"Until we extend our circle of compassion to
all living things, humanity will not find peace."
Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization

ME, MY POLITICAL FAMILY
AND OTHER ANIMALS

The left wing in Israel - much like the left in the rest of the world - stands today in a historical position from which its' accumulated experience enables it to recognize the crucial connection running through and uniting all the different struggles for justice, equality and liberation. A testament to this can be seen in the various and varied backgrounds, belief-systems and issues encompassing the 2004 version of the "New Left", the anti-globalization movement forged in the Seattle protests of late 1999.
Here in Israel, too, we seem to be witnessing more profound and aware connections being made within the left between supposedly unrelated sectors and topics: the widening social gap between rich & poor, women's status, racism and ethnic discrimination, pollution, the Israeli occupation and the just Palestinian struggle against it, the plastic culture of consumerism, homophobia as social norm, exploitation of foreign workers etc.
Different sectors are exploited and oppressed in different places and cultures, by different means and bodies and with different rationalizations and excuses. however, it is still possible to recognize one sole root generally responsible for the existence of social oppression and exploitation in and of themselves; this root is the identical logic behind them all, a logic which places monetary profits above all else and determines that our freedom, happiness and welfare should, even must, exist at the expense of the freedom, happiness and welfare of others - particularly of those who are different and/or weaker than us.
The aforementioned unification of struggles from such diverse areas into one rich tapestry, decentralized and "unfocused" to the untrained eye, actually represents a particularly deep focus, radical and clear-headed, leading the current protest movement not towards cosmetic reforms but onto a head-on collision with the root of the problem, that disastrous logic described earlier.
But even with the leftist camp being more diverse and clear-headed than ever before, the identification and recognition of the dominant narrative's logic in all its' different manifestations is an ongoing political process which has not yet reached an end, and it would be wrong of us to assume that we live in a sort of leftist "End of History", where the left is already aware of the whole spectrum of relevant struggles, and all that is left is to win them.
In fact, one area stands out in which the manifestations of the dominant narrative are so deeply entrenched in our lives and culture, and have been buried under such numerous, different justifications and camouflages throughout history, that even the clear-headed, diverse and radical left of today is not wholly capable of recognizing them for what they are, and worse - embraces them as part of human life, naturally and with a clear conscience.
We are talking, of course, of the massive, systematic exploitation of non-human animals by society as a whole.
The left tends to view the demand to end animal exploitation as a struggle not essentially linked to - or at best a minor item in - its' already busy schedule.
Of course, this is not the first time it has made such a mistake.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, who spoke of justice and liberty during the 18th century, even phrased the American declaration of independence, stating that "All men were created equal", was in fact himself a slave owner. He, along with the vast majority of the white population of his time, spoke highly of justice, equality and freedom for all, while depriving human beings of African origin of those very same things.
As it is today with the exploitation of non-human animals and their "natural inferiority" regarding mankind, so it was in the past that the institution of slavery and the "natural inferiority" of black people were so deeply entrenched in the lives and culture of white people, so obvious in their eyes, that almost no one recognized their existence as contradicting in any way the abstract values of justice, equality and liberty that they spoke and at times died for.
The mistake of designating certain sectors' struggles to the sidelines, as secondary or trivial, is also not a new mistake for the left. In the 19th century, for example, with the rising of the Socialist movement, there was a fairly popular point of view which saw the struggle for women's liberation as secondary to the proletarian struggle (during the early 20th century there were many within the labor movement that went so far as to claim that the fight for women's right to vote only creates divisions among the working classes). Unfortunately, it took several decades - until the 1960s - for the Feminist movement to escape the male shadow of class analysis and assume its' rightful place as a primal, essential component at the heart of the protest movement.
But not only Africans and women were met with these close-minded, stagnant attitudes; any sector or issue that has raised its' head to demand inclusion into the protest movement's agenda as equal among equals was originally received with a cold, indifferent and sometimes even hostile welcome. For more than 150 years homosexuality was perceived as "bourgeois decadence" even by the most advanced groups in the arena of the social struggle (F. Engels, for example, one of the fathers of Marxism, portrayed it as a perversion against nature and as moral decline in his book about the birth of the family, private property and the state). And in the field of ecology, it should be noted that except for a handful of pioneers (such as the American Anarchist Murray Bookchin, who already began developing the concept of social ecology back in the 1950s), it took the traditional left nearly thirty years to stop viewing this issue as the hobby of "hippies" and "nature freaks" who “only distract us from the real struggle”, or otherwise as one of Capitalism's internal contradictions, destined to simply "resolve itself after the revolution."
Today, it is the animal rights movement that is falling victim to this narrow-mindedness, and we hope with all our hearts that at least this time the leftist camp will learn from past mistakes, weight the issue seriously and realize it is not "nutritional recommendations" for "animal lovers", but a struggle for justice, equality and liberation that stands on grounds as firm as any and all human rights struggles mentioned above.
Our message to our allies in the Israeli left could not be more simple and clear:
The transformation of innocent, living beings into machines and dead products, merchandise and property, slaves and prisoners, is nothing but another manifestation - indeed the oldest, cruelest one - of the dominant narrative, of indifference to others’ fate and of the devaluation of life, tendencies which you and us both fight against in their other manifestations (Plutocracy, Patriarchy, Nationalism, Militarism etc.).
The fact that non-human animals look, communicate and behave different than us does not justify a lifestyle based on their ruthless exploitation and destruction in all imaginable ways (certainly not in the industrialized scale of today, devoid even of any natural, survivalist pretext), in the same manner that physical, biological or cultural differences do not justify exploiting other populations and sectors. As the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham once phrased it, "the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”.
Animals have been and remain the most oppressed sector: a sector which cannot speak up for itself in our language, a sector which all of us, conservatives as radicals and rich as poor, are guilty of its' active exploitation on every single day, in every meal and with every purchase. Therefore we call on you to join us and refuse to be foot soldiers for this terrible, ongoing occupation, to disobey the orders of a brutish culture that nourishes us by slaughtering others. Not in vain said the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy that "as long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields"...