The Eugenics of Aging Under Israeli Settler Colonialism

In a November 2024 testimony, ninety-one-year-old Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif details the ongoing brutalities of the Israeli government since its inception and the steadfast resistance of Palestinians in the face of erasure.¹ Abu Seif survived the 1948 Nakba, a word meaning “catastrophe” that denotes the Zionist militia’s forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians on the eve of its declaration of statehood. After violent displacement from his home in the village of Julis, Abu Seif became a refugee in Bureij and then Nuseirat refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. Abu Seif describes enduring what he calls a “war of extermination and destruction of humans and nature” since October 2023: 

I have lived through all the wars of the occupation . . . These [current] scenes remind us of the Nakba. Generations have changed, but the Israeli criminal mentality remains the same. . . . We are the Indigenous people of the land, and we will never leave our land, no matter what happens. I hope this unjust war stops, and I can return to my occupied town of Julis before I die. This was my dream when I was a child, and it is still my dream as an elderly man. If I cannot live to see it fulfilled, my grandchildren will achieve it soon…²

Abu Seif’s testimony conveys both intergenerational resistance to continual displacement and the enduring nature of the Israeli regime’s genocide, or what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls its “ongoing genocidal Nakba.”³ He also details the loss of newly-built concrete homes and tents, and the lack of access to medical care, food, medicine, and networks of familial care that Palestinians in Gaza — and the elderly and disabled in particular — require to survive. Over the last twenty-eight months, elderly Palestinians have faced assassination, bombing, kidnapping, starvation, and detention. This period of attenuated attack exacerbates the already high rate of chronic illness the elderly experience due to years of siege, deliberate injury, and medical apartheid.⁴

Whether through direct killing of the elderly or the eradication of resources required to guarantee their survival, the management of social reproduction is central to the settler colonial project.⁵ While the Israeli regime has killed or subjected to injury Palestinians of all ages, their treatment of the elderly in particular reveals the deliberate targeting of Palestinian historical memory. Contrasted with the Israeli regime’s multi-billion-dollar “longevity industry” for Jewish Israeli citizens, it also underscores the differential treatment of settler and Indigenous populations as an orienting tenet of Israeli settler colonialism. Insofar as social reproduction encompasses the biological, material, and ideological sustenance of individuals, families, and communities, it concerns those resources and conditions required to uphold human life.⁶ Preservation of the settler colony is necessarily a eugenic project, vested by design in “destroy[ing] to replace.”⁷ Continuities in the eugenic underpinnings of social reproduction are echoed in Abu Seif’s remark that even though the bombardment and killing has significantly worsened since October 2023, “the Israeli criminal mentality remains the same.”⁸ Rather than emerging as an entirely new phase of an otherwise episodically violent occupation, the current bombardment of Gaza illustrates how the settler colony is constituted by “a genocidal logic and ideology” that is part and parcel of its raison d’être.⁹

As I suggest throughout this essay, the eugenic substructure of social reproduction is plainly evident when contrasting the lack of care resources granted to elderly Palestinians and those facilitating and “optimizing” aging for Jewish Israelis. In particular, the Israeli regime’s billion-dollar longevity industry, a collaboration between Israeli biotech start-ups, venture capitalists, and universities vested in anti-aging research and development, aspires to reverse aging by promoting what the Israeli Longevity Alliance calls an “optimal hygienic lifestyle for all ages.”¹⁰ Through the work of what the Alliance calls “age reversal” and “healthy lifestyle extension,”¹¹ aging for elderly settler-citizens becomes “a medical issue in need of a ‘cure.’”¹² Echoing the decades-old Zionist commitment to racial hygiene as a form of national rehabilitation, the industry reveals continuities in the settler state’s eugenic practices. Yet, it does so through the hyper-financialized outsourcing of biopolitical management, turning aging into a site of profit extraction and national development all at once. 

While many states have supported corporate uptake of the longevity industry in recent years, the Israeli regime’s support for this endeavor is notable for a few key reasons. Most broadly, as one pillar of the Israeli regime’s broader eugenic investment in Jewish reproductivity, the embrace of longevity technology and finance contrasts markedly with the deliberate deprivation of resources for Palestinians, whom the government daily subjects to killing, trauma, violence, and environmental conditions that produce attenuated disease.¹³ Secondly, as I argue elsewhere, the Israeli regime’s portrayal of Jewish elderly is notable for the unique symbolic role this demographic plays as what Idith Zertal calls a “remembering collective,” which continually serves as a reminder of the Nazi genocide.¹⁴ Echoing Zionist tropes of the brawny pioneer, the elderly are also portrayed in social discourse as a “founding generation” that forged a Zionist state against all odds.¹⁵ At various moments, the Israeli regime has cynically invoked the image of the Holocaust survivor and publicly celebrated the “founding generation,” enlisting both images into nationalist justifications for ongoing colonial theft and genocide.¹⁶ These constitutive national images blatantly contrast with the disregard for elderly Palestinian life and collective memory in Gaza. Whereas elderly Jewish Israelis are a “remembering collective,” through a Zionist logic, elderly Palestinians are a collective whose memories must be eliminated.¹⁷ Treatment of the elderly is thus one facet of the Israeli regime’s broader eugenic management of settler and Indigenous populations. The Israeli regime, for instance, is notable for its high per capita support for in-vitro fertilization (IVF), as well as its campaigns of sterilization against Ethiopian women and neglect of pregnant Palestinian women.¹⁸ Yet, the eugenic strengthening of the settler state increasingly depends upon the state’s orientation towards its aging population, manifest in both the multi-billion-dollar “age reversal” industry, on the one hand, and wanton disregard for elderly Palestinians’ right to age in dignity and health, on the other. 

