“Who Is Entitled to Bear Children?”

Introduction

The United States made headlines with its apathetic response to the coronavirus in 2020. While the virus ravaged Black and Brown communities, which made up a disproportionate number of the Covid-19 cases and related hospitalizations, the administration under Donald Trump turned the other cheek. Analysis by The Washington Post found that Black-majority counties had three times the coronavirus infection rate and almost six times the death rate of white-majority counties, highlighting the structural health and socioeconomic disparities that led to these devastating consequences. The Trump administration explicitly endorsed a herd immunity approach to the pandemic, putting older people, people with disabilities, and Black and Brown communities at risk.

On the other side of the globe, Israel made international headlines in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic for its quick and mass dissemination of the vaccine to its citizens, far exceeding rates in the United States, China, and Britain. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule in December of 2020, health minister Yuli Edelstein stated in an interview that Israel is “leading the world race thanks to our early preparations,” citing Israel’s health maintenance organizations’ reputation for efficiency and gathering reliable data.”1 Netanyahu was credited for announcing an initiative to send over one hundred thousand surplus jabs from its well-kept stock of Covid-19 vaccines, declaring that Israel had “more than enough” vaccines for its own population.2 While the international community applauded Israel for its rapid distribution of the vaccine to its citizens and the world’s most vulnerable people, Israel withheld its Covid-19 vaccines for approximately five million stateless Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—what many journalists and analysts refer to as “medical apartheid.”3 Israel has rejected any responsibility for providing or facilitating vaccines to Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, despite that from 1967 until the present day, Israel exercises overarching control over these areas (and despite the fact that Israel has provided vaccines for its own citizens living in illegal West Bank settlements). Edelstein’s rationale was that it is not Israel’s legal obligation to provide Palestinians with vaccination, stating that Israel has no more obligation to them than the Palestinian minister of health must “take care of dolphins in the Mediterranean.”4

The United States’ and Israel’s different responses to the pandemic—the United States charged as apathetic, while Israel hailed as responsible—reveal how the two states are differently implicated in racial distributions of livability. These attitudes toward the coronavirus are haunted by eugenic ideas and language about how best to “improve” humanity by controlling both the reproduction and the visibility of individuals considered to be unfit and, therefore, unable to contribute to society. Public health initiatives have historically been shaped by institutional prejudice regarding what kinds of people should be included in the “public” when in pursuit of the public good. For most of the twentieth century, eugenics took shape within both colonial and nation-building projects, taking forms such as marriage restriction, sterilization abuse, and immigration reform. This article examines how the Immigration Act of 1924 in the United States and the 1950 Law of Return in Israel relied on eugenics language that shaped racial, gendered, and ableist ideas of immigration, settler colonialism, and nationhood. These laws mark moments in which the United States and Israel dealt with problems with new immigrants and Indigenous people. For both, the immigrant was often marked as a source of disease, crime, and social ills that might contaminate local societies. However, the native was marked differently as a menace to society that needed to be eliminated. Given this, American and Israeli lawmakers passed immigration legislation to include or exclude so as to create their national body politics within ongoing settler colonial projects.

The Immigration Act of 1924 in the United States and the Law of Return of 1950 in Israel must be contextualized within their ongoing settler colonial projects. Race-making and access to territory are key pillars of U.S. and Israeli settler colonialism. For settler colonialism, the principal objective of governments and settler-citizens is the acquisition of land for permanent occupation and domination. This required descendants of Europeans in their expansion to become and remain politically dominant over Indigenous Peoples. The construction of these settler societies was not simply about the movement of capital and building of overseas empires but also about settlers and other types of migrants settling into territories with preexisting Indigenous societies, requiring their removal or elimination. This manifested via physical and cultural genocide, the alienation and disruption of Indigenous societies, and enacting new economies and governance by settlers.5 The structure of settler invasion functions through the ongoing processes of Indigenous elimination and subordination of racialized outsiders—as well as through the creation and enforcement of laws that maintain the ongoing invasion. I frame this history of immigration and eugenics through the lens of settler colonialism to showcase how immigration legislation depended on different bodies to labor and populate the nation. While the United States depended on the labor of enslaved Black people and racialized Asians, it was white Europeans who were considered fit for citizenship. Like Native Americans, settlers imagined Black Americans as undesirable American subjects whose presumed racial inferiority informed eugenicist attempts to create a homogeneous (white) nation. Israel, however, barred all African Jews from becoming citizens because they were not considered authentic Jews and relied on cheap labor from Arab Jews. Thus, settler colonialism depends on this subordination of racialized outsiders to extract value from the invaded and expropriated Indigenous lands, secure its colonial foothold, and fuel its expansion.

In the traditional sense, eugenics is based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and reinforced by Mendelian genetics, wherein it is believed that genes pass from one generation to the next and that certain genes or traits could be eliminated by simply restricting the reproduction among those who carry those genes. Eugenics manifested in various forms, such as advocating increased procreation among those considered “fit,” or positive eugenics, or by instituting restrictions against the so-called undesirables, such as controlling immigration, restricting marriage, segregation, and sterilization, known as negative eugenics. While eugenics is often associated with Nazi Germany, which “was indeed the most murderous manifestation of eugenics,” it was in fact “a movement that attracted many followers. In every place it took a unique, local aspect.”6 This article examines how immigration legislation—and restriction—is itself a eugenics project by determining who can and cannot enter the nation and setting medical criteria about which bodies are fit to serve the nation.

