Actually existing intersectionality: The place-based and embodied politics of animal and human rights activism

Abstract

Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’, illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.

Introduction

I started [activism] with the animal rights movement… It was really mixed back then, Anonymous was dealing with everything, feminism and with anarchism and with environmental, and with human rights […] All this kind of group was really one struggle minded. [Ori, activist, Tel Aviv]

This is a quote from a conversation I, Esther, had with Ori, a long-standing activist in animal and human rights in Israel in 2017. We were on the terrace of an unassuming café in the more ethnically diverse south of Tel Aviv surrounded by Arabic posters in the window and young people speaking Arabic. The whole scene was unusual – to hear and see Arabic in Tel Aviv, to sit at a rickety table with mismatched chairs – in contrast with the hip vegan places more recent Israeli vegan activists often wanted to meet at. Yet it was not just the incongruity of the furniture that caught my eye, but Ori's description of the early animal rights movement in Israel as ‘everything, feminism and with anarchism and with human rights’. Her account refers here to Anonymous, an emergent and small group of Israeli activists – mostly anarchists and people involved in radical Left politics – who came together in Israel in the 1990s to campaign for animal rights under the banner of ‘one struggle’ [Hebrew: mahavak ehad]. A term also popular in Animal Studies literature (Jenkins and Stanescu, 2014; Nocella et al., 2014), ‘one struggle’ encapsulates Anonymous’ progressive platform and politics that views human and animal oppressions as interconnected.

Ori's description of Anonymous stood in stark contrast to the contemporary animal rights movement in Israel that has been criticised as a vehicle for ‘washing’ the human rights abuses of the Israeli state (see Alloun, 2020). Indeed, the vegan movement has been critiqued within and beyond Israel for its role in concealing the colonial violence waged by the Israeli state against Palestinians in Occupied Territories. Intrigued, I began the search for material from the 1990s, including zines, pamphlets and online archives that revealed a model of intersectional politics characterised by continuous critique of dominant ideologies and their connections with animal exploitation. These archives show that opposing the exploitation of animals was then seen as part of a trajectory of critical thinking and challenge to diverse expressions of oppression, exploitation and discrimination: ‘everything is connected’, a 1990 Anonymous flyer reads, a sentiment also encapsulated in the group's slogan, ‘human rights, animal rights, one struggle, one fight’.

The commitment by Anonymous to common logics and intersecting oppressions through an inclusive politics in practice speaks to ongoing questions about the significance of intersectionality, including within Critical Animal Studies. Indeed, calls to diversify animal activism reflect growing recognition that animal rights are enlisted in a range of nationalist and state projects (Gillespie and Narayanan, 2020) including cleansing the state of human rights abuses (Alloun, 2020), cementing cultural imperialism and racialised/colonial hierarchies (see, e.g. Alloun, 2018; Dalziell and Wadiwel, 2016; Deckha, 2018; Narayanan, 2019). Animal Studies scholars and activists have been at the forefront of calls to expand animal rights activism to integrate human rights through a ‘multi-optic’ approach (Kim, 2015) guided by the search for ‘mutual avowal’ between diverse human and non-human groups. Scholars argue these models could provide a pathway for relationships outside of domination, freed from racialised capitalism, colonialism and logics of accumulation (Kim, 2015: 21). However, the experience of activists negotiating the place-based politics and embodied affects of resisting colonial, capitalist, ecocidal and other regimes are too often overlooked.

Indeed the intractability of political conflict and specific identities cannot be easily set aside. Indigenous scholars have argued that Animal Studies needs to recognise the ‘entangled logics’ and incompatible standpoints and demands that characterise decolonisation and animal ethics in settler colonial contexts (Belcourt, 2020). Feminist and postcolonial scholars further emphasise the ‘stickiness’ of racialised and capitalist hierarchies that press upon activist and labouring bodies (Ahmed, 2004), while scholars of social movements highlight how political regimes mobilise these affective worlds to create complex and contested spaces for activism (Meier, 2020). The potential of an intersectional animal–human rights politics, therefore, hinges on the difficult work of contesting neoliberalism, nationalism, race and speciesism (Kim, 2015). Whether and how activists can negotiate and mobilise these conflicted place-based and embodied politics in an intersectional human and animal rights platform is not well documented or understood. Yet in the context of resurgent nationalism and mass exploitation of animals and environments, a pragmatic multi-dimensional politics is crucial to more-than-human flourishing.

To better understand the potential for animal activists to cultivate an intersectional politics foregrounding linked animal and human rights struggles, this article takes as its focus the formation and evolution of anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine. Through an ethnographic research approach of living, campaigning and working with activists on the ground, this article recovers the emergence and subsequent fragmentation of One Struggle providing new insights into the processes and forces through which diverse expressions of intersectional politics manifest and evolve. In so doing, the article intervenes in scholarly critiques and debate over intersectional oppressions, and coalition-building amongst difference. Drawing on the voices of activists, we suggest that attending to intersectionality in the context of animal activism and the questions of Animal Studies can help to illustrate how ‘actually existing intersectionality’ can be performed. Taking inspiration from geographical work that foregrounds the contingent nature of politics and justice (Williams, 2017a; Williams 2017b), we deploy the term ‘actually existing’ to denote the ways intersectional approaches are achieved in provisional ways. In defending Palestinian and animal rights, we foreground the malaise, ill-feeling and struggle that permeates Israeli intersectional activism. These tensions cannot be set aside: intersectional politics requires affective work that can be exhausting, even as moments of connection and understanding are reached. We thus offer a reconceptualisation of intersectionality centring the precarious and contingent character of shared struggle at the heart of intersectional political thought and praxis.

