36 minute read
GAZA
BY LAURA SCHLEIFER
Laura Schleifer created the word ‘artivist’ to describe her vocation as an artist-activist. An NYU Tisch graduate (BFA, Drama), she’s toured the Palestinian West Bank, Jordan and Egypt, performing with a theater/circus troupe for Palestinian and Iraqi refugee children, taught in China, Nicaragua, and at Wesleyan University’s Green Street Arts Center, performed off-Broadway, and arts-mentored homeless/targeted NYC youth. Her screenplay, The Feral Child, was a Sundance Lab finalist. Her essays appear in The Leftist Review, Project Intersect, The New Engagement, and an upcoming Black Rose Books Kropotkin anthology. Currently, she’s writing a book, Liberating Veganism, for Vegan Publishers. Laura is also the Institute for Critical Animal Studies Total Liberation Director and co-founder of Plant the Land, a vegan food justice/community projects team in Gaza.
BEYOND VEGAN-WASHING: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANIMAL --AND HUMAN-- LIBERATION STRUGGLES IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE
This spring, Israel once again dominated world headlines— both within the animal rights movement, and beyond it. In animal rights/vegan circles, Israel is once again being celebrated, this time for being the ‘first country in the world to ban fur’. While the struggle to ban fur in Israel goes all the way back to the grassroots Israeli animal rights movement in the mid-90’s, in more recent years, animal rights campaigns within Israel have gained more establishment support, with PETA US Honorary Director Pamela Anderson personally lobbying government officials in Tel Aviv and appealing to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to support a ban on fur, and Gila Gamliel, a former army sergeant -turned-Likud party Environmental Protection Minister, signing it into law. In a nationwide opinion poll, 86% of Israelis expressed support for the ban.
All across the Western world, animal rights organizations and media hailed the move. In a statement to Plant-Based News, Claire Bass, Executive Director of HSI UK, said: “This is a truly historic day for animal protection, with Israel becoming the first country in the world to ban the sale of fur fashion.” PETA swooned that, “This victory belongs to animals—the rabbits, minks, foxes, and other vulnerable species who suffer and are killed for human vanity.” Meanwhile, reporting within Israel was less impressed, with The Times of Israel flatly calling the ban “largely symbolic”, as the bill makes an exemption for the Hasidic fur-brimmed hats known as shtreimel—the predominant cause of fur-wearing in the balmy Mediterranean climate—and permits the use of fur for any religious, scientific or educational purposes.
Of course, the other reason why Israel was in the international news this past spring was for a rather different reason. On May 10th, Israel unleashed an 11 day intense bombing campaign against the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip—trapped because for the last 15 years, Israel has controlled the parameters of this tiny piece of land and refused to let anyone in or out without
its permission, leading Gaza to be dubbed the ‘world’s biggest open-air concentration camp’. Starting with the Israeli attempted eviction of long-term Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem that an Israeli court ruled earlier this year should be cleared for Jewish settlers coming from other parts of the world to move into, this most recent intense flare up of the longstanding ‘conflict’ between Israel and the Palestinians whose land Israel controls quickly escalated from the forced evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, to Israeli military teargas, rubber bullet and stun grenade attacks on Palestinian worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, to Hamas rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel in retaliation for the Jerusalem attacks and evictions, to an all-out Israeli slaughter of Gazans, the likes of which had not been seen since the last major Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza in 2014. In total, 260 Gazans were killed by Israeli bombs, including 66 children, and 1,900 were seriously (and in many cases, permanently) injured, while on the Israeli side 13 people died from Hamas rockets, including 2 children. As the world watched the horrifying images pouring out of Gaza, Haaretz Newspaper, one of the major Israeli news outlets, reported that the Israeli military was in fact intentionally wiping out entire families. One after another civilian building was destroyed, ultimately leaving 122,000 Gazan families homeless as a result of the Israeli bombing, according to UN estimates. On the 11th day of bombing, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire. In stark contrast to the 86% of Israelis who supported the fur ‘ban’, 72% did not support the ceasefire, and in fact wanted Israel to continue to bomb Gaza.
Just a few weeks later, when news of the Israeli fur ‘ban’ was announced, there was little-to-no mention of what had transpired the previous month in the vegan community news coverage of the event. Totallyveganbuzz.com was the rare vegan news source that acknowledged Israel’s recent human rights crimes, dryly noting, “Israel’s move to protect helpless animals from cruelties is heartening after the country was recently embroiled in conflicts with innocent Palestinians, raiding their homes for forced evictions, and attacking worshippers in the holy Al-Aqsa mosque.” To their credit, the website also published a separate story regarding Palestinian scholar and activist Zarefah Baroud far more critical piece, “Dear PETA, Israel’s animal rights record leaves a lot to be desired”, which excoriates Israel for its hypocrisy where both human and non-human animals are concerned. At the time of this writing, Totallyveganbuzz. com appears to be the only vegan news source to mention the most recent Israeli attacks at all.
