‘This is not a pig’: Settler innocence and visuality of zoos

Settler innocence is the primary organising principle of Israel’s space production. To construct themselves as innocent political actors, oppressors disavow, justify, and deny their responsibility for oppression. The rhetoric of settler innocence allows Israel, a settler colonial state responsible for the dispossession and military occupation of Palestine, to present itself as the “only democracy in the Middle East”. In this article, I perform a visual analysis of the Zoological Center Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan and the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo to examine how zoos, inherently violent colonial institutions, reproduce settler innocence. Entrenched in Israel’s national projects of linking modernity and Biblical antiquity, zoos naturalise settlers, normalise indigenous displacement, and obscure colonial violence.

Having no experience in taxidermy and no access to quality chemicals, Awaida followed instructions found on the internet to mummify animal bodies. Droopy and patchy, these stuffed animals were placed back in cages, alongside a few surviving animals.
In 2016, following an intervention by international animal welfare organisation, Four Paws, Khan Younis was shut down and its animals were transferred to other zoos outside of the Strip. The head of the rescue mission called conditions at Khan Younis 'horrific' and reported that the surviving animals, including a tiger, were happy to leave (Tenorio 2016:[sp]).
As was the case with the media coverage of Khan Younis, Israeli media routinely weaponise the devastating conditions of zoos in Gaza to accuse Palestinians of animal abuse and portray Israel as a benevolent state for helping to rescue the animals. Adding to the chorus is a Jerusalem Post article that contends 'Israel helps evacuate animals as "world's worst zoo" in Gaza closes' (Udasin 2016:[sp]). By presenting zoo

animals in Gaza as innocent victims of gratuitous violence inflicted on them by
Palestinians, Israel occludes its culpability for having produced the conditions that resulted in the suffering and death of animals. While the humanitarian idea of suffering pretends to universality, the rhetoric of innocence 'parses different kinds of suffering, qualifying them; it provides a moral and cultural frame by which to judge them' (Ticktin 2017:587). Israel's recognition of suffering in the Strip does not extend to the humans of Gaza, who, as Irus Braverman (2017:8) writes, 'it is implied, not only belong there but also deserve such treatment in light of their incivility toward animals'. In Israel's dominant visual regime, Palestinian lives are mediated in such a way that violence against them is invisible, or considered legitimate, or fails to register.
Despite Israeli media often portraying Gaza's animals more favourably than its humans, neither are understood as inherently innocent -a perception supported by the Israeli Defense Minister Avidor Liberman, who in April 2018 proclaimed, 'There are no innocents in Gaza' (Lazaroff 2018:[sp]). Regardless of an animal welfare rhetoric, there is evidence that in each onslaught on Gaza, the Israeli military kills not only hundreds of people but also many of the few animals remaining in the Strip, often deliberately shooting them point-blank (Salih 2014:303). The sniper scope visuality of the Israel Defense Force produces all bodies in Gaza as enemy combatants to justify aggression against them. During military operations, zoo animals are assigned subject positions of Hamas fighters and are presumed to lack innocence because of their existence in that geography (Braverman 2013:150).
The Khan Younis example demonstrates how innocence muddies the human-animal boundary. Humanity and animality are not zoological but political, discursive, and relational designations. Since the period of colonial conquest, animality has been constituted in opposition to 'humanity' and a justification for indigenous genocide.
Nicholas Mirzoeff (2016)  virtue via oppression' (Mawhinney 1998:17). Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012:10) write that settler moves to innocence are a set of evasions, strategies, and positionings that attempt to rescue settler futurity, reconcile settler complicity, and 'relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all'.
In this article, I perform a visual analysis of the Zoological Center Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan (ZCTVRG) and the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo (JBZ), both of which I visited in the summer of 2019. These zoos, produced as modern institutions that contribute to animal welfare and conservation, serve as evidence of Israel's purportedly progressive and democratic nature as a state. Maneesha Deckha (2020:82)