Intersectionality, coalition building and mutual avowal

Intersectionality is an idea that originated in the activism and scholarship of feminists of colour, including the ground-breaking work of Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term. As an analytic, intersectionality unsettles previous understandings of oppression as a ‘singular process or binary political relation’ (Carastathis, 2014: 304) and instead suggests that power relationships like racism and sexism ‘gain meaning in relation to one another’ and within specific social contexts (Collins and Bilge, 2016: 27). The concept thereby also illuminates the complexity – and sometimes contradictions – inherent in the formation of subjectivities (Mahrouse, 2014), as subjects are contoured by their specific locations at different intersections of race, gender and class, in what Patricia Hill Collins (2000) calls a ‘matrix of domination’. An intersectional approach, therefore, has far-reaching implications for anti-oppression efforts that have traditionally mobilised around single social categories and hierarchies.

Within Animal Studies, scholars draw on intersectionality as an analytic and heuristic device that investigates ‘how the material and symbolic exploitation of animals intersects with an helps maintain dominance categories of gender, race and class’ (Taylor and Twine, 2014: 4). In the postcolonial strand of Animal Studies, scholars like Deckha (2012: 531) argue for ‘centralising culture and race in feminist work on animals’, and explicitly draw on feminist intersectionality scholarship to better capture complex human–animal relations and subjectivities. Recognising a simultaneous multiplicity of social categories and oppressions nonetheless also raises questions of just how intersectional coalitions might be built in the face of difference. Incommensurable differences between groups and their interests cannot necessarily be resolved through open dialogues that recognise all claims as equivalent. As Wadiwel (2020) points out, strategies for alliances need to carefully consider ‘how the political terrain of existing contestation is constructed’ (xxi) and pay attention to the specifics of history and communities involved. The existence of such questions becomes particularly pressing in the context of human–animal relations predicated on fundamental differences in terms of life possibilities and co-existence. The tension characterising animal and human rights struggles thus provides an apposite case through which to explore the potential (and limits) of intersectional activism more broadly.

The difficulty of building coalitions amongst stakeholders has led to critiques of intersectionality within and beyond Animal Studies. For McClintock (1995) and others (Ko, 2019), the focus on ‘intersection’ reinforces and entrenches social categorisations and simple oppositions between ‘good and bad, victim and oppressor’ (Kim, 2015: 14). In this interpretation, intersectionality reinforces fixed ‘categories’ that also support superficial inclusion and ‘mindless pluralism’ (Kim, 2015) rather than remaining attuned to ‘the unevenness, messiness, complexity, fluidity, and unpredictability that actually mark the dynamics of difference production’ (18). This critique echoes assertions by feminist theorists that intersectionality is not about an additive model based on liberal ideas of ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ (see Bassel and Emejulu, 2017; Bilge, 2013; Verloo, 2013), terms that elide questions of power, domination and the material structures that underpin inequalities, difference and oppression.

These criticisms have led to alternative conceptualisations of human and animal ‘liberation’ (see notably Ko, 2019). Claire Kim (2015: 19), for example, develops the idea of ‘multi-optic vision’ as a heuristic to hold different forms of animal and human oppression in place ‘without privileging any one presumptively’, even while they collide in multi-racial, multicultural societies (see also Gillespie, 2018; Narayanan, 2019). A multi-optic vision can foster an ‘ethics of mutual avowal’, acknowledging the connection between diverse needs and justice claims that can facilitate ‘coalitional possibilities’ between animal rights, environmental, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial movements, instead of the zero-sum game produced by single-optic politics (Kim, 2015: 287). However, Kim (2015) simultaneously argues that an ‘ethics of avowal’ is the basis of a ‘reimagined “we” in resistance to the neoliberal elites waging war against racialised groups, animals, nature, and others’ (20). Defined as a ‘critical and transformational politics’ that lies ‘outside domination’ (21), mutual avowal paradoxically erases the complex identities and conflicting interests at the centre of Kim’s critique of intersectionality.

Yet, for racialised and/or colonised people, the work of cultivating alliances with dominant groups around a ‘reimagined “we”’ is no small feat. It can reactivate histories and experiences of trauma, and the violence of dispossession, enslavement and institutionalised oppression (Belcourt, 2020; Chang, 2020). The political urgency of racialised and colonial violence is not something of the past, and it is not insignificant to those who continue to experience it in visceral ways, complicating ‘an opening, recognition, turning toward' (Kim 2015: 20) other groups and agendas. At the same time, animal activists’ agendas may not be compatible with the demands of decolonisation that centre a diversity of place-based Indigenous understandings and ethics regarding animals, food and killing (Belcourt, 2020). As we explore below, for impoverished and/or displaced Palestinians with limited options and access to land, animal use may be a matter of survival and assertion of sovereignty that cannot be easily reconciled with a politics of animal rights and veganism as a baseline. Meanwhile, as one of us has explored elsewhere (Alloun 2021, 2020), the intersections between decolonising and animal rights activism developed by Palestinians on their own terms can decentre and unsettle liberal, western understandings of animal rights and multi-optic politics.

Mutual avowal, therefore, risks papering over the pressures and burdens of campaigning across incommensurable difference which adds to the challenge of carrying out activism. In the anthropology of ethics and activism, scholars like Dave (2017) show that extending reflexivity and criticism to an ever-expanding domain of ethical and political relations and responsibilities can slip into what she calls ‘the tyranny of consistency’. Dave (2017: 38) observes that once people decide to do ‘something’ to change the status quo, demands for consistency (from within and from without) tend to escalate and pressure them to do ‘everything’ in the pursuit of the ‘ethically otherwise’ (Povinelli, 2012). There is always one more cow, dog or pig, to rescue, and activists struggle to account for ‘apparent inconsistencies and contradictions’ (Dave, 2017: 37). These tyrannical demands for consistency are exhausting and ultimately impossible to fulfil (Dave, 2017), not least because as we argue below, they are deeply felt through embodied and affective registers of state power and resistance.