During a heightened moment of rapid immigration for both nations, the United States and Israel promoted racialized and ableist ideas of the individual body to construct a strong, physically fit collectivity to build the nation. These nations found themselves as part of a changing landscape—reshaped by mass immigration and its supposed threats to whiteness and Europeanness—but still threatened by the presence of Indigenous Peoples. Situating these two laws in relation to one another illustrates what their parallel and intersecting visions of national belonging reveal about Indigeneity and immigration as conditions central to American and Israeli identity. As these examples show, the language of eugenics often informed immigration policy and how policymakers imagined what the future of the nation would look like. The United States and Israel constitute interesting sites of analysis not only because of their ideological status as Western and progressive nations but also because they are nations marked as democratic, diverse, and hubs for immigrants. This is also an attempt to think across histories and geographies to understand how different variations of race, whiteness, and Indigeneity function in different spaces. In addition to thinking across time and space, these laws similarly help us understand the interlockings between racial and colonial medicine, immigration, and settler colonialism.

Constructing the Undesirable Through the Immigration Act of 1924

Following the Civil War, the United States witnessed a significant increase in immigrants, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe. These new immigrants were differentiated from those older immigrants of the antebellum era who came predominantly from northeast Europe. New immigrants were perceived as deficient in terms of race, social class, and their relationship to Anglo-Saxonism. Given that the native population at the time was lower than three hundred thousand in 1910, many white Americans saw the “immigrant problem” as a more pressing national concern than the “Indian problem.”7 As a result of this influx, many Americans developed an intense hostility toward immigrants, including advocating for the restriction of immigration. The United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States—the first immigration act to ban an ethnic group on the presumption that they posed a danger to the public.8 This law prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years and barred all Chinese immigrants from naturalized citizenship, with the exception of “merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats.”9 The Chinese Exclusion Act not only helped shape twentieth-century United States race- and class-based immigration policy, but it was the first to legalize and reinforce the need to restrict, exclude, and deport immigrants deemed “undesirable.”10 This established understandings and categories of desirability and, as importantly, whiteness of other immigrant groups based on who is deemed assimilable into the United States.

This legislation not only racialized Chinese immigrants as threatening, permanently alien, and inferior based on their race, culture, labor, and so-called abnormal gender relations; purportedly biological arguments about Asians shaped the enforcement of the law and incited moral panic among white Americans. In 1889, the United States Supreme Court described Chinese immigrants as “vast hordes of people crowding in upon us” and as “a different race . . . dangerous to [America’s] peace and security.”11 For instance, the Chinese Exclusion Act, with the influence of the previous 1875 Page Act, targeted independent women wanting to immigrate to the United States, on the grounds that they were perceived to be immoral or guilty of sexual misdeeds.12 The 1903 Immigration Act banned all sex workers from migrating to the United States, on the premise that they were “likely to become public charges.”13 The Immigration Act of 1917—other names include the Asiatic Barred Zone Act or the Literacy Act—imposed a literacy test in English on immigrants over the age of sixteen and excluded immigrants from most of Asia and the Pacific Islands.14 Although this act succeeded in restricting immigrants from Asia, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe arrived in the United States in significant numbers, pushing immigration policymakers to pass the Emergency Quota Act of 1921.15 This law, also known as the Per Centum Law, limited the number of immigrants admitted annually from any country in the Eastern Hemisphere to 3 percent of the number of residents from that country living in the United States at the time of the 1910 Census. These legislations were justified by local officials through the rhetoric of “protection” of the nation. San Francisco lawyer H. N. Clement spoke before a California State Senate Committee in 1876, proclaiming: “A nation has a right to do everything that can secure it from threatening danger and to keep at a distance whatever is capable of causing it ruin.”16

The language around the Chinese Exclusion Act and the laws targeting Asian migrants reveals how citizenship in the United States was premised on racialized discourses of desirable and undesirable bodies. These discourses paved the way to the creation of the Immigration Act of 1924, which is arguably the most restrictive and racist immigration law to have been passed by the United States Congress. Upon signing the bill, President Calvin Coolidge declared, “America must be kept American,” winning the support of the Ku Klux Klan and the recognition of Adolf Hitler.17 The Immigration Act introduced a quota system based on national origins. According to section 1 of the Immigration Act, “The annual quota of any nationality shall be 2 per centum of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the United States census of 1890.”18 This meant that policymakers used quotas based on the proportion of the national origin of the entire U.S. white population in the 1920 Census, inflating the numbers and proportions of Northern and Western Europeans, outnumbering other groups such as Slavs, Jews, Poles, and Italians. By limiting the number of new immigrants from undesirable nations—the supposedly backward European countries (Eastern and Southern Europeans) and Asian countries—the Immigration Act legislated the “racial and ethnic contours of the country and instituted new hierarchies of difference and (racial) desirability.” Restrictionists opposed the growing population of Jews, Italians, and Slavs, who had, for decades, contributed their brawn and sweat to America’s industrialization and urbanization, as the degraded races of Europe. Numerical restrictions instituted by this act “created a new class of person within the national body—illegal aliens,” where the status of legality and illegality became an abstract construction “having less to do with experience than with numbers on paper.”19 The new system also required immigrants to apply for and receive visas before arriving, as well as established the U.S. Border Patrol to monitor and enforce this law.

