Complicity & Selective Compassion
Making Sense of the Animal Rights Movement's Silence on the Palestinian Genocide
Dear Animal Rights Movement,
You have failed.
You have failed the values which you profess.
Compassion. Empathy. Justice. Equality. Morality. Anti-Racism. Intersectionality. Consistent Anti-Oppression. You have failed them all.
You have failed all those who believed you when you said you were dedicated to the liberation of the vulnerable, the exploited, and the forgotten.
You have failed the Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer/Trans, Female/Nonbinary, Disabled, and Immigrant bodies who believed you when you claimed to understand why their bodies needed protection.
You failed the decades of activists and organizers who came before you and laid the foundation for what was supposed to have been the greatest peace movement in the world.
All of this – I repeat, all of this – is rooted in your failure of Palestine: a failure so profound and absolute that it may render you irredeemable. A failure which unmasks the grotesque caricature of “social justice” which has become the contemporary animal rights movement in the West. Palestine was your litmus test, and you failed.
And because of all of this failure, you have failed the animals.
Let us not use euphemisms or whitewash the reality of what is happening in Palestine (Falasteen): since October 7 of last year, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed or disappeared, with more than two-thirds being women and children. These figures are likely a vast undercount. Gaza - and now Rafah and the West Bank - have been subject to an ongoing military campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide (following 75 years of brutal, racist apartheid) through deliberate and unrelenting bombing, starvation, and slaughter by the Israeli government and its primary backer, supplier, and funder, the United States of America.
And this is a moral abomination.
There, we said it.
It should not need to be stated why this is a moral abomination, but apparently it does: in the human context, genocide is the evil above all evils. It is the purest manifestation of absolute and unrepentant hate. It seeks only to erase and extinguish in the name of an enshrined barbarity and cruelty which cannot be adequately named or even comprehended.
And we reject this evil above all evils with every atom, cell, and fiber in our souls. To the animal rights movement, however, the question remains: do you?
Your utter inability and unwillingness to speak up on behalf of the Palestinians who have been subjected to wholesale annihilation by a white settler colonial occupier state (funded by another white settler colonial occupier state) since last October has proven the old adage true: silence speaks louder than words. In the context of the ongoing genocide, the silence from social justice corners has proven just as destructive as the U.S.-supplied Israeli bombs and tanks that have decimated Palestine and its occupied peoples.
And yet, in spite of this, your silence has been deeply instructive.
Your silence has proven that we - those of us who actually profess the values of universal compassion and love - were never doing the same advocacy as you. What a heartbreaking realization this is: that the movement to which we gave our trust and our best selves turned out to be undeserving of either. We are only realizing this now, but thankfully we realized this before we continued to believe more of your self-serving lies.
Perhaps you are not moved by the trauma-drenched tears and bloodsoaked rage of the Palestinians. Perhaps you are not gutted by the scores of images and videos of Palestinians standing over their massacred families whose remains lie on the ground below them in row after row of body bags. Perhaps you are able to look away from image after image after image of mothers sobbing over the enshrouded, lifeless bodies of their young children and bidding them goodbye forever. Perhaps you are unswayed by the fact that the genocidal atrocity that has been unfolding before your eyes for eight months has turned young children into professional pallbearers who have had to carry the corpses of their younger siblings to be buried in mass graves. Perhaps you are unmoved by the fact that Palestinians who showed up to receive flour to feed their starving families were instead met by Israeli bullets and massacred in open daylight. Perhaps the fact that scores of Falasteenis have had to be amputated without anesthetic and then died from infections does not give you pause. Perhaps the dozens of murdered journalists whose lives were taken in an attempt to bury the truth of the reality in Gaza is something at which you are able to shrug. Perhaps even the scores upon scores of rubble-covered, emaciated, and maimed cats, dogs, birds, donkeys, sheep, and horses who find themselves mired in a crisis fueled entirely by the insanity of human nature will not compel you to utter a single syllable in support of Palestine.
