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‘There are no chickens in suicide vests’: the decoupling of human rights and animal rights in Israel

2016; Wiley; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-9655.12453

1467-9655

Erica Weiss,

Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses

In this article, I consider the shifting politics of animal rights activism in Israel in relation to human rights activism. I find that whereas in the past, human and animal rights activism were tightly linked, today they have become decoupled, for reasons I explore in this article. Although human and animal rights activism once shared social and ideological foundations in Israeli society, today much of the current animal rights activism is assertive and explicit in its disregard for human rights issues, such as the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the treatment of Palestinians. This decoupling has been heightened by the appropriation of animal rights politics by a right-wing state for the purposes of ethical legitimation. This article considers the dilemmas of ethical responsibilities towards humans and animals as it plays out in one of the most vexed political environments in the world. I consider the shifting politics of human and animal rights activism, and demonstrate how they implicate and entangle each other in the context of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I further consider what the decoupling of the human and animal rights movements might suggest regarding the ongoing academic critique of human rights and humanism. Résumé Dans cet article, l'auteure examine la politique changeante des mouvements militant pour la protection des animaux en Israël en relation avec ceux qui militent pour la défense les droits de l'homme. Elle montre que les droits de l'homme et ceux des animaux étaient étroitement liés dans les mouvements activistes par le passé mais sont aujourd'hui dissociés, pour des raisons qui sont explorées dans l'article. Bien que ces militantismes aient eu autrefois des bases sociales et idéologiques communes en Israël, les défenseurs des droits des animaux affirment aujourd'hui explicitement leur désintérêt pour les questions de droits de l'homme, notamment l'occupation de la Palestine et le sort des Palestiniens. Cette dissociation a été renforcée par la mainmise d'un État de droite sur la politique de la protection des animaux, à des fins de légitimation éthique. L'article examine les dilemmes de la responsabilité éthique vis-à-vis des humains et des animaux dans l'un des environnements politiques les plus bouleversés au monde. Il examine la politique changeante de l'activisme pour les droits humains et animaux et montre comment les uns et les autres s'impliquent mutuellement et sont entremêlés dans le contexte du conflit chronique israélo-palestinien. L'auteure étudie également les implications du découplage entre les mouvements pour les droits de l'homme et pour la protection des animaux dans le cadre de la critique universitaire actuelle des droits de l'homme et de l'humanisme. Nir1 was agitated when I met up with him at his apartment in south Tel Aviv in the fall of 2012, despite the fact that he had asked me to join him for an event on an issue close to his heart. I had known Nir, a vegan and animal rights activist from central Tel Aviv, since 2008, during a previous period of fieldwork. He had offered to bring me to an event he heard about from a fellow activist, Tom, but I learned on arriving that they had just recently fallen out. Nir had been an activist since the late 1990s, and Tom was new to the animal rights movement. Both in their late twenties and pursuing their studies, they had quickly formed a friendship. A few days earlier, Nir had invited Tom to a salon gathering to discuss ongoing efforts to help the Palestinians living under blockade in Gaza. Nir assumed that Tom would be sympathetic to human rights causes on the basis of his animal rights activism, and was surprised when Tom balked, forcefully informing him that he didn't care about the Palestinian struggle, and wasn't interested in any of his leftist politics. Ethical veganism has become a national phenomenon in Israel (Reuters 2015), but while the previous animal rights movement was once solidly embedded in the Israeli political left, and specifically in its human rights causes, this is not the case today. Nir's mistaken assumption about Tom reflects this shift. Nir was upset, but decided to accompany me to the event nevertheless. At Rabin Square, we watched from the side as Israelis of all ages were lining up at stations to have their arms tattooed with numbers, a ritual inscribing in flesh being carried out in solidarity with the animal victims of factory farming. The recent surge of animal rights activism in Israel is larger and more mainstream than previous initiatives. It also distinguishes itself in its very explicit decoupling from human rights activism. In the past, animal rights activism in Israel was part