On Gaza, Dogs, and Humans
On Barak and Irus Braverman
Translated by: Orit Schwartz
We typically understand violence and war through anthropocentric lenses, and this is also the case when trying to comprehend the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. Many rely on categories like ‘crimes against humanity’ and related concepts—genocide, domicide (the destruction of housing and living environments), and scholasticide (the destruction of educational infrastructure)—to make sense of what is currently happening in Gaza. While this human-centered perspective is important, it remains inadequate because it obscures a crucial reality: humans exist within a complex ecological system that encompasses various other living beings as well as other environmental factors. This entire ecology is now under severe assault, with consequences that will reverberate throughout the region for decades. The power dynamics within this ecological web of life and infrastructure have created the conditions for today’s tragedy. As an alternative way for understanding this tragedy, which proves difficult to grasp and articulate directly, we propose observing Gaza through what is happening to its nonhuman animals and, specifically, to Gaza’s dogs.
Human identity has developed through interactions with other creatures. The partnership of humans with companion species in particular has shaped domestic human spaces as well as territorial boundaries in both urban and rural areas. We cannot fully understand the social organization of humans, or human patterns of violence and compassion, without considering the nonhuman creatures who accompany us. Our extended research project “Dogs and Domicide: Lessons from Gaza’s Frontlines of Ruination” demonstrates that acts of domicide extend far beyond destroying built environments and, importantly, that they undermine the very foundations of the “home” in ways that ruined walls or broken plumbing cannot convey. Domicidal attacks eliminate the home as the site of what makes us human, an identity that is shaped in significant parts by the companion species, and especially dogs and cats, who have become integral to it.
The relationship between dogs and humans had begun long before what we typically mark as the beginning of human history—the Agricultural Revolution and the “domestication of wheat,” when hunter-gatherer groups transitioned to settled farming and were themselves effectively domesticated. Anthropological, archaeological, and genetic studies reveal that domesticating wolves and transforming them into dogs didn’t happen by simply incorporating these animals into existing social structures. Instead, spaces like the home emerged through a collaborative process involving both humans and nonhumans. Through this process, humans have learned from their dogs about territory, family, and interdependence, just as much as dogs learned about the same things from their humans. From our ancient ancestors’ campfires to the present day, these relationships have continued to evolve, with dogs remaining integral to urban life throughout multiple regions, including the Middle East.
In the modern era, waves of migration from rural to urban areas dramatically altered animal temperaments. Once welcomed by city dwellers, nonhuman animals such as dogs soon became unwelcome. The earlier appreciation for dogs in the Middle East is evident in the water troughs built into exterior walls of many mosques in cities like Cairo, Istanbul, and Damascus. This appreciation reflected not only affection but also gratitude—street dogs helped clear garbage from the street and guarded neighborhoods against strangers. However, as urbanization intensified and growing populations flowed into cities, conflicts over territory and food scraps emerged. Dogs became more aggressive and noisier, prompting calls for their elimination. Campaigns to drown and poison dogs in cities across the Ottoman Empire were part of a broader assault on marginal populations on city streets, including on human beggars, orphans, criminals, and the unemployed.
Dog extermination was also standard practice during the British Mandate in Palestine, where the 1934 Rabies Ordinance provided both pretext and legal justification for subsequent mass killing campaigns. The newly established State of Israel adopted this ordinance and has been continued the eradication efforts. By the mid-twentieth century, a sharp divide emerged between house dogs—celebrated as beloved pets and as “man’s best friend”—and unowned dogs, perceived as strays, as feral, and as environmental threats and therefore targeted for elimination.
