A climate journalist recently interviewed me for a piece she was writing about water infrastructures in Gaza and the West Bank, and between the two occupied territories and Israel. She wanted to highlight Palestinian suffering in relation to water infrastructures. But she was worried that a piece like that wouldn’t move the needle with Israel supporters and liberals who were on the fence. To get them to consider a ceasefire, she explained, she was hoping to write her next article on what she called the “environmental damage” in Gaza. Then, she hoped, people might listen. This journalist’s thought process is common. It seems relatively innocent. But it also shares affinities with more obviously sinister modes of thinking that provide the conceptual groundwork for violent dispossessions. While she was responding to Palestinians’ dehumanization, in other words, was was also inadvertently participating in that same logic that allowed it.
I had in mind, among other things, that since October 7th, Israeli officials had repeatedly referred to Palestinians as animals. Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu called Israel’s war on Palestine “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle” (Oct 17, 2023). Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant remarked, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly” (Oct 9, 2023). These framings are mobilized in support of genocide by reducing Palestinian humanity through equation with nonhuman animals. Nonhumans are more killable and indeed must sometimes be killed for their irrationality and innate violence, and because they cannot be included in this imagined polity. Animality is mobilized as justification for human annihilation.
As anthropologists and STS scholars, we cannot respond to such framings with a reminder that all animals (and environments) deserve equal treatment, however excited we may be by calls from scholars like Marisol de la Cadena, Donna Haraway, and Wendy Brown, among many others, to understand all beings as kin, or by from the STS community more broadly, to think in terms of nonhuman agency as necessarily politically redemptive. Let me begin by considering what we can learn from STS in, and about, this moment. My hope is to consider how we can build on the critical lenses that STS offers to think of how to mobilize it in the service of a just future.
What can STS contribute to the study of Palestine in this moment? For one, STS invites us to describe, reminding us that description is analysis (e.g. Latour 2007).[1] It insists that the nonhuman and the sensory be included in description, and that we reveal technology’s social dimensions, its mangledness, intermingledness, with what some like to hold up as the social. Gaza today today is a Guernica of indistinguishable intermingledness. It is made up of chunks of concrete mangled together with iron rods, human body parts, poetry, and blood. The air is full of dust and smoke. Animal carcasses are strewn, charred fur of dogs and cats and the exposed flesh of birds where feathers once were. Burnt rubber from the tires of vehicles carrying people or supplies dot clumps of earth that were formerly roads. Mattresses and curtains that offered soft light to couples on Saturday mornings now smolder under rubble. Sewage lingers on the beach and in the sea. Seawater lingers in drinking containers. Human flesh festers with open wounds where the skin has been lit by white phosphorous. In shallow, sandy mass graves the dead are wrapped in white sheets with their names on them. Bodies mix with soil that Israel has so heavily sprayed with herbicides over the past decade that the plants growing on its surface are either sick or dying. Crushed works of art on canvas, like those made by Mohamed Harb, my friend and co-producer on a film we made about stale bread in Palestine, were left in his home in Gaza City before Israel began its most recent campaign to destroy the city. Tents and collapsed U.N. signs mix with shattered glass in Rafah. Shards of missiles and broken wheelchairs keep company to incubators knocked over by blasts in hospitals. Family photographs and identity documents float away as ashes. Terrifying silences and even more terrifying explosions deafen beings with the sensory tools to hear them and the eerie combination of weeping, chatter, yelling, and laughing, some muffled under fallen concrete ceilings and others gathered in unusually audible display under open skies. STS forces us to linger in the materialities of these scenes.
Second, the insistence of STS that to understand the relationships among technology, science, and society, we must think beyond political borders helps highlight that research about the material environment I just described must include tracking where the missiles and white phosphorous were designed and built, calculating the fuel spent to ship and fire them, learning the origin and chemical makeup of the herbicides mixing with corpses and a salinized aquifer, how far up the Mediterranean coast Gaza’s sewage is leaking, and the way the sewage affects fish and desalination plants, among other things.