of leftist politics, and relied on the same ethical and political rationalities as the human rights movement, which was closely associated with it. Domestic human rights activism in Israel has had a significant political presence owing to almost fifty years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Numerous violations of basic human rights are endemic to Israeli practices of occupation, including restrictions of movement, collective punishment, abuse, and more. Having reached its peak in the Oslo era (1990s), recently, the human rights movement has lost support domestically, subject to a rightward shift in Israeli politics (Shamir & Sagiv-Schifter 2006). It is in this context that the current animal rights movement has risen in its new manifestation divorced from the political left. Human interactions with animals often index and symbolize fraught intra-human relations (e.g. Cassidy 2002; Song 2010). In this article, I compare animal rights politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which had strong ties to human rights politics and ethical humanism, with the current animal rights movement. As exemplified in the scene above, there is a significant amount of antagonism between animal rights activists of the different movements. This article considers the experience of ethical dilemmas of violence towards humans and animals as it plays out in one of the more vexed societies in the world. I examine the decoupling of the animal rights movement from the human rights movement in order to illuminate the ethical and political stakes of their divergence. In the clash between the new animal rights movement and its still active predecessor, each side critiques the other as perverting ethical priorities, revealing deep rifts. I examine the process by which the politics of animal rights has abandoned the commitment to human rights, at times adopting a strongly right-wing, anti-Palestinian stance. I further demonstrate the ways the state inserts itself by appropriating this political issue for its own interests, and especially for the purpose of ethical legitimation. I go on to consider what this shift might mean for the ongoing academic critique of human rights and humanism. While activists of the earlier 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. I argue that this case demonstrates the limited value of theoretical ethical critiques outside the political context of their articulation. It affirms that a specific theoretical approach cannot guarantee political justice, an outcome that depends on how the approach is articulated and deployed in practice. This article draws on fieldwork conducted during 2007-9 with vegan military refusers dedicated to human rights, as well as fieldwork conducted during a major upswing in vegan and animal rights activism in the broader Israeli society between 2012 and 2015 with individuals of many different political stripes. During this later period, in addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews among new animal rights activists, I re-established fieldwork relationships with my interlocutors from the earlier animal rights movement to see how they experienced this new mainstream phenomenon. I take as a starting-point for this inquiry recent insights by scholars on the anthropology of ethics, specifically of ordinary and everyday ethical questions (Lambek 2010). This approach is fitting for this case, as the dilemmas regarding the correct ethical relationship with animals, such as whether or not to eat them, are routine and often faced multiple times a day. Furthermore, scholars of this approach, such as Webb Keane (2010) and Cheryl Mattingly (2013), demonstrate that everyday ethical judgements are fundamentally social, made not alone or in the abstract, but rather in communication with the community as mutual expectations are negotiated and actions and intentions are justified. This insight is especially important to the case considered here, because animal rights activism should be understood as a public reckoning over ethical norms. Furthermore, this account follows the 'ordinary' approach by privileging lived experiences of ethical evaluation over abstract deliberation (Das 2010: 377). Abdellah Hammoudi has termed this approach 'practical articulation' (2009: 51), referring to the concrete way people relate to ideas at specific times, in context and in motion. This concrete approach is contrasted with other treatments of humanist ethics in recent anthropological accounts. This account draws attention to the ways the reckoning between animal and human rights unfolds in an ongoing context of political conflict. The ethical claims at play are embedded in controversial political issues, and at times are appropriated for political goals and state control. However, the proper evaluation of the stance-taking described in this article should not be a judgement of 'sincerity' or 'bad faith' (see Keane 2010 on sincerity). Rather, the evidence suggests that while ethical judgements regarding animal