Many of us have been asking: why the silence? Aren’t we - the animal rights movement - the ones who always speak out against injustice? Are we not the movement that speaks for “the voiceless”, the most ignored, and the preferably forgotten? Isn’t our movement supposed to be about nonviolence and kindness toward all? ‘All’ as in literally everyone?
Omowale Adewale recently asked Is Veganism Still About Compassion? in direct reaction to the widespread refusal from mainstream (i.e. mostly white-led) animal rights groups and activists to name Israel’s targeted annihilation of Palestinians as actual and literal genocide and to call for a ceasefire. This question hangs over the movement like the contrails from Israeli fighter jets disappearing into the distance after dropping bombs on refugees in Rafah.
We know there will be no genuine answers given by “the movement” and its so-called “leaders” to any of these questions. But to this group of self-appointed leaders in animal rights spaces, we say your silence compels us to ask the same question of Palestinians that we ask of all who shrug in indifference at the slaughter of nonhuman animals: how do we show solidarity with those whose lives are disposable?
We are genuinely curious what your answer may be, but then again, why are we asking you? You have shown that in spite of your rhetoric of nonviolence, you are actually entirely fine with violence. You have shown that you are fully capable of looking the other way from a bottomless, engulfing pain that you would rather ignore. You have demonstrated for months now that your “compassion” is selective and self-serving, and that it has nothing to do with creating a kinder world but serving the needs and desires of the master donor class that cares little (if at all) for Palestinians. You have traded in your values of unconditional and universal compassion for the promise of revenue and in doing so have become complicit in genocide. You have become a part of the apparatus of death.
Over the past eight months, we have been contacted by dozens of rank and file staff members from animal rights organizations, both large and small, who without exception have expressed abject horror and disbelief at their employers’ collective inability and refusal to acknowledge the moral atrocity of the Palestinian genocide. Believe us when we tell you your staffers are disgusted by your silence and now your full-fledged complicity in the erasure of the Palestinians.
You will not utter a single word against the genocide of the Palestinians, but you will take to social media and regurgitate quotes like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” without a hint of the abject hypocrisy of your self-interested altruism regarding your silence on the mass slaughter of Palestinians. When Black History Month rolls around, you performatively regurgitate quotes like Desmond Tutu’s “When you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Our eyes and hearts strain with disbelief and disgust that you have the temerity to use the words of Black liberation activists whose legacies include fighting for a free Palestine while you remain silent on the current genocide of the Palestinians. If there is one quote from a Black liberation activist you should take to heart at this moment, it is Audre Lorde’s “Your silence will not protect you.”
When pressed on your continued silence on Palestine, you openly claim without any discernible self-awareness that it is your “official policy” to remain “neutral” on controversial, political topics. May we remind you that divesting from a speciesist world order and resisting animal exploitation in all its forms is the single most radical and politically powerful act of resistance one can make. If your veganism is not radical, if it is not expressly an act of political resistance, then you are doing it wrong and it is doomed to fail. And we know who suffers most if veganism fails.
Rid yourself of the pretense that you can carry on with business as usual in the midst of genocidal annihilation.
June Jordan said it best when she said, “In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is self-denial.”
We decry the silence of “progressive” and “liberal” voices who are afraid to denounce crimes against humanity for the most shameful of reasons - fear of getting “political”. The war crimes committed by Israel include the bombing of maternity wards full of newborns in intensive care, the assassination of pregnant women by machine guns and military tanks, and the intentional starvation of the elderly, disabled, and companion animals.
To those in the movement who have remained publicly silent and who continue to stay quiet while privately claiming to care about issues of morality, peace, and human rights, you have shown that your “social justice advocacy” is in fact a self-serving endeavor centering your own privilege. Your voices will only rise when precarity and injustice arrive at your doorstep. Your silence on Palestine virtually ensures that injustice will arrive at your doorstep sooner rather than later. May the silence of others not greet your annihilation the way yours greeted that of the Palestinians.
