How did you come to choose to study the Palestinian practice of sperm smuggling?

Since the early stages of my research career, I have been engaged with the question of population management and demographic control within the Israeli settler-colonial project. Yet, I have always felt that this form of violence demands greater attention, not solely at the geostrategic level, where it is typically analysed, but also in terms of its effects on the everyday lives of ordinary people. I thought it was equally important to view Palestinians not only as victims of such demographic strategies, but also as agents actively challenging them. The practice of sperm smuggling from Israeli prisons emerged as a compelling example. It offers a unique opportunity to examine how these forces manifest in everyday life, and how Palestinians continue to survive, love, and hope within a settler colonial system designed to kill them biologically and socially.

Can you describe your thesis questions?

My research explores the social and political life of sperm smuggling from Israeli prisons. It is a story about reproductive (in)justice, the right to healthcare and family life, carceral violence, and the everyday refusal of prison’s attempt to impose social death. But at its core, this project is about how families, separated by force, find ways to stay connected, to live, relate, and imagine shared futures in a landscape designed to fragment them.

If there is a central question, it is this: how do Palestinian families create shared geographies of intimacy and care under conditions of radical spatial and political rupture? What forms of infrastructure — material, emotional, communicative — sustain life and kinship in a settler colonial order designed to erase both?

How did you methodologically address this question, and what are your major findings?

I conducted dozens of interviews with families involved in sperm smuggling, reproductive health professionals, and community organisers. My analysis, like the trajectory of sperm smuggling itself, moves across four spaces: prison, home, community, and clinic. Each of these sites complicates the assumed boundaries between private and public, emotional and political, clinical and social. One of my key findings is that sperm smuggling is not an isolated event. It emerges from, and contributes to, what I call a communicative infrastructure of care; a system built over decades of prison–community relations that includes not only sperm, but letters, gifts, phone calls, smuggled notes, and shared, otherwise disconnected temporalities. These exchanges are attempts to reclaim sociality in the face of an institution designed to sever it. 

This network ultimately connected the three primary spaces that structure my analysis: the community, the home, and the prison. Yet there is a fourth site toward which my analysis turns, one that is often imagined as separate from the affective and political dynamics that shape the others: the clinic. One of the core promises of modern medicine is that the clinic is a neutral space, detached from geopolitical, political, gendered, and racial realities. A growing body of scholarship has challenged this assumption. Drawing upon this scholarship, I show how the clinic becomes deeply entangled in collective imaginaries and grievances, national aspirations, and emotional labour to sustain life. Palestinian medical professionals working in these clinics are constantly negotiating the tension between the humanitarian promises of modern medicine and their embeddedness in a collective reality of political violence and resistance. In this sense, the clinic becomes the fourth site in a broader geography of exchange, not only facilitating reproduction, but participating in much broader emotional labour and ways of making life.

You wrote in a LinkedIn post shortly after your PhD thesis defence: “It’s a strange, painful, and contradictory feeling: to earn a degree for studying things that no longer exist.” Would you like to say more about this?

It indeed was a strange and deeply contradictory feeling. I had spent years studying forms of intimacy that no longer exist, ways of connecting that have been destroyed, and infrastructures of care dismantled under intensifying settler-colonial violence. No visits, no phone calls, no smuggling. Like many others working in this field, I had spent years thinking through Israel’s colonial project and its impact on Palestinian life. But the scale and brutality of violence since the end of 2023 have reached a point that stretches the limits of our existing analytical tools. Prisoners are enduring some of the most violent conditions in recent memory. Dozens have been killed. Dozens more face death through denial of even the most basic medical care. There are reports of rape, sexual assault, and intensified, everyday forms of punishment. The past two years haven’t just changed life in Palestine, but they have unsettled the very conditions for thinking, writing, and doing anthropology about it.

Much of my fieldwork centres on life before 8 October 2023. That date now marks a rupture so deep that at times my research feels more like a historical account than an anthropological one. Still, I believe the work remains relevant. Colonial violence didn’t begin on 8 October; that’s true both analytically and politically. But on a human level, the break feels immense. As I wrote in my conclusion, I began this journey as an anthropologist. I may have ended it, unintentionally, as a historian.

