{"id":776680,"date":"2024-10-03T09:29:18","date_gmt":"2024-10-03T13:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=776680"},"modified":"2024-10-03T10:29:13","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T14:29:13","slug":"veganwashing-israels-dirty-laundry-animal-politics-and-nationalism-in-palestine-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=776680","title":{"rendered":"Veganwashing Israel\u2019s Dirty Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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In popular media, Israel has been referred to as \u2018the first vegan nation\u2019 and the \u2018global center for veganism\u2019. In reality, veganism in Israel has been enrolled as a device to narrate Jewish Israeli sovereignty and reinforce national myths of exceptionalism. Israeli State institutions have leveraged animal welfare and veganism for nation-branding purposes in yet another iteration of a \u2018washing\u2019 logic that uses social causes to diffuse criticism and project a national image of progress, while obfuscating the State\u2019s \u2018dirty laundry\u2019 and the violence of its settler colonial politics. <\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

ESTHER ALLOUN:<\/strong> In popular media and public discourse, Israel has been referred to as \u2018the first vegan nation\u2019 and the \u2018global centre for veganism\u2019 because of the mainstreaming of veganism in the country in the 2010s. The article examines this triumphalist rhetoric and argues that animal welfare and veganism have been enrolled as a device to narrate the Israeli nation within terms of Jewish Israeli sovereignty. The contemporary cultural politics of veganism in Israel circulate and reinforce national myths of exceptionalism tethered to a Zionist exclusionary ideology, including claims to unique victimhood, pioneering achievements and moral rectitude, which further entrench Jewish Israeli belonging and Palestinian unbelonging.<\/em><\/p>\n

Indeed, Israeli institutions have co-opted an image of \u2018vegan\/animal-friendliness\u2019 as makers of the nation\u2019s modernity and morality. Yet, drawing on fieldwork with Jewish Israeli activists, the article argues that both the deliberate practices of veganwashing and its well-intentioned critiques overlook the nuances and ambivalences of Israeli animal politics. The article also highlights that critiques of veganwashing do not go far enough to show how it is negotiated by Palestinian animal advocates. It suggests that focus on veganwashing as the primary debate of settler-colonial injustice and animal politics has paradoxically rendered them inaudible, and calls instead for a politics of listening…<\/em><\/p>\n

This article argues that popular discourses on the recent mainstreaming of veganism in Israel invigorate and extend existing national myths that have forged a Jewish Israeli national identity tethered to Zionist ideology and settler colonialism; in these narratives, Palestinians constitute the foil and negated subtext to an idealised national image of exceptionalism and settler belonging. This analysis suggests that contemporary Israeli animal activism is therefore circumscribed in nationalist settler colonial structures against Jewish Israeli activists\u2019 tendency to frame animal activism as neutral and apolitical. As argued elsewhere, such depoliticised framing obscures intersections of colonial and oppression, and we see here that it also facilitates nationalism contouring the terrain of \u2018proper\u2019 Israeli animal activism, opening the door for State cooption.<\/em><\/p>\n

Israeli State institutions have leveraged animal welfare and veganism for nation-branding purposes in yet another iteration of a \u2018washing\u2019 logic that uses progressive causes to di\ufb00use critique and project a national image of modernity and progress, while obfuscating the State\u2019s \u2018dirty laundry\u2019 and the violence of its settler colonial politics. At the same time, beneath the veganwashing headlines, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine-Israel in a spirit of open-endedness uncovered different stories to the State hasbara, and highlighted the difficulty, ambivalence and complicity inherent to ethical and political engagements in this polarised environment.<\/em><\/p>\n

From homonationalism to animal nationalism, the folding of progressive causes within a nationalist discourse works as a strategy of containment on a range of levels: it flattens representations of social movements and their histories, and neatly aligns them along the lines of national narratives; it limits \u2018the transformative potential\u2019 of radical struggles by containing them within national and institutional agendas; and it restricts the parameters of debate by creating specific norms of intelligibility, whereby in the instance of animal politics, Palestinians are only heard if they respond to the \u2018script\u2019 set by veganwashing, rather than speaking on their own anticolonial terms. If we are to take seriously the epistemic and material violence Israeli veganwashing endorses and the settler colonial logic of elimination it perpetuates, we must foreground Palestinian animal activists\u2019 critique and agenda, and centre solidarity on Palestinian sovereignty and a politics of listening. SOURCE..<\/strong><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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