It is important then, that in earlier reflections on intersectional justice, Kim wonders ‘how to make the leap from explicating co-constitution on the pages of an academic journal to challenging actually existing forms of domination in the real world?’ (Kim and Freccero, 2013: 471) Invoking a boundary between ideas and the real world, Kim opens the door to political change as an uncertain event, without time or place. However, more intriguing for us is the conceptual prompt towards ‘actually existing’ geographies. Recognising that discourses cohere through everyday interactions in place, ‘actually existing’ has been used across economic and cultural geographies to foreground the contingent ways in which dominant ideas unfold through contingent processes in place (Peck et al., 2018). In her analysis of care and justice in the city, Williams (2017a) for example, argues that in order to create more progressive cities, scholars and activists need to ‘look beyond the search for the perfect theory’, taking seriously ‘small acts’ that foreground dynamic practices and ‘partial understandings… always in a process of becoming’ (Williams, 2017b: 2227). Williams (2017a: 825) conceptualises mundane practices and ‘ordinary acts’ of care as ‘actually existing justice on the ground’. In so doing, Williams remains alert to the potential for change without simultaneously glossing over entrenched power relations. Drawing on geographical deployment of ‘actually existing’ as a rejection of the modernist separation of idea(l) and reality, we similarly foreground the experiences of campaigners who through ‘ordinary acts’ advance both animal and human rights and grapple with incommensurable claims. In so doing, we aim to centre political alternatives to the fragmented and conflicted politics of human and animal struggle while also resisting the romanticised ‘we’ of an idealised politics of radical transformation.

Affective geographies of political activism: Israel/Palestine

We draw on the experiences of activists in relation to human and animal rights activism in Israel/Palestine to better understand how complex affective logics and place-based conflict shape the conditions of activism based on human and animal differences and oppressions. Israel/Palestine provides an apposite case to examine these themes. Over three decades, Israel has centred animal welfare in legislation, instantiating policies such as bans on wild-animal circuses (1995), national foie gras production (2003), animal testing for cosmetics and cleaning products (2007), the sale of fur (since 2009) and the import of live sheep and cattle from Australia. In the 2010s, veganism became a ubiquitous national phenomenon in Israel, adding another element to the story of Israel as an ‘animal-friendly’ nation. In comparison to Western Europe, survey results from 2015 suggested that 5% of Israelis identified as vegan (numbers across Europe averaged from 1% to 2% at the time, Reuters, 2015), prompting praise and admiration from animal activists abroad. The rapid mainstreaming of veganism also triggered an avalanche of headlines calling Tel Aviv ‘the vegan capital of the world’ (Phull, 2017) hosting the ‘world's biggest vegan festival’ (Sales, 2014) and ‘largest animal rights demonstration in history’ with a crowd of 10,000 participants and international speakers (Leichman, 2017).

Crucially, this rising public support for animal rights and veganism in Israel has occurred at a time of escalating settler colonial tensions, aggression and violence against Palestinians. In the post-Oslo Accords era and since the early 2000s, the Israeli political spectrum has continuously shifted to the Right, with Jewish Israelis embracing hard-line nationalism and political conservatism, and even more so since the first war on the Palestinian Gaza Strip in 2008 (Pappé, 2015). At the time when these triumphalist headlines about the ‘first vegan nation’ began appearing, the 2014 Israeli military assault on Gaza had just concluded, killing close to 1500 Palestinians and 10 Israelis (see B’Tselem n.d.). Violent unrest started erupting in Jerusalem shortly after, continuing well into 2015 (a period referred to as the Jerusalem Intifada) and tensions have been building since then. For example, between 2016 and 2020, escalation reached extraordinary levels even for the region with mass Palestinian protests at the Gaza Strip border (a movement known as the Great March of Return) and the repression by the Israeli military. At the peak of those protests in May 2018, the United States moved its Embassy to Jerusalem and the Israeli army killed 60 protesting Palestinians on the bloodiest day of the Gaza border protest. ¹ In Tel Aviv on the same day, the homecoming concert of the nation's Eurovision song contest winner drew crowds in celebration with thousands of ecstatic fans draped in Israeli national blue and white flags dancing and chanting.

The juxtaposition of Israelis supporting violence and occupation of Palestine and their growing enthusiasm for veganism through an ethics of animal rights epitomises the double standard that has motivated calls for intersectional approaches. Critics characterised the Israeli animal rights and vegan movement as an instrument of veganwashing aimed at glossing over Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Critics and progressive activists abroad therefore called on Jewish Israelis to recognise the injustice of occupation and ally with oppressed Palestinians in what many call ‘intersectionality’ or ‘intersectional alliances’ (Hendricks, 2018; Macleod, 2019; Tanenbaum, 2017). Within the context of the veganwashing critique, intersectionality implies Jewish Israelis taking on and supporting the Palestinian struggle and Palestinian rights. As noted by other scholars of Israeli activism, the Israeli context incentivises a single-optic approach in progressive struggles that leaves Israeli-Palestinian relations and the ‘conflict’ unchallenged (see, e.g. Ritchie, 2010) partly because of the ‘chilling effect of nationalism’ (Gordon, 2012). The case of the animal rights movement in Israel/Palestine, therefore, offers a unique insight into the contested, conflicted political setting in which activists operate and must negotiate. Whether and how activists negotiate such dissonance, to what ends, and with what costs has critical implications for the feasibility/potential of realising ideals of mutual avowal and justice across difference.