This law also reified notions of whiteness and homogeneity of the nation by prioritizing immigration from Western and Northern Europe, much of whose immigration went unmarked. The Immigration Act of 1924 was posited as a victory of racism, nativism, scientific racism, and eugenics—“the decades-long project to establish the biological superiority of ‘whites,’ especially ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and ‘Nordics.’”20 The 1924 act sought to solidify whiteness in two ways: the assimilation of European ethnic people as white Americans and the continued exclusion of Asians based on race. Prominent eugenicists became politically involved in immigration legislation. The founder of the Human Betterment Foundation, Ezra S. Gosney, studied California’s sterilization program and concluded that California had benefited from the sterilization of prison and other institutional inmates.21 He believed that a massive sterilization program could reduce the number of so-called mentally defective persons by one-half in “three or four generations” and advocated for eugenics in federal immigration legislation.22 He viewed foreign immigration as incompatible with “American blood,” arguing that mixing the two would destroy the quality of the country’s native stock. Given this, eugenicists lobbied for selective immigration restriction to protect the nation’s racial homogeneity. They followed the social Darwinist assumption that a person’s economic and social statuses are tied to heredity. Eugenicists believed that foreign immigration would increase the occurrence of disease, illiteracy, poverty, and crime.

Congressman Albert Johnson, the bill’s cosponsor, consulted frequently with leading eugenicists, such as Harry H. Laughlin and Madison Grant. Laughlin, who served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, took great interest in the compulsory sterilization of the so-called unfit. One of his most significant contributions was the drafting of a model eugenic sterilization law where states could create their own laws around sterilization of mentally and physically disabled people. In fact, by the late 1920s, twenty-four states had passed involuntary sterilization laws, which were used to sterilize mainly low-income (and often Black) inmates of what were then called “institutions for the feeble-minded.”23 Laughlin expressed extensive statistical testimony to the United States Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924, claiming that there was “excessive” insanity among immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and that most Jews were born “feebleminded.”24 President Johnson appointed Laughlin as an expert eugenics agent to the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, where he helped design the language for the law for the medical selection of immigrants from Europe.25 He produced several reports for this committee, warning of the “contamination of American family stocks by alien hereditary degeneracy.”26

The 1924 Immigration Act reiterated that “immigration is a long-time investment in family stocks rather than a short-time investment in productive labor,” showing that immigration is just as much about preserving the character of the white race as it is about merely solving an economic problem.27 Earlier acts led to the creation of the U.S. Public Health Service, which conducted rigorous medical inspections at ports of entry, migrant quarantines, and deportations. All immigrants were to be medically screened prior to approval, and those having mental or physical defects that can constitute “public charges” or serve as a burden to the state are to be completely denied entry. This includes immigrants suffering from “idiocy, insanity, imbecility, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, constitutional psychopathic inferiority, chronic alcoholism, tuberculosis or from any loathsome or dangerous contagious disease”; these were constructed as medical illnesses that were either contagious or capable of “contaminating” the gene pool.28 This expands our understanding of immigration as something that restricts based on health and ability. The discourses behind the Immigration Act of 1924, including the circulation of the actual language of the law as it relates to the restriction of people with physical and mental ailments, gets taken up in other contexts, including Nazi Germany and in Palestine.

The Immigration Act of 1924 and the making of the proper American subject through eugenics similarly worked in relation to the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples.29 Shortly after the 1924 Immigration Act, the United States passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which gave American citizenship to Indigenous Peoples and weakened tribal sovereignty. It is important to note that by this time, the United States attempted other methods to assimilate Indigenous Peoples, including federal policy, neglect, separation from Indigenous communities, diminishing territory, and the removal of children to off-reservation boarding schools. Previous laws, such as the General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act), became a means to naturalize Native allottees as citizens. Assimilation is part of settler colonialism’s logic of elimination, designed to reconfigure the American gene pool by diluting the presence of Indigenous Peoples and maintaining a white majority. The Indian Citizenship Act operated alongside the Immigration Act of 1924 because it sought to create racial distinctions of “good” versus “bad” (Americans and immigrants), while eliminating the presence of Indigenous Peoples altogether.

Zionism and the Turn to Eugenics

The 1948 establishment of Israel as a settler colonial state led to the dispossession and expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians. Zionism is an ideology and political movement that subjects that land of Palestine and Palestinians to structural and violent forms of dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish state (what Palestinians call the “ongoing Nakba”). After its declaration in 1948, Israel legislated the Law of Return, granting every Jewish person the right to Israeli citizenship. According to the halacha (Jewish law), a Jew is a person who was born from a Jewish mother or has converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion. The amended version of the law in 1970 extended the right of return for Jewish people to include the grandchildren of Jews as well as their nuclear families. Israel exclusively uses the system of jus sanguinis (law of blood) to determine the citizenship of immigrants and their descendants. The Law of Return worked in contrast with the law that prevented over 750,000 Palestinians the right to return to their homeland. Ideas of who should be allowed to immigrate and become full-fledged citizens of the state were formulated prior to 1948. In every settler society project, settlers perceive the land as a “new world—available not only for immigration, but also for establishing a ‘new and better society.’”30 The Israeli settler colonial project constructed their new society as a rehabilitation of an old one—the biblical Judaic state—and the New Jerusalem was to be built over the Old Jerusalem. In the nineteenth century, European Jewish settlers began heeding the call of the Zionist movement, which positioned itself as a refuge from centuries of antisemitism, persecution, and genocide. Despite being geographically, linguistically, and culturally divided, Zionists proposed that Jewish people were indeed a race; however, they classified them as a supposedly low and racially degenerate race, but capable of uplift. Political Zionism desired to rehabilitate Jewish people from their seemingly debilitated and fragmented state in the diaspora by advocating for statehood in Palestine. In fact, Theodor Herzl, one of the founding members of political Zionism, contends that antisemitism was a response to a social irritant, rather than as a symptom of Europe’s continuing anti-Jewish pathology, and that securing Jewish autonomy in Palestine would “normalize” the Jewish nation.31 Other political Zionists believed that the Jews of Europe were physically and morally weak, parasitical, feminine, and without roots, proposing that the “muscular Jew” should replace the meek and sickly Jew.32 Zionism sought to transform Jewishness not only into a national identity but also into a national body politic.