In this article, I suggest that the Zionist approach to social reproduction — and eldercare in particular — disturbs a rigid “before” and “after” temporal framing of the Israeli regime’s genocidal governance. I emphasize continuities across the long history of settler-colonial violence, building on scholarship on the Israeli regime’s eugenicist approach to population management, social reproduction and racial/colonial domination, and disability, with attention to eldercare and aging.¹⁹ I begin by detailing the aspects of care and social reproduction that the Israeli regime’s differential treatment of the elderly brings into sharp relief. I then examine eugenic continuities across the longue durée of Zionist colonization, highlighting the annihilation of care resources needed for elderly survival in Gaza, on the one hand, and the Israeli longevity industry, on the other. Both examples suggest the eugenic underpinnings of social reproduction as a constitutive tenet of settler colonialism.²⁰ In conclusion, I suggest that attention to the eldercare industry can sharpen insights into the global financial circuits upholding ongoing genocide.

Care for the Elderly and Social Reproduction

The thoroughgoing decimation of resources needed to care for elderly Palestinians in Gaza and the scale of financial investments in longevity for settler society elucidate how social reproduction can become a site of “neo-eugenic” nationalism.²¹ By using the term neo-eugenic, I draw on the work of David-Jack Fletcher, who underscores contemporary continuities between the eugenicist agenda leading up to World War II and its latest transmutations in the management of elderly life.²² In my formulation, the term “neo” also denotes the thorough economization of this project: that is, the application of a cost/benefit economic logic to an increasing number of societal domains, such as health, education, technology, and social policy, to name a few.²³ The specific tools through which aging becomes profitable are financial in nature, predicated on the increased presence of hedge funds, investment banks, private equity, and the circulation of stocks, bonds, dividends, and securities more broadly. We can thus characterize this period of late capitalism as not only one of state cutbacks on the resources needed for social reproduction, but also of the transformation of the human capacity for life into an object of financial speculation and a site of future capital returns. Aging is thus both a site of profit extraction and a mode of biopolitical governance and racial management. Plainly, Zionism’s contemporary iterations of “racial hygiene” are different in form, though not ideology, from the long history of Zionism as a project preoccupied by racial engineering.²⁴

While Marxist feminists have traditionally used the term social reproduction to denote the various labors upholding the workforce, more recent scholarship has highlighted how labors such as eldercare and childcare are not solely a “precondition for capitalist profit.”²⁵ That is, social reproduction has long been a site of financial accumulation and the “economic extraction from life itself.”²⁶ Whether in the context of prisons or military occupation, the eugenic management of social reproduction entails the “extraction and manipulation of life sustainment into carceral state resource.”²⁷ Feminist political economists illustrate how in the age of deepening and widening financialization social reproduction is a site of “financial accumulation via securitization,” or the amassing of capital through household debt and its circulation.²⁸ Likewise, as Premilla Nadasen shows, attention to the long history of racial capitalism suggests how social reproduction generates profit beyond the labor relation, from chattel slavery to the present era of the for-profit care industry.²⁹ In an explicit example of the financialization of aging, the global anti-aging longevity industry turns care for the elderly into a multi-billion-dollar financial opportunity. According to the Aging Analytics Agency, a prominent UK-based research corporation, aging at once presents “one of the most acute problems of our time” and “one of the most promising opportunities” for financial institutions who “can either sink or swim when hit by the oncoming Silver Tsunami.”³⁰ This hyper-financialized approach to aging is, of course, not unique to Israel, the US, and the UK, states that actively and predominantly partake. Indeed, several states have supported longevity research and investment, including the US, Germany, the UK, Brazil, France, Russia, Singapore, Australia, and Belgium, among others.³¹ In many places, the “financialization of old age” has resulted in the state acting as a guarantor for the financial sector rather than a provider of services.³² In Germany, the UK, Brazil, and France, for instance, global real estate ventures have turned the elderly residential care services market into a site of financial profit, while in Brazil, payroll loans require older people to take on debt in order to maintain their own survival.³³ This global reality demands an analysis of care and social reproduction that reaches beyond the conceptualization of the elderly as non-productive, former workers. 

To be sure, the capitalistic characterization of those over sixty as “non-productive” plays a role in their treatment as a population draining money from the state by consuming more than they produce.³⁴ Yet focusing purely on the labor relation misses two key features of the work sustaining elderly life under late capitalism, particularly in the context of the Israeli regime. Firstly, the longevity industry demonstrates how aging has been subjected to financial speculation, wherein the economic utility of the elderly exceeds a simple accounting of how much they produce versus consume. The sheer existence of the field of “longevity finance,” a nexus of investment firms and academic enterprises aimed at turning “vitality itself [into] an asset,” demands further attention to elderly life as a predatory site of capital extraction.³⁵ And in the Israeli context, the public-private commitment to longevity is underwritten by the utter annihilation of resources for Palestinians that would otherwise ensure survival and thriving into old age. Further, through the Zionist logic of annihilation, the project of determining who lives and who dies in Gaza is part of attempts to financialize and render profitable the land, itself. 

