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Gaza, Solidarity and the Right to Protest Blog Series, Guest Edited by Alana Lentin and colleagues
Blog post by Anna Younes Dr Anna Younes is a scholar of race critical theories, using psychoanalytic approaches and post-/colonial theory. Israel is “imposing a complete siege on Gaza.
Israeli politicians, lawmakers, military personnel, as well as ordinary civilians, are talking – yet again – about Palestinians as animals: “human animals”, to be precise. For race critical scholars, or those studying genocides, it is no news that such dehumanizing language is often followed by an equally dehumanizing treatment. But what does that mean concretely for our understand of fast or slow genocide/s, and how might it propel academia to reframe our thinking around settler colonialism when viewing dehumanization through animal taxonomies?
According to Genocide Watch, dehumanization and the representation of target groups as animals or insects represents state 4 of the 10 stages of genocide. Staging the racialized human as animal was incremental during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and many others. In the more recent genocide case brought to the ICJ by South Africa against Israel, the framing of Palestinians as animal-like was used as evidence. Furthermore, such Israeli incitements also have historical precedents: As Darryl Li recently wrote, “the UN General Assembly recognized the 1982 Israeli-sponsored massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon as an act of genocide”, yet little has changed to protect Palestinians. In fact, some might argue, Israel grew more and more emboldened by the inaction of the “international community”, that as Li argues, witnesses a war over semantics that “gesture to a future in which the powerful decide that if they can’t control the use of the word genocide, it shouldn’t be used at all”.
Denying people’s humanity and framing them through animality is often the pretext to materialize the imposition of unspeakable violence, cruelty and degradation through the optics of a security/health necessity and a larger argument about the defense of humanity. It is thus no coincidence, that during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, for instance, the then Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Moshe Feiglin, wrote a letter to Netanyahu in which he discouraged “civilians from staying in Gaza” by cutting off the “electricity and water supply”. He argued for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip”, the “annihilation” of Hamas and the “concentration” of civilians into camps marked for deportation to other countries. Finally, he also propsed that “formerly populated areas will be shelled with maximum fire power”. These proposed fantasies of annihilation existed within a larger context where Palestinian life has already repeatedly been called “human animals” or “cockroaches” in 2023, or snakes in 2014, or “drugged cockroaches in a bottle” in 1983. Such historical and structural continuities impose that we cannot “take the human subject as [a] dominant object of analysis” anymore when we speak of settler colonial technologies. In that vein, Frantz Fanon already noted that “when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms”. Fanon’s work, albeit only marginally, troubled the Anthropocene’s category of “the human” by looking at animality/bestiality as used against those it colonizes and enslaves. “Humanity” thus moves from a ‘troubled concept’ to a ‘troubling concept’, especially when it has come to stand in for Whiteness, while non-Whiteness and Animality have been posited to represent the other side: “the children of darkness”, as Netanyahu named the Palestinian people. “Animality […] has become a racialized weapon of white supremacy. This is because the equation of Black people to animals by use of colonial language has allowed for their dehumanization. Just as animals have been forced into a space of “subhuman” by the white supremacist patriarchy, so have racialized peoples.” Dehumanization and imposition of brute force is a feature of (settler) colonialism more broadly. For further clarification, my intervention in this blog post and in response to dehumanization is not to defend humanity and the human, but rather to trouble the concept of the Human, as well as its foci on the Anthropocene to understand structures of violence. It will focus on and examine the link between the Capitaloscene and settler colonialism and how their merging operates to cut people/s, animals, nature and land into pieces for extractive purposes, as well as, to render settler colonial intentions productive to transform and catapult land and people into new realities. Similarly, cutting people into pieces – bodily and psychically – or cutting out/off body parts to make survival possible, serves to domesticate resistance, as Jasbir Puar duly noted in her work on maiming the Palestinian, Black, brown and queer body and psyche: while most statistics focus on those that actually die, those that survive with missing limbs and other disabilities – an oftentimes larger number than those that were killed – fall into public oblivion, submerged into a larger framing of “disabled” thus obfuscating the very production of its tactical use in racist population control. All the while, Puar argued, an