What makes the omission all the more glaring is the fact that other social justice movements have increasingly embraced the Palestinian liberation struggle and integrated it into their own struggles, actively seeking out and exposing the ways in which the various systems of oppression intertwine and taking the stance that the freedom of one requires the freedom of all. Whether it’s #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives pointing out the long history of Black-Palestinian solidarity against all forms of colonialism and apartheid and exposing the current trend of US police being trained by Israeli military, South Africans calling for an end to apartheid in Palestine just as they called for it to end in South Africa (and noting that Israel was one of the only countries to continue supporting South African apartheid right up until the very end), Native people of the Americas and Australia calling for indigenous solidarity and resistance worldwide and pointing out the similarities between the US border wall and the Israeli ‘apartheid wall’ built to separate ‘Israel proper’ from the Israeli-occupied and controlled Palestinian territories (“From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go!”), or intersectional feminists recognizing that one cannot be both feminist and a supporter of Israeli colonialism (aka ‘Zionism’) because in order to stand in solidarity with women one must stand with all the oppressed women of the world, including Palestinian women, in movement after movement there is a growing consensus that all of these issues are stemming from the same roots, and that systemic violence against humans must end in all its forms. In the U.S., even the mainstream news outlets have recognized the fact that support for Palestine is growing, and that it is due in large part to ‘America’s racial reckoning’ (“Time”, May 21st) and to inter-movement human solidarity building.
Of course, therein lies the rub— the key word here is humans. While the climate justice movement is working to bridge the gap between social justice and environmental movements, ultimately the focus there is on how ecological issues affect humans—not non-humans. Other movements may also include the impact of systemic oppression on non-human animals in their overall analysis, but the animal rights movement remains the only social justice movement that focuses on the direct exploitation of non-human animals and their natural rights based specifically on their individual subjectivity and ‘personhood’. Thus, the animal liberation movement is irreplaceable in the greater schema of movements for justice and liberation, as it alone contains this key piece of the greater puzzle. Yet, rather than take our rightful place in the broader movement for total liberation from the systems of violence—colonialism, imperialism, militarism, Capitalism, etc.--that are destroying ecosystems and harming humans and other species alike, the animal rights movement has largely continued to alienate itself from those other movements by refusing to make those connections, thus seeing nothing amiss about praising a colonial apartheid regime for ‘banning’ fur while the rest of the world harshly condemns it for slaughtering children.
Working donkey in the West Bank
The irony in this is that some of the most radical, revolutionary ideas about how these issues connect come from activists within the ‘Holy Land’ itself. While much has been made of the issue of Israeli government and military ‘vegan-washing’--that is, the attempt to ‘wash’ away their human rights crimes through promoting the image of Israel being a ‘vegan nation’ with the ‘world’s first vegan (occupying) army’--in fact, there is a legacy of ideas and actions on both the Palestinian and Israeli anarchist sides that combine the struggle for Palestinian liberation with the struggle for non-human animal liberation, and that look at how Israeli/Zionist colonialism has negatively impacted the indigenous Palestinians, the land, and the non-human animals in that region. It is here that the global animal liberation movement can draw inspiration for ways in which to work in solidarity with Palestinians and their allies towards a liberation for humans and other species that necessarily includes, but also goes beyond, merely boycotting Israeli goods and services and calling out Israeli ‘vegan-washing’ whenever and wherever we see it.
ONE STRUGGLE, ONE FIGHT— THE TOTAL LIBERATIONIST ORIGINS OF THE ISRAELI ANARCHIST ANIMAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT, AND HOW VEGAN “HASBARA’ WASHED THAT HISTORY AWAY
Mention the Israeli animal rights/vegan movement today, and you’re likely to get one of two reactions: glowing praise for Israel being the ‘world’s first vegan nation’, a ‘vegan paradise’, etc., or else intense skepticism about how the Israeli government, military and corporations are cynically exploiting veganism and animal rights as a way to give themselves a progressive veneer that serves to both distract from their human rights crimes and also distinguish them as being more ‘civilized’ than the ‘barbaric Arabs’ they are ‘surrounded by’, who naturally would never, ever have the moral capacity for veganism themselves. (This despite the fact that Palestinians are one of the lowest animal-consuming demographics in the world, while Israelis remain one of the highest...but since when has #Orientalism cared about facts?) It may surprise many to discover that at one point the animal liberation movement within Israel was profoundly radical, explicitly anti-Capitalist and anti-colonial, and deeply intertwined with solidarity for Palestinian liberation, as well as other social justice movements.
