Zooish Conspiracies III: Agent Bambi

Are Israel's reintroduced deer agents of colonialism?

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, I started to address 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.

Agent Bambi

After mentioning that “the conservation officials who have been involved in the fallow deer reintroductions have stressed that their mission is exclusively ecological, and certainly not political,” Braverman presumes to know better, and to accuse them all of trying to conceal a Zionist conspiracy:

“It is precisely the scientification of the project—its making into a cosmopolitan story that focuses on the global fight to save the planet's biodiversity—that serves to justify and normalize what is arguably a highly political decision to breed and release a certain type of deer into this landscape, made by a quirky military general and sparked by the Zionist imaginary of making the landscape biblical—namely, Jewish—again.”

So, a conservation and reintroduction program which is entirely normal and praiseworthy by global standards is now a nefarious cover for the real reasons, which are “political” and out of a desire to “make the land Jewish.” This despite the fact that the fallow deer were a normal part of the landscape in these lands for endless millennia, until just over a century ago.

Braverman goes even further in this vein:

“The deer are thus Israel's proxies, their bodies and movement across the landscape sending a powerful nonverbal message that this landscape is changing and that traditional Palestinian practices of hunting and herding must now alter to accommodate the wild old-newcomers. Israel's reintroduced deer are therefore agents of “normalization”—technologies for rendering banal, innocuous, and even natural Israel's conservation agenda that is closely aligned with its colonial control over the land.”

Now she claims that the deer are “agents” to send a “powerful message” that the landscape has changed (back to what it was in historic Palestine!) and that Palestinian practices of hunting (to extinction!) are preferred and shouldn't be altered. And that all this, she claims, is to render innocuous something which is not at all innocuous: nature conservation. I fail to understand why restoring Palestine’s historic wildlife, and placing restrictions on hunting (note that it is not banned entirely), is evil, colonialist, or anti-Palestinian.

And what about Palestinians who are happy to change from traditional hunting practices? The curator of Hai-Bar Carmel, the reserve where the deer were brought to establish the breeding colony, was Saleh Makladay, a Druze villager. He acknowledged that Druze tradition was to hunt wild animals, and was very happy to be working in conservation to counter its effects. Are they all victims of an evil colonial mindset? What about Arab countries, which gradually also developed conservation movements? What about Palestinians who care about conservation?

Braverman continues:

“The perception of Palestine as terra nullius (Kedar, Amara, and Yiftachel 2018), a desolate area that contained neither conservation-relevant animals nor civilized humans, provides the underlying justification for the reintroduction of wild creatures deemed native by those who see themselves as the original human natives of this place and thus as authentically caring for the region’s natural wildlife.”

Let us first note in passing that Braverman’s claim of Palestine having been perceived as terra nullius (a doctrine referring to land that does not belong to anyone) is sourced to Kedar, Amara, and Yiftachel. Yet those authors admit that this doctrine, used in international law by colonial European countries, was never explicitly adopted by Israel. Furthermore, even in their view that it was implicitly adopted by Israel, they write that this was vis-à-vis the Negev alone - which is not even part of the range of fallow deer.

In an earlier work, Yiftachel does argue that the entirety of Zionist land claims related to this: “A corollary move was to represent the country (Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish homeland) as terra nullius - an empty land awaiting its Jewish redemption after centuries of neglect. Zionist thus coined the now infamous idiom: ‘A people without land to a land without a people’.” But, contrary to Yiftachel, Diana Muir points out that the phrase was actually coined by Christian Restorationists, and it was nearly absent from pre-state Zionist literature.”^[1] Zionists were painfully aware that the land was not empty.

But of more relevance, Braverman’s claim that the terra nullius perception provides the justification for reintroducing fallow deer is absurd. There is absolutely no reason to believe that there is any connection between the two, and nor does Braverman even attempt to offer any. The justification for reintroducing fallow deer was exactly the same as the justification for the many dozens of other animal reintroductions around the world, including Muslim countries in Africa (which, ironically, have reintroduced animals bred in Israeli facilities); namely, to undo the damage to the ecosystem caused by people.

Braverman’s attempts to find fault wherever she can, and to assign nefarious motives to the entire reintroduction program, are simply bizarre. But later, when we look at her autobiographical essay, we can understand what drives her to fabricate such strange criticisms.

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^[1] Diana Muir, "A Land without a People for a People without a Land," Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2008), pp. 55-62.