Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante

For Aziz

People around the world are waking up to the outlandish tenor of Israeli propaganda. It’sderanged to legitimize occupation and genocide on the grounds of self-defense. Or to cast refugees burned alive and forcibly starved to death as imperiling Western civilization. Or to frame the colonial entity’s armed forces – which gleefully brag about murdering children and destroying homes, and post trophy photos clad in the lingerie of women they murdered – as “the world’s most moral army.”

Yet the discursive acrobatics do not end there. A lesser-known element of Israel’s disinformation campaign is its self-proclaimed status as the leading nation in animal rights. A richbodyof scholarship addresses the paradoxical relationship of veganism and animal liberation to colonialismin so-called Israel. On the one hand, the settler colony dehumanizes Palestinians, mobilizing the species divide to legitimizetheir erasure. On the other, it boasts of providing plant-based meals and synthetic combat wear to vegan soldiers. This framing perverts vegan ethics, which repudiate killing, confinement and the use of force against living beings. As Ahmad Safi, co-founder of the Palestinian Animal League**,** challenges, “What good is it if an Israeli soldier is vegan and wears leather-free boots if his gun is aimed at Palestinians?”

This reality-distortion is known as veganwashing. Vegans for Palestine, a Global South abolitionist collective, exposes links between vegan businesses, apartheid and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It unmasks Zionism’s entrenchment in everything from VeganFriendly branding to PETA, Mercy for Animals and the American Vegetarian Association. Vegans for Palestine has further investigated Israel’s pioneering “lab-grown” vegan food tech, mobilized as part of its constructed image as uniquely altruistic, eco-conscious and technologically cutting edge. Touted as the first head of government to taste cultivated meat, Benjamin Netanyahu declared “Israel will become an alternative meat superpower” and“It’s delicious and guilt-free.” In this aberrant reasoning, lab-grown meat enshrines the settler colony’s innocence, despite the apocalyptic slaughter it wreaks.

While animalization and racialization merge to produce unspeakable violence in Palestine, manifestations of anticolonial, transspecies solidarity subvert this bleak matrix. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Animal League approaches nonhuman animal liberation as a fundamental component of decolonization. The Black Palestinian led Sulala Animal Society is the only such organization struggling to operate in Gaza. In one pointed video, Sulala’s founder, Saeed al-Err, smashes apart a donkey cart after liberating the severely beaten creature from a massive tangle of chains and leather bindings.Plant the Land is a vegan food justice and community projects team whose mission is buying and distributing vegan food, planting food forests on public land and providing Gaza’s farmers with seeds and farming tools. Subsequent to Gaza’s devastation, Plant the Land has concentrated on supplying water and food to the starved and displaced. Whereas prominent Western animal advocacy organizations remain silently complicit with Zionist rhetoric, notable exceptions include Mother’s Against Dairy, Wild Country Farm Sanctuary, Institute for Animal Happiness and Animal Healthcare Workers Against Genocide.

Veganism’s coupling with genocide is logically untenable. Critical examination of this insidious deceit is essential for neutralizing the settler’s colony’s strategic deception. Yet our concern cannot rest merely on the “animal” as a rhetorical figure of the settler imaginary. Twenty-two months into the genocide, by August 2025, Israel had killed approximately 97% of Gaza’s animals. In addition to bombardment, orchestrated famine, habitat destruction and looting, there are also numerous videos of Israeli soldiers sniping animals, including horses and sheep, and settlers massacring infant sheep and goats. One video of severed donkeys’ heads mounted by settlers on the wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque went viral. The Israeli armed forces participate in the long history of weaponizing dogs against non-Europeans in the service of Western empire-building, routinely using trained military dogs to assault and rape detainees. Israeli priests periodically film “practice” ceremonies in which they burn red heifers alive.

Despite this, the Western animal rights movement has turned a blind eye or commented sparingly on the unfathomable destruction in Gaza, corroborating the longstanding critique that mainstream animal advocates align with white supremacy. When not mutely complicit, the animal rights movement has been overtly pro-genocide. For example, animal rights guru Gary Yourofsky declared that “Palestinians are the most psychotic people on the planet” and “F**k human rights.”

An upcoming Israeli animal studies symposium, “Entangled in Crisis: Human-Animal Relations in Times of Conflict and Upheaval” (12.11.25), likewise sanitizes Israel’s holocaust. The call for papers encourages analyses of events that “challenge established boundaries” and “expose systemic inequalities,” articulating a commitment to “multispecies lifeworlds.” It is peppered with oblique references to “political unrest,” “armed conflicts,” “crisis” and “upheaval,” but does not name the annihilation of life currently underway. To buy into the call for papers’ twisted logic requires full suspension of disbelief. It asks participants to join in its gaslighting denialism.