The Palestinian Animal League (PAL) feeding stray cats
A Palestinian Animal League (PAL) veterinary clinic
Watching footage of the early days of the Israeli animal rights movement vs. that of the movement today, it seems there is virtually nothing recognizable between them. In a YouTube video entitled ‘Animal Rights in Israhell: Diary of Actions 1995–2006’, punk music plays while anarchist activists wave signs showing animals being tortured on farms and in labs, chain themselves to McDonald’s outlets, and perform agit-prop street theater depicting Ronald McDonald as a blood-drenched killer. Protesters are shown as being in direct conflict with Israeli law enforcement. The mood is distinctly confrontational, anti-consumerist, anti-Capitalist, and anti-establishment. In contrast, the video “The Story Behind the Vegan Revolution in Israel”, from a talk given by Chen Cohen at the 2016 International Animal Rights Conference, is in many ways its complete opposite. Contrary to the anti-consumerist spirit of the original Israeli anarchist animal rights movement, this new and ‘improved’(?) movement gives the impression that it is about nothing but consumerism. Right from the get-go, the speaker diverts from any focus on non-human animal liberation straight to the fact that Tel Aviv has over 400 vegan-friendly restaurants, and you will know that they are ‘vegan-friendly’ because they have a sticker on their window marking them as such. And then he talks about vegan shopping in Israel, vegan venture Capitalism, and vegan celebrity blogger Ori Shavit, with her ‘Vegan Girls Have More Fun’ blog on the VegansOnTop.com website. Then we are shown smiling pictures of Ori hanging out with the Israeli military — yes, that military, the one that murdered 248 Gazans just a few weeks ago, injured 1900 and made 100,000+ homeless, the one that inflicts violence and brutality on the Palestinians whose land they occupy on a daily basis — discussing and cooking vegan delicacies. We are also told that now there are even vegan bbqs happening on Israeli Independence Day (a holiday that is a slap in the face to Palestinians, as the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian land 73 years ago involved mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, aka ‘the Nakba’ [‘catastrophe’ in Arabic], and of course continues to be the main source of their misery today.) Finally, to wrap things up, we are shown a final image of the Israeli flag, only with the bottom of the ‘Magen David’ (Star of David) covered with a green ‘V’ to represent veganism.
Poster for vegan 'Birthright tour'
Other sources tell a similar story about the New Israeli Vegan Movement. There are articles and videos promoting Tel Aviv as the ‘vegan capital of the world’, vegan tours of Israel, and even a vegan version of the Birthright tour. (For the uninitiated, ‘Birthright’ trips are Israeli government sponsored trips for young diaspora Jews aged 18-32 to come and visit Israel in the hopes that they will decide to move there, serve in the occupying army, get married and propagate the race—all of which is vital to Israel maintaining the demographic majority it needs to retain its function as a ‘Jewish state’. The title, ‘Birthright’, refers to the idea that any Jewish person from any part of the world is entitled to move to that land because it belongs to all Jewish people by divine right. Meanwhile, diaspora Palestinians cannot come home to that land, not even if they were born there.) And always, there are stories promoting the Israeli military as a ‘vegan army’, complete with vegan food, plant-based hats and boots, etc. for the 5% of soldiers who identify as vegan --so much so that the U.S. magazine The Atlantic Monthly published a feature piece on the subject. (Because apparently murdering humans, including children, is so very compatible with veganism? Surely Donald Watson and Elise Shrigley, the anti-war protesters who founded the vegan movement with the idea of creating a more peaceful world overall, must be shuddering in the afterlife.)
Clearly, something has dramatically changed between the Israeli animal rights/vegan movement of the ‘90’s, and the one today.
While it may be difficult to clearly pinpoint the exact moment the change happened, there are some indicators. The new Israeli vegan movement cites its origin as the moment when U.S. vegan activist Gary Yourofsky’s speech, modestly titled ‘The Greatest Speech You’ll Ever Hear’, was translated into Hebrew and went viral in Israel in 2010. Yourofsky is notorious for promoting a form of veganism that is not only single issue, but indeed downright hostile to human rights, essentially seeing human rights as being in opposition to animal rights because humans are the oppressors of other animals. When Yourofsky went to speak at Ariel settlement, a segregated Jewish-only housing settlement in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank that was not only being targeted for boycott by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against apartheid Israel but that even many Is- raeli public figures were boycotting because the residents of that settlement had been caught literally torturing Palestinian children, journalists from Israeli Leftist publication 972 Magazine asked him whether he was aware of the boycott, and if so, why he was still going to speak at the settlement in spite of it. Yourofsky replied that he didn’t care about, “Jews or Palestinians, or their stupid, childish battle over a piece of God-forsaken land in the desert. I care about animals, who are the only oppressed, enslaved and tormented beings on this planet. Human suffering is a joke.”