To recognise the complex and politically fraught dynamics of intersectional struggles is to acknowledge that questions of priorities, power, politics and historical legacies of conflict and trauma, do not easily go away. But research across the social and political sciences rarely grasps the actual embodied experiences of activists negotiating these issues, nor does it seek to understand the affective forces of the state in activists’ everyday lives. We therefore draw on political geographical research to show how affect and activism operates in embodied encounters in complex and contradictory ways. Scholars of social movements have increasingly emphasised the affective and embodied practices of challenging logics of domination and destruction (Verlie, 2021) and ‘becoming activist’ (Meier, 2018). The state wields power through affective technologies to punish and control dissident bodies, time and space through logics of ‘endless discomfort and depletion’ (Meier, 2020: 100702) and the emotional and mental work needed to negotiate and survive nationalist violence. Echoing scholarship on ‘affective nationalism’ (Antonsich et al., 2020) state power operates and endures through ‘affective, emotional and atmospheric resonances’ (Stephens, 2016: 181). This work builds on feminist theorising of affect (Ahmed, 2017), which reveals the ‘materiality of power’ that becomes ‘concrete’ (217) through the repetition of violent encounters with institutions and norms. Transformational politics and activism cannot therefore solely be read from intimations of ‘oppression’, ‘privilege’ and other ‘isms’, hence why, we would argue, ethnographic approaches, attuned to affect, atmospheres, places and bodies are essential.

We also came to this view as the realities of ethnographic fieldwork (introduced next) challenged us to go beyond presumptions of binary social categories, or simple equations of activism and resistance. Indeed, in the development of relationships through shared practices with activists on the ground, multidimensional experiences and ‘relations not yet normative’ (Dave, 2011: 15) came into view. These open-ended interactions with Israelis and Palestinians with very diverse political positionings, are often smoothed over in the tidy narrative of formal interviews, promotional materials or public facing campaigns, yet they became central in understanding the negotiations and implications of different intersectional analyses and political praxis. Meanwhile, the embodied and ‘affective economy’ (to use Ahmed's, 2004 expression) of politics as people negotiate state and colonial power and violence in Israel/Palestine became an increasingly salient aspect of the project. Not only because these considerations were commonly expressed, and sometimes narrated, by participants in terms of their embodied and visceral responses. But also because they were experienced firsthand by Esther who collected the data and whose North African features, gender and Jewish identity, elicited different questions, gestures and modes of surveillance in Israel and Palestine. Mobilising the lens of affect and embodiment then, we turned to feminist phenomenology (Ahmed, 2007; Young, 2005) to draw out how colonial and nationalist power do things, how they work ‘as a way of orienting bodies in particular ways’ (Ahmed, 2017: 43), creating tension, fatigue and malaise, physical and affective exhaustion as detailed in the ethnographic material presented below.

Methods

Fieldwork was carried out in 2017 and 2018 primarily in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Beersheba and the West Bank. Methods involved observation, fieldnotes, interviews and participation with a range of animal activists and groups in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian West Bank (Figure 1). This included shared practices of campaigning, living, working and talking together that were essential in apprehending the complex processes and power relations that shape different forms of animal and human rights alliances in place. Consent was obtained for interviews and pseudonyms used to maintain confidentiality (except when explicitly requested otherwise) along with a careful removal of identifying features and elements. In parallel to fieldwork, activist material and animal rights literature was collected, ranging from social media posts and media articles to activists’ personal archives of zines and pamphlets.

Figure 1.

Map of Israel and Palestine (United Nations, 2004).

Data from the wider project has been analysed elsewhere (Alloun, 2018, 2020, 2021). Here, we highlight the voices of 12 activists, amongst 68 participants, who illustrate the intersectional politics of the early animal rights movement in Israel in the 1990s. Because this history predates digital activism and communication, fieldwork and interviews were instrumental in uncovering this era of intersectional experimentation. Given that the contemporary movement has been critiqued within and beyond Israel for its role in concealing the human rights abuses waged by the Israeli state, activists’ narrative of a more complex, intersectional movement emerged as a key line of analysis. In particular, the question of how this working model of intersectional human–animal rights was operationalised, and its fortunes with respect to a narrower, depoliticised and consumerist approach provided critical insights into the challenges and opportunities of ‘actually existing intersectionality’.

The place-based politics of intersectionality: From ‘radical environment’ to resurgent nationalism

The 1990s and early 2000s in Israel provided a climate of optimism and countercultural ground particularly fertile for political experimentation and radical (animal and other) politics. The recollections of Israeli activists belonging to the radical Left circles who initiated early animal activism via the group ‘Anonymous’ provides a window into that era. The atmosphere and intersectional origins of the movement were captured by Lior, a vegan anarchist who shared his political coming-of-age at Anonymous in the 1990s, a place ‘packed with zines […] banners and dirty sofas’. He described these early days in animal rights as ‘the most radical environment’ he had been part of – a surprise, considering he is well-known for his lifelong commitment to Palestinian rights and had been ‘literally shot at’ and jailed multiple times. This atmosphere of radical experimentation and possibility at Anonymous was echoed by other members I tracked down in different parts of Israel and was enacted through prefigurative politics of refusal and direct action. Ori, Lior and other members I met (like Alon introduced later) refused mandatory drafting in the Israeli army and boycotted army uniforms in meeting spaces, since as Lior explained, colonisation, nationalism and militarism is ‘on the same continuum’ with meat-eating culture. Lior continued: ‘we did written material…we had a weekly picket in front of the local McDonald's and some anti-vivisection stuff’, actions that, combined with sabotaging fur shops and organising street carnivals to protest global finance, aimed to highlight the nexus of animal and capitalist exploitation (as also recounted on the anarchist web platform ‘Crimethinc’ and zines, see Crimethinc, 2013; Do or Die 1998, 1999; Massey, 2002).

