Zooish Conspiracies I

Is Israeli Wildlife Conservation really just another Evil Jewish Conspiracy?

Here is part one of an extensive article. I would like to thank Dr. Simon Nemtzov, Wildlife Ecologist & Head of International Relations at the Israel Nature & Parks Authority, for his assistance.

Introduction

Recently, a strong trend has developed in academia to delegitimize Israel, specifically as being a settler-colonial regime. This fashion has also found expression in areas that one would not normally think of as being related to politics, such as zoology, conservation and animal welfare.

Elizabeth Bentley, a postdoctoral fellow in social and cultural analysis at NYU, is one example. Her article "Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870–1935),” published in the Ramallah-based Institute for Palestine Studies’ Jerusalem Quarterly, falsely blames “colonialists” rather than the Ghawarna Bedouin for the extinction of crocodiles in Palestine, along with voicing various other specious claims and conspiracy theories about Zionists. I responded to Bentley in an article titled “Weaponizing Crocodiles Against Israel.”^[1]

Another article was written by Esther Alloun at the University of Wollongong in Australia, which she describes as being located on unceded Dharawal Country. But despite this acknowledgement of herself being involved in settler colonialism,^[2] she seeks to delegitimize Israel on this charge.^[3] Alloun claims that the fact that Israel animal rights activists do not see themselves as having anything to do with politics is proof of how Zionist settler-colonialism is so cleverly insidious that it enables people to engage in colonial domination and erasure of Palestinian culture without even realizing that they are doing it. She also refers to the IDF training dogs for operations as an example of the cruelty of involving animals in a conflict, while making no mention of the numerous times that Palestinians have sent donkeys and horses to their certain deaths by using them as suicide bombers.[4] And she describes Palestinians who try to help animals and disregard politics as "troubling."

But the most extensive anti-Israel claims relating to the animal kingdom are made by Irus Braverman, a professor of law and an adjunct professor of geography at the University at Buffalo. Her article “Wild Legalities: Animals and Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel” was published in Political and Legal Anthropology Review^[5] and was subsequently incorporated into her book Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel.^[6] This paper presents a comprehensive response.

On “Settler Colonialism”

The foundation of Braverman’s approach is found in her repeated reference to Israel as a “settler colonial” project (by which she does not refer to the West Bank, but to all Israel). While this has recently become a fashionable position in certain academic circles, it is a shallow and disingenuous attempt to place Zionism in the same category as entities such as the United States and Canada, which were genuine settler colonial projects. Zionism shares certain aspects with such projects, but has even more significant differences.^[7]

First of all, Jews did not come to Palestine in order to exploit its resources for an empire elsewhere – they didn’t have one. In fact, they didn’t come to exploit it at all, but rather to invest in it and to build it up. Jews developed the barren and unusuable parts of the land, getting rid of malaria and making it far more productive.

And the Jews came not to become wealthy, but because they needed to survive. Those who made it out of Europe before the Holocaust saved themselves from extermination by the Nazis, when no other country was willing to take them in, and they were later followed by hundreds of thousands of Jews who were expelled from Arab countries following centuries of unequal status punctuated by the occasional massacre.

Furthermore, the Land of Israel was not some kind of new country for them, like America was for the Europeans. Rather, it had been the Jewish sovereign national homeland in antiquity, and Jews all around the world had retained a powerful connection to the land, mentioning it several times a day and keeping its animals and plants and places as part of their culture.

The Jewish People have also always retained a physical presence in the land. Even after most of the Jewish People were exiled or left, they maintained an uninterrupted presence on the land. Additionally, throughout history, Jews from around the world returned to their homeland in various waves and movements, though they were sometimes met with persecution and massacres.

Nor did the Jews, even those who came in the early 20^th century, have a plan to take the land by force, or to drive out or oppress the resident Levantine Arabs; they generally hoped and presumed that some sort of compromise would be made. In fact, the Jewish investment in the land attracted many more Levantine Arabs from surrounding areas into Palestine.[8] The Jews who came purchased land legally, and only obtained more land as a result of the 1948 war. This in turn happened because the Arabs did not accept that the Jewish People had a right to live in large numbers and with sovereignty in any part of their historic homeland, and declared hostilities.

But beyond the inaccuracy of the term “settler colonialism,” it’s just strange – and revealing. Zionists see Israel as a national liberation project, but they don’t refer to Israel as “the National Liberation Project,” they just refer to it as “Israel.” Braverman, on the other hand, refers to all of Israel as "the occupation", and uses the word “colonial” an astonishing 45 times, usually in conjunction with the word “settler.” Later, I will refer to an article of Braverman’s elsewhere which sheds light on this.

Mixing Politics into Conservation

Braverman’s article is all about accusing the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA^[9]) and conservation in Israel of being driven by a political agenda, one which is moreover nefarious: violent settler colonialism.

“While wildlife managers here, as elsewhere, typically perceive themselves as apolitical, their work in fact serves to advance certain political agendas, which bias specific humans and nonhumans. The stories I tell here about INPA's engagement with more-than-humans^[10] demonstrate that this engagement is both a feature and a mechanism of settler colonialism.”

In fact, Braverman is the one revealing a very clear political agenda, whose goal is the delegitimization of the world’s only Jewish state. Conservationists in Israel, on the other hand, rather than acting to advance a political agenda, can be presumed to be doing exactly the same thing as conservationists all over the world do, and for the exact same reasons. Braverman does not bring a shred of evidence to indicate otherwise.

Braverman begins by noting examples of mistakes that Israel made:

“…several grave mistakes in the early days of nature management by the Zionist enterprise: the drying of the Hula Valley, the establishment of the National Water Carrier project, and the afforestation project by the Jewish National Fund.”