Needless to say, claiming that non-human animals are the only oppressed beings on the planet, and that ‘human suffering is a joke’, was perhaps a rather insensitive thing to say in a place where one group of humans are being so severely oppressed by another group that they are experiencing one of the world’s worst human rights crises, according to virtually every human rights org. and the United Nations itself, but Yourofsky didn’t stop there. Despite his protestations that he had no vested interest in ‘taking sides’, he then went on to make a video entitled, “Blacks, Palestinians and other Hypocrites’ (because apparently it was more hypocritical for [some] Black people and Palestinians to continue to consume animals while fighting for their own human rights than it was for the Israeli military to be proclaiming themselves vegan while slaughtering Palestinians, including children), followed by an epic Facebook rant in which he proclaimed that Palestinians are ‘the most insane people on the planet’. Oddly enough, no such criticism of Israelis/Zionists was ever forthcoming.
Of course, none of this stood in the way of Yourofsky becoming an overnight sensation in Israel, with up to 1 out of every 7 Israelis having seen his ‘greatest speech’. Indeed, Yourofsky’s brand of virulent anti-humanism played a significant role in inspiring the creation of what is now the biggest, most well known radical animal rights group in Israel: 269life. Named after a calf branded with the number ‘269’ who was rescued by anonymous animal liberationists just days before his scheduled slaughter, 269life is brazenly anti-humanist, with an organizational statement called ‘The Non-Humans First’ declaration, that proudly announces that 269life believes that human forms of oppression are wholly irrelevant to animal rights, that oppressed people must first ‘free their own (non-human) ‘slaves’ before gaining the ‘right’ to advocate for their own liberation, that issues of human social injustice should not be taken into consideration when engaging in animal rights activism, and it does not matter what someone’s stance on issues of human oppression is as long as they are willing to fight for animal rights for them to be welcomed into animal rights movements. (Translation: apparently vegan Nazis, Klansmen, sex offenders and all other bigots and abusers should be welcomed into animal rights movements with open arms.) While similarly to Yourofsky, the group claims no official position on the Israel-Palestine “conflict”, co-founder Santiago Gomez has revealed that while he initially opposed the Israeli occupation and control of the Palestinian territories, he now supports the Israeli blockade that is literally causing Gazans to starve, as well as depriving them of medicine, clean water, electricity, gasoline, jobs, and every other necessity of life because the blockade limits the number of cows allowed into Palestine and because Israeli military attacks have caused the near collapse of the Gaza fishing industry. And despite the organization’s staunch opposition to considering the relevance of human social injustice in relation to animal oppression, that has not made them hesitate to constantly include references to human social injustice in their activism in the most offensive way possible—comparing a black man being lynched to a pig being strung up, holding fake ‘slave auctions’ referencing the auctions of enslaved Africans in the 19th century, representing the ‘end of human supremacy’ by juxtaposing a black person’s face with a white cow’s face, and other such propaganda that could only be described as blatantly racist, especially when used in the context of a predominantly white group that outright says they don’t care about human injustice, yet treats human injustice like it’s their property to be used for their own purposes, just like the black people whose trauma they exploit were, and in many ways still are, treated like property by the dominant white society.
Compare this to the Left-wing anarchist Israeli animal liberationists, particularly the group Ma’avak Ehad, or ‘One Struggle’. Formed in 2002, their name was inspired by the phrase, “One struggle, one fight—human freedom, animal rights!”, One Struggle was total liberationist to the core, with an animal liberationist ideology and practice firmly rooted within a holistic, anti-statist/decolonial, ecological, feminist, Socialist, queer liberationist, intersectional, anti-war/anti-imperialist, anti-Capitalist and certainly anti-Zionist framework. In short, they were working towards dismantling all systems of hierarchy, domination and oppression in order to actualize a broad vision of social justice and collective liberation for all—human and non-human alike. From organizing animal rights protests that were anti-Capitalist in nature (including the aforementioned protests against McDonald’s) to participating in Palestinian-led solidarity actions to running a Food Not Bombs vegan food distribution site, One Struggle was making powerful connections between veganism, food and economic justice, anti-militarism, Palestinian liberation and the liberation of non-human animals, calling attention to animal rights within peace and social justice movements, but also encouraging anti-occupation resistance in the vegan/animal rights community. When One Struggle eventually disbanded, its members went on to form another group, Anarchists Against the Wall, that retained its veganarchist ethos but primarily focused on Palestinian solidarity work, the ‘wall’ in its name a reference to the Israeli ‘apartheid wall’ that separates ‘Israel proper’ from the Palestinian territories it occupies and controls. Today, some of its members have also become active in Boycott from Within, a group of Israeli Free Palestine activists who organize to encourage the world to participate in the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement to pressure Israel to end its illegal (in violation of international law) and immoral military occupation and control of Palestinian land, apartheid conditions, and genocidal sanctions on and bombing of Gaza.