Secondly, while profit is a constituting relation of social reproduction, so too is the project of racial/colonial management. This reality holds across national contexts but is particularly important in understanding the constitutive Zionist drive for dominance over land in the case of occupied Palestine. Such a lens is necessary in marking the dual nature of eugenic nationalism under late capitalism: on the one hand, the desire to bolster health and capacity beyond human bounds, such that settler society transcends mortality itself; and on the other, the attempt to disregard, deplete, and destruct Indigenous Palestinian life, such that the land, too, can be financialized and reserved for this imagined settler specie.³⁶ Akin to what Bayan Abusneineh calls “reproductive genocide,” this treatment of the elderly attacks “Palestinian life, generationality, and futurity.”³⁷ Beyond the realm of financial investments, these attacks are evident in the evisceration of Palestinian hospitals, medical personnel, and families providing care; the denial of food and medicine to Palestinians in Gaza; stifling of an independent Palestinian economy that could ensure the livelihood of entire populations; and control over mobility across occupied Palestine.³⁸ This reality demands that we engage the long history of colonial and racial violence as constitutive of social reproduction. Through this dual project of infusing Jewish Israeli elderly with the capacity for life and depriving Palestinian elderly of the capacity to survive, the Israeli regime transforms care into a site of hyper-extraction.

Elderly Depletion and Resistance

The Israeli regime’s approach to eldercare is fundamentally biopolitical, governed by its broader “reproductive regime.”³⁹ As I argue elsewhere, this regime encompasses and exceeds the reproductive labors required to sustain individuals and collectivities. It also extends to policies and laws aimed at capacitating the lives of some while depleting the same for the Indigenous communities it intends to replace.⁴⁰ Shirin Rai’s concept of “depletion” is helpful in tracing the long entanglements of social reproduction with the eugenic titrating and targeting of resources needed for survival. Depletion tracks how a lack of “inflows” need to do the work of social reproduction (e.g. healthcare infrastructure, adequate nutrition, housing, and human support networks) can lead to a “deterioration in the health and well-being of individuals, households, and communities.”⁴¹ Depletion can also be a deliberate policy goal aimed at removing the material conditions for community self-reproduction altogether. Even under political conditions of collective self-determination and autonomy, elderly survival requires access to social welfare, mental health resources, and extended care networks of kin unburdened by the labor of surviving themselves. This physical and social infrastructure is ever more necessary in contexts of systematic deprivation.

The conditions elderly Palestinians in Gaza have faced over the last two and a half years are part and parcel of the utter depletion of Gaza’s medical infrastructure since the early days of Zionist settlement. As Yasmin Chilmeran and Nicola Pratt argue, since its declaration of statehood, the Israeli government has deliberately “target[ed] Palestinian social reproduction” as a means to “erase Palestinian life in line with a settler colonial logic.”⁴² Since the instantiation of a nascent health system under British Mandate Palestine, British colonial administrators facilitated the growth of a medical school, hospitals, and other health services for Zionist settlers while denying the same to Indigenous Palestinians.⁴³ After the declaration of Israeli statehood, these colonial hospitals became the blueprint for the state’s medical infrastructure, with Jewish sick funds excluding the Palestinian population.⁴⁴ In the years after the Nakba, the fragmentation of the Palestinian population across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the newly declared state created distinctive legal regimes and social structures, with the effect of severely limiting access to welfare benefits such as medical care.⁴⁵ For instance, the Israeli regime systematically revoked residency status for many Palestinians living in Jerusalem, thereby denying them entitlements to health insurance and benefits for unemployment, eldercare, and disability care under the National Insurance Law.⁴⁶

The contemporary impact of this apartheid medical system on the elderly is profound. Between 2021 and 2022 alone an estimated 70 percent of the elderly in the occupied Palestinian Territories faced challenges in accessing and paying for healthcare services.⁴⁷ Pre-existing illnesses such as hypertension, stress, anxiety, heart disease, and respiratory illness have all worsened over the last twenty-seven months of Israeli bombardment, while the life expectancy in Gaza has diminished by over thirty years.⁴⁸ Since the latest bombardment in Gaza, the Israeli regime’s intensification of medical depletion is evident in the intentional bombing of hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and medical personnel.⁴⁹ The intentional “maiming” of over 169,430 Palestinians since October 2023 compounds pre-existing mobility challenges for the elderly.⁵⁰ This deliberate “debilitation” prohibits many elderly Palestinians from following evacuation orders due to difficulty walking long distances and transporting heavy belongings.⁵¹ The latest rise in injuries follows decades of intentional maiming by the Israeli regime as a way of diminishing capacity at a population level.⁵²

Alarmingly high elderly death rates are also due to starvation, dehydration, and the blocking of aid into Gaza.⁵³ The sheer scale of destruction prevents Palestinians from accessing adequate sewage, potable water, medicine, hospitals, food, and mental health services.⁵⁴ Compounding this destruction of life and resources are the environmental impacts of genocide — whether chemical or biological — exacerbating pre-existing illnesses.⁵⁵ Altogether, since October 2023, the Israeli regime has indirectly killed 2 percent of Gaza’s elderly population, who constitute roughly four percent of all Palestinians killed in Gaza.⁵⁶

As pronounced as the depletion of socially reproductive infrastructure is the deliberate evisceration of extended kin and family networks who can care for the elderly. And yet, it is precisely the withholding of welfare services and infrastructure under the Israeli regime’s eighteen-year siege of Gaza since 2007 that make these networks so crucial.⁵⁷ As “a strategy of occupation,” the decimation and annihilation of entire bloodlines and care networks eliminates the emotional and physical human support so integral to surviving old age.⁵⁸

