The species divide is innately hazardous. 'Human' is a discriminatory identifier, concocted to validate a racist world order wherein attributions of sub-humanity have long been mobilized in the service of massive-scale destruction of life. As many have decried the dehumanizing language weaponized against Palestinians, animals have been doubly thrown under the bus. Efforts to demonstrate Palestinians’ 'shared humanity' solidify the conceptualization of animals as ineligible for concern.
ALEXANDRA ISFAHANI-HAMMOND: Over the last several weeks, I’ve been frustrated that animal advocates have largely remained silent about… the omission of animal suffering in denunciations of the bombardment of Gaza. As many have decried the dehumanizing language weaponized against Palestinians — laboring to convince the world that Arabs are, indeed, human and, therein, worthy of empathy — animals have been doubly thrown under the bus.
Efforts to demonstrate Palestinians’ “shared humanity” solidify the conceptualization of animals as ineligible for concern. As Fadi Abu Shammalah put it, “You know what happens to animals? They’re slaughtered.” It is not only possible but imperative to hold two things simultaneously. Palestinians must be unshackled from the degrading classification of “animals.” Vital to achieving that goal, other species need be as well…
The species divide is innately hazardous. “Human” is a discriminatory identifier, concocted to validate a racist world order wherein attributions of sub-humanity have long been mobilized in the service of massive-scale destruction of life. Frantz Fanon diagnosed the lethal implications of such “othering,” observing that “the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms” and that colonizer and colonized are constructed as “different species.”
Casting non-Europeans as animals makes violence as such invisible. Europeans defended African enslavement on the basis of zoological taxonomy. The species divide is entangled with the civilization versus barbarism trope undergirding Europeans’ colonization of the Americas, including the genocide of indigenous Americans. Nazis portrayed Jews as vermin to justify the Holocaust. Predictably, Israel is legitimizing its extermination campaign against Palestinians on the grounds of precisely this dichotomy…
In the margin of a photograph of Gaza the entirety of whose frame is the white of blasted concrete, I allow my eyes to take hold of an emaciated donkey. This proverbial “beast of burden” is outside even what leftist observers are called upon to grieve. They are hidden in plain sight beneath the shroud of speciesism, excluded from the destruction and death we are entreated to condemn…
The human/ animal binary is foundational for the unmitigated violence on display in Gaza, an embargo on kindness itself. Within the frame of rubble and rocks, advocating for justice requires that we express our grief and rage about the donkey’s fate, too. Doing so is not a distraction from solidarity with Palestinians, but intrinsic to promoting life.
As Cary Wolfe observes, “As long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of whatever species….” SOURCE…
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