Human vs. Nonhuman Rights in an Israeli/Palestinian Context

One of the few areas in which the relationship between human and nonhuman rights has been explored is that of Israel/Palestine, where several recent papers have looked at the tension between, on the one hand, the prominence and popularity of veganism in Israel, and, on the other hand, the Israeli state’s apartheid regime. A great deal attention has been particularly paid to the endorsement of veganism by the IDF, which advertises vegan options for soldiers (including faux-leather boots).

One of the earliest explorations of this issue, Erica Weiss’s “ ‘There are no chickens in suicide vests’: the decoupling of human rights and animal rights in Israel” (2016), foregrounds its principal claims in its title. First, animal rights activism has become massively and explicitly decoupled from human rights activism in Israel; second, “[w]hile activists of the earlier [animal rights] movement articulated their claims through the ethical regime of humanism and the commonality of suffering, the latter movement has adopted an approach focused on the commonality of agency that foregrounds questions of guilt and innocence” (2). The same shift that has elevated animal rights activism (and particularly veganism) to mainstream and official acceptance in Israel (Weiss 6-7) is a shift that has seen animal rights become apolitical, a question of universal rights and wrongs, where human rights activism is understood as political.

The adoption of animals as apolitical figures of absolute innocence is reminiscent of the use of children that media scholar Susan Moeller has described in war reporting. Moeller, in “Hierarchies of Innocence,” argues that children have come to serve as “moral referents” in a post-Cold War world that increasingly requires us to make complex and uncomfortable moral judgements. Children relieve us of this uncomfortable responsibility insofar as they are figured as apolitical (outside of political struggles), absolutely innocent (outside of struggles around culpability), and avatars of the future (meaning, I would argue, that they allow us to displace our care onto an abstract future rather than a messy and demanding present).

However, especially in Israel/Palestine, children are no longer perceived in this way— Weiss quotes an Israeli animal rights activist who argues that “[e]ven a child is not really a child over there [in Palestine]. Even the children are sometimes terrorists” (7). A need exists, therefore, for a “more pure” moral referent, one that will allow the effective partitioning of “political” issues from “ethical” issues in a way that relieves Israelis of the discomfort that they might experience from understanding the two as intertwined. In particular, Weiss looks at how the current animal rights focus on agency and innocence allows Israelis to figure Palestinians as “responsible for their own denial of basic rights by virtue of their own agency” (14). If the debate around animal suffering is framed in terms of who deserves to suffer, in other words, then the debate around human suffering can also be framed in these terms, permitting not only the creation of moral hierarchies (animals deserve to suffer less than humans do) but also the justification of Palestinian suffering.

Similarly, Esther Alloun’s work on Israeli veganism and animal rights activism suggests that Israeli mainstreaming of animal rights functions to ease moral discomfort with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in several ways. Like Weiss, Alloun (2017) notices that veganism is framed as a “simple,” higher, apolitical issue of compassion and ethics rather than a political issue, implying that human rights (particularly in the context of Palestine) is merely a political issue. At the same time, Alloun (2019) observes that the figuring of Palestinians as incapable of properly caring for animals, in contrast to Israeli care for animals, is used to justify Palestinian subjugation. (In particular, Alloun notes that “animal welfare has been leveraged in popular media to depict benevolent Israelis coming to the OPT to rescue zoo animals from Palestinians who lack care and knowledge, obscuring the role of Israeli occupation and warfare in creating poor living conditions for humans and animals alike” [2019 7].)

This particular strategy of “veganwashing” (as Alloun terms it) has very clear connections to the mobilization of animals to justify Western humanitarian intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Purnima Bose (2020) has made this argument in her analysis of the “canine-rescue narrative,” which sees a soldier or military family rescue a stray dog from Iraq or Afghanistan and “bring it home” to the West. Bose deals with this narrative in a specifically American context, but I (2023) have discussed British examples, notably Pen Farthing’s memoirs of saving Afghan dogs and Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between.

The canine-rescue narrative, Bose argues, “valorizes Americans as more compassionate pet owners than people in Central and South Asia” (95), a kind of “American pet exceptionalism” (105) in which “it is better to be an American dog than an Afghan or Kyrgyz one because Americans love dogs and Afghans and Kyrgyzes do not” (ibid). Canine-rescue narratives often specifically emphasize the cruelty and indifference of Afghans and Iraqis towards dogs, in contrast to the Western capacity to recognize dogs as subjects. (For more on all of this, see my forthcoming article in Intertexts). Such portrayals justify Western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan through the figure of the dog: the Iraqi and Afghan incapacity to properly care for animals becomes a visceral illustration of “their” primitivism and barbarity, which Western education/enlightenment arrives to correct.

What particularly interests me in the similarity between the Israeli mobilization of veganism and American & British mobilization of canine rescue is that animal rights discourses seem to arise in each case in response to otherwise-unmanageable experiences of moral tension and discomfort. The animal becomes a vessel for displaced affect— not necessarily a substitute for the human, but a kind of new person that allows the partitioning of this kind of person (deserving of compassion) from that one (not deserving of compassion). There are some echoes here of the Valladolid debate that took place at the dawn of European colonization and slavery, a debate that sought to regulate which types of non-Europeans could be licitly treated as non-persons and therefore enslaved. Sylvia Wynter (in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”) has discussed the role of this debate in forming the current “statement” of what it is to be human. I am interested in the possibility that we are seeing another shift in how we state what it is to be human, one that is necessitated by the inability of the “old” statement to sufficiently justify and relieve the tensions of our current situation of border imperialism.