rights are not formed in abstract contemplation of 'the animal' and 'rights' outside the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are also not completely determined by politics or deployed cynically purely for political expedience. Instead, my interlocutors 'cross-pollinate' ethical and political discourses, inserting animals into the politics of Palestinian occupation, and inserting Palestinians into the context of animal rights discourse. This case contributes to anthropological understandings of ethics by drawing explicit attention to the importance of political context to ethical dilemmas. It expands on insights into the social nature of ethical deliberation by showing how ethical norms are negotiated hand-in-hand with the foreseeable political implications of such norms. I conducted my first fieldwork research between 2007 and 2009 with Jewish Israelis who refused to perform their mandatory military service because of reasons of conscience – most often violations of human rights brought about by the Israeli occupation. When I began my fieldwork with Israeli pacifists, I noticed very quickly that an unusually large percentage of my interlocutors who defined themselves as pacifist were also vegetarian or vegan. Wary of ethnographic 'mission creep', I initially tried to maintain focus on what I considered the 'relevant' motivations for their pacifism towards other humans. But I eventually found that the reasons underlying their opposition to eating animals were closely related to the reasons for their conscientious objection to military service. Indeed, there were many examples in which military refusers referenced animal rights in addition to human rights in their letters of refusal to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). In Western societies, in which meat-eating is hegemonic (in contrast with Buddhist or Hindu cultural practices), veganism and animal rights activism is often aligned with the political left (e.g. Adams 2015), and this was certainly the case with this group. I guess it all started when I started getting into the animal rights scene. A few kids at school were saying things like 'meat is murder', and I didn't really think about it before, I just kind of ate what was on the table or in the refrigerator. I started doing some research, and I couldn't believe what I saw. Once you see those pictures of the animals suffering, I don't think it is possible to continue to eat meat. So I became part of this scene, handing out flyers in school and also doing some graffiti on Rothschild Boulevard. I spray-painted 'I don't eat things that come out of a chicken's pussy', on the side of a building. Anyway, people started talking about the army also. I was reading about the things from Betzelem [a human rights NGO] about the occupation and the treatment of Palestinians, and it reminded me completely about the way people were raising animals for food. How they were basically keeping Palestinians in cages and not letting them move around, it was like the videos of the animals that couldn't move. I decided my position was against causing suffering and the military was causing suffering, because of how many animals and Palestinians it was torturing and killing. So I decided not to enlist. The connection between the suffering of animals and the suffering of Palestinians was ubiquitous in discussions among this group. The juxtaposition was initially jarring as the equivalence between Palestinians and animals has been more commonly made in order to dehumanize Palestinians, and thus legitimize violence against them. In the Israeli public sphere, Palestinians have been compared, not infrequently, by eminent politicians to cockroaches (Israeli Military Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan) and grasshoppers (Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir), crocodiles (Prime Minister Ehud Barak) and snakes (Israeli Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked), and generically to animals and beasts (Israeli Deputy Minister of Defence Eli Ben-Dahan). Dehumanization in those cases is done discursively and symbolically, denying full humanity and human characteristics to Palestinians in order to deny them the ethical responsibility owed to fellow humans. For example, in March 2015, a philosophy professor from Connecticut College gained attention for a Facebook posting that described the situation in Gaza over the previous summer as 'a rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape'. Many claimed that this comparison to a pit bull reflected the attempted dehumanization of Palestinians, and thus racism. The online petition calling for the university condemnation of the professor noted that '[d]ehumanization has been used all throughout human history to justify genocide, colonialism and hatred of many communities' (quotes in Mulhere 2015). Above, and in my ongoing conversations, it is evident that in this version of animal rights thought, the principle of preventing unnecessary suffering is