The only democracy
Conceived as fundamentally different from their predecessors, modern zoos claim to be institutions that achieved a 'higher levels of enlightenment' (Uddin 2015:9). No longer in tiny cages behind metal bars, animals in modern zoos inhabit spacious enclosures that recreate their natural habitat. Yet, Stephen Spotte (2006:21) writes that 'zoos have advanced little heuristically since the beginning of the modern age'.
Modern zoos never broke away with 'species thinking' (Deckha 2010:38) -a colonial ideology that reifies the exceptionality of 'human' and perpetuates a hierarchy in which certain humans can cage, displace, and display those who are cast as animals.
Modern zoos are descendants of European royal menageries, private collections of exotic animals, and public amusement shows, which included circuses, fairs, and traveling acts exhibiting caged animals and peoples. As early as the 17th century, people from various colonized communities were displayed in Europe alongside nonhuman animals to represent imperial conquest of 'discovered' lands and the 'triumph' of Western colonial powers (Taylor 2017:108 During my visit, as the safari shuttle drove through the immersive landscape, the driver barely slowed down at the sight of African animals in the middle of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. Nevertheless, I saw a tower of giraffes bending their necks to drink from a lake, a bloat of hippos resting in water, a dazzle of zebras crossing the road in front of us, and an ostrich who for a moment locked eyes with me. To invisibilise animal incarceration, the Safari produces animal sightings as chance encountersas if herds of non-native animals happened to be gallivanting around the pastoral terrain of the colonised Palestinian land sculpted with African characteristics.
One of the visitors who shared the safari shuttle with me, briefly looked at a confusion of wildebeests before announcing with a British accent, 'I would not want to be in page 06 of 15 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 Africa right now'. Even mistaking a simulation for versimilitude, the visitor perceived her safari adventure as non-threatening compared to being in Africa. According to Rothfels (2002:9), this type of experience is an intended consequence of the zoo design, which allows visitors to unproblematically 'observe exotic animals in their native habitat without leaving the comfort of ... civilization'. The structuring of the gaze in the safari is characterised by what Mary Louise Pratt (1992:169) calls 'imperial eyes' -the visual entitlement of the coloniser who is positioned as 'the monarch of all I survey' (Pratt 1992:169). Designed for white audiences, the 'nature' trope of zoo displays reproduces the colonial sense of mastery and superiority rooted in the power to observe others risk-free.
Another imagery of Africa, that of the gorilla display, is domesticated by positioning the visitors in a wooden cabin elevated above the animal enclosure. Unlike other zoo animals, separated from visitors only by rope or glass, gorillas are additionally removed and thus configured as particularly dangerous. The cabin from which to observe the animals is filled with objects related to travel: suitcases, binoculars, and nature journals.
Zoo visitors are constructed as travelers, or rather colonial explorers who have been transported to the gorillas' habitat, which is primarily in central and western Africa.
Typical of the colonial gaze that sees 'fully populated spaces as "empty"' (Nelson 2011:162), these animal exhibits neither denote nor allude to African people who are erased from these representations. Unpeopled African landscapes facilitate a historical disavowal: erasure of indigenous people allows the colonisers to 'dissociate from the harmful legacies of colonial power' (Uddin 2015:202) and maintain their innocence.
The tiger enclosure, located in the Asia area, features two elusive Sumatran tigers. area, produced as a visual and cultural "other". These representations exoticise the region and reproduce colonial stereotypes that configure Asia as mysterious. The Orientalist imagery also allows Israel to rhetorically construct itself as part of 'the west' despite geographically being located in Asia.
Unlike the visually busy tiger display, the kangaroo enclosure looks bare. There is only a handful of haystacks on the red, arid ground, and a small number of kangaroos are The animals seem unharmed. The camera follows them for a few more seconds until the video fades to black. With its subject confined to the enclosure and unable to run for shelter, the video constructs the rocket attack from Gaza as unprovoked violence seeking to harm innocent actors. The video elicits sympathy for the elephants who rhetorically stand in for Israelis, alerted by the same siren and facing the same enemy.
Innocence, as Miriam Ticktin (2017:583) argues, can 'ignore the political and historical circumstances that created these victims' and present perpetrators as victims.