Even today, according to one Israeli anarchist who spoke anonymously to the anarchist website Crimethinc, an animal liberationist element is pervasive throughout the Israeli Leftwing anarchist movement, and quite a few of the shministim (Israeli conscientious objectors who go to prison for refusing to do their mandatory military service in solidarity with the Palestinians) are vegan as well. Yet, outside of that region, hardly anyone is aware of the rich and radical legacy of Israeli veganarchism. The Israeli vegan movement we always hear about is always either the consumerist foodie movement, the anti-humanist movement, or the straight-up-military propaganda movement.
So, here we come to a question that has plagued the international vegan community in recent years: Is the Israeli government intentionally using the cause of veganism and animal rights to ‘wash’ its image? All evidence says yes. The key indicator is the active role that Brand Israel has been taking in promoting Israel as a ‘vegan nation’. According to Wikipedia, “Brand Israel is a campaign run by the Israeli government to improve Israel’s image abroad. By showing Israel’s “prettier face”, downplaying religion, and avoiding discussing the state’s conflict with the Palestinian people, it hopes to counter foreigners negative attitudes towards Israel.” Formed in 2006, Brand Israel was created in order to both improve Israel’s image internationally and also attract young diaspora Jews to ‘make aliyah’ (move to Israel, or ‘return’ in Zionist parlance), serve in the Israeli occupying military and/or marry a Jewish Israeli and have children, all of which is necessary for Israel to maintain its identity as a ‘Jewish nation’ and its military and demographic dominance over the Palestinians. It was created with the express purpose of giving Israel a ‘makeover’ after public opinion polls showed that while many in the West still supported it militarily, it’s image was that of an old-fashioned, religious theocracy. With the help of NYC ad agencies like Rubicam & Young and Saatchi and Saatchi, Brand Israel set out to discover what would make young people, and specifically young Jews, tick. Initially their efforts were a little less ‘socially conscious’, a little more salacious (their first venture into the public arena was putting together a ‘Women of the IDF’ spread in ‘lad mag’ Maxim, replete with Gal Gadot reclining in a bikini, legs splayed), but while this approach wildly appealed to young men, it wasn’t reaching the young liberal demographic that Israel was targeting. So they began very visibly promoting Israel on the global stage as being a haven for various progressive movements: gay rights (‘pinkwashing’), feminism (‘purplewashing’), ecology (‘greenwashing’), and veganism, which is how the Israeli government ended up sponsoring 4 massively popular vegan vloggers with a combined following of over 1 million youtube subscribers to go on an all-expense paid ‘Vegan Vibes’ food tour of Israel (a particularly cruel irony given that Palestinians in Gaza were literally being held captive and starved by Israel just a few miles away), and how we ended up with vegan birthright tours and government-run Meatless Monday campaigns and even the Israeli military claiming a vegan identity.
And so, this Brave New Israeli vegan movement has not only served to ‘wash’ Israeli human rights atrocities away, it has also served to ‘wash’ the radical, total liberationist, anarchist elements of the animal liberation movement away, as well.
Daily Hugz Animal Sanctuary in Palestine
THE PALESTINIAN ANIMAL LIBERATION AND VEGAN MOVEMENT: A NASCENT MOVEMENT FOR OUR TIMES
In recent years, an inspiring new development has taken place, one that the Israeli vegan ‘hasbara’ (propaganda) machine never could have predicted: the Palestinians have started their own vegan and animal liberation movement.
Needless to say, it should be fully understandable why this did not happen until now. Living under daily foreign military occupation and control for decades on end, Palestinians struggle each day for even the most basic human rights, let alone animal rights. Yet, in recent years there has been a growing sense among some Palestinians that just as their own liberation is so obviously tied up with the liberation of their land, it is also deeply intertwined with the liberation of the other species they share that land with.
