Wild Asses and Camel Clashes

Zooish Conspiracies IV

In Part I of this series, I began to address extensive anti-Israel claims relating to the animal kingdom made by Irus Braverman, a professor of law at the University at Buffalo, in her article “Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel” from Political and Legal Anthropology Review, subsequently incorporated into her book Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. In Part II and Part III, I addressed her claims about Israel’s reintroduction of Mesopotamian fallow deer being an act of “violent settler colonialism.” This post continues the critique. I would like to thank Dr. Simon Nemtzov, Wildlife Ecologist & Head of International Relations at the Israel Nature & Parks Authority, for his assistance.

Wild Asses and Camel Clashes

An Asiatic wild ass. Photo by Doron Nissim, used with permission of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority

Wild asses (Equus hemionus) occurred in the historic Holy Land for millennia, and are mentioned in the Bible. They live in the desert regions, where they fulfill an important ecological role by dispersing seeds across large areas.^[1] The local sub-species (E. h. hemippus) was last seen in the wild in Syria in 1909, and it finally went extinct around 1927. Braverman notes this fact, although she does not mention that the cause of their extinction was that they were hunted by Bedouin and other Arabs.

Subsequently, individuals from two closely related sub-species of Asiatic wild asses were imported and hybridized in order to establish a breeding population for reintroduction in Israel. Reintroduction into the wild began in 1982, and expanded in 1992 and 1997 into different parts of the Negev desert. The reintroduction and monitoring project continues to this day as part of the Range-Wide Action Plan for the Asiatic Wild Ass, run by the UN Convention on Migratory Species. It covers all eight Range States, namely China, India, Iran, Israel, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. 

Today over 300 Asiatic wild asses live wild in southern Israel. The area where they occur is a declared nature reserve. In order to maintain the area as "wild" as possible for this small population, no domestic animals are allowed into the nature reserves. But some local Bedouins, such as Salman Sadan, were using these protected areas as grazing areas for their camels.

Camels are even more problematic than other domestic animals in the fragile nature reserves of Israel's desert regions. Their eating habits often include trampling and tearing plants totally out of the ground, rather than just grazing in the manner of goats or sheep. After camels have eaten in a nature reserve in the desert it can take many years for the fragile plant life to return (if at all). Furthermore, witnesses observed that Sadan's camels, by drinking water from the spring and from water troughs set up for the wild asses, disrupted the wild asses, who depend on this source of water and do not approach it when the camels are present. This is particularly dangerous for pregnant wild asses.

In 2017, the INPA (Israel Nature & Parks Authority) finally pressed charges against Salman Sadan for allowing his camels to graze over and over again in the Negev Mountain Nature Reserve. Braverman focuses upon this case, and quotes Sadan’s lawyer as explaining the secret Zionist agenda which allegedly lies behind the protection of the wild asses:

"…the policy of INPA is meant to promote a pushing out of the Bedouins from the reserve, and not the protection of nature ...what bothers INPA is not that the camel entered the reserve, but that after the camel usually comes a Bedouin (interview)”

This defamatory accusation by the lawyer is presented by Braverman as factual truth:

“While INPA's mandate to care for wildlife and for the natural environment seems far removed from the violent schemes of the settler colonial project, human-animal relations are in fact an important component of both settler and native nature cultures. Targeting the unique human-animal kinships that have evolved over centuries, for example between camels and Bedouins, serves to simultaneously target the essence of Bedouin identity, amounting to cultural, rather than genocidal, elimination (Wolfe 2006).”

According to Braverman, this is another example of a Biblically-based imaginary past being used to erase and inflict violence upon Bedouin and their animals:

“The reintroduction of wild asses has effectively become a technology through which the desert landscape is altered back to an imaginary Jewish past that does not include the local Bedouin communities and their more-than-human traditions. For the landscape to reappear in all its authentic biblical glory, those animals who have come to be associated with the Bedouin lifestyle are carefully and thoroughly eliminated from the region.”