Because of this, the founding of the state posed several contradictions about who they wanted to immigrate into Israel. While Zionism constructed the new state as a homeland for all Jewish people, in practice, there were debates over whether a mass immigration would result in a loss of control over the character of the Zionist endeavor. Some claimed that Holocaust survivors and immigrants from Arab and North African countries may not assimilate quickly enough and posed a burden to Israeli society. Others contended that Jews from Africa were not authentically Jewish. Political Zionists agreed that the new society in Palestine needed to consist of young, healthy, and productive individuals who would become Jewish farmers and rebuild the Jewish nation. Liat Ben-Moshe writes that “physical labor, return to nature and fitness, conquest of the ‘wilderness’ (with Palestinians in it) and military power were seen as the antidote to the scholastic Diaspora Jew.”33 The logic was that Zionism can instill the discipline, mental agility, and physical strength to produce stronger, more physically fit, and confident Jewish bodies, necessary to reverse the long-held representation of the weak and overly intellectual Jew. Constructing this “New Jew” collectivity is predominantly embodied in the trope of the pioneer: secular, strong, masculine, healthy, and physically perfect. Herzl proposes that the Jewish people would never fully assimilate into European culture and needed to build a European country, outside of Europe. While the Law of Return advocated for all to return to Palestine, the emphasis on normalization and survival of the state depended on a European (Ashkenazi) majority, which required the violent management and reproductive control of Black, Arab, and Jewish bodies.34

Discourses referring to the decline of the physical and mental health of Jewish people and the Zionist solution to “cure” them physically, mentally, economically, and politically coincided with debates concerning the racial nature of Jewish people. Given that the Zionist project was based on Jewish “racial improvement,” it coincided with the eugenics movement that dominated Europe. Eugenics gave Zionists the framework by which to understand supposed Jewish degeneracy and weakness.35 Antisemitism, or the racialization of the Jewish subject as the “internal other . . . as a nomad . . . rootless and parasitic,” is in fact inherent to the political project of the West, particularly Europe. Zionists understood they could not assimilate into Europe. However, they still wanted to be a part of it, which “required their physical departure from its shores; through this process, the Jew could be (finally) of, even if not in, Europe.”36 The physical departure from Europe to Palestine was the means to Jewish people to finally join the “Christian West,” which included internalizing ideologies about Jews as a race who are capable of self-improvement. Zionist racial and nationalist discourses reveal that Zionist “men of science” in both Palestine and Europe appropriated eugenic language to describe Jews as a race undergoing a process of degeneration and a nationalist project toward “regeneration” and “racial improvement.”37

The Law of Return was supported by all the political parties in Israel as setting forth “the character and special mission of the State of Israel, as a state that carries the vision of the Redemption of Israel.”38 The language of the Law of Return addressed the medical selection of immigrants, viewed as an urgent public health issue of the time. One iteration of the Law of Return stipulated that not regulating immigration of Jews to Israel “could endanger public health.” Medical selection—or, as it was labeled in the 1950s, aliyah muvcheret (selective immigration)—revealed the tensions between the young country’s desire for immigrants and the fear of the economic and social consequences of such urgent absorption. During the early years of the state, Hadassah Medical Organization and the workers’ sick fund Kupat Cholim formed Israel’s health-care system.39 Other health bodies included the Ministry of Health, the Jewish Agency, the JOINT, the World Zionist Organization, and other local organizations. New Jewish immigrants automatically received three months of coverage exclusively through Kupat Cholim; after three weeks, they were free to choose other options from the sick funds. This became even more of a necessity after the State of Israel’s declaration, during which it absorbed hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom came with illnesses that required hospitalization, including tuberculosis, syphilis, trachoma, and ringworm, overwhelming the new young state.40

The subject of reproduction has always been and continues to be central to Zionism and the Israeli settler colonial project. Alongside immigration reform, Zionists depended on European (Ashkenazi) women to reproduce, returning to traditional gender roles of mothering. These women bore the responsibility for birthing healthy and physically fit children “for the glory of the state of Israel.”41 The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, writes in his autobiography, “For the survival and security of the State of Israel, a higher birthrate and increased immigration are essential.”42Although no formal Israeli policy had been codified, Israel found ways to promote Jewish over Arab population growth through immigration laws, economic incentives, targeted modernization programs in Arab communities, and creating governmental coverage of reproductive health services for its citizens. Because Israel was founded as a dual Jewish and democratic state, Ben-Gurion was not able to advocate for prenatal laws that explicitly favored Jews over Arab non-Jews, so he placed the responsibility of demographics on the wealthy and influential Jewish Agency, setting a precedent of crafting legislation that introduced a Jewish population preference indirectly. This pronatalist policy of increasing the Jewish birth rate worked simultaneously with its antinatalist approach to eliminating Palestinian reproduction. Targeting Palestinian reproduction, discursively and materially, is structural to Israel’s settler colonial project of racialized elimination. Zionists characterized native Palestinians as an undesirable problem population whose fertility and reproduction were highly threatening. Through Israeli discourse, images, and media, Palestinians are often represented as breeders, irrational out of control reproducers, with the strong connotation that they “need to stop breeding.” For instance, Palestinian women, including pregnant women, were targeted during the massacres and mass evictions in 1948. Controlling Palestinian reproduction is also manifested through home demolitions, conditions in Israeli prisons, checkpoints and closures restricting access to prenatal and postnatal care, and airstrikes targeting Palestinian homes and hospitals in Gaza.