Note that Braverman refers to Israel here as “the Zionist enterprise.” Just as how she repeatedly refers to Israel as “the colonial settler project,” this is odd and revealing. Zionists are proud of Israel being a Zionist enterprise, but they don’t refer to it that way, they just call it Israel. Braverman’s referring to the country in such a way is clearly out of a desire to delegitimize it. Apparently it implies that what she documents is a function of that ideology.

Yet such mistakes are par for the course in countries all over the world in the early twentieth century, where there was little understanding of the delicate balance of nature. Whether it was Australia introducing cane toads to control insect pests, or the US trying to stop all forest fires (leading to fires which eventually broke out that were far more catastrophic), or numerous countries building dams in the wrong places, such mistakes are a feature of human development in general and the early twentieth century in particular. There’s nothing “Zionist” about them.

“Biblical” Conservation?

Why would conservation by Zionists be any different than conservation by anyone else? Braverman claims that this is due to an alleged Biblical influence. She refers to retired general Avraham Yoffe (pictured below), an amateur naturalist who was the first director of the INPA (then called the Nature Reserves Authority) serving from 1965-1978, and who initiated the reintroduction programs:

“The origins of Israel's reintroductions in a figure who converged military-type operations with scientific nature management while deriving legitimacy from the Bible set the stage for Israel's conservation orientation for years to come. Indeed, Israeli nature conservation officials often reference the Bible alongside ecological reasons when explaining the importance of reintroduction projects here. This goes to illustrate that “Zionism, like all settler colonialisms, has a Promised Land and sees itself reenacting a Biblical story” (Veracini 2015, 270). The reenactment of the biblical story encompasses not only imaginaries of human natives and their natural landscapes (Braverman 2020; Braverman forthcoming) but also, and even more so, imaginaries of the flora and fauna that inhabit this landscape…  The reintroduction of wild asses has effectively become a technology through which the desert landscape is altered back to an imaginary Jewish past.”

Braverman is trying to make two claims here. One is that conservation in Israel is driven by religious, Biblical and militaristic motives. The other is that such a view of Israel’s historic wildlife is “imaginary.” Both are not just false, but bizarre.

With regard to the first claim, religious Jews have long been greatly under-represented in Israeli conservation. The Bible played a role for conservation pioneers such as Avraham Yoffe and others not as a religious text, but as a historical one, a record of the animal life that lived in the Holy Land for millennia.

And likewise, this is not an “imaginary” conception but a historical fact. This is not about Biblical stories that are claimed by others to be myth. The Biblical references to Mesopotamian fallow deer, white oryx and wild asses describe animals that really did live here – nobody at all disputes that. And it is not “re-enacting” a Biblical story, in the way that genuine settler colonial regimes did elsewhere, but restoring a historical reality.

Nor is this some historical reality which is long gone since antiquity. Contrary to Braverman’s later claim that the species being reintroduced are only “deemed” native by Israel, they are very clearly factually native, and only disappeared around a century ago after being hunted by German Templars, Levantine Arabs and Bedouin tribes.

Such reintroductions are done by conservationists around the world. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone and Colorado, beavers to Britain, and Southern white rhinoceros to various African countries, amidst many dozens of further examples. There’s nothing religious, militaristic, colonial or nefarious about it.

Part II to come soon.

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^[1] Available online here and soon to be revised and posted at www.BiblicalNaturalHistory.org.

^[2] For a critique of such acknowledgements as replacing action with virtue signaling, see Michael C. Lambert, Elisa Sobo & Valerie L. Lambert, “Rethinking Land Acknowledgments,” Anthropology News (Nov-Dec 2021) 62.6.

^[3] “That’s the beauty of it, it’s very simple!’ Animal rights and settler colonialism in Palestine–Israel,” Settler Colonial Studies (2018) 8:4 (559-574)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal-borne_bomb_attacks.

^[5] PoLAR 44, no. 1 (2021): 7–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12419, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/plar.12419

^[6] University of Minnesota Press. The use of the word “regime” in reference to a conservation body is extremely unusual, and is doubtless employed here to imply authoritarianism.

^[7] Derek Penslar, “Is Zionism a Colonial Movement?,” in Derek Penslar, ed., Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 2007), 90–111; Johannes Becke, “Historicizing the Settler-Colonial Paradigm.” Medaon 12 (2018), 22. Available online at https://slub.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A34621/attachment/ATT-0/; Yoav Gelber, "The History of Zionist Historiography: From Apologetics to Denial," in Benny Morris Making Israel (Benny Morris ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 47-80. Available at https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mlwpphucd7l971l6lcwcy/9780472115419-ch3.pdf; Ran Ukashi "Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis," in Peace and Conflict Studies: Vol. 25 (2018) No. 1 , Article 7. Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol25/iss1/7; Jarrod Tanney, “Israel Is Not a White Imperialist Project: A Toolkit,” available online at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-is-not-a-white-imperialist-project-a-toolkit/; S. Ilan Troen, “Countering the BDS Colonial Settler Narrative,” Academic Engagement Network Pamphlet Series No. 4, April 2018. Available online at https://academicengagement.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Troen-Pamphlet-Final.pdf.

[8] Fred M. Gottheil, “The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931” Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2003), pp. 53-64; Gad Gilbar, Ottoman Palestine, 1800–1914: Studies in Economic and Social History (E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1990).

^[9] INPA – The Israel Nature and Parks Authority is the sole government agency in Israel that manages all Nature Reserves and National Parks, as well as enforcing the nature protection and hunting laws.

^[10] "More-than-humans" means the animal world as is defined by Oxford as "A term used critically to remind human geographers that the non-human world not only exists but has causal powers and capacities of its own " https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/­acref/­9780199599868.001.0001/­acref-9780199599868-e-12161