This might be settler colonialism’s most brutal violence: its power over time and its relentless effort to turn every Indigenous present into a past that cannot be recovered. This might sound theoretical or abstract, but settlers say it clearly and openly. Drive through the West Bank and you’ll see the dozens of billboards they’ve put up, in Arabic: “There is no future here.” And yet, the future they deny continues to be imagined, quietly, daily, persistently. This dissertation is, in its own way, centred around that imagining. It comes from those imaginations. Maybe it even becomes one of them.

In December 2023, you wrote in an article that since 7 October 2023 “Israeli hospitals have extracted sperm from the bodies of numerous fallen servicemen” and that “in this way, soldiers become the colonial embodiment of Israeli national masculinity”. Israeli sperm is therefore preserved in the service of the State’s militarisation of reproduction and masculinity, while Palestinian sperm is preserved in the service of resistance. Would you care to expand on that? 

One of the central aspects I focus on in my research in general, not only in the dissertation, is how the reproductive clinic can offer a space for understanding Zionism as a political project.

Israel is today a global leader in reproductive technologies. Per capita, Israeli women undergo more IVF cycles than women in any other country. This is widely celebrated in Israeli public discourse as a marker of national modernity and scientific advancement. As I mentioned before, the clinic is imagined as a neutral and humanitarian space: apolitical, inclusive, and universally accessible. But as many Palestinian scholars have shown, this perception conceals a much more violent reality. Israel’s reproductive infrastructure has developed on deep foundations of discrimination, racism, and violence against Palestinians

Why do I view the Israeli practice as part of a broader project of producing a desired masculinity, while I understand the Palestinian practice as a form of anticolonial resistance? At a distance, these experiences may appear very similar; both are tied to forms of national masculinity. I’ve argued in my research, like others have, that resistance in the Palestinian case is deeply gendered.

But we must not forget: In Israel, we’re talking about state-managed and supported reproductive technologies, offered free of charge to every Israeli woman for up to two children. In contrast, sperm smuggling is practiced by a small number of Palestinian prisoners who are attempting to bypass incarceration and the broader settler-colonial system that denies them access to family life and reproduction — the very system that impowers others to reproduce. These prisoners come from all sectors of Palestinian society. Since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, almost a quarter of the Palestinian population has been imprisoned. To compare these two systems is to ignore the massive asymmetry between them. On one side, there is a technocratic infrastructure designed to produce more ideal settler subjects. On the other, there is a fragile and deeply intimate effort to build families and a sense of ordinary life. 

If Israel’s obsession with technological advancement and population management reveals anything, it’s that the settler-colonial project is anything but ordinary. It’s unsustainable, and it demands constant maintenance. I believe that biomedicine plays a crucial role in that ongoing artificial maintenance of the settler state and society.

What are you doing now?

I’m currently the editor-in-chief of an Arabic media network called UltraSawt. Although I was never formally trained in journalism, I’ve been working as a journalist for over 10 years. I’ve been somewhat detached from academia for a while now, but I keep trying to make sense of it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

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Izzeddin Araj defended his PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology, titled “The Palestinian Experience of Sperm Smuggling: Reproduction, Intimacy, Sociality, and (Counter)Domination in a Settler-Colonial Order”, on 10 June 2025. Associate Professor Julie Billaud presided over the committee, which included Assistant Professor Umut Yildirim, Thesis Co-Supervisor, Associate Professor Graziella Moraes Dias Da Silva, Thesis Co-Supervisor, and Associate Professor Ismail Nashef, Anthropology and Sociology programme, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Araj, Izzeddin. “The Palestinian Experience of Sperm Smuggling: Reproduction, Intimacy, Sociality, and (Counter)Domination in a Settler-Colonial Order.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2025.
Access:
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis on this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Araj.
 

Banner image by nayef hammouri/Shutterstock.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.
The views and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to Dr Araj and should not be construed as representative of or endorsed by the Geneva Graduate Institute.