Over the last decade, several animal sanctuaries and rescue efforts have sprung up in the Palestinian West Bank. Founded by Maad Abu-Ghazalah in 2011, the animal sanctuary Daily Hugz, so named because it is conscious of the healing effect that connecting with animals can have on traumatized children, provides sanctuary to homeless and abused animals and provides a safe space for children to play. It also combines hands-on rescue and healing efforts with consciousness-raising, focusing on spreading environmental and animal protection awareness and fighting Palestinian society’s negative perceptions of street animals. A key point of Daily Hugz’s work is helping to alleviate Palestinians’ fear of dogs, which is the result of the Israeli military usage of trained attack dogs to terrorize the Palestinians. Abu-Ghazalah says that when he adopted a German Shepherd at the sanctuary, the children and even the adults were frightened of her because German Shepherds are commonly used by the Israeli military. Abu-Ghazalah took great pains to make Olive seem nonthreatening to them, even putting a flower in her ‘hair’ to make her look approachable. Once the children got to know Olive, they all fell in love with her, which helped to heal their feelings about dogs on the whole. Daily Hugz also provides emotional support for disabled children, who spend a lot of time at the sanctuary connecting with the animals. Additionally, they work with Dr. Bilal, a local vet who donates his services to this non-profit org. for free. Currently Daily Hugz and Dr. Bilal are teaming up to fund aspiring Palestinian veterinary students to study in the USA so they can eventually bring those skills back to care for the animals in Palestine. For more info.:
http://www.dailyhugz.org
Another organization, the Animal and Environment Association in Bethlehem Palestine, has opened the only animal shelter in the West Bank. Founded by Diana Babish and opened in 2016, the organization provides a home for thousands of dogs and cats, and works to prevent local municipalities from poisoning and shooting the dogs to control their populations. AEA-Bethlehem is the only shelter working to provide treatment to injured dogs, cats and other animals, including arranging legal animal adoption documents. They also provide spay and neutering services to the animals under their care, and to those they adopt out. AEA-Bethlehem is also working to change policies allowing dogs to be abused or poisoned without penalty, and for vets to stop allowing that. AEA-Bethlehem receives no government funding, relying totally on urgently-needed donations. They also encourage local people to volunteer at the shelter. To support AEA-Bethlehem, please visit GoFund- Me:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/5ga53r-bethlehem-animal-shelter
Venmo: @bethlehemshelter
Other activists in the region work independently to rescue individual street animals in their area by providing them with food, medical care, and finding them homes. Suzana Zorko, based in Al-Azariya, combines her animal rescue efforts with human rights work—in her case, children’s education, women’s economic empowerment, and local ecological restoration projects. Working to provide food, water and medical care for stray dogs and cats, Suzana recycles food scraps from local food producers to provide meals for animals. She also provides water, which is especially critical in this desert climate where Israelis control the water supply and there are severe water shortages. Another individual animal rescuer working independently, Heba Al-Junaidi, has built a makeshift shelter for 50 cats in the garden of her home in Hebron. For more info on Al-Junaidi’s efforts:
www.xinhuanet.com/eng
Sulula Society Animal Rescue workers in Gaza
Another organization operating in the West Bank is the Palestinian Animal League. Founded by Ahmed Safi in 2011, it was created in response to traumatized children in refugee camps taking out their pain and anger over living under Israeli military occupation and apartheid by abusing animals who were even more powerless than they were, with the belief that encouraging the children to care for the animals rather than abuse them would both help the animals and also help the children emotionally through bonding with the animals. Another focus has been helping Palestinians become more conscientious about how they treat the animals who are doing labor, mostly horses and donkeys. While the ultimate goal is the liberation of all animals, these activists recognize that in a place where there is mass poverty and where people are struggling for their own daily survival, the immediate goal is to ensure the animals are treated well, and to raise consciousness about the animals and their suffering more generally. In addition, PAL rescues street dogs and cats and finds them homes, runs a veterinary clinic, and has started the first Palestinian TNVR program (trap, neuter, vaccinate and release) to prevent local municipal authorities from poisoning the strays.
