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ABSTRACT
In popular media and public discourse, Israel has been referred to as ‘the first vegan nation’ and the ‘global centre for veganism’ 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. Indeed, Israeli institutions have co-opted an image of ‘vegan/animal-friendliness’ as makers of the nation’s modernity and morality. Yet, drawing on fieldwork with Jewish Israeli activists, the paper argues that both the deliberate practices of veganwashing and its well-intentioned critiques overlook the nuances and ambivalences of Israeli animal politics. The paper 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.
Acknowledgements
I would like first and foremost to acknowledge the generosity of my participants across Palestine and Israel. In developing some of the ideas in the paper, I also greatly benefited from attending the ‘Listening beyond Liberalism’ workshop convened by Tanja Dreher and Leah Bassel in November 2018 at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. My thinking about veganwashing began almost five years ago and has evolved through the many conversations I have had with activists and scholars on this topic – I am deeply appreciative of the intellectual and political communities that have stimulated and supported my work. I would also like to thank people who provided feedback on earlier drafts of this paper (special thanks to Akane Kanai), and Yamini Narayanan and Kathryn Gillespie as well as the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Esther Alloun is completing a PhD in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong, located on unceded Dharawal Country. Her research interests include intersectional politics, feminisms(s), animal studies, and settler colonialism. She has published her work in Settler Colonial Studies and Animal Studies Journal.
Notes
1 Israel is a relatively small market for Australia’s live export of cattle and sheep (between its fourth and fifth largest market) and shipments were down in 2018 compared to 2017 (Taylor and Riordan Citation2018).
2 I do not mean to imply that animal welfare and veganism are the same thing, but they are evoked as synonyms in Israeli public discourse as Sara Netanyahu’s comment illustrates. In preference to using animal politics terms like rights or welfare, the Israeli discourse mainly focuses on veganism in ways that suggest a narrow and depoliticised understanding of the term. For the purpose of this article then, veganism is taken to mean what it signifies in public discourse in Israel, that is, abstaining from eating animals and their by-products, rather than an expansionist definition connected to human and animal liberation from oppression.
3 The UK offers a good comparative example. The explosion of veganism in the country in the last decade has not attracted the hyperbolic headlines and rhetoric of exceptionalism found in the Israeli case.
4 Homonationalism and pinkwashing are not unique to Israel however; Jasbir Puar (Citation2011) originally developed her argument in the US context, while Tanja Dreher (Citation2016) recently tracked emerging homonationalism in Australia.
5 To be sure, challenging the evidence base of Israeli veganwashing can be a worthwhile endeavour, starting with Israelis’ average meat consumption which is among the highest in the world.
6 I use pseudonyms for all the interviewees except for the Palestinian Animal League’s director who spoke to me in his official capacity.
7 Other vegans (in Israel and abroad) followed suit with 269 tattoos in group demonstrations that 269Life encouraged to stage in a similar fashion as scenes of the Jewish Holocaust.
8 By extension, this logic continues to elide and justify violence against Palestinians, as Jewish Israeli activists I interviewed mobilise the same moral economy of innocence and victimhood to maintain Palestinian exteriority to settler narratives and sovereignty: ‘There’s innocent and non-innocent. A cow that was born, innocent! But if someone puts a bomb in a bus station, he is not innocent!’, Maya explained, echoing an activist who told Weiss (Citation2016) that ‘there are no chickens in suicide vest’.
9 Since 2009, Israel even has a dedicated Ministry for hasbara.
10 I use the term ‘gay’ purposefully, as Israeli-Zionist sexual politics are dominated by gay men and their demands, and they are also the main audience of pinkwashing campaigns overseas (see Elia Citation2012; Stelder Citation2017).
11 I witnessed this dynamic first-hand at the time of the 2018 Gaza protests. At the peak of the Israeli State’s repression, I received a hostile Facebook message from an Israeli man with a picture of a donkey allegedly abused by Palestinians and a comment that called on saving animals from Palestinian ‘vicious terrorists’.
12 Some of these animal activists from the earlier anarchist movement even denounced Israeli veganwashing in a 2018 op-ed in the Israeli Haaretz newspaper (see: https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.6574256).
13 SWU usually brings in IDF soldiers for their speaking tours and they were excited to find a fresh topic (Eitan, interview 20 February 2017).
14 I formally interviewed six of these vegan soldiers and had conversations with many others at vegan stalls, demonstrations, and vegan cafes.
15 I also spoke to soldiers who displayed no moral qualms about serving, had volunteered additional time, and were sceptical of the idea of the IDF using veganism for hasbara.
16 Critiques of veganwashing typically create a binary of ‘good’ or ‘intersectional’ vegans versus ‘bad’ or ‘single-issue’ vegans, and can therefore slip into an exercise in identity politics and policing that centres on Western vegan activists, more so than Israeli colonial politics and Palestinians. Jason Ritchie (Citation2015) makes similar observations about pinkwashing debates.
17 The nation’s start-up qualities also manifest in its growing ‘high-tech dairy industry’ which has international export aspirations and needs urgent critique (Sharon Citation2017).
18 In the context of progressive social transformation, practices of listening also need to extend to animals who are systemically marginalised and oppressed (this is beyond the scope of this paper but see Birke Citation2014).
19 Perhaps, it also points, more broadly, to how veganism has come to inform and shape animal advocacy, and therefore plays a critical role in the contemporary debate about animals across borders, a question that needs to be teased out further.