Palestinian cultural context, speech and oral narratives have traditionally defined masculinity and resistance. Even though women have always been subsumed into a higher Palestinian masculine order of power and colonial struggle, it is through medically assisted conception that women have redefined the body of the Palestinian female, who emerges as the resistant conceiver and writer, in the least symbolic sense.

80 Massad, Joseph A., The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (New York: Routledge, 2006), 49Google Scholar.

81 Ibid., 50.

82 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 143.

83 Ibid., 162.

84 Susan Rahman and Tara Dorabji, “How Palestinian Women Defy Israel's Occupation: From Mothering a Child to Mourning One, Three Women Share Stories of Steadfastness and Resistance,” Al Jazeera, 30 October 2015, accessed 4 August 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/palestinian-women-defy-israel-occupation-151029062324106.html.

85 Vertommen, “Babies from Behind Bars,” 207.

86 Farsoun, Samih K., Culture and Customs of the Palestinians (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004), 38Google Scholar.

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88 Lughod, Abu, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999), 80–81Google Scholar.

89 Rubenberg, Palestinian Women, 35.

90 Ibid., 42. Emphasis added.

91 Abu Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, 208.

92 Robenburg, Palestinian Women, 42. Emphasis in original.

93 As the general manager of Razan Assisted Conception Unit in Nablus, doctor Abu Khaizuran sometimes speaks on behalf of his female patients. However, it is also true that the prisoners’ wives are the major role-players in the process of smuggling, which is a dangerous journey that has importantly been documented as a gender-related story of success by female journalists such as Susan Rahman.

94 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 422.

95 Sharrock, Cath, “Reviewing ‘Spirit of Man-Hood’: Sodomy, Masturbation and the Body (Politic) in Eighteenth-Century England,” Textual Practice 11 (1997): 10–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Derrida, , Dissemination, trans. Johnson, Barbara (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 68Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

97 Ibid., 115.

98 Ibid., 77.

99 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 142.

100 Haraway, Donna, The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge: 2004), 33Google Scholar.

101 Harriet Sherwood, “Palestinian Prisoners in Israel ‘Smuggling Out Sperm,’” The Guardian, 8 February 2013, accessed 22 February 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/08/palestinian-prisoners-israel-smuggling-sperm.

102 Rubenberg, Palestinian Women, 47.