Zooish Conspiracies II: The Deer Project

More Alleged Evil Jewish Wildlife Conspiracies

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. 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.

Illegal Smuggling of Deer?

Israel’s flagship reintroduction project is that of Mesopotamian (Persian) fallow deer, Dama mesopotamica. This species was hunted to extinction in the wild, for sport and for food, by Arabs in Palestine and elsewhere. In the 1960s, the Israel Parks Authority (today called the INPA, Israel Nature and Parks Authority) launched an ambitious program to locate the few deer that survived in zoos and reserves, create a breeding colony, and reintroduce them back to the wild, now protected under new conservation laws.

It was discovered that a tiny colony of Persian fallow deer remained in Iran. General Avraham Yoffe, head of the Israel Parks Authority, managed to strike a deal with Prince Abdul Reza, the brother of the Shah, who was an avid hunter. The ibex with the biggest horns in the world lived in the Negev desert in Israel. Yoffe offered the prince the opportunity to hunt this ibex, in exchange for a pair of fallow deer. Prince Reza came to Israel, shot the ibex, and offered Yoffe not one, but two pairs of deer.

In 1978, General Yoffe flew to Iran to capture the deer, but suffered a mild heart attack upon arrival. As he was carried back to the airplane on a stretcher, he pleaded with Brigadier General Yitzchak Segev, the Israeli military attaché in Tehran, to find a way to get the deer. But shortly afterwards, the Islamic revolution gathered steam, with drastic rioting taking place, and the fall of the Shah was imminent. Israel frantically launched a mission to evacuate the Jews of Iran, and Yoffe frantically launched a mission to evacuate the deer. He sent zoologist Mike Van Grevenbroek to assist Brigadier General Segev in capturing the deer. They drove to the nature reserve, captured the deer, and brought them to Tehran, where they planned to house them in the zoo until a flight could be arranged.

However, meanwhile, Prince Reza had fled the country. The person in charge of the royal zoo was Erwin Muller, a former Gestapo agent, and he refused to house the deer, insisting that they would not go to Israel. The deer had to be quickly housed at the Israeli embassy. But an export license was also required for the deer, which only Muller could issue. However, at that point the rioting was increasing, and Muller was terrified that the rioters would kill the Shah’s beloved cheetah and leopard. He agreed to let the Israelis take the deer, if they would also find a good home for the cheetah and leopard. The Israelis agreed, but by the time they arrived at the zoo, the angry mob had already killed the big cats. Brigadier General Segev attempted to console the weeping Muller, and managed to put the deer on the last El Al flight out of Tehran.

Arriving in Israel, the precious deer were housed in the Har-Bar nature reserve in the Carmel, and later also at the Jerusalem Zoo. They reproduced extremely successfully, and many of their descendants have been returned to the wild in Israel. Today, there are several hundred deer in the Upper Galilee and the mountains surrounding Jerusalem.

Notwithstanding some challenges along the way, this project has ultimately been very successful and is one of the highlights of conservation in Israel. But Braverman seeks every possible way, no matter how detached from reality, to cast a sinister spin on it.

“On December 8, 1978, the fallow deer were loaded onto the last El Al flight out of Tehran. The rescue mission was presented by the Israeli media as a military feat. While one could view it as an act of illegal smuggling of cultural heritage from its country of origin, such a perspective merited no mention in the Israeli media, which emphasized Israel’s bravery in saving the deer from Iran’s Islamic regime.”

Far from being “illegal smuggling,” these deer were acquired in an Iranian government-authorized deal. And this act saved these four deer’s lives in particular and the species in general. These particular deer were housed at the royal palace, and when the revolution broke out, the zookeeper saw that the king’s animals were going to be massacred and asked the Israelis to rescue even more animals. And all the Persian fallow deer in Iran were at risk^[1], while only a few individuals existed in zoos, meaning that the entire species was at risk of extinction. Braverman’s desire to rebrand a fully legal, absolutely moral and very successful rescue operation as “illegal smuggling of cultural heritage” further demonstrates her irrational obsession with demonizing Israel.