entire community is forced to turn into care mode to care for those now unable to care for themselves. Today, with the genocide in Gaza going into its fifth month, we observe that the genocidal tendencies within settler colonialism, operating through maiming as already “normalized” on Gaza’s and Palestinian populations before, accelerated their own production, turning the pace of slow genocide into fast genocide: caring for those left with torn bodies and psyches is practically impossible amidst starvation, relentless bombing and an end to humanitarian aid deliveries. According to the theorist of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, by decimating native peoples and their resistance, the ultimate goal of settler frontier violence is to “constitute its principal means of expansion”. In further steps, the transfer, incarceration, replacement and/or elimination of the native population takes place. In this scenario, frontier violence and its racializing semantic taxonomies structure settler colonial societies and the way they operate. Within such verbal power displays, taxonomies classifying the value of sentient life, in this case animals, are produced to signify brutality, violence, but also hypersexuality and beastiality in the racialized Other. While “invasion is a structure and not an event”, the genocidal nature of frontier wars and settler colonial expansion simultaneously separate and collapse into each other in the name of capitalistic reproduction and premature death the minute there are profits to be made from war. Within such settler colonial logics, there has also been a deeply ingrained interplay between figurations of the native, animal and plant life to structure their exploitation, dispossession, elimination and/or replacement. Hence, whether native or racialized life is metaphorized as plant life or as animalistic, both foils function to frame the Other’s personhood as devoid of social, political, or historical human context, and thus also do not need explanation or empathy during states of war and conquest. Today, an unprecedented spatiocidal war on Gaza and settler colonial frontier killings and landgrabs in the Westbank are broadcasted on our screens. Under settler colonialism, La Paperson summarizes, land becomes the main biopolitical target, which in turn also requires the total control over its bodies. While conquest, killing and dispossession occur, sentient bodies can be made productive through their parts, pacified via their separation into pieces as well as the separation of their communities and families. Turning whole subjects – including people – into object pieces of dead or part-life matter is part of settler colonialism’s very own death-world biopolitics. Inflicting pain on sexual organs, or the body in general – maiming for the purpose of domestication – has imminently structured the human relationship to farm animals in modern capitalism and beyond. La Paperson writes: “[…] the exercises of supremacist sovereign power over life and death are most chillingly undisguised when we consider the ways the life worlds of land, air, water, plants and animals, and Indigenous peoples are reconfigured into natural resources, chattel, and waste: statuses whose capitalist ‘value’ does not depend on whether they are living or dead but only on their fungibility and disposability. […] The business of chicken ‘farming’ involves the separation of birds into parts with exchangeable value, extractable value, or disposable value. [...] Chickens grow like vines into cages; cattle are planted in boxes of mud where they are watered, fertilized, and fed growth serum. In modern animal industrial processes, the ‘livestock’ are already in a state of living death.” Surplussed indigenous humans, whether viewed as the “walking dead”, animal-human, or insects by a genocidal gaze, are taken into focus with the goal to split their bodies and communities into separate parts. Human and animal collectives and their infrastructures are thus treated the same the minute racializing taxonomies cast them as necessary and productive waste for a larger “human” project: In Gaza, the maimed bodies of structured settler warfare survive with missing limbs, reproductive organs removed without anesthetic, and their mental and physical wholeness destroyed waiting for development and humanitarian aid to water them further into life worlds of death that do not change the material foundations framing their value. Those bodies, torn into material or psychic pieces, however, also represent the success of an industrial and developmental war machine that enables businesses and states to make profits by cutting animals, nature and land, into parts, generating surplus for a few humans. Much like the acceleration and intensification of state-sanctioned and continuous war in a post-WWII world, the acceleration and intensification of killing animals, for example for human fast food, coincided historically in the last century. McDonalds, founded in 1948, the first company specializing in the mass-production of animal death, was founded on Indigenous territory, using the re-/productive logics of high-value technology so important for settler colonial societies as Aijaz Ahmed stated (i.e. war, agribusiness, surveillance). In his probing critique of settler colonial imperial capitalism, Ahmed states that settler economies