They also work to promote veganism. Student activists successfully created Cafe Sudfeh, the first Palestinian vegan cafe, by convincing East Jerusalem-based Al Qud University’s cafeteria to go fully vegan, and to split all proceeds between funding animal rescue and providing scholarships for students. (Sadly, Sudfeh has now closed, with plans to eventually re-open in the West Bank capitol, Ramallah.) They also run school workshops on veganism, and organize vegan tours of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. In 2018, they organized their first international vegan conference there. Conference attendees were also guided around the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank in order to get a better sense of how living under per- manent foreign military occupation, ongoing colonization and apartheid conditions is affecting the people, the animals and the ecosystems in that region. For more info.:
https://pal.ps/en/
In Gaza, Sulala Animal Rescue has been especially active in providing the animals who were injured and made homeless during the recent Israeli bombing campaign with medical care and a home. Founded by Saeed Al Err, who has been rescuing animals since 2006, he keeps 40 cats at home, has placed 30 more with volunteers and oversees a shelter that’s now home to 200 dogs. It also had a horse and a donkey, but both were killed in the recent Israeli airstrikes. Saeed’s policy is to never refuse to help any animal in need—and especially since the recent bombing, the need is great. One dog is even receiving treatment after jumping from the sixth floor of a building because he was scared by the bombs, suffering a spinal fracture. The shelter runs solely on donations, including donations of free goods and labor from local vet clinics and pet food suppliers. For more info.:
https://www.facebook.com/SulalaSociety
Additionally, one organization has formed to provide vegan food to Gaza. Founded by Anas Arafat, a Gazan lawyer, and Laura Schleifer, a Jewish-American Free Palestine activist and animal liberationist, Plant the Land Team’s mission is to connect the international vegan community to Gaza to bring vegan food to people there who need it. Because of the Israeli economic blockade, Gazans lack access to food (one Israeli official even ‘joked’ that Israel was ‘putting Gaza on a diet’ by intentionally starving them), as well as clean water, electricity, medicine, gasoline, building materials, and all other necessities of life. Unemployment is roughly 80% there. Plant the Land Team provides immediate plant-based food aid and other forms of emergency aid (plant-based insulin, warm winter coats and blankets, home rebuilding, etc.), while also working towards longer-term solutions such as planting food forests on public lands, building village water wells, and providing people with gardening tools, with long-term goals of buying land for a community to share and opening a school to teach children how to garden, as well as teaching them respect for the land and its animals. Resolutely non-hierarchical and inspired by the principles of mutual aid and communalism, the team also recently partnered with US organization Million Dollar Vegan to provide 3,500 plant-based meals to Gazans in the aftermath of the recent Israeli bombing. Plant the Land Team’s name refers to the literal work of planting the land to help Gaza become food autonomous, to land reclamation, and to the metaphorical idea of planting seeds of peace and justice for a better future. For more info.:
https://nyartivist.wixsite.com/ plantthelandteamgaza
Finally, Vegans for BDS is a collaborative effort between international activists and Palestinians who choose to remain anonymous for security reasons working to promote the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement within the vegan community, and to specifically target vegan brands who are profiting off of the Israeli occupation or who do business with those who are with organized boycotts. Currently, Vegans for BDS are mounting a campaign to pressure plantbased consumer products seller PlantX to end their planned expansion into Tel Aviv, which has been funded to the tune of $11.5 million by Psagot, an investment company that is financially linked to Israel’s military occupation. For more info.:
https://vegansforbds.com
CONCLUSION: HOW CAN WE BEST SUPPORT TOTAL LIBERATION— FOR PALESTINIANS, FOR THE ANIMALS, AND FOR THE LAND THEY LIVE ON?
It is easy for those of us in other parts of the world to feel powerless to affect events taking place on the other side of the world. However, because of the unique relationship between Israel-Palestine and the outside world, particularly the Western countries that fund and arm Israel, we have both the power and the moral responsibility to take action to help Palestine, and to support Palestinians fighting for both their own liberation and that of non-human animals. As vegans and animal liberationists who support total liberation for everyone, here are some ways we can help:
1. Participate in the BDS movement—Inspired by the South African BDS movement to end apartheid there, Palestinians have organized a global movement to pressure Israel to end it’s occupation, sanctions, apartheid system, and ethnic cleansing policies inflicted on Palestinians through a combined strategy of boycotting Israeli companies, pressuring international public figures to not make public appearances/performances/lectures/etc. In Israel, divesting from Israeli companies, and pressuring governments in other countries to stop funding/arming/ doing business with Israel. In this way, Palestinians have a way to resist their oppression non-violently, while raising awareness of their suffering all over the world. For more information, visit
www.bds.net
2. Get involved with Vegans for BDS-- As vegans, we have a special role in resisting Israeli occupation because Israel has chosen to use our movement to improve its self-image. Vegans for BDS is working hard to challenge that, and to promote awareness within the vegan community of which vegan products to boycott in solidarity with the Palestinians. These products may not contain any animal ‘products’, nor have been tested on animals, but if they support colonialism they aren’t ‘vegan’ and certainly aren’t ‘cruelty free’. Additionally, Vegans for BDS works to convince vegan ‘influencers’ to NOT make public appearances in Israel, as doing so violates the boycott. For more info.:
https://vegansforbds.com
3. Call out Israeli vegan-washing whenever and wherever you see it—The Israeli propaganda machine is depending on the silence of total liberationist vegans to continue exploiting our movement to improve Israel’s image and to hide its human rights crimes. Don’t let it.
