Borders: IVF @ the Vanguard of Technology + War

Abstract

Stacks of fieldnotes from my first weeks in Jerusalem are smudged and cluttered with phone numbers for apartments to view, entry codes for different wards, names of key personnel and phone numbers for different physicians. Pages are folded and half-torn, differently coloured pens had been used. These pages are as chaotic as the days when I began my fieldwork at the height of the Al Aqsa Intifada. While setting up my research site, I searched for a place to live. Meanwhile each day I commuted 20 minutes by taxi between the hospital and the kibbutz (where I was staying for the week) because I was told that the bus may not be safe around these parts because the ‘Arabs in the village above have connections with Hamas’. Such warnings were a constant refrain from my interlocutors. These cluttered, chaotic notes materialize ‘the field’ as a site of intersecting vulnerabilities: my own fear of being caught in a suicide bombing during research,¹ the everyday anxieties of my interlocutors (largely Jewish Israelis with whom I had longstanding and new relationships that were familial, friendly or professional), and a deepening concern for what the Israeli military occupation was doing to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The complexity of these intersecting vulnerabilities is a much richer story than a narrowly ‘domained’ account of IVF in Jerusalem could be and it is also a ‘truer’ story.²