The same political maneuver of using animals as tokens of settler innocence is deployed in the representation of the vulture conservation program at ZCTARG. 'Griffon Vultures need regional peace too' -contends one of the signs. Visitors should infer that Israel is the party that 'too' needs regional peace, as it is engaged in combating the decline in the population of the vultures. Sympathy for the birds should extend to the countries that participate in the conservation programme as suggested by the sign. The vulture sign exhibits a map of the region that demonstrates the vultures' flight trajectory. separates it from countries with primarily black and brown populations. Palestine is not named on this politically and geographically imprecise representation of the region.
Israel visually marks its aspirational belonging to Europe, democracy, and whiteness, which is constructed as politically innocent and virtuous.
The logic of modernity validates zoos as '"arks" seeking to conserve animal species' (Philo & Wilbert 2000:13). Zoos bolster the impression that they rescue endangered animals from the cruelty of nature and global armed conflict while obscuring the reasons why animals become endangered and near-extinct, which is often a result of colonial violence, including hunting, poaching, the capture of animals for zoo exhibits, (2013:136) also remarks that to please its devout Jewish visitors, the zoo changed the language on one of the signs that was interpreted as contradictory to the Bible: '40 million years ago' was changed to 'a long time ago' to prevent further instances of vandalising the sign.
The peccary enclosure is a prime example of how the Biblical commandments overrule other considerations in the design of the JBZ. Though a different species, a peccary looks like a pig, which, according to Jewish religious law, is not allowed to touch Israel's ground. The smelly enclosure with dozens of small, loud animals is surrounded by signs that, in several languages, including Yiddish, inform visitors, 'This is not a pig'. 2 The signage at the peccary enclosure is the only one in the zoo that addresses the visitors in Yiddish -the language that many ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not The Bible is the ideological guarantor of settler innocence and belonging to the land, so the zoo trumps up some of the textual references 'to realize an intrinsically Jewish space, continuously substantiating the land's own identity and purpose as having been and needing to be the Jewish national home' (Braverman 2013:138). In the Israeli national project, Jewish settlers who recently emigrated from other countries are imagined as having ‛returned' to Israel after temporarily being gone, akin to some of the Biblical species that went locally extinct and are now being reintroduced to the land, as per the JBZ's mission. The zoo views the two processes as one and the same in its goal of the 'restoration of the Biblical natural order,' as indicated on a plaque in the zoo. The Zionist ideal of Jewish 'return', embodied by the zoo's Biblical ‛restoration', promotes settler innocence by effectively erasing Palestine and its history and curtailing its future. Today, the JBZ holds the largest captive herd of Persian fallow deer in the world. Deer were bred in captivity so that they can be ‛reintroduced' into their once native habitat -the Jerusalem hills. However, the zoo admits that the project had limited success.
Over 60% of deer released around Jerusalem have died from train accidents, a fact that articulates the violent disjunction between the Biblical past of the Kingdom of Israel and the industrialised modernity of the Israeli nation-state. Still, the fallow deer project is the JBZ's proudest achievement in its 'global mission to save endangered species and their ecosystems' (Braverman 2013:129). Palestinian people is obscured, and the view is presented as peaceful. Once I zoomed in with the camera, not only did the Wall become visible, but also the checkpoint, the soldiers manning it, and the structure of oppression that keeps Palestine out of sight.
That's what the JBZ and, broader, the national project of Israel is about -a quintessential view that seems peaceful while, in reality, is obscuring the violence of colonial space-making to protect settler innocence.

Conclusion: 'Why look at animals?'
In Israel, like in other settler colonial geographies, zoos reproduce settler spatial entitlement -the right to claim, displace, and possess. As 'microcosms of empire' (Hanson 2018:8), zoos rely on seeing the world, including non-settler lives and modes of being, as objects of possession. Zoos' authentic mission -making animals properly visible -celebrates the imperial eye, and the right of the coloniser to see, or indeed to stare. Our visual pleasure justifies animal captivity and promotes the idea that 'the captured rhinoceroses will far more "benefit the world" than forty adults "running wild in the jungles ... seen only at rare intervals by a few ignorant natives"' (Rothfels 2002:248 All zoos are places of animal captivity that reduce animals to spectacles. Animals are 'emptied of experience and secrets' (Berger 2009:12), so that visitors can project themselves onto the animals and see themselves reflected back. Berger (2009:23) writes that we look at zoo animals in the 'hope of re-finding some of the innocence' we believe animals to possess. This observation is applicable to modern zoos, including those in Israel. Animal displays in the Zoological Center Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan and the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo reflect and reaffirm settler innocence, and take settler minds off occupation. Gaza's zoos, in turn, are not innocent. They are highly politicised -