These examples in the early days of Anonymous speak to a multi-optic political practice that centres both animal rights and the fight for Palestinian justice. Throughout the 1990s Palestinian rights were incorporated into political actions that according to David, a self-described ‘retired anarchist’, included public protests and sit-ins to highlight the Israeli state's land-grabbing and the Palestinian struggle against elimination and erasure (see also Do or Die 1999). The problem of animal rights, therefore, continued to be examined in relation to human rights, as shown in the decision by activists to boycott vegan products like dates, fruits and vegetables from the Occupied Jordan Valley because they were grown by Israeli settlers and/or dispossessed Palestinian farmers. As David elaborated, in the early days of the movement, ‘being vegan’ and activist meant ‘checking the ingredients of everything, and the ingredients of everything is also the ingredients of the political situation that you live in’ including the ‘strong ideology’ that is Zionism. There is sense in these accounts of intersectionality as continuous critique that is embedded in place and politics, as issues of human rights are never set aside or resolved but continue to present themselves for politicisation in tandem with the question of animal rights within the specific parameters of the Israel/Palestine question.

At the same time, these ‘radically inclusive politics’ (Wolch and Emel, 1998: 88) remained sensitive to national political shifts, that with increasing tensions between Israel and Palestine in the late 1990s, created a complex context for multi-optic practices. In Israel, the optimism of Oslo made room for disappointment as the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist ² (1995) and it became apparent that there was no real peace in the Oslo process. The increasing fear and suspicion were captured by Alon – another member of the old guard met in Tel Aviv – who described somewhat bitterly, in their disappointment, many Israeli leftists believed the new Israeli PM from the Labour Party, Ehud Barak, when he famously concluded, ‘there is no partner for peace’. This context of resurgent nationalism and increased settler colonial violence that culminated with the start of the Second Intifada (2000) therefore gave new inflections to the meaning and practice of intersectional activism.

This worsening political climate played a significant role in the snowballing of tensions around competing priorities and inclusion of non-(directly) animal causes in Anonymous. These issues crystallised with the influx of new activists in Anonymous who were often left-leaning but Zionist and less likely to include Palestinian human rights within an expanded activist agenda. Disagreements, regarding tactics and priorities stalled activities at Anonymous. Ori summed up some of the debate as:

…the idea that if you ask people to do all of that, we will stay 100 people or 50 people, and most of the people cannot relate to it [the one struggle agenda], and if you want to change the animal thing, we need to be more mainstream.

In this context, the question of connection to other struggles was a sticking point, and as another anarchist put it, ‘the main divider of the animal rights movement’ (interview with Micah). While anarchist activists in the group felt that resistance to Israeli militarist nationalism was particularly required at that time, the climate of the Second Palestinian Intifada likely fuelled Left-Zionist animal activists’ resolve to prioritise animals, and further, to decouple animal activism from solidarity with Palestinians and politics of anti-occupation. As such, the year 2000 became a ‘year of really hard fights’ at Anonymous, especially about the ‘connections to the occupation and other subjects’, Ori explained. As a result, anarchists left and created another group whose name unequivocally captures its agenda: One Struggle Anarchist Group for Animal Rights (thereafter ‘One Struggle’) [Hebrew: Mahavak Ehad HaKvutsa HaAnarchistit Lizhuyot Ba’alei Haim]. While One Struggle continued an anarchist multi-optic approach seeking out connections across diverse platforms (including alliances with the newly formed queer group, Black Laundry), it remained small. As such, the politics of place, in this case a resurgent Zionism, actively contoured and shaped the potential for intersectional political praxis and a multi-optic vision. From this point, animal activism started travelling along two distinct paths, the intersectional politics taken up by One Struggle, and the increasingly single-optic perspective of Anonymous which slowly grew into the single-optic professional NGO it is today.

The affective work of intersectionality: Being a killjoy and resisting complicity

The split in the Israeli movement points to the ways that nationalism and settler-colonial violence infiltrates the relationships and spaces that underpin intersectional human and animal rights political activism. Activists must continue to manage the ways in which context and place affect their subjectivity and practices of shared struggles. Crucially, this includes maintaining non-complicit subject positions with regards to the Israeli state and being willing to go against the prevailing social order. However, and as Ahmed (2010) argues, navigating complicity and going against the ‘happiness order’ involves tremendous embodied and affective work.

Indeed, the aims of One Struggle (2000; 2003) to highlight the ‘connections between all different forms of oppression, and hence also the various struggles against them’ as ‘one rich tapestry’ (Figure 2) were at odds with the emerging single-optic focus of the Israeli vegan movement. For One Struggle (2000, n.d.), resistance should be ‘sweeping and total’, with a special emphasis on the exploitation of animals (‘the worst kind to ever take place, in terms of both nature and scale’) and the fight against Israeli ‘nationalistic, militaristic’ social order (Figure 3). This work, Ori described, involved ‘annoying’ people:

Figure 2.

Me, my political family and other animals [Hebrew], pamphlet (One Struggle, 2003). The pamphlet describes the ‘unification of struggles from diverse areas [of the left] into one rich tapestry’ that would also include animal rights.

Figure 3.

Right, Left, turn back! Militarism, Zionism and the peace camp [Hebrew], pamphlet (One Struggle, n.d.). The pamphlet virulently critiques Israeli nationalism and militarism and the Zionist Left's complicity with a ‘military democracy with second class citizens’.