extended to include animals as well as humans. Peter Redfield (2013) has summarized the premise of humanitarian thought as the idea that human beings are a species that should not be made to suffer. Ideas regarding the proper treatment of animals have a long history in humanist thought. The Bible establishes human dominion over animals (Genesis 1:26), and this is central to ideas concerning the 'humane' treatment of animals, which in turn reflect a concept of responsible stewardship. European laws based on humanist principles preventing certain forms of cruelty against animals, especially domestic animals, go back at least to the seventeenth century. Dog-fighting, cock-fighting, cock-throwing, badger-baiting, bull-baiting, bull-running, and other forms of blood sport were all targeted for humane intervention (Ritvo 1987). Paternalistic care for animals emerged in tandem with ideas of empathy as a guiding force in moral regulation. For example, Jeremy Bentham articulated the problem of animal protections in a way that has influenced thinking on the humane treatment of animals ever since: 'The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but, Can they suffer?' (2007 [1789]: 311). Fieldwork with the animal rights activists in the early 2000s reveals a reliance on the humanist politics of suffering and compassion. This is an ethical approach that has been heavily critiqued of late by a number of philosophers and anthropologists, who claim that its rationality produces and reproduces problematic politics. Didier Fassin (2011) has suggested that the focus on suffering displaces other, more robust forms of social justice, such as those based on rights. Miriam Ticktin (2006; 2011) has also criticized the politics of universal suffering, arguing that they reinforce hierarchies and inequalities, and thus produce the exclusion of those suffering from the political community by casting them as passive victims in need of heroic intervention. Ticktin has herself extended these observations to the field of humanist animal rights politics, which rely on an imagined mute and passive suffering animal in need of rescue. She notes that this reliance on humanist values reproduces distinctions between the noble rescuer and the mute rescued that underlie forms of exploitation familiar to us in human society (Ticktin 2015). Thus, it is claimed that the politics of humanism are unfit to produce justice, both in human society (Bornstein 2012; Fassin 2011) and in our ethical responsibility to animals (Haraway 2008; Ticktin 2015). In the critique of humanism, it is proposed that an alternative politics of responsibility is needed, one that divorces itself from the problematic concept of suffering, and, in the case of animals, one that moves away from paternalistic notions of responsible stewardship. We will see that the latter animal rights movement does abandon humanist ethics, though it does so in ways that are locally embedded and politically unanticipated by these calls to do so. Specifically, owing to the ongoing regional conflict, the embrace of animal rights outside the humanist grammar enables and becomes complicit in aggressive political stances against Palestinians. While the earlier animal rights movement described above was relatively small, ethical veganism has become an ubiquitous national phenomenon in Israel over the last three years. (Overly) optimistic activists have even predicted that Israel will soon be the first vegan nation. One of the first mainstream incursions of the animal rights/vegan message was a video lecture of Jewish American vegan activist Gary Yourofsky. The video is called 'The best speech you will ever hear', and it was translated into Hebrew by two animal rights activists. Yourofsky compares meat-eating practices to slavery, torture, and murder. He challenges the school of thought that allows for the concept of 'humane slaughter', claiming this is a contradiction in terms akin to humane rape, humane slavery, or a humane Holocaust. This video has been enormously popular in Israel. It has been viewed on YouTube by hundreds of thousands of Israelis and featured on prime-time television. Public figures, including journalists and politicians, have called on people to watch the video and change their eating habits. The video has even been screened for the public by at least one municipal government (Modi'in, July 2012). Animal rights activist groups have formed or been reinvigorated. For example, the animal rights group Anonymous was founded in the 1990s, but has become a household name in the last few years. By contrast, the group 269life, which staged the public brandings described in the beginning of the article, was created in 2012. Further, countless Facebook pages and websites have been created to share information about animal rights and veganism. Vegetarianism and veganism have moved very quickly from the upper-class ideological margins to the mainstream. In a recent survey, 10 per cent of Israeli society reported being vegetarian, and another 