Middle East and the World: Population, Motherhood and The “War of Cradles”

 Record!

I am an Arab

And my identity card is fifty thousand

I have eight children

And the ninth is coming after a summer

Will you be angry?

-From the poem, Identity Card, by Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine

We are a civilisation camouflaged in modernity and democratic virtues, yet ancient emotions reign underneath. The Israel-Gaza war offers a sinister peek into them. The violence of this war is such that both sides kill indiscriminately, even civilians, in huge numbers. There is an unfathomable absurdity to this and every conflict. 

The lives of young Gazan and Israeli soldiers are cut short in acts of intergenerational hostilities over disputes about stretches of fertile and barren lands and cultural memories. We begin to see a pattern emerging, signifying ancient fears and hopes. This article is about one such fear and the hope originating from it.  

The news from Israel indicates that many parents and widows of the young Israeli soldiers killed in the war now want to preserve the semen of these soldiers. They hope that this ensures continuity of life beyond death. Many Israeli women reportedly are coming forward to mother the children of these dead soldiers in an act of patriotism. The sperm of many young people who died in the Nova festival during the Hamas attack have also been extracted and preserved. In the latest development, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that a child conceived using a dead soldier’s sperm can be legally considered a war orphan. Sperm preservation of deceased soldiers is a trend gathering momentum as the country steps deeper into many wars fought on many fronts.  

A BBC news report profiled a child born out of a dead soldier’s semen preservation. There was an attempt to legalise taking semen from the dead soldier and preserving it for continued lineage. This controversial bill has supporters and opponents among the Jewish religious leadership and the society as a whole. To take semen from a dead man and create a child using it when he has not consented to it before his death is deeply in the grey region of religious and moral values. Hence, the bill is currently set aside until there is a consensus. Yet, the parents can apply for semen preservation of their dead son, and this application can be approved in a case-by-case manner in Israel by a court. It is a task uphill because the onus is with the parents right now to prove that the deceased wanted a child. They sometimes bring a photograph of their deceased son holding a child to the court and argue that he loved children. 

 

The War of Cradles

Gaza has the largest child population in the world compared to other nations and national entities. Of the 1.8 million people who were living in Gaza before the war, 47% were children. The median age in Gaza was 18 compared to the world average of 28. The fertility rate was 4.4 children per woman, the highest in the world. In Israel, they have three children per woman. The severely orthodox Haredi Jews have six children per woman. 

Interestingly, some researchers felt that a “war of cradles” or a “battle of numbers” has been ongoing between Israel and Palestine. They also predicted that Israel might surpass Gaza's fertility rate soon, a trend often overlooked.  

A few social scientists have looked into the reasons for the high fertility rate in Gaza. 

The major explanations they found are as follows-

• Only 14.7% of the women of Gaza work outside their homes. Unemployment could be one reason.

• Traditionally, employers pay more wages to men who have more children. This acts as an incentive to have more children.

• Studies have shown that despite having access to contraception, Palestinian women choose to have more children.

• Despite being educated, many Palestinian women opt not to work, a study revealed.

• The largest study carried out by Sara Randall and Marwan Khawaja, with a sample size of 16,204 Gazan women, revealed that one reason for Gazan women choosing to have more children is because “reproduction is one of the few liberties which remains.”

• Another researcher, Jon Pederson, with the demographic research institute Fafo Institute, Norway, found that Gaza women choose to have more children out of a sense of duty towards expanding the population, which has been scattered and declining due to unending conflicts for many decades. 

• Researchers also concluded that this phenomenon emerged from living in the most violent conflict situation of the first Intifada.   

 

The Palestinian mothers have spent their entire motherhood under occupation and violence. Bree Akesson (Holding Everything Together: Palestinian Mothers Under Occupation, 2015, Demeter Press), who interviewed eighteen families in the West Bank and Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, notes that as a reaction to Israeli oppression, the women are focused on protecting their children and the family more. The family has become an extended and reliable institution in times of conflict. The Gazan women have volunteered as active relief workers since the first Intifada in the 1980s and 1990s. They have set up orphanages and clinics and built an informal network of aid primarily based on the foundations of the family.  

The statement I cited above, “reproduction is one of the few liberties which remains”, is from a paper written by Sara Randall and Marwan Khawaja and implies how oppressed the people of Palestine are. The way fertility, sex life, family, love, survival, and legacy operate at individual and political levels in these convoluted circumstances is too complex a scenario to comment on casually.   

Israelis also might be waging this “war of cradles” for similar reasons. Much investigation has not gone into it. Israel’s birth rate is the highest among OECD countries. 

The reactions of the bereaved mothers of both sides, as displayed daily on television, contain the painful yearning to find meaning and continuity in the deaths of their sons. When the narrative of patriotism and sacrifice proves insufficient to calm their grief, these women’s search turns to new life and the new hopes accompanying it. A newborn is a symbol of hope in the dark times- both for Gazan and Israeli mothers. This is a point where everyone, irrespective of their ideologies and religion, is just human and vulnerable. 

The Nazi Population Project

Though incomparable to the Israeli situation, Hitler’s Germany had an active and well-thought-out population project, the Lebensborn Programme (Hitler’s Stolen Children: The Shocking True Story of the Nazi Kidnapping Conspiracy, Ingrid von Oelhafen and Tim Tate, 2020, Collins). The project intended to increase Germany’s population, which they thought of as a pure race, the Aryan master race, and envisaged it to command world domination. The pregnant mothers were considered valued assets in Nazi Germany, and the Stasi even set about stealing children who had the so-called Aryan features, a core activity of the Lebensborn Programme.

