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hate to be the one to tell you but beyond has ties to israel 😕
NOOOOOOOOOO 😭 thats so disappointing. well thank you for letting me know i very much appreciate it.
also when i googled about it i found the page "vegan bds" on ig which is real helpful n focuses on veganwashing of the genocide/apartheid/occupation, if anyone else wants to check them out
Can a system that advocates for reducing the suffering of animals while contributing to the suffering of humans be part of the vegan politic
Telling a country’s story “through its strengths” is also known as whitewashing, and there’s a long history of it in Israel. In 2005, the Israeli government, with help from American marketers, launched the Brand Israel campaign, an effort to position the country as “relevant and modern” and obscure its record of human rights abuses at a time when the Nation Brand Index deemed Israel’s brand the worst ever measured by a “considerable margin.” A crucial part of this campaign involved promoting the country as an LGBTQ haven and framing the occupation of Palestinian land as a means to protect queer people. While these efforts have been widely condemned as “pinkwashing,” they also successfully generated plenty of positive foreign press.
The Israeli government’s “veganwashing” initiative, likewise, has generated substantial pushback domestically and internationally, and attracted the attention of the global Vegans for BDS movement. But it has also earned a fair amount of unmitigated praise, including among animal rights organizations. In a 2018 blog post, PETA dubbed Israel the “vegan capital of the world,” attributing the country’s leadership on the issue to the Jewish prohibition of “tza’ar ba’alei chayim,” or the suffering of living creatures. It made no mention of the suffering of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
PETA also failed to describe the limits of Israel’s “vegan revolution.” While the Knesset has passed some progressive animal welfare laws, the country still has a spotty track record when it comes to animal cruelty. While Israel does have the most vegans per capita, it’s also one of the world’s biggest per capita meat consumers, and the single largest per capita consumer of poultry. And while the IDF may now have a number of soldiers who care about animal cruelty, before Israel went “cruelty-free,” the state had a history of killing zoo animals and dogs in Palestine. “The dogs were killed because they barked and alerted us to night operations whenever Israeli patrols came up through the streets,” one Palestinian man said after Israeli authorities shot at least ninety dogs in Hebron in 1995. “They didn’t shoot the stray dogs kept by settlers, did they?”
The haters are now accusing us of 'veganwashing'. What should this tell us?
In other words, Jewish Israelis are not allowed to be vegans like other people. They are not allowed to be vegans because they feel eating meat and animal-related products entails cruelty. They are clearly only doing it to divert attention away from their cruelty to palestinians.
At the same time, palestinians are allowed to treat animals horrendously. They are allowed to use donkeys as suicide bombers. They are allowed to butcher sea turtles. They are allowed to use birds as incendiary device carriers. They are allowed to fling cats by the tailfor entertainment. They are allowed to keep animals confined in horrendous conditions. They are allowed to torture cattle.
I could go on and on. You get my drift.
Israel has long been accused of "pinkwashing" – the practice of whitewashing or obscuring the abuse and maltreatment of the Palestinian people behind an often embellished version of its record on LGBTQ+ rights.
It presents itself as a forward-thinking, liberal democracy – the only state in the Middle East which respects its LGBTQ+ citizens. This gives the impression that it simply isn't in Israel's nature to violate Palestinian human rights or national sovereignty.Palestine and Palestinians are then cast, without nuance or exception, as the polar opposites of Israel and Israelis – backwards, illiberal, undemocratic, homophobic. Who then are the international community and well-intentioned private citizens to believe and support?
Ahmad Safi is the co-founder of the Palestinian Animal League (PAL). PAL is a collective of animal rights activists operating throughout the West Bank. They are also ardent advocates of Palestinian self-determination. [...]
For Safi, the successful propagation of the Israeli pinkwashing narrative has spawned what he terms "veganwashing." "The Israelis are using veganism and animal rights to clean up their image around the world," Safi told The New Arab. This time, an animal-loving depiction of Israel is juxtaposed with a view of Palestine as a haven for animal abuse. And just as with pinkwashing, Israel's track record on animal rights is not quite as rosy as one might be led to believe.