The depletion of care networks also deliberately targets Palestinians as witnesses to Israeli violence and Palestinian collective resistance. Elderly Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom survived the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa, play a crucial role in “leading communities, caring for relatives, and helping sustain collective memory.”⁵⁹ The genocide of elderly Palestinians is therefore also a “memoricide” that not only targets Palestinians’ connection to their land, but also the “detachment of the Palestinians from their history.”⁶⁰ Memoricide thus attempts to create an unbroken link between an imagined messianic Jewish past and a Jewish racial future in Palestine.⁶¹

Against this genocidal depletion, the elderly continue to resist dispossession, refusing, in Abu Seif’s words, to “make Israel’s plan of depopulating Gaza successful.”⁶² As he asserts: 

We remain steadfast due to our awareness and understanding of all the [plans] of the occupation, and our insistence on staying in Gaza and not migrating from it, no matter what it costs us.⁶³

Against the “reproductive genocide” of Palestinian generationality, Abu Seif names the certitude of a Palestinian future on the land.⁶⁴ As Mai Taha shows, the struggle over resources needed to survive can also be a site of “insurgency,” whether in Gaza, during the 1936 Palestinian Revolution, or amidst the first intifada.⁶⁵ Taha illustrates that while homes are sites of dispossession, so too are they places where Palestinian families — and women in particular — have resisted “the British watchtowers,” given life and capacity to movement leaders resisting Zionist surveillance, and created networks of mutual aid.⁶⁶ Given this gendered breakdown of socially reproductive labors, the purposeful targeting of homes and family networks is also fundamentally gendered, placing the burden of maintaining family structures and caring networks disproportionately on women. The refusal to leave, itself a form of “insurgent social reproduction,” counters the callous discussions by venture capitalists and leaders in the imperial core to turn Gaza into a Riviera-esque financial asset.⁶⁷ The Zionist ethos of expansion and domination is thus constituted by a dual logic of elongating Jewish Israeli life, on the one hand, and targeting the networks, land, and resources that ensure survival into old age for Palestinians, on the other. As I suggest in the subsequent section, the financial aspect of the management of eldercare is brought into even sharper relief through the Israeli longevity industry, a neo-eugenic project of hyper-investment in settler life. 

Aging and the Financialization of Eugenics

While the Israeli regime harnesses depletion in its biopolitical management of elderly Palestinians, for settler-citizens, it hyper-invests in aging.⁶⁸ Importantly, rather than an objective, moral commitment to the individual well-being of elderly Jewish Israelis, the state’s investment in aging is an instrumental and symbolic preoccupation with bolstering population-level health as a proxy for demographic and financial strength. One need only consider the 30 percent of Israeli Holocaust survivors living below the poverty line to grasp this gap between the government’s stated commitments and the material economic reality for many elderly.⁶⁹ Contrasting the abstract and grandiose language of life extension are the brutal attacks on the resources and care networks enabling longevity of human life in Gaza. This reality constitutes the underside of the Zionist allocation of resources towards comfortable, active, and leisurely lifespans for Jewish Israelis. An assemblage of finance capital, high-tech “bio-gerontology” start-ups, and med-tech research, Israel’s longevity industry aims to extend elderly lives and reverse processes of aging at a population level. Much like the call of Zionist leaders to “cure” the “weak” diaspora Jew of racial degeneration through settlement in Palestine, industry influencers frame aging as both a medical illness that can be eradicated and a for-profit opportunity that can bolster the nation’s financial health.⁷⁰

In this updated eugenicist discourse, it is not the state meting out solutions to the “problem” of a growingly frail population, but rather, financial institutions and risk management firms committed to the work of “gerontological hygiene.”⁷¹ Playing a pivotal role in the global trillion-dollar anti-aging industry, the Israeli longevity ecosystem is largely guided by the conglomeration of Israeli universities, “aging-tech” gene and cell therapy companies, venture capitalists, advocacy associations, and government proponents of anti-aging technology and research.⁷² The function of the state within this industry is to encourage the development of “cutting edge technology, big data and personalized medicine” across countries; supplement manufacturing costs for biotech start-ups; provide grants for longevity medicine researchers; and invest directly in digital health, among other sectors, as a means of drawing foreign investors.⁷³ Simultaneously, longevity think tanks and organizations lobby the government to increase its investments in digital health and regenerative, personalized, and preventive medicine technology to “keep the country’s overall health from slipping.”⁷⁴ Though much of the anti-aging technology that the industry touts is still in clinical or product development stages, particular services have already been marketed to citizens, such as oxygen therapy, plastic surgery, and enhanced imaging and diagnostic technology meant to catch illnesses before they progress.

While the turn to “bio-gerontology” and “regenerative medicine” is not unique to the Israeli regime, the Israeli brand of longevity tech builds upon and expands older Zionist commitments to eugenics and racial hygiene as a form of nation-building. Treating Israeli society’s aging population as a national illness, the Israeli Aging Alliance “promotes the amelioration of the deteriorative aging process” as “a core aspect of Israel’s national development strategy and agenda.”⁷⁵ In a nearly six-hundred-page report that functions as the industry’s main position paper, the Israeli Aging Alliance details the many risks of ignoring the growing size of the state’s elderly demographic as a proportion of the overall population. The report calls for the prevention of “aging-related chronic non-communicable diseases and disabilities, in order to extend the healthy and productive life expectancy for the entire population.”⁷⁶ It also highlights the “biological and cognitive degeneration” that accompanies aging as presenting many “socioeconomic challenges.”⁷⁷ Though never directly named in the Alliance’s reports or materials, the specter of race and indigeneity underlies its demographic analyses. In the entirety of the report, the authors never directly mention Indigenous Palestinians, except when discussing the anticipated 77 percent increase in the elderly population by 2035. Here they note that “the percentage of Arabs within the elderly population is expected to increase from 8 percent in 2015 to 14 percent in 2035.”⁷⁸ Though unstated, the statistic marks the Zionist preoccupation with a rising non-Jewish population that presumedly makes the physical and mental fortification of settler society ever more urgent.