We further reject the large-scale gaslighting to which the Palestinians have been subjected. For the first time, the world is collectively bearing witness to a targeted population livestream its own genocide: on social media, in international news reports, in interviews with journalists, activists, and government officials, and above all in their continued individual and collective acts of resistance against Israel’s terrorism. To deny this evidence is to invoke George Orwell’s infamous quote from 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
The tragedy in Palestine has unmasked that into which mainstream animal advocacy has devolved: an exercise in consumer branding and apolitical allyship. You are no longer a movement oriented around justice, but a decaying appendage on the body of the nonprofit industrial complex. You have allowed yourself to become reduced to raw metrics and data points that have no relevance to the animals on whose behalf you claim to exist. You are your follower and impression counts; you are your paid celebrity endorsers and vegan capitalist apologists. You are forever in pursuit of bigger, more ‘impressive’ numbers that you have deluded yourself into believing is proof that you are changing the world for the better. Your “activism” is a product to be bought and sold on the commodities market. It is, plainly, another form of “capital” - a branding tool - to be wielded by those who stand to benefit from the commodification of social justice. Let us be clear: those who stand to gain from this are literally anyone but the animals.
Sheep killed by Israeli colonizers in the West Bank (Jan 2024).
And so we have no choice but to conclude that the corporate capture of the animal rights movement is complete and that you are no longer committed to your values. You are instead committed to the empty promise of dollars that you think will give you the leverage to accomplish your “mission”.
Let us tell you why this will not happen:
By refusing to condemn Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine, you uphold the dominant colonial world order and align with the will of the donor class which benefits from said world order - an order defined entirely by hierarchy of the most powerful and the hoarding of resources by a singular class that sustains its power by deeming the rest of the world – both human and nonhuman – as mere tools and assets in its quest to maintain its stronghold on the prevailing white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, speciesist, capitalist empire.
And when you uphold empire, you also uphold the oppression of animals. In a geopolitical landscape which makes it illegal to liberate animal bodies from captivity, torture, and slaughter, it should outrage you that the United States, along with its imperial allies Germany and the United Kingdom, mirror this framework by essentially criminalizing any expression of solidarity with the Palestinians. They are two sides of the same coin. Violence against those bodied as nonhuman animals and Palestinians is not merely justified, the empire tells us: it is, in fact, required for the functioning of the empire.
We recognize this as a lie. A vile and fundamental falsehood. Any empire built upon such deceit should only be challenged but destroyed. If this notion unsettles you, so be it. But should you find yourself resisting this truth, defending the very structures you profess to oppose, then it's worth reflecting on what has been compromised within you.
It was the very essence that was never supposed to falter—that activist spark, that righteous rage, and the bottomless empathy, grounded in a pity beyond all telling, for those living at the mercy of others—that initially birthed the animal rights movement. Yet, as the movement changed, this core may not have broken but rather became invisibilized. Just like the suffering of the Palestinians.
Our primary mandate as liberation activists is to turn toward suffering, not away from it. To shed light on existences defined by such constant tragedy, violence, and pain that it jolts us (and hopefully others) out of complacency. Is this not why we as animal liberation activists conduct undercover investigations on factory farms and slaughterhouses? Is this not why we endure social isolation and displacement in a society that has enshrined violence against nonhumans as a ‘value’? Is this not the very crux of the call we all answer when we join the ranks of social justice activism?
The lived reality for so many is so heinously void of joy and self-determination that it cannot rightly be termed ‘Life’. Once we know, we cannot unknow; we cannot look away and carry on in ignorance. We are changed by the knowledge that others suffer so profoundly; we are devastated by the existences that must endure endless heartbreak simply because of the bodies into which they were born.
Israel has written its own death certificate with its genocidal war of aggression. Perhaps, so too has the United States. We warn you that your silence may be the first death knell for the animal rights movement. At the very least, this is an inflection point for which justice-oriented animal rights activists splinter from the apolitical, revenue-oriented mainstream movement, with the former refusing to take cues from the corrupted latter.