Third, STS also encourages us to think about relations of interdependence between nonhumans and humans. It invites us to consider how the death of chickens means the death from starvation of people, just as the crippling of donkeys means a family fails to escape a bombing, and inversely how toxigenic bacteria like Vibrio cholerae, which causes the acute diarrhoeal infection we call cholera, find homes and thrive in the bellies and blood streams of Gaza’s children. Thinking in terms of interdependence helps tell us something about the objects of Israel’s attack. They are Palestinians, they are the ecologies and infrastructures within which Palestinian life is made possible. It allows us to see this as a war that both kills and preempts life (Rubaii 2018).[2] It reveals the processes by which Israel makes “war ecologies” (Guarasci and Kim 2022).[3]
Fourth, STS offers ways to consider multiple forms of agency beyond and adjacent to that of humans. Although the Israeli military is acting in ways that make it appear to be all-powerful and certainly with political impunity and material support from even more powerful allies, STS reminds us to wonder how the flatness of Gaza’s land, the shallowness of its aquifer, the density of its built-up areas, and the particular properties of its fighter jets conspire to shape Israel’s ability to act as it does. These same forces also contribute to the appearance of Israel as a single, cohesive state despite the many fragments that must be constantly reassembled to produce it as such (Mitchell 1989).[4] We are witnessing not only an assault on Gaza as an environment, but an alliance, among other things, among Gaza’s ecological features, global circuits of machinery and weapons, capital, digital images and humans cultivating and disseminating particular visions of Palestinian life that see it as less valuable than the life of a Jew. Knowing this is useful for knowing where to orient our political energies in the fight for justice.
Yet there is also much to learn from Gaza as the part of Palestine that is currently the most violent (but by no means the only) target of Israeli genocidal policy. On the one hand, Palestine is not unique in being a place of war, displacement, racialization, expertise, secularism, religiosity, gender, class struggle, capitalism, environmental destruction, or climate change. On the other hand, Palestine is a place from which we can rethink fields including STS. Among the things that Palestine has to teach at the scale of a field like STS is, I think, how to consider where the problem of dehumanization should fit into an analysis that embraces prioritizing, and sometimes centering, the nonhuman. We can see this through an examination of the place that nonhuman animals have occupied in Palestinians’ recent experiences of, and exposure to, dispossession, displacement, and death.
One of the most important contributions that STS and adjacent fields have made to the social study of science and technology, and by association, to the study of “the environment,” is the proposition that nonhuman animals possess forms of agency that render them equal to humans at the level of analysis as well as at the level of morality. This contribution has dovetailed with another proposition I mention above: that ecologies, networks, and assemblages that make and are made by human and nonhuman agencies necessarily extend beyond political borders. One result of this twin set of propositions has been that moral and political “points” are attributed to those who, either in advocacy or in scholarship, or both, underscore the significance of nonhuman animals. Notwithstanding compelling work that has shown how domination has been smuggled in under the banner of conservation and animal rights, it is still the case that showing that you are able to think “beyond” national or political borders in the name of the protection of the nonhuman world offers strong moral and political currency, including in liberal and progressive circles. Israel and its allies in the West are a case in point.
During my own fieldwork in the West Bank in the 2000s and 2010s, I witnessed both of these propositions–the need to “think beyond borders” and avowals of care for nonhuman animals–weaponized in the service of “slow” forms of violence (Nixon 2011)[5] within settler colonialism as well as in the service of rapid annihilation schemes like Israel’s current massacres in Gaza. Israeli government officials and settlers often blocked construction and rehabilitation of Palestinian sewage and solid waste projects, for example, in the name of protecting the environment that Israelis and international donors treated as an environment “shared” between occupier and occupied (Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2019, 2021).[6] I saw how the same Israeli settlers who argued for the protection of the environment in the West Bank simultaneously argued for the eradication of all human Palestinian life from historic Palestine, sometimes even on environmentalist grounds.
In addition to taking precedence over protection of Palestinian life, the protection of nonhuman animals has served as justification for not taking part in “politics”--that is, in critiques of Israeli state policies that kill and maim Palestinians, that destroy Palestinian infrastructures and that displace and dispossess them. During previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, for example, Israeli and North American animal rescue organizations that remained silent about their governments’ destruction of Palestinian life also sent aid to Gaza’s nonhuman animals and framed their efforts as a way to skirt “politics” altogether. In 2009, YNET news (a Israeli news agency) celebrated the fact that the Israeli animal rescue organization "Let the Animals Live Israel" had, together with a Palestinian animals welfare organization with the Israeli government Coordination and Liaison office in Gaza and other international organizations, arranged for a delivery of food and medicine supplies to benefit the animals in Gaza in general and specifically the Gaza Zoo. Thirty trucks loaded with oats and hay, along with medicine and medical supplies, entered Gaza while the Israeli military rained bombs on Palestinian apartment buildings.
Protecting nonhuman animals while remaining silent on the killing of human children has been mobilized as a sign of humanity. Eti Altman, the Israeli spokeswoman of "Let the Animals Live", was quoted as calling "the collaboration between us and the Palestinians…proof that the animals are not part of the political conflict, and anyone with a bit of humanity left in them, should volunteer and help out.” According to the organization’s director, Israeli participants in the aid to Gaza’s animals “found out that the situation there was terrible.” They lamented that “[m]any animals died in the bombings” and that “the remaining animals were living in poor conditions.” They said nothing about the humans also killed in the bombings. Altman told a reporter: “We said, ‘Let’s put politics aside and take care of the animals’” (Feb 2009).