The idea was to be annoying… The idea was to go to animal rights groups and to make them more political, and to go to politics group, like we were going once a week, twice a week, to the West Bank with the Left organisations, and on the way in the bus we give them leaflets about the connections between feminism, anarchism, and animal rights, and everybody was hating us, on all sides. So, it was really cool, I loved it. The idea was to do the links all the time, to go to each place and try to do the links between the different struggles.

However, given that practising inclusive politics meant being ‘annoying’, their initiatives were not always well-received. This had the effect of turning the person doing the naming into a problem, as Ahmed (2010) remarks in relation to feminist ‘killjoys’ who denounce patriarchy and misogyny and the happiness order they create. This explains Ori's sentiment that activists on ‘all sides’ hated the vegan-anarchist killjoys of One Struggle. Here, maintaining intersectionality against the odds involves being a killjoy in relation to like-minded, but single-optic, allies and as such, it comes at a cost. As Ori puts it: ‘at some point there was a lot of criticism against us, that we were very mitsnasse [Hebrew: arrogant] […] in human rights group I was just like vegan-Nazi, and in animal rights group I was just [a] feminist anarchist’. People thought One Struggle killjoys were ‘extreme’ (a qualifier that was repeated across the interviews) for imagining radically different forms of life based on the ideals of ‘liberation, justice and equality’ described in their manifesto (One Struggle, 2000). While activists acknowledged this refusal was ‘difficult’, they also insisted ‘an easy life is an easy lie’ (One Struggle, 2000).

As Ahmed (2010) notes, ‘even if unhappiness is not your cause’, going against a social and moral order (Zionism in this case) is ‘to be willing to cause unhappiness’ and this is often the work of political activism. As such, killjoys are also literally ‘out of line with an affective community’ and become ‘affect aliens’ (Ahmed, 2010), people who are thought to be extreme (‘vegan-Nazi’) or mad. A multi-optic vision, therefore, generates a complex and richly patterned ethical landscape, encompassing the ethics of the killjoy as much as mutual avowal. The work of negotiating complicity and distancing strains the desire for ethico-political consistency in the coalitional politics of Israeli anarchists, and it generates more (affective and other) work for activists too, as alignment with Palestinians deepens and, the practice of intersectional politics becomes a matter of living with fear and exhaustion.

Taking intersectional politics to the West Bank: Affective atmospheres of fear, violence and exhaustion

In an attempt to build anti-colonial coalitions against Israeli violence, vegan anarchists made increasingly frequent trips to the West Bank. This decision followed the Israeli state's repression of the Second Intifada, that in 2002, reached new levels with Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank (the largest military operation since the 1967 war) and that year also marked the beginning of the construction of the Separation Wall. Enacting an intersectional agenda amid militarised border violence illuminates the visceral, exhaustive work required to sustain a multi-optic politics in the occupied spaces of settler colonialism, and against the affective forces of the settler state. The affective labour of being a ‘killjoy’ then is overlaid with fear, violence and exhaustion when One Struggle joined grassroots Palestinian civilian resistance efforts headed by local popular committees, and working in collaboration with Ta’ayush [English: Living Together], the main organ for Palestinian-led co-resistance at the time.

While intersectional politics presents very difficult choices that are not unique to Israel/Palestine activism, they manifest in particular ways in this intense conflict zone. Here, supporting an anti-colonial agenda during the Intifada meant physically and emotionally confronting Israeli violence in Occupied Territories. As such, the practice of intersectional politics illustrated in Ori's account is also about experiencing intense fear:

We started to go more and more to the West Bank and it became very extreme, and we were really shocked because there is different stuff than just [going to a] protest, and to see what is going on over there, it became very like, I don’t know. It's the same [with] like veganism, like it kind of changes your perspective in some ways when you go to the West Bank and start protesting over there because, even though I was very radical Left before, and I didn’t go to the army, I refused yes. Even though I thought that soldiers are terrorists, when I saw that, it was mind blowing for me because you experience it, it's different. I remember the first protest when they shot at us, like it's the first time I’m afraid of soldiers, really afraid, it's not like, it's not in my mind…[…].So there was the first time, and I was like, ah okay I can see it from the Palestinian perspective, not completely because I’m still Jewish and privileged, but I can feel the fear, and I can see how it feels to be on the other side so…

Ori's account aligns the understanding of Palestinian struggle, and thus, the cultivation of a multi-optic vision, with an embodied politics of fear: ‘I can feel the fear’… ‘it's not in my mind’. The violence of the encounter with Israeli soldiers becomes a violence Ori encounters in a real, material and corporeal way because her Jewish identity is not enough to shield her from it (cf. Amir and Kotef, 2015). It is through her embodied capacity to be affected that Ori develops a more deeply Palestinian alignment and perspective. This deep solidarity is not in her mind (or indeed, following Kim, on ‘the page’), yet it is not ‘safe’ either: it carries risk, uncertainty and threat.

That encounter with state violence shook Ori and yet, despite the threats and fear, One Struggle activists kept going to the West Bank to support the Palestinian Intifada. They were even invited by Palestinian residents in 2003 to set up a resistance camp in their village where they lived continuously for 4 months, protesting the state's attempt to annex part of the village's land and sabotaging sections of the Separation Wall in construction. ³ In retrospect, Ori had good cause to be afraid of Israeli soldiers: another group member, Gil Na’amati, was shot and almost died at one such protest against the Wall in December 2003 (Gordon and Grietzer, 2013). The name the group of protesters had picked for that day's action, Anarchist Against the Wall (AATW), stuck. As Ori pointed out, ‘it's the same people! We just move[d] during the years’, responding to my initial surprise that AATW had originated out of One Struggle. That AATW was the product of an animal rights organisation attests to the extent to which animal activism in Israel in the 1990s was immersed in multi-optic politics. ⁴ However, at this juncture, it becomes apparent that nationalist power becomes a ‘tangible thing’, a ‘feeling pressed into things, by things’ (to cite Ahmed, 2017: 50), where the practice of intersectional politics is a practice of also enduring fear.