Against this historical backdrop, how can we understand the role of dogs in Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza since October 2023? Following the security fence’s collapse during the Hamas attack of October 7, and as Israel’s bombardments from air, sea, and land have intensified, devastating Gaza City and the surrounding areas, dogs from the Gaza Strip have begun crossing the border into Israel. Specifically, large packs of free-roaming dogs, numbering in the hundreds and possibly in the thousands, started appearing in the areas bordering Gaza. Their presence sparked debates among decision-makers and in the media, once again positioning dogs along the familiar axis between domestication and feralization and between adoption and extermination. Often, participants in these debates will express compassion toward Gaza’s dogs and call for their rescue. Immediately after Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, appeals to adopt these dogs circulated on Israeli social networks. Configured as humanitarian acts, these attempts at rescue simultaneously offer glimpses into the dehumanization of Gaza’s people and the deep disregard for the human families and webs of life from which many of these animals were torn. At other times, Israeli social network discussions have focused on allocating resources to exterminate dogs from Gaza who have entered into Israeli territories, despite the warnings by veterinarians that killing them would increase, rather than reduce, the number of free-roaming dogs.
The calls to exterminate border-crossing dogs are arguably enmeshed with actions that target Gaza’s human residents, demonstrating the enduring connection between eradicating so called feral (or feralized) animals and harming vulnerable human populations. In battered Gaza, packs of dogs have been roaming freely, revealing additional dimensions of the ongoing crisis, whereby hungry humans have been forced to rely on animal food, resulting in severe health risks as well as deep humiliation (“We’ve become dogs and cats,” a Gaza City resident told a BBC correspondent). This has, in turn, reduced the amount of food available to animals in Gaza, forcing dogs to seek alternative food sources, sometimes across the border in Israel. The destruction of built environments and domestic spaces that once made them into part of the Palestinian family as companion species has driven many dogs out of their homes and onto the streets, changing the broader dynamics regarding human-dog interactions in the Gaza Strip.
As part of these changes, Gaza’s visual landscape of ruination has become a space of radically altered acoustics and smells. These are experienced acutely by the sharp senses of dogs and influence their behavior. As sirens wail, bombs blast, and smoke and toxic vapors fill the air, dogs have formed packs that have even been documented feeding on human remains (ashlā’ in Arabic), prompting Palestinian children to plead with their companion species not to devour their bodies if they die. This underscores the social norm of preserving the body from dismemberment and mutilation as a fundamental aspect of humanity. Having a proper burial, one that ensures the integrity and dignity of the human body, has accordingly become one of the last aspirations of Gaza’s human residents.
But the presence of dogs in Gaza has been threatening this aspiration. In this context, the continued operation of a handful of animal shelters by Palestinians in Gaza, such as Jam’iyyat Sulāla li-Inqādh al-Ḥayawānāt (‘Sulala Association for Animal Rescue’), represents the Palestinians’ stubborn insistence over human dignity. The transformation of dogs from household to homeless animals has effectively reorganized their relationships with the humans of Gaza, which now center around anxieties over bodily integrity, competition for food, and profound loss. The current impossibility of raising dogs as beloved companions and as family members is a profound loss of what fundamentally defines us as humans: the human capacity to forge and nurture such relations with others.
The behavioral changes in Gaza’s dogs cannot be attributed to ideology, theology, or the occupation. Their transformation during Israel’s domicidal project in Gaza—from friendly household companions to feral animals—reveals what happens when the home, in all its multifaceted dimensions, is obliterated and the intimate relationships it once contained, including human-animal relationships, are drastically disrupted or eliminated. Such a domidical process undermines the basic hierarchies and distinctions between human and animal, a process which often involves dehumanizing the human. In this sense, dogs offer a unique lens for understanding the idea of domicide beyond its legal definition: beyond massive destruction of infrastructure, Israel’s domicide in Gaza is an assault on the very foundations of what it means to be a Palestinian human.
On Barak is a full professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University.
Irus Braverman is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Law, Adjunct Professor of Geography, and Research Professor at the Department of Environment & Sustainability at the University of Buffalo, The State University of New York. Her most recent monograph, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) discusses the deployment of national parks and biodiversity protections for settler colonial ends.