are different than metropole or (extractive) colonial/ imperial projects: instead, he argues, settler economies focus on high-value technology, such as agriculture, and war technologies, to maintain their grip on land and its attendant settler economy. Here, for instance, I read his work with the plantation economy in mind, which combined agriculture tech with enslaved labour. With the latter then also came an expansion of surveillance, policing, maiming/torture and incarceration technologies, including war technologies. During the weeks following October 7th, 2023, politicians, policy makers, commentators and intellectuals tried to find semantic loopholes between the human and the animal and the politics and laws separating them. These debates remind us that Palestinian life and animal life share many similarities within these dominant frameworks: family bonds do not matter to the colonizing Humans controlling their lives, and separating and killing off its members into parts for productivity and capital. The fact that Palestinian families are torn apart, their members dead, incarcerated, maimed, or simply unable to visit each other, is normalized. A new humanitarian category was even coined during this particular war: “Wounded Child No Surviving Family Member”. In the name of settler security, the destruction of native and animal bonds are necessary, along with their live-worlds. The recent onslaught on Palestinian life in Gaza, the Westbank and Israel have now shown to the world what Palestinians have known for a longer time: namely that Human Rights are only applied to Humans and not to those who are dehumanized and categorized as Human Animals. The transnational operations of said technologies of power become apparent when looking at Europe: While anti-genocide protests in Berlin were met with harsh police brutality, one protester had a particularly uncanny encounter. While most pro-Palestine speech or mobilization acts had already been banned and marked as a threat to peace and as antisemitic even the years before, the protester wrote instead: “From Risa to The Spree – Palestine Will be Free” and was met at gunpoint by the police. As Abir Kopty noted, “Risa is a popular Arab fast food chain in Berlin and Spree is the river”. Although the protester didn’t intend to free Risa’s chicken, but rather intended a sarcastic wordplay to circumvent the white German state censor, it nevertheless speaks to the simultaneity of racialized neighborhoods and their repression (Risa started out in the “Arab” neighborhood of Neukölln, Berlin), fast food and animal death, and the production of mass-death in the global south. Today, the multi-billion-dollar fast food industry feeds low-income families in the West, while setter colonial soldiers kill off their offspring in Palestine, eating McDonalds for free. My intervention was meant to show that in settler colonial societies the production of surplussed sentient life, their extermination, cutting into pieces, surveillance, incarceration, or dispossession has led to a dominance in war and agricultural industries. Today, the “scorched earth” techniques of modern war, turn nature into its “silent victim”, as a recent New York Times article titled, making war one of the major culprits of the destruction of sentient life on earth, as we know it. An article on “Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots”, from 2009, found that over “90% of the major armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000 occurred within countries containing biodiversity hotspots, and more than 80% took place directly within hotspot areas”. Most of them are in what we call “the Global South”. The transfer of settler colonial death-world technologies and fantasies have today become part-and-parcel of imperial rule. All the while, its globally operating technologies also become productive for other states – may they be settler societies or not – to “enjoy the fruits of exploiting the colonial and semi-colonial world”, as Rodney noted. The disruption of settler colonial supply chains of death are thus just as important as solidarity and empathy, to be able to challenge racializing taxonomies between animals and humans. One of the most important tasks is thus the disruption and dismantling of settler colonial supply chains of death to even be able to challenge racializing taxonomies between animals, humans, plants as well as the land upon which they walk, in order to preserve sentient life on this planet. Maybe then, we can again invest in fantasies and materialities that value life, no matter its shape or where it is from. Stopping genocides thus means stopping the supply and production chains making these interconnected and ostensibly different and separate enterprises lucrative.
“From Risa to The Sea – Palestine will be Free.”
Image credit: Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
Read further in the Gaza, Solidarity and the Right to Protest Blog Series:
Jewish anti-Zionism Genocide is not a metaphor: reflections on Gaza and genocide denial Palestine, Islamophobia and the policing of solidarity Defending the indefensible 
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The views and opinions expressed on The Identities Blog are solely those of the original blog post authors, and not of the journal, Taylor & Francis Group or the University of Glasgow.