In 2014, as Israeli bombings backed by U.S. dollars and protections killed Palestinians and destroyed Palestinians’ homes, the Israeli military allowed an international animal welfare organization called Four Paws to enter Gaza to treat the 20 surviving animals at the Bissan City zoo (Buzzfeed September 2014). Founded in 1988 in Vienna by Heli Dungler and friends, Four Paws advocates for a world where humans treat animals with respect, empathy and understanding. In April 2019, weeks before another Israeli assault was to begin on Gaza, Four Paws again celebrated its work helping Gaza’s animals. Israel had allowed a team of veterinarians and wildlife experts from Four Paws to enter Gaza to evacuate 47 zoo animals. The animals – including five lions, a hyena, several monkeys, wolves, porcupines, foxes, cats, dogs, emus, ostriches and squirrels – came from what Four Paws called a “neglected zoo in Rafah in the south of Gaza.” I do not believe that Four Paws was being malicious. On the contrary, being ethical, or human here meant not asking “political” questions about how over seventy years of Israeli military occupation, twenty-five of which included a blockade on the Strip with severe constraints on trade, on the import of building materials, and ecological destruction, might have contributed to a zoo coming to look “neglected.” It is an ethics of caring for animals first, as a sign of humanity, that allowed Four Paws to overlook the question of whose responsibility it was to provide care for a zoo under the international laws that govern military occupation of a territory, because thinking about the occupation was political and thinking about animals was not.
Being mindful of the deployment of animal metaphors and protection as lubricants of Palestinian erasure helps us understand and position ourselves critically in relation both to those practices and to responses to them. I say this among other things because Palestinians have themselves of course been provoked to respond to their own dehumanization. Some responses have included efforts to prove their own humanity by highlighting virtuous acts of offering care to the nonhuman world. Videos and images circulating on social media depicting tender relations between Palestinians and cats in Gaza since October 7th are likely oriented toward a multiplicity of audiences for any number of reasons. Among their effects is the continuation of a longer tradition that appeals to international audiences to consider Palestinian innocence by association with nonhuman animals. In 2022 the English-language online publication Palestine Chronicle profiled Salalah, a Gaza-based Palestinian animal welfare organization that has been providing for dogs and horses since 2016, for instance. The article was titled “Animals are Victims of Israeli Wars, Too.” It invited readers who inured to Palestinian suffering to tap into affective responses to animals as a way to open up broader potential for empathy toward those who care for them. Such depictions do different kinds of work. To the extent that they are diagnostic of Palestinians’ dehumanization, they can also be read as attempts to gain a kind of proxy humanity through the appreciation granted more to animals than to them. Israel’s massacres in Gaza since October and Western governments’ reluctance to stop them show that this struggle for innocence has not born its intended fruit.
One dilemma those fighting for justice in Palestine face is how to navigate the conceptual and political shackles into which the centering of nonhuman animals and the interconnectedness of ecologies contain them. If Palestinian calls for their own right to live (and to live on their own land) fall on deaf ears in places like Israel and the United States, is the answer to push the protection of animals and the environment or to try to convince those with the deaf ears of Palestinian humanity–if not through animals and the environment, otherwise?
In closing let me return to the climate journalist with whom I opened this piece. The journalist said that the reason she was speaking with me was that, while she had obtained all of the relevant numbers for the water article she was currently writing–including the cubic meters of water to which Palestinians are limited in the West Bank, the fact that Israel controls most of Gaza’s water and is the main cause of the pollution of Gaza’s aquifer–from Palestinian sources. But she was hoping to ask me for the names of some Israelis who could say the same things that her Palestinian sources had said, on record. She admitted that she felt sheepish about it, but couldn’t help that she felt she needed a Jewish Israeli body to be the origin of information that Palestinians had already given her. “That’s just how it is,” she said. For the field of STS and for social scientists working on questions of science, technology, and society and concerned about things like genocide and settler colonialism, the question is how to draw a materialist sensibility into a broader analysis of power that both reveals the processes of dehumanization of which many of us become a part but also into a methodology that can help combat those same processes.
Notes
1. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oup Oxford, 2007.
2. Rubaii, Kali J. Counterinsurgency and the ethical life of material things in Iraq's Anbar Province. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2018.
3. Guarasci, Bridget, and Eleana J. Kim. 2022. "Ecologies of War." Theorizing the Contemporary,Fieldsights, January 25. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/ecologies-of-war
4. Mitchell, Timothy. "The effect of the state." In SSRC workshop on State Creation and Transformation in the Middle East, Istanbul. 1989.
5. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
6. Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. Waste siege: the life of infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford University Press, 2019; and Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. "Failure to build: Sewage and the choppy temporality of infrastructure in Palestine." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (2021): 28-42.