In fact, according to an OECD report published earlier this year, Israel is the sixth biggest per capita consumer of meat and the number one per capita consumer of poultry.
Moreover, The Guardianhas documented the horrific treatment experienced by farm animals subjected to live export from Australia and Europe to Israel. The squalid, unsanitary conditions aboard the boats and trucks which bring these animals to their final destinations are torturous. Those who have perished or will soon perish are unceremoniously dumped and left to decompose throughout the desert.
Palestinian national emancipation and intersectionality
It is here that Palestinian national emancipation enters the debate. Safi remarks that PAL is keen to dispel Israeli veganwashing propaganda. In demonstrating that "it is not just Israelis and Europeans who are leading this fight," but Palestinians too, PAL advances the Palestinian national cause. The example provided by their activism shatters the illusion that they and their fellow citizens are inherently regressive in comparison to the Israelis.
But animal rights are not merely a vehicle for achieving national emancipation – they are part and parcel of the same struggle. In the words of PAL's Executive Director, Ahlam Tarayra, "It's not enough to raise the Palestinian flag. If you want to liberate your land, you need to work on building a strong society that cares for all who inhabit it. Palestine is the people, the animals, the plants, everything." [...]
Perhaps the clearest-cut evidence for PAL's intersectional position comes in the form of the so-called Separation Wall, which PAL refers to as the 'Apartheid Wall.' The Apartheid Wall does not discriminate between species: Palestinian farmers are cut off from their land, while other mammals are prevented from observing their natural migratory patterns. Furthermore, just as Palestinian human families are ripped apart, so too are the red fox and the gazelle separated from their mates.
Moreover, just as with the Apartheid Wall, it is not just Palestinian humans who find themselves victimised by the IDF. Safi reports witnessing many occasions where Israeli soldiers have shot and killed stray dogs who attempted to play with their military dogs while on their way to conduct raids in his refugee camp. [...] Safi and Tarayra both separately recounted a story in which a woman repeatedly pleaded with them to collaborate with a vegan IDF soldier to bring three puppies to an animal shelter. Tarayra in particular was shocked at the idea that this soldier could properly be described as a vegan. "Does he have a vegan machine gun, with vegan bullets?" she enquired.
– Nick McAlpin, "How Israel uses animal rights to 'veganwash' the occupation," The New Arab (2019).
Israel is using veganism as a calculated facade to gloss over the occupation of Palestine, and appropriate regional culture and traditions.
Excerpts from the article below. It's from 2019 but many of its points are still relevant and crucial:
Make no mistake: Israel is using veganism as a calculated facade to justify its military’s program of terror, gloss over its occupation of Palestine, and appropriate regional culture and traditions that predate Israel by hundreds if not thousands of years.
Far from being a politically neutral “lifestyle,” true veganism is a radical anti-oppression philosophy, and yet one of the most oppressive governments in the world is co-opting veganism for its own gains.
Ahmad Safi, the Executive Director of the Palestinian Animal League, perhaps best encapsulates the IDF’s breathtaking hypocrisy around veganism in his piece “On the ‘IDF’s vegan warriors’: A vegan Palestinian’s perspective.” In describing a BBC special on the “vegan warriors” of the IDF, Safi notes, “I was somewhat baffled by a particular passage in the article, taken from a radio interview which said of one of the vegan soldiers: ‘Her diet is so important to her that had the army not been able to provide conditions that had harmed no living creatures, she might not have enlisted in a combat unit.’ The only way in which I can interpret this is that the soldier in question does not consider Palestinians to be ‘living creatures.’”
An explicitly intersectional, anti-capitalist vegan movement could never provide a coherent justification for human rights abuses, even on a superficial level. In our desire to make veganism more appealing to the masses, however, vegans have sold our politics out. And the wrong people bought them, along with the IDF’s favorite hummus.
Though we are up against powerful industrial and military systems, we can still move towards justice. Rejecting a consumerist vision of veganism, learning about Palestinian cuisine and culture, and joining the Palestinian civil society movement of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) are just a few actions that we can take.
