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  • 3 - “Children Are the Treasure and Property of the Nation”

  • Frances S. Hasso, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book:
    Buried in the Red Dirt
    Published online:
    25 November 2021
    Print publication:
    02 December 2021, pp 115-151
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  • Summary

    This chapter examines British and Zionist demographic anxieties and their eugenicist inflections in Mandate Palestine, which came from different places and had global precursors and diffractions. British authorities frequently expressed concern with higher Palestinian birthrates, which they racialized from early in the occupation. These concerns were balanced by a rarely expressed calculus that recognized limited investment in Palestinian welfare and infant, child and maternal healthcare produced higher mortality rates. The second section explores Jewish and British eugenicist discourse that predates and overlaps with the Mandate period and its iterations among Zionist health workers as they built a Jewish settler-colonial homeland in Palestine. The final section discusses transnational maternalist and breastfeeding campaigns, which were motivated by classed and racialized eugenicist concerns to reduce infant mortality and increase fertility among “white” better-off married women, and the conditions of the appearance of these discourses in Zionist archival records in Mandate Palestine.