This demographic anxiety echoes decades-old Zionist eugenicist discourses that emphasize the importance of racial hygiene to national preservation. Regular references to the promotion of a “hygienic life-style . . . for aging persons” and the like function as a contemporary iteration of the same preoccupation.⁷⁹ The Alliance’s focus on preventive medicine and the containment of diseases associated with old age invoke the rhetoric of Arthur Ruppin, the “father of Zionist settlement” who, in his preoccupation with the racial composition of the Jewish people, insisted that “it would be better if only healthy people with all their needs and powers would come to Palestine so new generations will arise in the country that are healthy and strong.”⁸⁰ This sentiment also pervaded public health outreach material to would-be settlers.⁸¹ One outreach booklet, published by the Immigration Department of the Palestine Zionist Executive in 1926, noted that “It is not enough to forbid sick people from coming to Palestine, it is our obligation to make sure that the immigrant will be equipped with information on how not to become ill . . . One whose path is for the benefit of the motherland, must change his direction and adapt to a new way of life.”⁸² Not unlike this early eugenic culling of the Jewish population, the contemporary longevity industry targets health and disease as the site of national rehabilitation, yet the “new way of life” it promotes is one of biotechnological transformation of the human body. Through personalized medicine, medical robotics, oxygen therapy, and artificial intelligence, Israeli start-ups and innovators offer age reversal as an antidote to elderly disability and illness. Fittingly, the Zionist preoccupation with racial health was shaped, in the early days of settlement, by an abiding obsession with youth. The “new Jew” who was to emerge through “redemption” of Palestinian land was not only strong and masculine but also young in body and spirit.⁸³ Attempting to “change the nature of Jewish identity” from that of the frail, diasporic Jew, the image of the physically active “new Jew” became the negation of the elderly body.⁸⁴ The Zionist emphasis on racial strengthening of the Jew is equally evident in the state’s decades-long espousing of pro-natalist policies, manifesting in rewards for high birth rates, cultural celebration of the Jewish mother, and extensive state support for assisted reproductive technologies (ART).⁸⁵ Today the longevity industry is as much a repudiation of the “weak” and disabled population as it is an attempt to fortify the nation through financial accumulation and high-tech exceptionalism. Tellingly, in 2024, while the Israeli regime continued to bombard Gaza with two thousand pound bombs, advocacy organization Vetek (called “The Movement for Longevity and Quality of Life”) and Bar-Ilan University co-organized a national conference entitled “Longevity Nation.”⁸⁶ Around the same time, the founder of an Israeli “anti-aging solutions” start-up, Jennifer Elias, described the Israeli regime as transitioning “from start-up nation to longevity nation,” and media coverage boasted Israel’s rising life expectancy.⁸⁷ The use of such rhetoric at a time when the global Palestine solidarity movement grew in number and geopolitical power betrays the longevity industry’s dual function as a site of financial accumulation and a means of portraying the state as a humane leader in addressing aging and disability.

Indeed, the promise of strengthened financial health and greater global credibility is evident in attempts to frame the Israeli longevity industry as uniquely ripe for profit and innovation. According to promotional material by Vetek and Aging Analytics Agency, Israel’s politico-economic terrain “outstrips the rest of the geographical region” in the business of life extension with “Israeli startups [being] acquired four years after founding, compared to an average of six years in Europe.”⁸⁸ The full promotional report also boasts that Israel is a “world leader in mobile and E health [sic] implementations,” and that the “maturity of its innovation ecosystem” makes it “very attractive for international investors.”⁸⁹ Painting Israeli high-tech “innovators” as the contemporary version of the sturdy Zionist “pioneer” forging a home in Palestine, much of the public-facing longevity industry material highlights the state’s exceptionally high funding of research and development, a term that becomes a proxy for the nurturance of innovation.⁹⁰

This framing absolves the Israeli regime of its ongoing genocidal governance while reaffirming its role as an innovative “start-up nation.”⁹¹ As I have suggested elsewhere, the state has regularly portrayed elderly Jewish Israelis as metonymic for Holocaust survival as a way of justifying ongoing occupation under the guise of vulnerability and “self-defense.”⁹² Belying this overlap between discourses of aging, victimhood, and “self-defense” are the deep ties between the industry and the economy of occupation. Reflecting the broader Israeli-American economic relationship, roughly half of Israeli longevity financiers come from the United States, followed closely by Israel, Germany, and the UK.⁹³ The Alliance also highlights its ties to Microsoft, Google, Intel, and Israeli funders such as Bank Hapoalim and Teva Pharmaceuticals, companies complicit in the production of surveillance technology and military vehicles, the provision of logistics to the Israeli military, and the expansion of Israeli settlements.⁹⁴ Similarly, the industry names as its leading influencers several former military and “intelligence” personnel, each of whom transfer “expertise” from these fields into the business of caring for the aging. Indeed, a key longevity industry investor is the former CEO of Israel Chemicals Limited, a corporation that manufactures white phosphorus, a deadly substance that the Israeli military has used in Lebanon and Gaza.⁹⁵ Financial circuits of occupation and genocide thus infuse the industry, whether through digital technologies that can both gather personal use medical data and extend surveillance infrastructure, or through secondary financial markets that bundle, buy, and sell securities, dividends, stocks, and bonds across the war and biotech economies alike.