This is very strange. The Jewish past most certainly includes domesticated camels - they are mentioned in the Bible! Likewise, nobody has ever denied the existence of the Bedouin. Nor is there any attempt to “thoroughly eliminate camels from the region.” There is no law against keeping camels!

In any other context, the case of Salmad Sadan would be easily viewed as a recalcitrant selfish herder using public lands that are protected for everyone for his personal herd. But Braverman argues that protecting nature from camels is itself actually concealing a settler-colonial political agenda:

“Israel's nature administration does not need to directly regulate humans; quite the contrary, the power of nature conservation work derives precisely from its focus on what is ostensibly far removed from the political realm. This, in turn, serves to naturalize, normalize, and thus obscure the specific animal-human imaginaries underlying the settler agendas… Similar to the wild deer-feral dog matrix, in the wild ass/semi-domestic camel story, too, the newly introduced wild ass is presented as wilder and more native, and thus also as more worthy of environmental protection, than the semi-domesticated camel ... The wild ass-camel story thus exposes the settler colonial logic underlying the ecological reintroduction project.”

Yet there are many parts of the Middle East, such as Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait where they also endeavor to ban camels from protected areas due to their particularly destructive habits. To quote one example, from the website of the Qatar News Agency:^[3]

The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change confirmed that wildlife and camel taming environments are of a sensitive nature that requires protection by prohibiting camel grazing in those environments, especially since the rainfall ratio during the last period has been very low. The ministry appreciated the farm owners' understanding of the reasons behind prohibiting camel grazing which underscores their awareness of the significance of conserving Qatar's wildlife. The ministry has noted today that Environmental Protection Reserves and Wildlife Department's patrols have detected a reported camel grazing infraction in the southern areas of the state of Qatar. It confirmed that this procedure comes according to the enforcement of the ministerial law No. 188 of 2021 that prohibits camel grazing, adding that the necessary legal action has been taken against the violators.

Braverman does not mention any of this. Yet it proves that it has nothing to do with settler colonialism – if anything, it’s the opposite. It’s about protecting nature and wildlife from the harm that it suffers from a growing human population.

Then we turn to a discussion of camel-related car accidents which is similarly problematic. Camels are particularly dangerous animals to run into, since their legs are very long and the body of the camel starts above the hood of a typical car, at about windshield height. After many deadly incidents resulting from camel-owners whose camels wander onto roads, Israel designated criminal responsibility for the camel-owners in such cases, and a corresponding requirement for camels to be microchipped.

A camel-car accident in Aqaba which killed the driver, showing how the camel’s high center of gravity results in it crashing through the windshield

For Braverman, this is a further example of a settler-colonial agenda of oppression of an indigenous population – and, as she writes, “camels are not only subjects of calculation and surveillance; they also generate income for the colonial state.” But this is absurd. What Braverman fails to note is that Saudi Arabia (which microchips every single camel^[2]), Libya and Oman have also enacted similar laws, for the exact same reason! In fact, these countries have even stricter laws, in which fines are imposed not only in the event of a collision, but even for just letting camels wander on or even near a road.

The laws are simply to protect others. Like with all livestock, the responsibility rests with the camel’s owner to keep them away from areas where they cause harm, whether it's eating from someone's crops, wandering onto highways and causing traffic fatalities, or grazing wild plants and harming rare species in nature reserves. There is no political agenda behind camel policies in Saudi Arabia, Libya or Oman, and it’s ridiculous to posit that the same policies in Israel are due to a colonial agenda.

To be continued

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^[1] Tal Pollak, et al., “Redundancy in seed dispersal by three sympatric ungulates: A reintroduction perspective,” Animal Conservation (May 2014) 17:6.

^[2] https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/saudi/stray-camel-causes-deadly-crash-in-saudi-arabia-1.90154655.

^[3] https://www.qna.org.qa/en/News-Area/News/2022-07/28/0055-environment-ministry-calls-for-qatar%27s-wildlife-conservation-through-prohibiting-camel-grazing.