The Palestinian cause is a vegan cause
2023 is the year when I became an advocate for the Palestinian cause. It’s not that I did not support Palestine before and was not aware of its situation of oppression under the apartheid system imposed by Israel. I was, like many people, aware of it but kept the issue on the edge of my perception, like an insect buzzing around the room, sometimes louder and sometimes quiet. But somehow, always there.
© Abbas Momani / AFP via Getty Images (Via Amnesty International)
All of this changed in October 2023, when in response to the Hamas attack on Israel, whose facts and figures have been distorted and manipulated to serve the Israeli victim narrative and garner support in the West. This ‘alternative reality’ approach has effectively given Israel a carte blanche to act out its revenge attack on the civilian population of Gaza, flattening the place and promoting what is being deemed as the first televised genocide in history.
The turning point for me was the absolute openness regarding the genocidal intentions of Israel and the compliance of the West, where all forms of power coalesced to deliver a tightly controlled message that “Israel has the right to defend itself” and erasing all context before October 7th. Israeli representatives appeared on the media using language that I had never heard before while Europe and the US placed themselves firmly on their side, making it clear that Palestinian lives were disposable.
As the carnage started on the 8th of October, and war crimes became the norm, I started to follow Palestian profiles and educated myself about the history of this anti-colonial struggle that goes back 75 years and which has become a symbol of the global anti-colonial struggle. Like many people I heard speaking on social media, I realised I had fallen foul of the ‘it’s complicated’ phallacy (it’s not, it’s violent settler colonialism versus indigenous population) designed to block the debate. Israel is an apartheid country, as attested by Amnesty International.
I also learned that the story stretches way further back than the aftermath of WWII and that Zionism, the ideology behind the conception of Israel as a state that goes back to the late 19th century. Zionism is, in essence, a racial supremacist ideology whose goal has always been to displace the Arabs in Palestine in order to create Israel, a Western outpost in the Middle East.
One very importat historical fact I became more aware of was the Balfour Declaration (1917), an aberration of British colonialism where a country promises someone else’s land to another group of people. The Balfour declaration is a statement of British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” It was made in a letter from Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary, to Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild (of Tring), a leader of the Anglo-Jewish community.
Then of course there was the displacement of three quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948 (ironically, the year of the Declaration of Human Rights by the UN and the creation of Israel), which is known as Nakba (‘catastrophe’ in Arabic). And the horror goes on through the decades to the present: the Occupation that started in 1967, the ongoing illegal, violent squatters in the West Bank (700,000 of them at present), the suffocating blockade that started in the 2007 and the many episodes of violent eruption and mass slaughter of Palestinians that I cannot possibly cram into one article as my goal is to make the case of the Palestinian cause as a vegan cause.
So, I will go back to my personal experience with the Palestinian issue. Armed with all the aforementioned information, I have concluded that my awakening to the Palestinian cause was very similar to my awakening to veganism: it happened quickly and as a result of shock. As in the case of the animal suffering issue, I had always been aware of it, been against it but always found excuses for it as a result of intellectual laziness, moral contortionism and a self-deluding belief in the viability of welfare as opposed to liberation.
Similarly, I had always been aware of the Palestinian cause, had sympathy for it but somehow found excuses for Israel which had been insidiously planted in my brain by the bigoted, one-sided version of a story which, unlike other examples of colonialism, places a colonizing oppressor as the victim. I guess Zionism was my Welfarism on this topic.
That all changed in the aftermath of the 7th of October. I saw immediately the dark clouds of revenge gathering above Israel, with the political support of the Western world and its monolithic media banging the Zionist drum like a well-trained robot. Israeli reps appeared on various media outlets unabashedly calling for the anihilation of all Palestinians and the cutting off of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and aid.
What followed was exactly what had been announced. It was terrifying. Social media, through the brave work of Palestinian journalists and vloggers on the ground, many of whom paid with their lives, became flooded with some of the most gruesome imagery ever recorded. The ferocity and the indiscriminate bombing that created an apocalyptic scenario of mangled buildings and chopped up bodies being broadcast live jolted the world, me included. It was impossible to unsee it and remain passive in the face of such depravity. Gaza, from concentration camp had been turned into a slaughterhouse.
In the face of such horror and as a consequence of my education on the historical and political facts surrounding the Palestinian cause, it became obvious to me that the Palestinian cause must be included in any type of vegan activism. As political activist Angela Davis put it, it is a moral litmus test for the world. Davis urges all social movements to incorporate the Palestinian cause into their struggle.
The genocidal language used by Israeli reps compared Palestinians to human animals, which further highlights how speciesism can affect both humans and non-humans. This statament has been widely quoted by commentators as one of several expressing genocidal intentions, which at this point, 75 days after the bombardment started, has seen more than 20,000 Palestinians killed, 42% of them children, besides 112 journalists. There have been attacks on hospitals, houses, schools and refugee camps. Gazans are being starved by Israelis and highly preventable diseases are spreading fast, due to the low sanitary conditions and lack of clean water.
Yet, despite all this, Western governments continue to support the slaughter using talking points that sound increasingly desperate and dissonant with the reality that has leaked to the world through social media.
The political denialism of the situation and the use of esoteric and vague reasons to side with Israel on its no-holds-barred brutality are two other elements that make the Palestinian cause a vegan cause. Vegans spend most of their time emphasising the glaringly obvious fact that non-humans can suffer and feel emotions — in other words, calling attention to their sentience. Palestinians suffer a similar fate: they have had their sentience denied to them. Their lives are treated as disposable, of no value and even the suffering of babies does not seem to move a section of humanity in the same way that the suffering of non-human animals does not. The mechanisms of oppression and the denial of moral consideration are strikingly similar.
Veganism is, first and foremost, a justice movement against oppression and for freedom. The occupation of the Palestinian territory to create the state of Israel is one of the longest-standing cases of injustice in recent history. It has become a symbol of the fight against colonial superpowers, the war machine, the arms trade and, of course, racism. Vegans who really understand what our philosophy is about must extend their arms to the Palestinian cause as a part of their activism for the liberation of all sentient beings. As Nelson Mandela famously said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
For further information on veganism in Palestine, please visit Vegan in Palestine.
