A resurgence of animal mobilization in Israel

I’ve written previously about the history of animal mobilization in Israel— in particular, giving an overview of academic work that observes the ways in which veganism and animal rights have been mobilized as evidence of Israeli “civilization” in contrast to Palestinian “savagery,” and the ways in which the mainstreaming of animal rights has occurred alongside the mainstreaming of Palestinian suffering.

Perhaps it therefore comes as no surprise that the current conflict has seen an extraordinary resurgence of animal mobilization. Here, for example, in the Times of Israel, we read about how the “onslaught of terror” has “upended large numbers of citizens around the country – and their furry friends,” and how Israeli animal welfare organizations (“another group of emergency workers”) have acted to save animals. Particularly striking in this article is a quote from an animal welfare worker who is caring for the two pets of a neighbor, and who laments the trauma caused to them by airstrikes: “During the airstrikes this morning Malka the dog was shaking and freaking out, and Paspas the cat has been showing all of the signs of stress, like over-grooming herself. And last night she was having tremors and jerking.” The article does not acknowledge that Israel is carrying out far more extensive and severe airstrikes against Gaza, whose residents cannot (as Malka and Paspas’s owner did) flee, or that pets and indeed humans in Gaza might suffer the same kind of trauma from these airstrikes.

This implications of these absences is that the suffering of animals is more visible, more legible, and more significant than the suffering of Palestinians. Yet, at the same time, Israeli rhetoric in recent weeks has overwhelmingly trended towards equating Palestinians with animals: Israel’s defence minister, Yoan Gallant, described Palestinians as “human animals,” and Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor, characterized them as “bloodthirsty animals… people who basically act as animals.”

Palestinians are animals, and yet they are not animals like other animals, because, as the poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan observed on Twitter, “the western public consciousness would mobilize if this was 2.2 million golden retrievers being bombed to extinction in an inescapable cage.” And, indeed, a 28 October article in the Jerusalem Post treats Israeli animals as “four-legged victims” of the current war, whose suffering is moving in ways that the suffering of Palestinians fails to be. Another Jerusalem Post article on the same day announced that a Palestinian rocket had claimed one casualty in a town: a dog. Violence against Israeli animals by Palestinians (“Hamas barbarians butcher family dog in bloody rampage”) is offered as evidence of the extreme and singular barbarity of Palestinians, in spite of notorious recent and historical incidents that have involved Israeli slaughter of Palestinian dogs.

I have previously discussed the idea that one of the functions of animal mobilization and animal citizenship is to relieve moral discomfort in situations whose moral tension has become unbearable. I remain convinced that one of the ways in which this occurs is through a reorganization of the category of “persons.” In my forthcoming Intertexts article about the Nowzad dog rescue, I discuss the ways in which the substitution of the person for the human creates the possibility of the nonhuman person and the human nonperson. Personhood is no longer something that is assumed to be innate to the human, but rather something that must be earned and performed in a specific and legible way. This facilitates the removal of Palestinians from the category of “persons” (because they fail to perform personhood in a way that is acceptable to Israelis and, indeed, to many other Westerners) and in fact facilitates the eviction of Palestinians from the category of persons insofar as Palestinians are denied access to the very things (stable infrastructure, economic prosperity) that would allow them to perform a version of personhood that is legible to Western eyes. More broadly, the reconceptualization of personhood means that resistance to the hegemony of elite states is always figured as an abdication of personhood, since it becomes yet another way of “acting as an animal.”

The other, important side of this is the elevation of certain animals to the status of personhood. What renders this so important is the fact that, without it, the de-personalization of humans would be seen as structurally undermining the category of the person. If all humans are supposed to be people, then the systematic treatment of some humans as not-people creates dissonance. Now, however, being a person is not about being a human, but rather about performing a certain personhood. This means that we can feel confident in our moral coherence: it is not that we are failing to treat humans properly, but rather that these humans are not people.

Meanwhile, pets are people. Just as we deny Palestinians (and other non-persons, such as asylum seekers) the things that we view as the prerequisites for personhood, we supply these things to pets as part of extending personhood to them. We create their narratives of personality through the provision of pet consumer culture, which assigns them cosmopolitan tastes and interior liveliness. Thus we are always producing this new category of personhood even as we pretend that it is natural and pre-existing.

This is one reason why I feel that posthumanism has revolutionary promise at the same time that I’m suspicious of the ways in which it can be co-opted. After all, what we see here is one version of posthumanism, insofar as personhood is extended to nonhumans. At the same time, in reality it is simply substituting the “person” for the hegemonic human. This means that it is more important than ever to refuse the policing of subjectivity, to insist that you do not have to be legible human or person in order for your life or your being to have value. But I don’t know how we get there from here.