5 per cent reported being vegan, while 40 per cent reported having a friend or relative who had become vegetarian or vegan in the last year. Another 13 per cent said they were seriously considering becoming vegetarian or vegan, and more than 50 per cent of Israelis reported changing their eating habits recently to include less meat (Aharoni 2014). I spoke with many Israelis who had become vegetarian or vegan after being educated on veganism, not by leftist activists, but by their mainstream relatives, friends, or coworkers. Businesses in Israel have responded accordingly, with a few restaurants becoming entirely vegan, and many more increasing their vegan options in order to be included in businesses identified as 'vegan friendly' (Halutz 2013). Even large chains like Domino's pizza have changed their practices, and now offer a vegan pizza option, only available in Israel (Arad 2013). Newly converted vegans and vegetarians were also quite easy to find. I found new activists handing out flyers and posting stickers in public areas and on bathroom walls. Rina was a typical example of a newly converted vegetarian. I met her at a café of the chain 'Aroma', where I overheard her asking the waiter if the avocado sandwich on the menu was vegan. (It was not; he suggested the vegan omelette sandwich.) Rina was a svelte 49-year-old, and two-month-old vegan. She lived in an upper-middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv with her husband, three children, and their dog, Gili. Rina played on a local women's throwball team (cador reshet, a game similar to volleyball), and one of her friend's on the team, Tami, had introduced the women on the team to the Gary Yourofsky video and had made the idea of veganism realistic for them. Rina told me that she was never a huge meat-eater, and she was deeply affected by the materials she saw on-line. She also told me that she recoiled at the images of factory farming, and could not help think of their dog, Gili. She also said Yourofsky's argument that there is no such thing as 'humane slaughter' was undeniable. 'How can you kill something in a humanitarian way?! Do you say sorry to the cow?' Initially, Rina had been sceptical about whether vegan food would be too restrictive and difficult to prepare. But Tami had invited the throwball team and their families over for dinner one night to show them that this food could be satisfying and simple to prepare. When Rina's husband gave the verdict that the food was not terrible, she made the change. The latest animal rights movement has impacted a far broader contingent of Israeli society than earlier efforts did.2 Accordingly, among this group, I found far fewer ties to the traditional Israeli left (anti-occupation positions) and human rights organizations. The Israeli left is relatively small, and often activists wear many hats on issues considered politically symbiotic. But those involved in the new vegan movement are far more likely to be single-issue activists or enthusiasts. As a result, the current politics of animal rights activism cuts across the traditional divisions of Israeli politics, and produces alliances that would have previously been politically unlikely, if not impossible. Contributing to their widespread popularity, animal rights issues have received significant official support (many would argue more than human rights issues have), and have reached a degree of mainstream consensus uncommon in Israel. The Israeli legislature, the Knesset, has adopted the global movement of Meatless Monday,3 and does not serve meat on this day in the government cafeteria. Israel's President, Reuven Rivlin, is a long-time ethical vegetarian. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also very recently shown significant concern with animal rights, supporting Meatless Mondays (Ravid 2013b), and limiting his own consumption of meat (Eichner 2013). He stated in a government meeting that his opinion was changed after reading a book by Yuval Noah Harari, saying, 'I understood from the book that animals have more consciousness than we thought. It bothers me and causes me to think twice' (Ravid 2013a). Interestingly, both President Rivlin and Prime Minister Netanyahu are right-wing politicians. So too is Israel's Minister of Agriculture, Uri Ariel. Ariel belongs to the far right party Beit HaYehudi, he is a leader of the settlement movement, and has been singled out by a group of moderate Israel and Palestinian scholars as one of the four most egregiously anti-peace Israeli politicians. In his previous role as Housing Minister, he used housing tenders to extend Israeli settlements in the West Bank and he has intentionally undermined international peace efforts. He visits the Al-Aqsa Mosque, particularly during times of tension, in order to demonstrate Jewish sovereignty over this Muslim holy site, and he called for the establishment of a Third Jewish Temple there. Ariel has also been very pro-active in his official role on behalf of animal rights. After video footage