Early Zionist settlers did not simply encourage Jewish women to birth a large Jewish population to increase the demographics against native Palestinians; it was also a priority to encourage immigrants to implement practices designed for proper child-rearing. Organizations such as Hadassah, the Women’s International Zionist Organization, and Kupat Cholim brought family health stations or clinics called Tipat Chalav (A Drop of Milk) as well as “Mother and Child clinics” to Israel during the British Mandate and continued to do so after 1948.43 These stations administered vaccinations to Jewish infants and taught young mothers how to diaper, feed, and bathe their offspring. Hadassah emphasized the status of the mother and child as a cornerstone in revitalizing and building the nation. Yosef Meir, medical director of Kupat Cholim, “brought young mothers the gospel of eugenics, warned them about degeneracy, and transmitted the message to them about their obligation and responsibility for bearing only healthy children,” as well as advocated for the castration of the people experiencing mental illness.44 In response to the early leaders’ policies toward increasing the Jewish population, Meir warned that too many immigrants would be counterproductive to the new nation: “We have no interest in the tenth child or even the seventh in poor families from the East. . . . In today’s reality, we should pray frequently for a second child in a family that is part of the intelligentsia. The poor classes of the population must not be instructed to have many children but rather restricted.”45

Settler colonialism and militarization in Israel depend on the disablement of both Jews and Palestinians. Adria L. Imada argues that (settler) colonial projects demanded “able body minds from subordinated subjects,” where colonial projects imposed impossible regimes of self-regulation its subjects would not be able to perform.46 Colonized subjects were “always already figured and constituted as disabled, whether because of their perceived unproductivity as laborers; embodied racial-sexual differences; ‘unchaste’ proclivities of their women; susceptibility to moral contagion and infectious diseases; or inability to learn.” The labor movements in Israel held firm to the notion that welfare depends on productivity, which in turn depends on the development of the right human stock.

Many Zionist leaders and physicians responded to this crisis through eugenics, by encouraging selective immigration policies and institutionalizing people experiencing mental illness.47 This similarly worked to define the racial and ethnic contours of the new state to “rehabilitate” the Jewish people. Arthur Ruppin, an early Zionist thinker and founder of the city of Tel Aviv, called for the “purification of the ‘Jewish race,’” writing that it was “desirable that only the racially pure come to the land [of Israel].”48 Known as the “father of Jewish Sociology” who eventually founded the Department of the Sociology of Jews at Hebrew University, he advocated for a eugenics approach to Zionist nationalism, arguing that Israel must adopt a selective policy for immigration to Israel. In his text The Sociology of Jews, he writes: “While in Europe many are calling for a eugenic policy, the Jews . . . have never engaged in a ‘self-cleansing’ of their race, but rather, every child, be it the most sickly, to grow and marry and have children like him. Even the mentally retarded, blind, and deaf were allowed to marry. To keep the purity of our race such Jews must abstain from childbearing.”49 He advocated to “limit ourselves to the physical appurtenances of immigrants, and reject those individuals who are dangerous by virtue of some infectious disease (syphilis, advanced tuberculosis, etc.) or who are likely to become public charges (the mentally deranged, epileptics, and those who are prevented by sickness from making a living).”50 Zionist physicians recommended that those with serious ailments posed a burden on the state and should be barred from immigration. For instance, Meir, as director general of the Ministry of Health, argued that those with tuberculosis were overwhelming Israeli hospitals and must be cured abroad before being allowed into Israel. This eugenicist approach did not simply affect selective immigration; it extended to those immigrants who arrived and settled in Israel, constructing new racial meanings for the different Jewish groups. A lack of hygiene became associated with the native population while it was necessary for European settlers to be clean. Early settlers emphasized hygienic education as a core component in the proper development of the body and mind, from teaching new immigrants how to wash their bodies, how to sleep, how to work, and how to engage in sexual intercourse. Discourses of hygiene became a part of “purifying” the Jewish race, emphasizing European models to construct this New Jewish collectivity in opposition to native Palestinians. Palestinians were regarded as having an “ignorance in basic hygienic questions” related not only to their bodies but also to their land and the climate.51 Teaching newly immigrated settlers proper hygiene became synonymous with modernization and bringing Western progress to Palestine: “And let nobody shut our eyes by comparing us to our Arab neighbors, since it is not by their words that we live; we are here to bring the West—what is good and improved in it—not only to ourselves, but to the entire backward Orient which must rise to a clean hygienic life.”52

