Saeed Al-Err purchased the bloodied donkey to relieve his agony. The donkey’s mange-covered body had two large gaping wounds on his neck and rump where he has been repeatedly struck. 'This whip, in the garbage!' shouts Al-Err, 'We’ll untie him and destroy the cart!”. Two men take-up sledgehammers and proceed to smash the cart to shreds. The ethos of Al-Err’s organization, Sulala Society for Animal Care, dismantles the logic of incarceration and use of force. Not only checkpoints, surveillance, jails, artillery and bombs, but also whips, bits, blinders and cages. Sulala’s transspecies solidarity is the future of care and resistance, pointing the way to a world wherein no creature is 'animalized' nor subjected to the use of force.
ALEXANDRA ISFAHANI-HAMMOND: Palestinians have been live-broadcasting their genocide via social media since the beginning of the Israeli-U.S. bombardment of Gaza on October 8, 2023. One such video records Saeed Al-Err intervening on behalf of a bloodied donkey
Purchasing the donkey to relieve his agony, Al-Err removes his metal collar and unties the maze of heavy straps and chains encircling his face and diminutive frame. He invites the camera to focus on the donkey’s mange-covered coat and two large gaping wounds on his neck and rump where he has been repeatedly struck.
A hand holding a whip fills the screen. “This whip. In the garbage!” shouts Al-Err, “We’ll untie him and destroy the cart!” Casting down the whip, two men take up sledgehammers and proceed to smash the cart to shreds.
The ethos of Al-Err’s organization, Sulala Society for Animal Care, dismantles the logic of incarceration and use of force. Not only checkpoints, surveillance, jails, artillery and bombs, but also whips, bits, blinders and cages. Sulala’s solidarity subverts the entangled hostile structures of white supremacism and anthropogenic, or human-caused, violence.
Frantz Fanon’s discussion of colonialism’s “zoological terms” elucidates the 2023 Israeli-U.S. siege of Gaza. Israeli and U.S. political leaders justify Palestinians’ extermination on the grounds that they are “animals”…
Solidarity between mainstream animal advocates and decolonialists is scarce. Despite the interdependence of racism with speciesism, the anti-Zionist movement fails to center animal suffering while prominent animal rights platforms remain silent about Gaza.
To question human violence against animals transporting cartloads of murdered and wounded Palestinian refugees, themselves treated like “animals,” is to approach what Claire Jean Kim calls a “dangerous crossing”. Kim advocates an ethics of mutual avowal, whereby we simultaneously see and respond to multiple forms of oppression. Applied to the current catastrophe, mutual avowal means challenging both white supremacy as well as ever-present human-on-animal “warfare”.
Al-Err has been modeling this for a long time, aiding abandoned and abused animals since the early 2000s amidst brutal apartheid and occupation and establishing Sulala Animal Rescue near the northern Gaza city, Al Zahra, in 2006. Prior to Nakba 2023, Sulala housed more than 400 dogs and 120 cats, divided between two shelters and Al-Err’s home. It also provided educational resources to improve humans’ treatment of animals, including donkeys and horses used for transportation…
When Israel first ordered northern Gazans to evacuate to the south, Al-Err was forced to leave the 400 dogs with open bags of food and the sanctuary gates open. He and his family moved with 120 cats into one of the cat shelters, located just south of the evacuation line…
Al-Err and his family currently have more than 150 animals in their care, including 120 cats and two donkeys (Al-Err rescued a second donkey subjected to violent beatings, with oozing sores and a nail in her leg.) While most of the dogs in the northern shelter are presumed killed, remarkably seven of them found their way to Al-Err after walking six or seven kilometers.
Of the more than 30 dogs that remain in a temporary shelter, 20 are amputees or paralyzed dogs Al-Err picked up at the beginning of the war. The remainder includes four puppies found wandering alone, one dog hit by an ambulance, one with a shrapnel injury and another paralyzed dog brought to Al-Err by photojournalist Motaz Azaiza…
Amidst infrastructural decimation, targeted assassinations, imposed starvation and potable water deprivation, imagine the utter precarity of providing for and repeatedly relocating one’s family along with 120 cats and two donkeys, while temporarily sheltering more than 30 disabled dogs at another location…
Sulala’s transspecies solidarity is the future of care and resistance, a manual of perseverance in the face of annihilation. Sulala’s interventions point the way to a world wherein no creature is “animalized” nor subjected to the use of force. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: