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Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 283 pp. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-520-22379-9. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-520-22944-4.
Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh's first book is an ethnography of discourses about sex and reproduction among Palestinian women in the Galilee, an area with a majority Palestinian population, which has been inside Israel's borders since 1948. Kanaaneh grew up in the Galilee. She returned there for a year to conduct her research, making productive use of her native Arabic and her connections with friends and family members. Her goal in Birthing the Nation is to show how Palestinian women and their families reinterpret and resist the official modernization discourse of the Israeli government and use this reconstituted discourse to organize their sexual and reproductive lives.
The opening chapter describes the colonialist population control policies of the Israeli state, which since its founding has attempted through land seizures and family planning policies to limit the growth of the Palestinian population inside the nation's borders. Kanaaneh points out that the Israeli Health Ministry runs clinics in the Galilee whose main mission is to promote small families among Palestinians. Health officials use a modernization discourse to justify their work, suggesting to their Palestinian clients that families with a small number of children are "modern." A family with two children can maintain a high standard of living; backward families have lots of children and cannot afford to provide well for each of them. But this discourse is not consistent with government policy overall, since the Israeli government also provides Jewish families with subsidies for every child. The result is that government health clinics are perceived as part of the machinery of oppression.
The intellectual core of Birthing the Nation is an analysis of the various strategies used by Palestinian women to resist the Israeli colonialist agenda while staking their claim to modernity. Kanaaneh's most compelling argument, which gives rise to the book's title, is that Palestinian women see giving birth, particularly to sons, as their contribution to the...