Today is the 167th day of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people that began on October 7. Even before Hamas’ strike on October 7, many media sources called 2023 “the deadliest year on record” for Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli forces had killed 395 Palestinians in the West Bank that year, while settlers were responsible for 9 more killings. While murders such as these are the direct cessation of life, Israel still conducts other forms of violence, for instance attacks on hospitals and schools, that impede Palestinian lifemaking. In Palestine, a declared war is a spatio-temporal escalation of a slow and ongoing war against its people.

In this essay, using the lens of social reproduction theory (SRT), I show that the disruption (through policies) or annihilation (through violence) of Palestinian life is inherent to the Zionist project. Consequently, in this current cycle of violence, Israel is targeting two kinds of social reproductive capacities: institutions of social reproduction such as schools and hospitals; and the future generation, that is, children. Israel wants to eradicate both life and the ability to reproduce a future life. A ceasefire can thus only be a baseline demand. A flourishing of life in Palestine requires more than a cessation of killing; it requires what Marx thought of as the realization of species being. The ineliminable creativity of Palestinian resistance sheds the clearest light on what species being can, and indeed must, mean.

Social Reproduction feminists have used the formulation lifemaking to identify the multiple ways in which human beings labor to transform nature to maintain themselves and satisfy needs. I employ the concept to understand the comparisons, connections, and affective outcomes between the nodal points of Zionist violence, both direct and indirect. To acknowledge the continuities between military aggression and militarized containment of Palestinian life, we need to start from the destabilization, vulnerabilitization, and annihilation of Palestinian capacities of social reproduction. Lifemaking as a concept provides us with the analytical connective tissue between the nodes.

In the Economic and Philosophical Notebooks of 1844, Marx leads us through a careful distinction between alienated and unalienated labor. The former, under capitalist direction, feels “external to the worker,” while in the latter humans make “life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness.”1 As humans we are deliberate: we do not merge with our labor (as a spider does). Too many Marxists focus on food, shelter, and so on when citing products that result from humans acting upon nature. Marx, however, saw these bare necessities of lifemaking as limited examples. What, then, is lifemaking in the non-restrictive sense?

Marx uses the word spiritual twenty-two times in this work. He denotes human labor to be a form of activity in which “all the natural, spiritual, and social variety of individual activity is manifested.”2 He is most struck by the deliberation and universality of human labor, where we labor not simply “under the dominion of immediate physical need” but even when we are “free from physical need,” and thus “only and truly… [produce] in freedom therefrom.”3

The distinction between lifemaking through capitalist regimes of work and lifemaking under conditions of freedom is a persistent theme in Marx. He used an Aristotelian framework, mediated through Hegel, to discuss formal freedoms, which are available under capitalism, and the unfreedom and alienation that lurk beneath them. Marx agreed with liberal theorists that the condition of freedom was historical, and that, even in its preliminary proceedings, it had to be grounded in those bare necessities of lifemaking. He thus argued that “the realm of freedom” really begins “only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends.”4

Following Marx, we can discern a clear distinction between living (a form of lifemaking under capitalist conditions of formal freedoms but alienated labor) and flourishing (a form of lifemaking that is in our species being).

While the distinction is stark in Marx, it is also clear that within everyday living under capitalism, we frequently catch a glimpse of what I am calling flourishing. If alienated labor is that which is compelled by an external force on the worker, then unalienated labor is that which is both freely chosen and self-determined by the worker themself. Within the overall context of systemic alienation, we still nourish our plants/animals/children, make art, and have great sex — all forms of labor that we engage in with relative freedom. In the Grundrisse, Marx refers to the composition of music as “really free labor,” which requires “the greatest effort,” and is “at the same time damned serious.”5

Thus, when the Palestinian feminist poet, Rafeef Ziadah, writes, “We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life,” I read that as a searing theorization of the politics of lifemaking. I read that as a call to explore what happens to lifemaking, both in the living and flourishing sense, in Palestine.

Israel employs three broad strategies vis-à-vis Palestinian life:........

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