The Zionist desire to bring hygiene to Palestine to distance itself from the East not only produced a distinction between Jews and Arabs but also created differences between European Jews and so-called Oriental Jews, including Yemenite and North African Jews who immigrated to Israel during the late 1940s and 1950s. In his writings, Ruppin explicitly “emphasized the superiority of the Ashkenazi Jews to the Sephardic and Oriental Jews, in terms of intelligence, creativity, mathematical ability, agility, imagination and hygiene.”53 He argued that “with proper treatment [they] could become a new, productive Jewish-Yemenite type, capable of serving the new nation that was evolving.” An article written in 1966 in Davar—a Hebrew-language newspaper published during the era of the British Mandate until 1966—claims that Yemenite immigrants brought diseases from Israel from their homeland, suggesting that disease is biologically inherent to all Arabs. It continues that Yemenite immigrants were not only “disease ridden” but also “ignorant of basic baby care such as bathing or changing a diaper,” a belief that the Mizrahim were incapable of taking care of their own.54 In order for the Mizrahim to assimilate into Israeli society and become a part of the New Jewish collectivity, the Jew must be severed from the Arab. To “become European,” they must dismiss or negate their “Easternness” (i.e., Arabness); often this was done through violence and force: “Yemenites were shorn of their sidekicks, religious artifacts were stolen by Zionist emissaries (with false promises of return), babies were kidnapped. . . . Mizrahim under the control of Ashkenazi religious authorities, meanwhile, had to send their children to Ashkenazi orthodox schools, where they learned the ‘correct’ forms of practicing Judaism.”55 While colonized people are typically figured as disabled, due to their “perceived unproductivity as laborers,” Zionists actually racialized the Mizrahim as “natural workers” and disposable labor, which made bringing them to Israel via the Law of Return more attractive.56 The transformation of Arab Jews into the figure of a New Jew (European Jew) occurred through productive labor, especially agricultural labor.57 Labor Zionists understood their role to be replacing native Palestinians as the primary labor force, as the latter were thought to lack the intelligence and creativity that Europeans possess: “This is the simple, natural workers capable of doing any kind of work, without shame, without philosophy, and also without poetry. . . . The Yemenite of today still exists at the same backward.”58 This meant that while Israel accepted Yemenite Jews through the Law of Return to outnumber Palestinians and physically expand its territory, they were never envisioned as part of the New Jewish collectivity.

Conclusion

At the time of writing this article, Israel has entered almost three hundred days of its genocidal project against the Gaza Strip, killing over forty thousand Palestinians and decimating more than half of the territory to the point of no return. Imposing an even stricter blockade, more than 90 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of starvation. Given that children make up half of Gaza’s population, a third of these deaths have been children, transforming Gaza into a “graveyard for children,” as U.N. Secretary General António Guterres phrased it, and as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child,” according to UNICEF Director Catherine Russell.59 Israeli politicians have utilized eugenic language meant to eliminate the entire Palestinian population, including “wiping out [entire] families, their mothers and their children,” referring to them as “human animals,” and threatening to bring Gaza to ruins.60 The intentional language of inciting violence to kill mothers and children is reminiscent of how Israel historically demonized and targeted Palestinian women and Palestinian reproduction as a method of Zionist settler colonialism by literally cutting off generations. This is manifested materially as Israel continues to target intimate spaces such as homes, hospitals, and shelters, wiping over nine hundred families from the Gaza Civil Registry.

Given that the goal of eugenics is the creation of an ideal, genetically pure population, the annihilation of Palestinian families is part and parcel of the eugenicist nature of Zionism, designed to bring Palestine to “a land without a people.”61 With more than 2,100 Palestinian children under two killed (including over 150 born and killed within these ten months of ongoing genocide), more than 1,000 children with lost limbs, family homes with children targeted with precision, and the lack of hospitals for pregnant mothers to safely deliver in, this most recent onslaught by Israel is a war on Palestinian reproduction. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office iterated that this recent attack is a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness,” returning to the haunting legacies of European Jews’ mission to “lighten” the land of Palestine.62 Since “eugenics functions as a racialized and ableist science of preserving valued life at the expense of devalued life,” Israel’s recent warfare is aimed to bring Gaza, and the Palestinians who inhabit it, to ruins to pave the way for the expansion of Israeli land and life, with the financial and ideological backing of the United States.63

While I reflect on the urgency of what it means to contest ongoing genocide in this contemporary moment, while watching United States presidential candidates boast over who supports genocide more, it is evident that the legacies of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Law of Return of 1950 have not disappeared. Eugenics continues to play a role in these intersecting visions of national belonging, as the United States continues to crack down on immigration from “shithole” countries and Israel debilitates Palestinian life in the West Bank and Gaza.64 These laws were also about reproducing the purity of white and European bodies, maintaining that only certain bodies should and could biologically reproduce for the state, while hindering others from reproducing, including undesirable migrants and Indigenous Peoples. Placing these laws alongside one another reveals how language around protecting (white and ableist) life, security, and labor becomes embedded within a racist and eugenicist logic of management, containment, and elimination. Understanding the haunting afterlives of these laws as they relate to the restrictions of the border or ongoing genocide can allow more building and solidarities across the spaces of settler colonialism, abolition, and reproductive justice.

Bayan Abusneineh is assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at the Ohio State University. Her research examines the relationship between racial and reproductive politics in Palestine and Israel, with an emphasis on genocide, family separation, and intimacy. She is an active member of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at Ohio State University, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and a board member of Baladna: Palestine Society of Columbus.