The promotion of biomedical and financial infrastructure as a panacea for the care needs of the elderly is thus a continuation of the “nation-building project of [racial] rehabilitation” that has long driven the Zionist project.⁹⁶ This reality suggests that social reproduction of elderly Jewish Israelis is not only aimed at increasing the lifespan of productive workers, nor are elderly Jewish Israelis purely a population whose consumption the neoliberal government attempts to limit.  While these logics are present, so too is that of targeting the life chances of reaching old age for Indigenous Palestinians and treating care itself as a site for the hyper-extraction of land and life. That is, we must contextualize the profit-driven logics of the longevity industry within the longue durée of colonial attacks on Palestinian life, and on the family networks, hospitals, medicines, food, housing, and built environments that would otherwise enable widespread longevity. 

Conclusion

Through a settler-colonial logic, aging is a proxy for the tenuous edge between living and dying, human and non-human, and survival and death of the settler project. Social reproduction of the elderly reproduces not just capitalist society as a whole but also settler society. The financialized, biopolitical management of aging thus becomes what Vásquez and Girón call the “pathway for the binary evaluation of human life.”⁹⁷ Following Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the management and annihilation of elderly life thus suggests that usage of the term “genocide” in its post-October 2023 iteration must be supplemented with a historicizing of the longer history of eugenics that upholds the Zionist state’s project of “destroy[ing] to replace.”⁹⁸ Such a contextualizing is a reminder of how population-level caring needs can become sites of financialized eugenic management.

The continued US funding of genocide in Palestine and the close collaboration of US investors and biotech influencers in the aging industry, shed light on the “the geopolitics of social reproduction and depletion.”⁹⁹ While the US-Israel financial relationship endures at the macro-economic level of arms deals and Israel bonds, so too does it persist through industries targeting care for humans. Important research coming out of critical university studies and left organizing spaces alike has helpfully turned to the many financial ties between academic institutions and the war economy, and the role universities play conducting research and development for weapons manufacturers and surveillance tech.¹⁰⁰ Fertile ground for future praxis-oriented research is the many ways financial circuits penetrate the human lives, capacities, and care networks that comprise the work of social reproduction, tying our bodies to war and occupation.

