"Call me human animal—it honors me"

A week or two ago I saw a screenshot of text that read something like “People literally become vegans/vegetarians to save animal lives but when it comes to Palestine, ‘it’s complicated.’” It had over 21,000 retweets, which is no surprise. Vegans are a perpetual scapegoat and if you want to go viral at any time, you can just say we’re disrespectful to indigenous people or responsible for some specific agricultural problem, as if we actually have the buying power to set off and sustain international crazes for quinoa and almond milk.

It was stupid of me to be upset by something so predictable, but it was as if someone took a swing at a target who ducked and they ended up punching me in the face instead. What was the intended point? That vegans are responsible for attacks on Palestine? Israel has a reputation for being a vegan paradise (due to aggressive and “deliberate practices of veganwashing”) but vegans make up less than 6% of their populace and not every vegan is committed to animal liberation anyway.¹ Are many Zionists outside of Israel vegan? I find that impossible to believe. By a recent poll, only 1% of Americans identify as vegan. Joe Biden and his administration, shithead AGs, everyone in the Senate, almost everyone in the House, everyone who sells arms except maybe this guy, and so on, are not among them.

I don’t think whoever wrote the original sentence actually believes vegetarians make up a significant portion of people saying “it’s complicated” about Gazan genocide. I think the person was in pain about equivocation and apathy at large² and the expression of their pain came out in a meme-y rhetorical format that, while incoherent in content, felt right to a lot of people. I myself know two vegans—before you ask, yes they are—who post daily on Instagram but haven’t said or shared a word about Palestine though they each position themselves as anti-cop iconoclasts who are generally too radical to function.³ Hypocrisy has been an incessant siren’s scream for four weeks now when it comes to posturing losers who are liberals or centrists or bigots at heart. But, again, there’s no version of reality in which vegans comprise a meaningful number of these types because there are not enough of us to make up a meaningful number, full stop.

The sentiment hurt me because it reminded me of the ubiquitous refusal to think expansively, carefully, thoroughly, about life and rights and interbeing even among those on the left. The attitude across a variety of political factions is that caring about (non-human) animals is embarrassing and unserious, and that it comes at the expense of caring about humans. You have to choose between being someone who is moved by an unhoused person or being someone who is moved by an unhoused person’s dog, someone who cares about a hungry family or someone who cares about the goat a hungry family could eat; someone who wants to heal a horse or who wants to heal the man who rode him. It’s threatening to consider the possibility that we’re morally obligated to care about both because Western civilization is built on the notion of human supremacy and our ontological separation from everything else on the planet, but there is no such divide or superiority. It is a willful delusion. Recognizing that would transform us and remake the way we live. It would fell a massive obstacle to the process of understanding our relationship with the earth and the other beings here with us. To borrow from Melanie Challenger, as long as we live as animals who don’t want to be animal, we cannot know “the right way to behave towards life” because “we can’t decide how other life forms matter or even if they do.”

People’s readiness to put animal lives at odds with Palestinian lives was especially painful to me because Palestinians themselves, in this endless moment of their massacre, care about and care for other living beings with no apparent resentment or hesitation. Like the olive trees, animals are part of the land and therefore their home; they are part of their families and are a part of them. In the midst of bombardment, a little girl cries over the death of her bird. A man mourns the mortal wound of a donkey. Animal rescuers patch a horse’s injury. A man lets a thirsty dog drink from his precious water bottle. And cats are forever in their arms and their thoughts. Rama evacuates with her cat. Tamer and Samer refuse to leave their cat shelter. Cats are dug out of the rubble, spoken to loving after an attack. A man brings a burned cat into the hospital. Seven year old Raneem texts her sister Reem, “take care of our cat and yourself. Do good in school. This what mama said to me to tell you.” It is their final communication.

“War is not healthy for children and other living things” wrote Lorraine Schneider, a Jewish peace activist, during the Vietnam War. I’ve been thinking of that as headlines occasionally break through about the environmental catastrophe that will endure long after the bombing in Gaza has stopped: chemicals in soil and water, caustic dust in the air, poison in the fish for dozens, maybe hundreds of years. Hierarchical habits of thought can suggest acknowledging this ghastliness is wrong, somehow. That it takes attention away from human deaths which should be all that matters, all anyone needs to know. We’re used to thinking of ourselves and the environment as two separate things, but we are not. War is not healthy for children and other living things. Bombs destroy babies and cats and plants alike. We might discriminate as to which is worth more, but the explosion will not.

Palestinians want and deserve to live on their land and their land must be livable in order for them to do so. The land must be alive. No one comprehends this more deeply than they do, these people who are willing to die for their trees. Human interests are not at odds with other animals’. On the contrary, our fates are inextricable. When plants and other animals thrive, we thrive. When they die, we die. To acknowledge our obligation to all life is to open up the opportunity for our own liberation.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “where life is precious, life is precious.” Trying to cleave ourselves from other animals furthers the inclination to divide ourselves from other humans on the basis of abilities or race or religion or gender. And because it is fallacious, the border between ourselves and beasts is easily erased and manipulated. To compare a person to an animal is a sign of impending violence because it signals an intent to exploit and slaughter. That tells us something about how we treat non-human animals and how unrepentantly and openly we do it. It also tells us something about the impossibility of containing the conviction that life, in any form, can be used as property and commodity, instrumentalized, seized, brutalized, and extinguished. Where life is not precious, life is not precious. The rot will not be corralled.

“I have never been prouder to be of people who love birds and bread and whose humble existence has shaken the core of those who are scared of life and who continue to destroy all of it —human and non human,” writes Vivien Sansour. “Call me human animal—it honors me to be from humble people who value all life. When history will be visited it will be remembered that we are people of earth and those who have attempted to destroy us eventually destroyed themselves.”

1  I don’t believe there’s any country or even any city in which every vegan eats as they do because of animals. People do it because it’s trendy or because they think it will be good for their health, for economic reasons or because of the environmental impact. “Vegan for the animals” is a distinct thing because that orientation is not a given.

2  Which I understand and sympathize with

3  I don’t want to be a social media cop. What people do or don’t share online can’t represent the entirety of how they think or behave; it’s not some infallible depiction of their souls. But silence is a choice and an action, too.