The programme ran for 85 years and was later extensively documented by author and journalist Dorothee Schmitz-Koster. Her documentation is available online in the Arolsen Archives. Himmler envisioned this programme as the first step to develop a population pool of “racially and genetically valuable” children. In Germany and in many other countries that Hitler conquered, Lebensborn houses were established literally to breed such children. Single “Aryan” women were assigned to give birth to children in these homes, and the fathers were Stasi men who were already married. 

History keeps repeating, the modern version of the old story presenting itself in the conscious choices of the orthodox settler Jews in Israel who decide to give birth to more children. The increasing population of Israel enables it to expand its settler communities into lands rightfully owned by Palestinians. On the other end, backwardness and the fear of extinction and exile lead Palestinians on the same path. 

India’s Majority and Minority Population Narratives

If you compare India with this, one would realise that one of the mainstream Hindu majoritarian right-wing narratives is also about population and fertility. They believe in the threat of the increasing population of Muslims in India. The extremist Hindu groups have not shied away from asking Hindu families to give birth to more children and thus “preserve” the Hindu-ness of the nation. In 2022, Yati Narasinghanand Saraswati, a politically charged Hindu priest of the Dasna Devi temple in Uttar Pradesh, was among the many Hindu leaders who toed this line. A poster is displayed on his temple premises asking for Hindus to give birth to more than five children. 

In the book, ‘The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning, and Politics in India’, S Y Quraishi (2021, HarperCollins) busts the population myth about Muslims giving birth to more children to increase their political influence. Though the Muslim population in India has increased and the Hindu population decreased between 1951 and 2011, the data cited in the book shows that Muslims are taking to family planning in India faster than Hindus. Social scientists have observed, more than once and in many different contexts, that high fertility is associated with community backwardness rather than religion. This is why when one sees exceptions, as in Israel, one begins to doubt if it is a politically engineered project. Meanwhile, in India, there is no proof that Muslims, as a community, are undertaking such a political project. On the other hand, the Hindu right-wing has come out in public asking Hindus to procreate more. 

Motherhood and War   

The Israel-Gaza war has been the recent reminder that whenever war is fought, for the ordinary people, it is all about grief and loss, especially so for the mothers on both sides. One might remember the all-women Jeanette Rankin Brigade that marched in 1968 in Washington, DC, against the Vietnam War. Many women’s groups were involved in the protests against the Vietnam War. The protestors chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” referring to Lyndon B Johnson, the then President of the United States. Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to the US Congress, a leader inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. 

In the Indian literary and mythical magnum opus, ‘Mahabharata’, an epic moment unfolds when Gandhari, the mother of the 100 Kauravas who were the kings of Hastinapur, grieves her all 100 sons slain in the battle. A sublime lamentation that could fill our hearts with pain, the words of Gandhari are an eternal reminder about war and the futile loss of lives that it begets. Later in the story, the entire lineage of the faction of cousins who won the war, the Pandavas, is wiped out in a final act of carnage commissioned by the dying Kaurava King Duryodhana, the elder brother, from his deathbed. Panchali, the mother of the murdered children, is left to grieve and is the first to die on the Pandava side when they finally set out on their last walk to the netherworld. One could imagine that she might have had no life left in her after all the violence she had witnessed and the children she had lost. 

In a way, the story again reminds one of the Palestinians and Israelis, who have been distant cousins from an ancient time. World literature has been rife with such stories of grief, tales of wars between people once united by lineage, culture, language, and people who can easily coexist if they decide so, and drenched by the weeping of mothers on both sides of such conflicts, as is world history.   

The meaning of motherhood can vary drastically. On one extreme, women like the Palestinian and Israeli mothers give birth to more children only to be sacrificed at the altar of war. On the other end, the Rwandan and Bosnian mothers raise children born out of rape and genocide. The African mothers stand silent, witnesses to their progeny turned into child soldiers and sent to wage bloody wars. The repertoire of motherhood also must include the many mothers who, with agency, negotiate with violence, and sometimes, out of conviction and belief in various faith systems or political systems, fight in physical battles and send out their sons to die. Yet, the meaning of motherhood for a woman, ultimately, is about life preservation and not about destroying life.  

There are combat mothers in the Western world who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and continue to be sent to fight in remote lands, to come back to their children from the battlefields and to find them distant and depressed. Many of these women are single parents, another complex topic for a later discourse.  

The inconsolable mothers of Gaza still cry out loud and often proclaim to believe that their sons have become martyrs for a greater cause. Yet, even the television images tell us that they are struggling to see it that way in the face of a loss that runs deep into their wombs. 

Israel has a policy of recruiting women as combat soldiers. These young women are propaganda material of empowerment and bravery for the country. How would the Israeli parents ensure the legacy of these daughters, the women soldiers, if one is to follow their logic when they use the semen from their dead sons to bring new offspring to this world?  A strange gender question manifests there. 

There has been no dearth of philosophical narratives about the contradiction between war and the human inclination towards life preservation. Children and soldiers reflect this contradiction at its sublime best. To hurt a child is the greatest evil act. For the mothers on both sides, the soldiers are children, their children. They grieve separately and by design within the parameters of an imagined nationhood, oblivious to the suffering of the mothers on the other side of the fence.