Indeed, for Ori, continuing to operate with fear was ‘not sustainable in a lot of ways’, because of the nature of the activist work and the place where it occurs. As she put it: ‘it's really really exhausting and frightening […] there was a lot of fights because of the extreme situation’. Her account not only reveals how animal rights anti-colonial politics involves experiencing, processing and working with fear, stress and ‘burn out’ but how these affects coalesce into a ‘situation’ or as Anderson (2009) puts it an ‘affective atmosphere’ that continually calls for commitment in terms of time, and material and emotional resources. Yet even outside spaces of violent protest and routine physical confrontation, intersectional politics can have a dampening affect. Ilana – an Israeli vegan woman involved in anti-occupation activism since the late 2000s – spoke about the difficult choices of her solidarity work with Palestinian farmers in terms that evoked emotional work unfolding through particular encounters and embodied relationships. Contrary to the ideals of mutual avowal, her account refers to such alliances in the language of impossibility – echoing Dave's (2017) tyranny of consistency. In this case, she reflects on the tension of supporting Palestinian farmers who did not recognise animal rights:

As almost impossible as it is, because you see the animal misery, it's right there in front of you, I think we can start to have conversations… […] because we are really there for them, and again these are people I love, I would never start this sort of conversations with stranger farmers

[…] And also the relationship of the farmers that they have with the animals. I think it's easy for us to look at them as people who butcher their animals for meat, you know? It's not that simple. I saw them celebrate when the sheep had babies, and it's true that these babies may be eaten or they may die of old age, it depends […] I think for me, as someone who literally, every other week, I’m in your home, we are really friends, we talk about everything, our personal lives, and it brings so much pain every time my friend's older son gets arrested, every time, for all these things…. On the other hand I love animals and they know it […] It would be a lie to say that… like, I’m not there being noble, I’m there being bothered […] So it's all these things going on…It's exhausting.

Ilana's account draws attention to the impossible contradictions that characterise intersectional political action. The pressure is affective and embodied: settler-colonial projects are woven into the ‘situation’ and embedded in place, captured in this case by Ori's expression of ‘Isra-hell’ denoting an affective, material, ethical and political atmosphere (cf. Anderson, 2009). As queer vegan-anarchist Gal pointed out when we spoke one evening in Tel Aviv:

there is something specifically terrible about living here that makes you think about all the possible axes and workings of oppression, does that make sense? I do think it has a lot to do with the circumstances of living here, where there are so many levels of horror involved in living here that your analysis has to be complex in order to make sense of it.

These accounts highlight the ways affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion grind down and restrict the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. Indeed, a multi-optic activism requires resistance against the settler-colonial state and identification with the fear of oppressed people; along with the malaise of negotiating contradictory agendas with uncertain allies. Pursuing one struggle comes with emotional and embodied costs that are overlooked in Kim's (2015) conceptualisation of mutual avowal. Maintaining a multi-optic vision is predicated on the work of being worn down, feeling fear and experiencing the malaise (negative/repressed feelings) of continuously negotiating contradictions.

Compromising and rebuilding through selective alliances: Actually existing intersectionality

The rise and fall of activist groups is a familiar story, one that is often couched as resistance and its eventual demise, and it would be easy to read the eventual dissolution of One Struggle around 2003 as a failure of intersectionality (cf. Cook, 2018). In fact, this is how the majority of Israeli participants – Jewish activists in the contemporary animal rights movement – in our larger project spoke of it. Our ethnographic material called for a different interpretation however, and a reconceptualisation of intersectional animal activism and its impacts. Rather than aiming for the revolutionary politics of grand manifesto, activists continued to pursue opportunities for intersectional activism that exist alongside and within single-issue movements. These temporary coalitions do not manifest in an easy way that conforms to clear ideals but they carry a form of situated persistence that resonates with the ‘small acts’ of ‘actually existing justice’ observed by Willians (2017a; 2017b), yet oriented towards an intersectional politics.

While some activists in One Struggle refused all compromises and gave up entirely on human rights activism, the majority of vegan anarchists focused most of their energy and time on Palestinian solidarity and anti-occupation via AATW (and some also via the queer group Black Laundry) while animal activism took a backstep. Yet, the death of One Struggle does not mark the end of vegan-anarchists’ experimentation with intersectional politics in the 2000s. In parallel, around the end of the Intifada, former One Struggle members opened an anarchist info shop and café in Tel Aviv, ‘Salon Mazal’, where vegan anarchism formed the ideological baseline and monthly events on feminism, ecology, animal rights and militarism were organised. Salon Mazal was located in the same neighbourhood as Anonymous and over time, activists began working together from time to time. As Ori explained, Anonymous did ‘more mainstream’, ‘single issue animal rights’ work like lobbying, while Salon Mazal retained an anarchist multi-optic perspective, and a grassroots approach with ‘more imagination’.

Elsewhere on the Israeli side of the Green Line, we heard that veganism and animal rights within progressive coalitions appeared through different forms in the 2000s, embedding and embodying an anti-oppression ethics inclusive of animals (the essence of an intersectional agenda in this context). For instance, Ori and Meirav spoke of organising feminist and anti-militarist youth camps that supported young Israelis refusing to serve: the camps catered vegan food and included discussions of animal rights. In the anarchist anti-militarist queer politics of the Pink Black Bloc formed in 2006 to protest the second Lebanon war, Gal also explained that the food was vegan and animal rights was an integral part of their agenda; in Jerusalem as well, the queer and anti-occupation activist milieu of the 2000s was seeped in a culture of ‘vegan food and stickers’ (interview with Meirav).