The hypocrisy is laid bare by the event’s organizers, whose ties to Israel’s military apparatus invalidate any commitment to justice. “Entangled in Crisis” is sponsored by the Community for Human-Animal Studies Israel and the Israeli Anthropological Association in collaboration with the Coller-Menmon Animal Rights and Welfare Program at the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. Tel Aviv University actively collaborates with the military. It houses the prestigious “Erez” B.A. program for officers in combat military units.

The Department of International Law plays an increasingly pivotal role in Israeli military decision making. Its jurists routinely council top commanders on how to plan and carry out operations. Their role extends beyond offering legal advice, since they determine the interpretation of wartime law and the deployment of military violence. Tel Aviv University appointed Sharvit Baruch as a lecturer in its Faculty of Law – he went directly from overseeing the 2008-9 offensive on the Gaza Strip to teaching a course on international law the following semester. The symposium’s co-sponsor, the Israeli Anthropological Association, joined reactionary opposition to the adoption of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, including the American Anthropological Association’s adoption of BDS. The website of its other co-sponsor, the Community for Human-Animal Studies Israel (HASI), refers to crisis and war but contains zero references to Gaza or Palestine.

White aligned, single-issue animal advocacy is irreconcilable with the intersectional ethic of groups like Vegans for Palestine. Veganism that condemns certain forms of slaughter while normalizing others is an oxymoron. Fortunately, not all animal studies scholars support this pernicious symposium. Critics see through Israel’s doublespeak. They comprehend that humans’ oppression of animals is inextricable from the animalization of Black and Brown humans. I contributed to a letter calling upon academics to boycott “Entangled in Crisis,” underscoring that it normalizes the annihilation of Palestinian humans under the auspices of liberating animals. The letter indicts Israel’s false claim to “vegan friendliness,” given its catastrophic destruction of animal life.

Alongside outrage at the perversion of animal advocacy, the letter’s signers recognize the danger the settler colony poses to education. The two issues are inseparable: twisting concern for animals to sanction genocide aligns with Israel’s all-out assault on truth, with particular impact on higher learning. Israel’s decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure includes scholars’ targeted assassinations and the obliteration of educational institutions, constituting scholasticide. Israel has systematically destroyed or rendered unusable every university, college and high, elementary and nursery school in Gaza. Refaat Alareer, a distinguished poet and professor of English literature and creative writing, is the most prominent of countless scholars and intellectuals executed by Israel since October 2023, perpetuating a century-long practice of eliminating influential Palestinian thinkers, artists and public figures. In addition to executing academics, Israel’s “right to exist” hinges on the sublimation of indigenous cultural practices and systems of knowledge. Israeli voices and perspectives are amplified while Palestinian perspectives are silenced, a form of erasure known as epistemicide.

The assault on Palestinian education and knowledge production extends beyond Gaza’s borders. Signers are concerned with the rights of students and scholars everywhere to intellectual freedom and political dissent without exception and without undue state interference, repression, and military violence, including research and public speaking about the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. Shadow banning, doxxing, the long-practiced “Palestine exception” — academic freedom with the exception of Palestine — and the militarization of campus protest policing are rampant globally. Palestine solidarity activists have been brutally beaten, losing their diplomas, fellowships and visas, while faculty speaking out against the genocide have lost appointments, grants, visas, and publication and speaking opportunities.

Animal studies scholars understand that the human/animal divide is a discriminatory invention wielded to justify denying moral consideration to members of any species. Displacement from the Human realm relegates all living beings to the same lethal vulnerability. Mohammed El-Kurd observes that Palestinians need be “defanged” and “declawed” to elicit Westerners’ empathy. To be “humanized” is to be delivered from barbarism. Unless they passively surrender to obliteration, Palestinians are no better than killable beasts.

At times, the beyond-human world appears to resist this cruelty. Perhaps it was precisely such injustice that led a wild desert lynx to attack Israeli soldiers in the Naqab desert last March. The strike led some social media commentators to quip that the feline was guilty of antisemitism, but that aspect of Israeli hasbara warrants a separate discussion. It is related to a convoluted spin combining Jews’ unparalleled victimization with a 4,000 year old divine covenant. For now, let’s just say “it’s complicated.”

To sign the letter, click here.

The post In Israel’s Warped Logic, Veganism and Genocide go Hand in Hand appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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