If empathy is a muscle, apathy is also a muscle. So what do we train our bodies, minds and hearts to be capable of, when we train them to be indifferent to injustice?
On my social media feed, I watch impotently a video of a crying Palestinian Surgeon and father amputating his teenage daughter’s leg on their dining room table after her body has been crushed under Israeli airstrikes, and the family are unable to reach a hospital due to the Israeli soldiers stationed outside, shooting at anyone nearby, their gunfire audible throughout the video. Through his and her tears, he concedes he has no other choice, but to amputate her leg without anaesthesia, using just a saw, needle and thread, because not only has Israel dropped bombs from the skies, they’ve also blocked medical supplies reaching Gaza.
After liking and saving the video, hoping such a feeble action might help it reach more people and gain traction with an algorithm we know is deliberately suppressing and censoring Palestinian content, I swipe to the next video. It is eerily similar, someone cutting the leg of someone who is alive. But this video is from a French slaughterhouse. A worker is hacking into and dismembering a cow while she is still conscious. Unlike the Palestinian father, he is not forced into doing this horrific act to help her survive. He is doing it because we, as a society, enjoy the taste of flesh. And we like it particularly when it’s cheap, which means we’re willing for a certain percentage of animals to suffer this kind of fate when it means we won’t have to pay too much money at the checkout.
My body physically recoils watching the cow jerk her leg as the knife slices into her skin. Unlike the previous video, her reaction has not been blurred, but I struggle to watch. How someone can bring themselves to actually physically do such a thing to somebody else, I am not sure. Is it not obvious when we are hurting someone? How do we not want to immediately stop and help them, instead? And what does it do to our soul when we ignore that feeling, and we continue to stab, slice and tear into somebody else’s struggling body, anyway?
Over the past year and a half, I am struck by the similarities of what I see. I go from one video to another. One video shows soldiers repeatedly hitting and slapping a man simply because they can, the next video shows a worker repeatedly beating cows in a shed simply because he can. I see a video of a teenage boy chasing after a baby wild boar, whose only crime was being born in the wrong place, in the wrong body. I swipe away before the inevitable stabbing I read from the description is about to follow. I see other videos. Grown adults laughing and mocking Palestinian death, gloating about killing Palestinian kids. “There are no innocent Palestinians.” so many of them repeat again and again as though repeating it enough times might make it true, as though anyone whose innocence is in question deserves to have their life extinguished by an occupying force, their judge, jury and executioner. Videos fill my social media feed of Palestinian flesh. Bombed. Crushed. Shot. Cut off. Cut up. In plastic carrier bags. In a mothers’ arms. My God, does our flesh not all bleed the same way?
Yet somewhere, somehow, we draw a line about whose flesh and bodies are worthy of caring about. People with the resources and privilege to choose otherwise, who share these same videos showing Palestinian bodies torn up, hoping to shake up a Western world indifferent to Palestinian suffering, in their next story, share a video of their meal – someone else’s body we didn’t care about being torn up.
Likewise, far too many animal activists who have made it their life’s mission to speak out against animal suffering remain deafeningly silent when it comes to Palestinians, or perhaps worse, try to “both sides” what is happening, obscuring the power dynamics at play and making this genocidal apartheid seem like an evenly-matched conflict between coloniser and colonised, occupier and occupied. So many of us seem to be comfortable believing that it is all simply “too complicated” to bother to take a side when it comes to genocide, these human victims not even worthy of an afternoon spent educating ourselves on a subject that does not directly impact us.
I’m struck by our inability or unwillingness to draw parallels in what we see. “You must not compare human lives to animals!” many would argue, as though by drawing this comparison, one might think Palestinian lives could be any less precious and worthy of protection. As though by recognising that we are all animals, this might just be a justification to bomb, starve and annihilate some of us. For many in the Israeli government it is such a justification. There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the discourse comparing Palestinians to beasts, rats, snakes, pigs, dogs and other non-human animals. When the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel would blockade Gaza, he supported such murderous action by claiming: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
“As long as there are slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields.”
― Leo Tolstoy
And yet, if we thought for a moment that a vegan world in which every life holds inherent value, we might just put an end to human bloodshed, the responses of fellow activists to this genocide depressingly tells me otherwise. I have witnessed activists, who I greatly admire for their commitment and sacrifices to end animal suffering, justify and excuse Israel’s actions, with some terrifyingly cheering them on, and boasting of donating vegan meals to the IDF, who disturbingly call themselves “the most vegan army in the world“. Gaza has the most child amputees per capita in the world, researchers estimate that upwards of 186,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israel’s genocide, and 1.9 million people have been displaced from their homes and rendered homeless. These statistics do not factor in the untold numbers who, if they somehow manage to survive this genocide, will die from the toxic cloud of airborne particles released from Israel bombing 70% of Gaza’s buildings. The IDF, “the most vegan army in the world” is responsible for this. Only in a world that can rebrand speaking out against genocide as anti-semitic could bombing children in schools while wearing leather-free boots be claimed to be vegan. Veganism is not and has never just been a diet. It is a social justice movement that directly opposes the oppression and exploitation of all sentient life – human and non-human – and we ignore that at our peril.
I have had self-professed animal activists write to me on social media, threatening to unfollow me unless I stop posting in support of Palestinians and Palestine because somehow, unlike non-human animals, they do not believe that Palestinians’ lives are worth defending (I say “self-professed” because I cannot understand how animal liberation or animal rights does not by its very definition also include humans, for whether we like to admit it or not, we humans are also animals). In what kind of society might a follower count matter more than human lives? I want to scream, to wake this world that has somehow shut its eyes to what is right in front of us. How is it possible to become so blinded to that which binds us all together? How can we not see that our flesh bleeds the same, and when one of us bleeds, we all bleed?