4. Expose Israeli atrocities to the vegan community—including those involving animal exploitation and abuse. While Israel is promoting itself as a ‘vegan nation’, in actual fact, Israel is consistently in the topten meat consuming nations on earth and has one of the biggest dairy export industries in the Middle East. As is typically the case with colonialism, one of the biggest drivers of its resource theft, particularly that of precious water supplies in the desert environment, is animal agriculture. Additionally, Israel exploits animals in their violent attacks on Palestinians, from the Israeli military usage of trained attack dogs, many of whom are imported from Europe, to Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian villages in the West Bank that involve attacking animals, in addition to burning olive trees, attacking local children and other forms of hate crimes. During the 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza, Israeli military entered the Gaza zoo and summarily executed the animals. We never hear about these things in the vegan movement, only about how Tel Aviv is the ‘shining vegan city on the hill’, and about how Israel is the ‘world’s first vegan nation’ with the ‘world’s first vegan army’. Expose them.
5. Support the Palestinian-led animal rescue, sanctuary, and vegan food justice efforts mentioned above—Palestinian animal and vegan activists need our help! They are working under the most unimaginably difficult circumstances, and need all the support they can get. Additionally, spreading awareness about these organizations within the international vegan community will not only help them and the humans and animals they assist directly, it will also help indirectly by breaking the racist/Islamophobic/Orientalist implication that only Israelis care about animals.
6. Connect with Boycott from Within and the true Israeli Leftist/anarchist/veganarchist community, and promote THAT Israeli vegan movement, rather than the single-issue, anti-humanist, government propagandist-influenced one— Israeli Leftists/anarchists who support total liberation are still out there, and they need our support, especially because they are such a tiny and despised minority within Israel. Additionally, promoting the stories of the shministim, Israeli conscientious objectors who go to prison for refusing to serve in the Israeli occupying army (in Israel, almost every young person of any gender is required to serve in the military), can help to disrupt Israeli ‘vegan washing’ propaganda about the military. Many of these brave young people are also vegan. Promote their stories in the vegan community. For more info.:
https://boycottisrael.info
7. Call out Israeli cultural appropriation of traditional vegan Arab foods—Falafel, hummus, baba ganoush, etc. are all traditional Arab foods going back centuries, but to hear Israel speak you’d think they were all invented by Israelis during the brief 73 years of Israel’s existence. Calling these foods ‘Israeli’ is Palestinian cultural erasure, and fits into a larger Zionist project of denying the existence of Palestine on the whole. Whenever you see these foods or other traditional Arab/Palestinian things being referred to as ‘Israeli’, call that out.
8. Educate yourself and others about the Israeli occupation and overall oppression of Palestinians-- Some helpful resources to check out include organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, Adalah, B’Tselem, Middle East Children’s Alliance, International Solidarity Movement, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, Birthright Unplugged, and Existence is Resistance, among others. Follow Palestinian and Jewish/ Israeli Left-wing media like Maan News, The Palestinian Chronicle, Haaretz, 972 Magazine, Mondoweiss. The Electronic Intifada. Films to check out include “5 Broken Cameras”, “Tears of Gaza”, “Stone Cold Justice”.
9. Share resources with friends and family. Post about the situation for Palestinians on social media. Bring up Palestine as an issue in other social justice movements you are involved with, and reveal how it connects to those other struggles. Support for Palestinians is growing tremendously, and that is in no small part because of the influence of both social media and intersectionality. You can play a significant role in making that happen.
10. Finally, keep working for collective liberation and reject single-issue veganism/animal rights activism—When our movements become single-issue, they become vulnerable to co-optation and exploitation. That is why feminism and gay rights became exploitable by the Capitalists, colonialists and imperialists—because without an intersectional analysis, those movements could be framed in terms that served to advance overarching systems of oppression rather than dismantle them. If you dislike the cynical usage of identity politics as a way of silencing dissent, that’s actually more reason to take an intersectional, total liberationist approach to your activism. Additionally, taking a total liberationist approach wards off false accusations of unfairly singling Israel out for criticism or of engaging in ‘anti-Semitism’, and lets Jewish people know that your criticism is not of them, but of Israeli colonialism/Zionism. By standing up for the liberation of ALL beings at once, we can forge strong bonds of solidarity and collaboratively strive for collective liberation far more powerfully and effectively.
