21st of January 2025, 16–18, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24A, 3rd floor. Drinks and snacks will be served after the lecture – please sign up here for catering by 20.1.2025!
Zoometrics: Dogs in Palestine-Israel
Only with dogs before us and beside us can we understand the making or unmaking of the idea of persons.
---Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog, 209
Images of Israeli soldiers saving dogs buried in the rubble circulated widely in the media during the earlier rounds of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. In her HSSH keynote lecture, Irus Braverman will argue that although they may seem tangential to the spectacular violence in Gaza, such acts of empathy on the part of Israeli soldiers toward dogs in Gaza (and elsewhere) in fact provide an important lens through which to understand the racial and colonial power dynamics in the region. According to Braverman, such acts are deeply connected with statements by Israeli officials that describe Gazans as hayot-adam, which translates into “animal-humans” and is used colloquially in Hebrew to refer to beasts or savages. How might animal survival, on the one hand, and animal death, on the other hand, help us reveal the shifting meaning of humanness and humaneness amidst the ongoing violence in the region? Offering the term “zoometrics” to identify the hierarchies that extend value to life and death by ordering different entities as either “more human” or “more animal,” Braverman will identify both the humanizing and the dehumanizing roles that nonhuman animals—and especially dogs—have been performing in Palestine-Israel, and especially in Gaza. Most acutely, Braverman will show how the conceptual violence of dehumanization often precedes, and precisely predicts, the enactment of physical violence in this place.
Irus Braverman is professor of law, adjunct professor of geography, and research professor of environment and sustainability at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her books include Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (2012), Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018) and Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (2023).