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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the destruction of Palestinian reproductive futures and intensifying domestic pronatalism through reproductive violence, highlighting how religious-nationalist fusion and Biblical references—from Amalek to female purity—reshape the politics of life and death in Israel/Palestine.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines Israel's war on Gaza alongside heightened pronatalist pressures within Israel through the lens of reproductive violence—violence operating on and through women's bodies (Chadwick & Mavuso, 2021). On one side, we analyse the systematic destruction of Palestinian reproductive futures: the decimation of maternity wards and neonatal units and Gaza's main fertility clinic, alongside the obstruction of infant sustenance through siege and starvation (UN COI, 2025). On the other, we document intensifying pronatalist pressures within Israel, manifest through state-sanctioned posthumous sperm retrieval from fallen soldiers and parliamentary initiatives promoting religious discourses of feminine purity.

Together, these movements constitute a reformed mode of reproductive governance (Morgan & Roberts, 2012; Morgan, 2019), interweaving racism, patriarchy, and Jewish-national supremacy. Yet we take these claims further, addressing the underlying religious-nationalist fusion (Rothschild, 2023) that justifies them, drawing from Jewish and Christian-Evangelical sources. We highlight the undertheorized role of religion—as institution and ideology—in contemporary polarisation of reproductive terrains, intensifying colonial logics of difference and uneven distributions of the right to live versus the imperative to kill, now dressed in theological terms of redemption and eschatological glory.

By analysing media coverage, Knesset proceedings, and policy documents, we examine how Biblical references fuel these reproductive struggles: how the imperative to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek" (Deuteronomy 25:19) underwrites genocidal logics, while injunctions that women be "all glorious within" (Psalms 45:14) underpin neo-conservative Orthodox campaigns—revealing how theological interpretation reshapes the politics of life and death in Israel/Palestine.