The Deer Reintroduction

Fallow deer being released into the Jerusalem hills

The reintroduction project was not without its challenges. Many of the first deer released into the wild were attacked and killed by feral dogs. The INPA initiated a control program to reduce the number of feral dogs in the release area. Braverman considers both the death of the deer and the dogs as examples of “colonial violence”:

“In addition to the violence inflicted upon humans, one must also attend to the ways in which more-than-humans are impacted by both the slow and the fast forms of violence that are inherent to the colonial scheme. Indeed, the need to make the natural landscape also serves as a justification for sacrificing those animal lives who undermine this scheme, such as the feral dogs and even the individual deer—many of whom have died during the reintroduction process for the sake of their conspecifics.”

Braverman is apparently critical of the INPA's decision to cull feral dogs so that the deer could survive. Would she prefer that no action is taken against feral dogs, which are a risk for spreading rabies, and the reintroduced deer should simply suffer extinction? What about the fact that the 30,000 feral dogs in Israel attack numerous people – including Palestinians, who are often only too happy to kill them?^[2] Is it only legitimate for Palestinians to kill animals as part of their hunting culture, but not for Israel to kill dogs as part of the overall conservation and safety culture? What about the fact that the Palestinian Authority also outlaws hunting? And Braverman herself acknowledges that conservation programs worldwide assign less value to animals that are not wild. So how is this part of “colonial violence”?

Braverman then notes that the reintroduction program has not been “entirely benign.” She quotes the Jerusalem zoo’s veterinarian, Nili Avni-Magen, as having a hard time with the fact that there was a 40% death rate among the reintroduced deer:

“For a vet who cares for each individual animal, reintroductions are a difficult undertaking, both emotionally and ethically. As a conservationist, however, Avni-Magen understands the need to sacrifice individual animals for the survival of their species—indeed, this level of sacrifice is not uncommon in reintroduction programs around the globe.”

Exactly – this is perfectly normal in all the reintroductions done around the world. Which reveals the utter emptiness of Braverman’s entire claim here about the deaths of some of the deer being evidence of a Zionist crime.

But Braverman proceeds to claim that despite her position being at odds with conservationists around the world, there are others who agree with her assessment – the deer!

“Perhaps sensing their caregiver's inner conflict, the deer have not been too keen about the reintroduction scheme, either. They have often refused to leave the safe facility for the much riskier life outside, indicating that behind the appealing narrative of liberation lurks a deeper violence toward these animals.”

This is a completely anti-scientific and ridiculous claim. Deer are not able to intuit subtle human concerns about their long-term survival. Nor do they even know whether they are in a large enclosure or in the wild. Rather, as shy herbivores, they are naturally reluctant to leave the acclimation enclosures and head out to strange and unknown surroundings. It would make no difference whether they were being introduced to the wild or to a new zoo enclosure.

To Braverman, no aspect of deer reintroduction is free from being part of the nefarious plans of the “settler colonial regime.” Even tracking the movements of the released deer, in order to monitor the success of the program, is claimed to have a deeper and sinister function:

“For this to happen, conservation managers must constantly monitor and manage the deer's movement in the landscape. While benign, these tasks result in much more than scientific knowledge: they also contribute to a sense of spatial and temporal control of the territory... tracking and monitoring animals in the wild advances not only scientific knowledge about these animals, but also an affiliation with and a sense of belonging to the land, which in turn lays stronger claims to it—a central goal of settler colonial regimes the world over.”

If monitoring movements of animals is all about claiming land, one can only wonder what this means for zoologists who travel to different countries to study such movements worldwide. Does this mean that zoologists are taking over the world?

To be continued.

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^[1] Reed, C. A. (1965). Imperial Sassanian hunting of pig and fallow deer, and problems of survival of these animals today in Iran. Postilla, 92, 1-23.

^[2] The Palestinian mayor of Hebron once offered a bounty for the killing of stray dogs. There is a Hadith which relates that Mohammed himself ordered stray dogs to be killed.