revealed abuse at Israeli slaughterhouses, he immediately shut down the plants, ordered cameras installed in all slaughterhouses throughout Israel, and pursued indictments against individual slaughterhouse employees who were shown to engage in abusive practices. He stated: 'I will show zero tolerance towards harming animals' (quoted in Udasin 2015a), and 'I will operate with zero tolerance regarding the subject of animal welfare, and against those who perform acts that should not occur from either a Jewish perspective or from the perspective of the laws of the State of Israel' (quoted in Udasin 2015b). Ah, ok. I think human rights, it's a very pretty idea. But basically, today it is only used by the Europeans and the Arabs to criticize Israel. They don't know what it is like here. They think it is all innocent victims, but we are dealing with terrorists, and it is not always nice and pretty. My son is in the military now in the territories, and the things he tells us when he comes home on the weekends, you can't believe it. Even a child is not really a child over there. Even the children are sometimes terrorists. She told me that she had voted for the right-wing Likud party and Netanyahu for many years, not seeing any other viable alternative among the other parties. She told me her husband and her oldest son had voted for the far right Jewish Home party (Habeit Hayehudi) because they were fans of the politician Naftali Bennett and particularly his august military service. I guess I'm a leftist, and I support human rights, but I think that is different because the veganism is an ethical issue, and the human rights is more political. I mean, clearly it is ethical as well, but I feel like for me they aren't related. Even if I became a right-winger, I would still be vegan. Those on the right who rejected human rights were even more emphatic about the distinction. Orna told me, 'But human rights is not the same thing. We aren't eating Palestinians for food, we aren't taking their children from their mothers, we don't wear their skin as clothing. We give them electricity, water, jobs, everything they have'. The decoupling of the new animal rights movement from the left runs against the grain of how people conceptualize animal rights as a left-wing cause in the West, where meat-eating is hegemonic.4 In Israel today, by contrast, we find an explicit clash between human rights and animal rights. One development that sparked this clash was also a clear sign that the current animal rights movement has detached itself from traditionally left-wing politics: its embrace by the IDF. While, at one time being vegan or vegetarian in the Israeli military was a nearly impossible feat, today it is recognized by the military as a legitimate life-style and ethical choice that they see as in their interest to support. In November 2012, the IDF posted on Facebook and tweeted an image advertising their accommodation of vegan ethics (Fig. 1). The IDF now provides faux leather boots and (as of 2014) offers synthetic berets in place of the traditional wool out of respect for vegan ethics. According to the military, hundreds of these berets have already been issued to soldiers. Vegan soldiers receive extra money from the military to supplement their food supply. The military also started serving a vegan, soy-based meat substitute from the Israeli company Chef Man (Benari & Kempinski 2011). In July 2015 they added a post to Facebook and Twitter with a caption that read: 'Going vegan is a choice – respecting that choice is our obligation. #Meatless Monday' (Fig. 2). This change is not only about the recognition of veganism as an ethical choice, it is also about public perception both domestically and internationally (note the campaign poster is in English). The IDF is constantly fighting what Yoram Peri has called 'perceptual warfare' (2006: 4), an ongoing attempt to shape public opinion in favour of the military in Israel and abroad. This campaign should be seen as part of a concerted effort to cast the IDF as ethically attuned and morally upright. Here, we see that not only does the political context play a part in determining the ways people think about animal rights and vice versa, but also that the state is an active player in this negotiation. The reaction on Facebook and Twitter to this initiative was swift and divided. Many commentators praised the progressiveness of the IDF, and called it a model of a moral military in the world. Some thought it demonstrated how 'advanced' Israel culture is. Others immediately reacted to what seemed to them to be a grossly misplaced concern for animal welfare, while the more important abuses of human rights continue. One critic responded, 'You murdered thousands of Palestinians, including more than 500 innocent children in Gaza last year. You protect settlers who steal Palestinian land and commit hate crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank. How dare you try to whitewash your despicable inhuman crimes by pretending to respect a