Endnotes

1. Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif, “Displaced in 1948 and Today: Surviving Another Nakba and Genocide,” The Progressive Magazine, November 7, 2024. I use the terms “Israeli government” and “Israeli regime” interchangeably throughout the article. When emphasizing the actions of current actors making policy decisions that uphold the ongoing genocide, I use the term “Israeli government.” When referring to the longue durée of Zionist colonization since the 1948 Nakba and leading up to the present moment, I use the term “Israeli regime.”[↑]
2. Abu Seif, “Displaced.”[↑]
3. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Five Pillars of Zionist Genocidal Apparatus: A Palestinian Problematization of Genocide Studies,” Journal of Genocide Research (2025): 3.[↑]
4. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “Gaza: About 4 Percent of Victims of Israel’s Genocide Are Elderly,” September 1, 2024.[↑]
5. For an extended discussion of social reproduction in Palestine, see Yasmin Chilmeran and Nicola Pratt, “The Geopolitics of Social Reproduction and Depletion: The Case of Iraq and Palestine,” Social Politics 26, no. 4 (2019): 586-607; Bayan Abusneineh, “Reproductive Genocide, Disabling Futures, and Carcerality in Gaza,” The Scholar & Feminist Online  21, no. 1 (2025); Mai Taha, “Insurgent Social Reproduction: The Home, the Barricade and Women’s Work in the 1936 Palestinian Revolution,” Theory, Culture & Society 42, no. 4 (2025): 101-20; Rachel Brown, Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel (Duke University Press, 2024).[↑]
6. Here I draw on Shirin Rai’s definition of social reproduction as encompassing these three distinctive components. See Shirin Rai, Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring (Oxford University Press, 2024).[↑]
7. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 387-409.[↑]
8. Abu Seif, “Displaced.”[↑]
9. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Five Pillars,” 11.[↑]
10. Singularit, “Israeli Longevity Alliance Bylaws,” August 2, 2015. According to a 2023 report, the financial backbone of Israel’s longevity industry is comprised of two hundred and fifty global and local companies, including investment banks, wealth management firms, health insurance conglomerates, private pension providers, big data corporations, longevity securitization groups, and AI advisory groups, among others. See Aging Analytics Agency et. al., Longevity Financial Industry in Israel, 2024.[↑]
11. Singularit, “Bylaws.”[↑]
12. David-Jack Fletcher, Age as Disease: Anti-Aging Technologies, Sites, and Practices (Palgrave, 2021).[↑]
13. Neta C. Crawford, The Human Toll of the Gaza War, Brown University Cost of War Project, 2025; Abdullatif Husseini, “On the Edge of the Abyss: War and Public Health in Gaza,” Institute for Palestine Studies Policy Papers, January 30, 2024; Bilal Irfan et. al., “War-Related Trauma and Displacement in Gaza,” The Lancet 6, no. 5 (2025).[↑]
14. Brown, Unsettled Labors, as drawing on Idit Zertal’s term “remembering collective.” See Idit Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18; Howard Litwin et. al., “Religiosity and Well-Being Among Older Jewish Israelis: Findings from SHARE,” Journal of Religion, Spirituality, and Aging 29, no. 2-3 (2017): 209.[↑]
15. Brown, Unsettled Labors, as drawing on the term “founding generation,” as developed by Howard Litwin et. al., “Religiosity and Well-Being Among Older Jewish Israelis,” 209.[↑]
16. Brown, Unsettled Labors.[↑]
17. Nur Masalha, “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory,” Journal Of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 20, no. 1 (2015): 3-57; Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (OneWorld Publications, 2006).[↑]
18. Abusneineh, “Reproducing”; Rita Giacaman et. al., “The Politics of Childbirth in the Context of Conflict: Policies or de Facto Practices?” Health Policy 72, no. 2 (2005): 129-39.[↑]
19. See e.g. Nahla Abdo, “The Palestine Exception, Racialization and Invisibilization,” Critical Sociology 49, no. 6 (2023): 967-89; Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie, “Settler Colonialism and the Logic of Double Elimination,” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2019): 464-85; Abusneineh, “Reproducing” and “Reproductive Genocide”; Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception (Bloomsbury, 2018); Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim, Duke University Press, 2017; Ari Parra, “Social Reproduction Theory, the ‘Care’ Economy, and the Specter of Disability: A Critique,” Forum for Social Economics, (2025).[↑]
20. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Five Pillars,” 1, 6.[↑]
21. Fletcher, Age as Disease.[↑]
22. Fletcher, Age as Disease.[↑]
23. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (MIT Press, 2015).[↑]
24. Sandra Sufian, “Mential Hygiene and Disability in the Zionist Project,” DSQ 27, no. 4 (2007); Sandra Sufian, Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2007).[↑]
25. Premilla Nadasen, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Press, 2023), 8.[↑]
26. Nadasen, Care, 9.[↑]
27. Sarah Haley and Emily Thuma, “Introduction,” The Scholar & Feminist Online 21, no. 1 (2025). Here Haley and Thuma summarize a roundtable discussion between Haley, Orisanmi Burton, Tiffany Lethabo King, Judah Schept, and Rosie Stockton.[↑]
28. Adrienne Roberts, “Household Debt and the Financialization of Social Reproduction,” in Risking Capital, ed. S. Soederberg (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2016), 12. See also Gerald Davis and Suntae Kim, “Financialization of the Economy,” Annual Review of Sociology 41,(2017): 203-21.[↑]
29. Nadasen, Care.[↑]
30. Aging Analytics Agency and InvestTech Advanced Solutions, Investment Digest, 2025.[↑]
31. José Cordeiro and David Wood, The Death of Death (Springer, 2023).[↑]
32. Guita Grin Debert and Jorge Félix, The Financialization of Care and the Indebtedness of the Older People in Brazil (Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento Cebrap, 2023).[↑]
33. Debert and Félix, The Financialization of Care.[↑]
34. On the biopolitical treatment of the elderly as consumers rather than producers, see Parra, “Social Reproduction Theory.”[↑]
35. Longevity Finance, “Who We Are” (2026).[↑]
36. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Five Pillars,” 314.[↑]
37. Abusneineh, “Reproductive Genocide.”[↑]
38. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “Gaza”; Nadia Abu-Zahra and Adah Kay, Unfree in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2012).[↑]
39. Brown, Unsettled Labors, 4.[↑]
40. Brown, Unsettled Labors.[↑]
41. Rai, Depletion. Whereas Rai defines depletion as the outflow of reproductive labors exceeding the inflow of resources need to do these labors, I follow Chilmeran and Pratt (2019) in charting the depletion of the resources needed for social reproduction rather than solely the depletion of individuals doing the labors of social reproduction.[↑]