Notes

1. 1. Jemima McEvoy, “How Israel Became a World Leader in Vaccinating Against the Coronavirus,” New York Times, October 3, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/world/middleeast/israel-coronavirus-vaccines.html. According to the National Health Insurance Law of 1995, health care in Israel is universal and participation in a medical insurance plan is compulsory. All Israeli residents are entitled to basic health care as a fundamental right and are required to enroll in one of four official health insurance organizations, known as Kupat Holim (קופת חולים, “Sick Funds”), which are run as not-for-profit organizations and are prohibited by law from denying any Israeli resident membership.

2. 2. Associated Press and Times of Israel Staff, “Netanyahu: Israel Giving Countries Vaccines ‘for Things We Already Received,’” Times of Israel, February 24, 2021, https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-israel-giving-countries-vaccines-forthings-we-already-received/.

3. 3. Mouin Rabbani, “Medical Apartheid in Palestine: The Case of Covid-19 Vaccination,” Jadaliyya, March 10, 2021, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42475.

4. 4. Philip Weiss, “Israeli Health Minister Likens His Obligation to Vaccinate Palestinians to Palestinians’ Responsibility to Care for ‘Dolphins in the Mediterranean,’” Mondoweiss, January 24, 2021, https://mondoweiss.net/2021/01/israeli-health-minister-likens-his-obligation-to-vaccinate-palestinians-to-taking-care-of-dolphins-in-the-mediterranean/.

5. 5. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.

6. 6. Sivan Tal, “On the Racial Basis of Zionism,” Mondoweiss, May 28, 2020, https://mondoweiss.net/2020/05/on-the-racial-basis-of-zionism/; Sachlav Stoler-Liss, “‘Mothers Birth the Nation’: The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israel Parents’ Manuals,” Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (2003): 104–17.

7. 7. Christina Stanciu, The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924 (Yale University Press, 2023).

8. 8. Chinese Exclusion Act, Pub. L. No. 47-126, 22 Stat. 58 (1882).

9. 9. Erica Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History 21, no. 3 (2002): 36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27502847.

10. 10. Lee, “Chinese Exclusion Example,” 39.

11. 11. Lee, “Chinese Exclusion Example,” 39.

12. 12. The Page Act of 1875, Pub. L. No. 43-141, 18 Stat. 477, Ch. 141.

13. 13. Immigration Act of 1903, Pub. L. No. 57-162, 32 Stat. 1213.

14. 14. Immigration Act of 1917, Pub. L. No. 64-301, 39 Stat. 874.

15. 15. Emergency Quota Act, Pub. L. No. 67-5, 42 Stat. 5 (1921).

16. 16. Quoted in Stephanie Hinnershitz, “The Chinese Exclusion Act,” Bill of Rights Institute, https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-chinese-exclusion-act.

17. 17. President Calvin Coolidge, First Annual Message, December 6, 1923.

18. 18. Immigration Act of 1924, Pub. L. No. 68-139, 43 Stat. 153; Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 67–92.

19. 19. Ngai, “Architecture of Race,” 69.

20. 20. Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 69.

21. 21. Southern California was part of these national trends and a hotbed of eugenics in the state. An alliance of educators, social workers, clinicians, and juvenile authorities advocated for the confinement and sterilization of disabled and “defective” individuals in such Southern California state institutions as Pacific Colony and Patton. Pasadena legislators implemented eugenic values by passing segregated zoning laws and instituting an unequal educational system. Jill Shook, “Pasadena’s Racialized History,” Making Housing and Community Happen, June 23, 2020, https://makinghousinghappen.net/2020/06/23/pasadenas-racialized-history/.

22. 22. “Second Report of the Sub-Committee on Selective Immigration of the Eugenics Committee of the United States of America,” Ezra S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe Collection, E. S. Gosney Papers and Records of the Human Betterment Foundation, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, pg. 1.

23. 23. Even though the application of these laws was at times resisted and challenged, by the mid 1930s at least thirty thousand individuals had been sterilized under them. New sterilization laws were added in the late 1930s and the number of sterilizations increased. Altogether, some seventy thousand individuals were sterilized in the United States between 1907 and the end of World War 2.

24. 24. “Second Report of the Sub-Committee on Selective Immigration,” 5.

25. 25. Ezra S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe Collection.

26. 26. “Second Report of the Sub-Committee on Selective Immigration,” 6.

27. 27. Robert DeC. Ward, “Our New Immigration Policy,” Foreign Affairs 3, no. 1 (September 1924): 104.

28. 28. “Second Report of the Sub-Committee on Selective Immigration,” 3.

29. 29. Other laws, such as Virginia’s Preservation of Racial Integrity Law of 1924, which outlawed interracial marriage, aided in the eugenics project designed to maintain a white majority and keep from “diluting” the white population. “Preservation of Racial Integrity (1924),” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/preservation-of-racial-integrity-1924/.

30. 30. Nahla Abdo and Nira Yuval Davis, “Palestine, Israeli and the Zionist Settler Project,” in Unsettling Settler Societies, ed. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval Davis (Sage, 1995), 291.

31. 31. William Eichler, “Herzl’s Troubled Dream: The Origins of Zionism,” History Today 73, no. 6 (June 2023): https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/herzls-troubled-dream-origins-zionism.

32. 32. Sherene Seikaly and Max Ajl, “Of Europe: Zionism and the Jewish Other,” in Europe After Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality, ed. Agnes Czajka and Bora Isyar (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 122.

33. 33. Liat Ben-Moshe, “Movements at War? Disability and Anti-Occupation Activism in Israel,” in Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability, ed. Pamela Block et al. (Springer, 2015), 51.