Since the stance from the political and corporate class is changing ever so slightly in favor of Palestinians, you may put out some perfunctory statements about Palestine and calling for an end to genocide. Because you are tacticians. You will only follow public sentiment when it behooves you to do so. When it will bring no precarity to your doorstep. But we see you exactly for what you are. And we want you to know it.
While we wholeheartedly sympathize with the families of Israeli citizens taken hostage and wish for their safe and timely return, we will not fall into the dominant white supremacist and zionist narrative of false equivalency and both-sides-what-aboutism that questions the resistance of those who have been occupied for generations. We call out the absurdity and hypocrisy in certain corners of the “vegan” movement that vocalize empathy for Israeli hostages – often characterized as innocent, blameless, scared, and injured – yet conjure no empathy at all for significantly larger numbers of Palestinian hostages and Palestinians families destroyed by imprisonment, kidnapping, murder, and displacement. The Palestinians are unjustly characterized as less “moral”, “backwards”, and “barbaric”, with their suffering dismissed as self-inflicted due to an alleged failure to adhere to Western standards of “morality” or to quietly acquiesce in their own annihilation. The notion that Israel is the only “democracy in the region” or is home to more vegans and is therefore granted moral cover for its war crimes is demonstrably false and is a meaningless attempt at deflection, designed not to address any real issues but to silence dissent in order to ensure the genocide continues. We will make sure our dissent is not only heard but that it entirely upends the war machine to which you have unfathomably attached yourselves.
Rationalization of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine —in tandem with its history of apartheid and displacement of millions of indigenous Palestinians — has exposed the deep undercurrents of white supremacy in the mainstream animal rights movement. When you chose to be complicit in the evil of genocide by refusing to even name it in spite of vast amounts of irrefutable evidence, you forsook your right to speak as an authority on any matters of or justice or morality, especially the oppression of the most vulnerable: the animals.
For those of us who reject white supremacy in all of its forms — including (and perhaps most notably) in “vegan” spaces — we grant ourselves permission not to align ourselves with a movement more dedicated to dollars than to its values. We give ourselves permission to advocate for animals in ways that do not uphold oppression.
We grant ourselves the space not to identify with those who will be only too happy to look the other way when it is our turn to be genocided.
This is not merely a call for peace. This is far from a hollow offering of “thoughts and prayers." This is a pivotal moment for us, as advocates of collective liberation, to rise to action, and communicate in no uncertain terms that the racial caste system governing us all—the white supremacist neoliberal world order that reduces Black, Brown, Indigenous, and nonhuman beings to mere resources and instruments—is imploding due to its inherent cruelty and barbarity.
Many of us, willingly or under compulsion, have contributed to sustaining this global system of oppression — from our roles within the animal rights movement to our personal lives, our interactions with others, and, most importantly, within ourselves. But the events of the past eight months have profoundly disturbed and awakened us. We've been expected to uphold a facade of normalcy amidst what is clearly an overt genocide. We've been urged to suppress our voices, opinions, and very souls to placate the powers that benefit from this abomination. We've been openly and explicitly instructed to suppress our feelings of betrayal and heartbreak by an animal rights movement that has decided the cost of showing solidarity with Palestinians is too steep — these demands for the burial and denial of Palestinian solidarity mirroring the tragic fate of countless bodies in Gaza, Rafah, and the West Bank.
We are done complying with the system that turns a blind eye to the annihilation of the Palestinians, and will certainly look the other way when it is our turn. We have witnessed and mourned more than our share. We have endured enough crushing pain - an agony beyond agony - to carry for the remainder of our lifetimes.
We are done.
And if after all of this, you still cannot bring yourself to speak out against genocide, you still feel comfortable looking the other way because you think it does not affect you directly, and you still refuse to use your position and influence to speak out on behalf of those being annihilated:
Then may the Palestinians forgive you. Because we cannot.