42. Chilmeran and Pratt, “Geopolitics,” 588.[↑]
43. Osama Tanous et. al., “The Formation and Transformation of Medical Apartheid in Palestine,” International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services 56, no. 1 (2026): 41-59; Sufian, Healing the Land and the Nation.[↑]
44. Tanous et. al., “Formation.”[↑]
45. Human Rights Watch. “Israel: Jerusalem Palestinians Stripped of Status,” August 8, 2017.[↑]
46. Human Rights Watch, “Israel.”[↑]
47. Carol El Jabari et. al., “Barriers to Elderly Healthcare in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services 54, no. 2 (2024), 143-50.[↑]
48. UNRWA, The Situation of Older Persons in Gaza, 2025, as citing UNGA Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing, 13th Session – Right to Health and Access to Health Services; Bilal Irfan et. al., “War-Related Trauma,” as drawing on Michel Guillot et. al., “Life expectancy losses in the Gaza Strip during the period October, 2023, to September, 2024,” Lancet 405, no. 10477 (2005): 478-85.[↑]
49. UNRWA, Situation of Older Persons.[↑]
50. Crawford, “Human Toll,” as drawing on Gaza Ministry of Health 2025.[↑]
51. Euro-Med, “Gaza”; UNRWA, Situation of Older Persons; Puar, Right to Maim.[↑]
52. Puar, Right to Maim; Abusneineh, “Reproductive Genocide.”[↑]
53. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “Death of Elderly People in Northern Gaza Strip Soars Due to Bombing, Starvation, Dehydration, and Lack of Healthcare,” March 10, 2024; UNRWA, Situation of Older Persons.[↑]
54. Husseini, “On the Edge.”[↑]
55. Husseini, “On the Edge.”[↑]
56. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “Gaza.”[↑]
57. El Jabari et. al., “Barriers”[↑]
58. El Jabari et. al., “Barriers,” 147, as drawing on McNeely et, al., 2014.[↑]
59. UNRWA 2025, Situation of Older Persons, 1.[↑]
60. Masalha, “Settler-Colonialism.”[↑]
61. Masalha, “Settler-Colonialism.”[↑]
62. Abu Seif, “Displaced.”[↑]
63. Abu Seif, “Displaced.”[↑]
64. Abusneineh, “Reproductive Genocide.”[↑]
65. Mai Taha, “Insurgent Social Reproduction: The Home, the Barricade and Women’s Work in the 1936 Palestinian Revolution” Theory, Culture & Society 42, no. 4 (2025): 101-20. Chilmeran and Pratt (2019) also discuss how sumud, or steadfastness, resists the ongoing capture of social reproduction by the Israeli regime.[↑]
66. Taha, “Insurgent Social Reproduction”; On this topic see also Frances Hasso, Buried in the Red Dirt (Cambridge, 2021) and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Counter-spaces as Resistance in Conflict Zones,” in The Politics of the Personal in Feminist Family Therapy, ed. A.M.P. Lyness (Routledge, 2007).[↑]
67. M.E. O’Brien, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023), 6. Taha (2025) also uses this phrase in the context of Palestinian resistance through social reproduction.[↑]
68. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism.”[↑]
69. Ben-Zion, Ilan, and Isaac Scharf. “As World Marks Holocaust, Some Survivors in Israel Struggle,” Associated Press, January 27, 2022.[↑]
70. Abu El-Haj, Genealogical Science; Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct (University of California Press, 1997).[↑]
71. Fletcher, Age as Disease, 134.[↑]
72. Aging Analytics Agency et. al., Longevity Industry.[↑]
73. Aging Analytics Agency et. al., Longevity Industry, as referencing a Knesset debate on aging.[↑]
74. Aging Analytics Agency et. al., Longevity Industry, 13.[↑]
75. Singularit, “Bylaws.”[↑]
76. Aging Analytics Agency et. al., Longevity Industry, 80.[↑]
77. Aging Analytics Agency et. al., Longevity Industry, 78.[↑]
78. Aging Analytics Agency et. al., Longevity Industry, 46.[↑]
79. Singularit, “Bylaws.”[↑]
80. Seth J. Frantzman, “Israel’s Uncomfortable History of Racist Engineering,” The Forward, April 21, 2014, https://forward.com/opinion/196719/israel-s-uncomfortable-history-of-racist-enginee/.[↑]
81. Abu El-Haj, Genealogical Science, 82, as citing Falk 2006, 155.[↑]
82. Sufian, Healing the Land, 274, as citing Davidson, “Hakdama.”[↑]
83. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct.[↑]
84. Galia Hasharoni, “Old Zionists, Old Masculinity,” Jewish Culture and History 23, no. 3 (2022): 226.[↑]
85. Nitza Berkovitch, “Motherhood as National Mission: The Construction of Womanhood in the Legal Discourse in Israel,” Women’s Studies International Forum 20, no. 5-6 (1997): 605-19; Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, “Resilient Pronatalism: Reproductive Politics Among Jews in Israel,” in The New Reproductive Order, eds. S. Franklin and M.C. Inhorn (NYU Press, 2025).[↑]
86. Vetek, “Longevity Nation Conference.”  May 1, 2024. Available at: https://www.longevityisrael.org/longevity-nation-conference-bar-ilan-university-28-31-october-2024/.[↑]
87. Jennifer Elias, “From Startup Nation to Longevity Nation,” TechItForward, May 22, 2024, https://www.techitforward.com/post/from-startup-nation-to-longevity-nation-unveiling-israel-s-ageless-innovation.[↑]
88. Aging Analytics Agency and Vetek. Teaser: Longevity Industry in Israel. 2019.[↑]
89. Aging Analytics Agency, Longevity.[↑]
90. Joseph Getzoff, “Start-Up Nationalism: The Rationalities of Neoliberal Zionism,” Society and Space 38, no. 5 (2020): 811-22.[↑]
91. Getzoff, “Start-Up Nationalism,” as citing Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation (Twelve, 2009).[↑]
92. Brown, Unsettled Labors.[↑]
93. Aging Analytics Industry et. al., Longevity Financial Industry in Israel, 2024.[↑]
94. Mevlut Ozkan, “Google, Amazon, & Microsoft Allegedly Complicit in War Crimes Amid Israel’s War in Gaza,” Business and Human Rights Centre, April 2, 2025; Michael Kwet, “How US Tech Supports Israel’s AI-Powered Genocide and Apartheid,” Al Jazeera, May 12, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/5/12/how-us-big-tech-supports-israels-ai-powered-genocide-and-apartheid; AFSC, “Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries LTD,” Investigate (2025); AFSC, “Bank Hapoalim,” Investigate (2025).[↑]
95. Amnesty International, “Lebanon: Evidence of Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Southern Lebanon as Cross-Border Hostilities Escalate,” October 21, 2023.[↑]
96. Abdo, “Palestine Exception,” 977; Puar, Right to Maim, 101.[↑]
97. Karol Gil Vásquez and Alicia Girón, “Social Reproduction and Biopolitics: Introduction,” Forum for Social Economics, (2025).[↑]
98. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Five Pillars.”[↑]
99. Chilmeran and Pratt, “Geopolitics.”[↑]
100. See e.g. Barry Smart, “Military-Industrial Complexes, University Research and Neoliberal Economy,” Journal of Sociology 52, no. 3 (2016): 455-81; Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, The Imperial University (Minnesota University Press, 2014).[↑]