In a fragile compromise, the ethics of animal rights therefore continued to manifest in the interstices of anti-colonial activism, as expressions of actually existing intersectionality. They materialised in ordinary, small and everyday actions that move beyond typical spaces of public protests and visible confrontations, and as such, they are also easier to dismiss or make invisible as substandard (Alloun, 2021). Emerging in actions that are ephemeral, variegated and under the radar, these practices have more modest goals and fall quite far from the high ideals of one struggle or the ‘reimagined “we”’ beyond domination (Kim, 2015: 21) of Critical Animal Studies manifestos. Yet even at the height of Palestinian co-resistance, these actually existing intersectionalities were manifest for instance, in conversations between Israelis and Palestinian farmers, in talking with Palestinian children about being kind to stray animals, or in the mundane practices of sharing vegan food in Palestinian villages post-protests. Intersectional activism here is made of small, fleeting and constrained practices that also depend on ongoing negotiations. Finding ways to keep going and creating new possibilities for intersectional politics lies in a process of negotiation; if you accept that you cannot agree or align on everything with your allies (whether they are Palestinians, or fellow Israeli animal activists), you can start to rebuild selective alliances on particular issues. The parameters of those negotiations, what is lost and what is gained, are not predetermined: they are elusive, there is ‘no answer’ or easy ‘solution’, activists shared time and again.

Conclusion

Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. Alternative approaches call for a multi-optic vision attuned to the complexity and contradictory nature of identity categories, as well as a commitment not to privilege one set of justice claims over another (Kim, 2015). Our ethnography foregrounded the experiences of activists in Israel/Palestine negotiating the affects of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggle. These stakes were further intensified as activists negotiated the affects of straining and dissatisfaction that cohered around impossible compromises and conflicting political positions of potential allies (e.g., conceding loss of animal life to support Palestinian struggle for sovereignty). The interplay of material, ethical and political tensions in place reveals the stifling affective atmospheres that envelope, permeate and radiate (cf. Anderson, 2009) the political practices of building coalition across difference. For Israeli activists, holding multiple justice claims and struggle in place is not only about grappling with being ‘stuck’ (cf. Ahmed, 2004), and pushing against the Israeli state. It is also becoming an affective alien and killjoy to other Israeli animal rights activists. This atmosphere was captured by participants as ‘Isra-hell'.

We argue that the expectation that a multi-optic vision gives rise to an ethic of mutual avowal (Kim, 2015) therefore overlooks a wider set of ethical outcomes, including the ethics of the killjoy and the ‘small acts' of actually existing intersectionality. Our critique of an ethics of mutual avowal is not that it fails to recognise complex and contradictory identities, rather, that it fails to acknowledge the exhaustive, isolating and difficult work of coalition building in the face of both state power and incommensurable differences. While there is always a risk that models of intersectionality reify and solidify identity categories, we contend that mutual avowal overlooks and wishes away place-based politics, state power and the embodied affects of holding contradictory agendas with the same regard.

Staying with activism in Israel/Palestine as it moves through impossibilities, contradictions, walls, fear and violence, does not however, preclude coalition building. But it does require conceptual tools that move beyond a modernist separation between ideas and the ‘real world’. Taking our steer from ‘actually existing’ geographies that foreground interactions in everyday life as generative of political and social transformation, our ethnographic research with activists reveals multiple practices and commitments to coalition building that have been under-acknowledged in the search ‘for perfect theory’ (Williams, 2017b: 2227). These ‘small acts’ fall short of the structurally transformative goals of mutual avowal, yet in facilitating understanding and coalition in the face of significant struggle and state power constitute actually existing intersectionality.

For some Israeli activists, it means being selective about priorities and agendas and being pragmatic and strategic. Indeed, despite their differences, Ilana worked with Palestinian farmers to defend their land and rights, while other One Struggle members allied with single-issue activists to campaign against the mass abuse and exploitation of animals in Israel. Priorities and commitments keep evolving and shifting based on changing political context and activist dynamics and relationships. Actually existing intersectionality is therefore characterised by modest alliances and goals that are realised through contingent, diverse actions. While the lived experience of alliance building in One Struggle falls short of the high ideals of their manifesto, it produces moments of shared understanding and common ground as with sharing vegan food with Palestinians resisting in the West Bank or debating animal rights with young Israelis opposing state military drafting and war. However, they do not offer a simple win-win but involve trade-offs between diverse interests and agendas with exclusion and costs either way (Alloun, 2021). Our research shows the pathway is not one of purity nor consensus, but of the processual, ongoing negotiation of priorities and conflict that does not get resolved. If this points to the importance of place-based and affective logics in understanding the potential for intersectional activism, it also reveals the instrumental role of ethnographies of activism in excavating the work and labour of diverse participants in the messy, fleeting, and layered negotiations of coalition across difference.

Highlights

• The potential for shared struggles between animal and human rights activism is not well understood – current models are abstract and idealised and require interrogation and reframing.

• Drawing on a case study from Israel/Palestine, we argue that ethnographies of activism can reveal the negotiation of intersectional agendas in place.

• This case demonstrates that the discomfort, alienation and exhaustion of nationalism, entrenched conflict and the settler state, shape the conditions of intersectional activism.

• The concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’ denotes the processual and precarious nature of alliance-building across difference. The politics of intersectionality are worked through modest goals, contingent and diverse actions, impossible contradictions and compromises and trade-offs with material and embodied costs.