34. 34. I expand elsewhere on Israel’s reproductive control over Black and Arab populations in both my dissertation (“Chosen and Imagined: Racial and Gendered Politics of Reproduction in Palestine and Israel” [University of California, San Diego, 2022]) and my article “(Re)producing the Israeli (European) Body: Zionism, Anti-Black Racism and the Depo-Provera Affair,” Feminist Review 128, no. 1 (2021): 96–113. In both pieces, I argue that the coerced inoculations of Depo-Provera against Ethiopian Jews in the 1990s and 2000s and the state-sponsored kidnappings of Yemenite Jews’ children in the 1950s and 1960s were both eugenics projects by the Israeli state, designed to maintain a white European nation.

35. 35. Dafna Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage, and the Creation of a ‘New Jewish Type,’” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 3 (2009): 592–609.

36. 36. Sherene Seikaly and Max Ajl, “Of Europe: Zionism and the Jewish Other,” in Europe After Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality, ed. Agnes Czajka and Bora Isyar (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 121.

37. 37. Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage,” 593.

38. 38. Nadav Davidovich and Shifra Shvarts, “Health and Hegemony: Preventative Medicine, Immigrants and the Israeli Melting Pot,” Israel Studies 9, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 154.

39. 39. Hadassah Collection, Women’s Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y.

40. 40. Davidovich and Shvarts, “Health and Hegemony,” 152; “Minutes of Meeting of Immigrants’ Medical Service Committee, Held on April 9, 1945,” Immigrant Medical Services Folder, Hadassah Collection, Women’s Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y.

41. 41. The language around producing healthy and fit children haunts Israeli reproductive politics today, with the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies’ cases of abortion of genetically defective fetuses, as well as a small percentages of fetuses with Down syndrome.

42. 42. David Ben Gurion, Israel: a Personal History (Herzl Press, 1972), 838.

43. 43. “Coordination of Work in Health Centres (A Translation),” Immigrant Medical Services—Correspondence Folder, R62-HMO, Hadassah Collection, Women’s Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y.

44. 44. Stoler-Liss, “‘Mothers Birth the Nation,’” 105.

45. 45. Stoler-Liss, “‘Mothers Birth the Nation,’” 111.

46. 46. Adria L. Imada, “A Decolonial Disability Studies?,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017): https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5984.

47. 47. “Memorandum: On the Arrangements Regarding the Transfer of Immigrants’ Medical Services to HMO as from October 1st, 1946,” Immigrant Medical Services—Correspondence Folder, R62-HMO, Hadassah Collection, Women’s Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y.

48. 48. Bayan Abusneineh, “(Re)producing the Israeli (European) Body,” Feminist Review 128 (July 2021): 109.

49. 49. Alberto Spektorowski and Liza Ireni-Saban, “From ‘Race Hygiene’ to ‘National-Productivist Hygiene,’” Journal of Political Ideologies 16, no. 2 (June 2011): 169–93.

50. 50. Quoted in Spektorowski and Ireni-Saban, “From ‘Race Hygiene,’” 182.

51. 51. “Obstetric and Infant Welfare in Palestine by Hadassah,” folder 1922–1937, Hadassah Collection, Women’s Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y., pg. 3.

52. 52. Quote from Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew Daily paper Ha’aretz in 1935, “News from Hadassah, Jerusalem,” folder 1922–1937, Hadassah Collection, Women’s Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y.

53. 53. Shohana Madmoni-Gerber, Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict: The Yemenite Babies Affair (Springer, 2009), 19; Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Berghahn Books, 2009).

54. 54. Madmoni-Gerber, Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict, 20. The logic that Mizrahi women cannot care for their children properly becomes the rationale for the Yemenite, Mizrahi, and Balkan Children Affair or the state-sponsored kidnapping of Yemenite, Mizrahi, and Balkan babies from the Israeli state.

55. 55. Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19, no. 20 (1988): 6.

56. 56. Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19, no. 20 (1988): 14

57. 57. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (University of California Press, 1996), 24.

58. 58. Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel,” 14.

59. 59. “UN Chief Guterres Urges Ceasefire as Gaza Becomes ‘Graveyard for Children,’” Al Jazeera, November 6, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/6/un-chief-guterres-urges-ceasefire-as-gaza-becomes-graveyard-for; “Statement by UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell on the Resumption of Fighting in Gaza,” UNICEF, December 1, 2023, https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/statement-unicef-executive-director-catherine-russell-resumption-fighting-gaza.

60. 60. “‘These Animals Can No Longer Live’ Says Israel’s Oldest Reservist,” Al Jazeera, October 14, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/14/these-animals-can-no-longer-live-says-israels-oldest-reservist.

61. 61. Adam M. Garfinkle, “On the Origin, Meaning, Use and Abuse of a Phrase,” Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 4 (1991): 539.

62. 62. Media Statements, “Excerpt from PM Netanyahu’s Remarks at the Opening of the Winter Assembly of the 25th Knesset’s Second Session,” gov.il, October 16, 2023, https://www.gov.il/en/pages/excerpt-from-pm-netanyahu-s-remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-knesset-s-winter-assembly-16-oct-2023.

63. 63. Keva X. Bui, “Eugenic Ecologies of Herbicidal Warfare in the Vietnam War,” Journal of Asian American Studies 26, no. 3 (2023): 315.

64. 64. Ali Vitali, Kasie Hunt, and Frank Thorp V, “Trump Referred to Haiti and African Nations as ‘Shithole’ Countries,” NBC News, January 11, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946.