Why animals make Israel vs. Hamas look like an Old West range war

The place ain’t big enough for everyone’s herd

TEL AVIV,  GAZA––Though the Gaza war is fought with jets,  tanks,  rockets,  automatic rifles,  and bitterly opposed world views,  ideology,  and international politics,  recent incidents involving sheep,  goats,  donkeys,  horses,  and pigs illustrate that it is,  beneath everything else,  fundamentally an Old West range war.

Rustlers are one of the issues.  Feeding donkeys,  horses,  and camels is also problematic.  And the fighting talk includes allegations from Jewish and Islamic farmers on the West Bank of the Jordan River that either contingent are cultivating feral pigs––whom neither Jews nor Muslims eat––to harass the other.

(See Wild boars win, camels lose, across Gaza, Israel, & West Bank.)

Sheep rustling

Columnist Amira Hass,  writing for Haaretz,  the largest liberal newspaper in Israel,  on May 1,  2024 brought rustling to the fore.

“Israeli Settlers Aren’t Content With Expelling Palestinian Shepherds, They Also Steal Their Sheep,”  Hass headlined.

“In recent months,”  Hass detailed,  “Haaretz has learned of several cases of armed Israelis – sometimes in Israel Defense Forces uniforms and usually wearing Jewish religious garb – stealing Palestinian sheep and goats.  The incidents have occurred in places in which the number of Israeli sheep ranches has grown over the past decade.  They were erected without formal authorization and are illegal according to international and local law,  but they have thrived.”

Goats shot

Hass described four sheep-rustling cases,  two of them involving flocks of hundreds,  and one episode following the murder of 14-year-old Israeli settler Binyamin Achimair,  in which about a dozen Palestinian homes and 30 cars were set on fire,  while “Israeli Defense Force soldiers were standing by,”  Hass charged.  “Later,  20 goats were found shot to death.”

Continued Hass,  “As has been reported in Haaretz several times,  attacks and threats by settlers in nearby outposts have gradually reduced the grazing areas that have been used by the Palestinians long before Israel was established.  The loss of access to grazing areas and the high cost of buying food for their animals have forced families to sell their herds.”

Since 2020,  Hass indicated,  about 30 Palestinian sheep-herding families have had to retreat from grazing land after confrontations with armed Israelis––who,  by treaty,  are not supposed to be on the West Bank in the first place,  but the Benjamin Netanyahu government,  politically dependent upon factions hoping to reunite the whole of Biblical Israel,  has been reluctant to enforce treaties that Hamas and other Palestinian militias have also disregarded.

“Donkeys & horses now more important to Gaza than ever”

In Gaza,  65 miles west of the West Bank,  “Donkeys and horses are now more important to the people of Gaza than ever before,”  Do Good PR founder Heather Collins wrote to ANIMALS 24-7 on April 25,  2024,  on behalf of Safe Haven for Donkeys.

“With fuel scarce,  and many trucks,  vans and cars destroyed,”  Collins said,  “donkeys and horses have become the main mode of transport – moving people,  food,  water,  building materials and essential medicines through a war-ravaged landscape.

“Evacuees are counting on these animals to help them move away from the conflict zones,  but the donkeys and horses need food so they can continue to be a much-needed resource,”  Collins emphasized.

Safe Haven for Donkeys

Founded in 2000 by former British Airways flight attendant Lucy Fensom,  55,  Safe Haven for Donkeys operates from Gan Yoshiyya,  Israel,  about 23 miles northeast of Tel Aviv,  the Israeli capital,  “and 1.5 miles from the border with the Palestinian Territories (West Bank).

“We also work in the West Bank itself,”  the Safe Haven for Donkeys website says,  fielding “three mobile clinics which visit towns and villages across the West Bank,”  as well as maintaining “a permanent clinic in the city of Nablus.”

Safe Haven for Donkeys early in the war avoided involvement,  but on April 24,  2024,  Collins said,  “the first aid package sent by Safe Haven for Donkeys since the conflict started,  of animal food and urgently needed veterinary medication,  was received,”  having been sent in December 2023.

More aid promised to follow

A second shipment,  Collins continued,  would be on the way through the labyrinth of checkpoints and inspections that makes what could be a 90-minute drive to Rafah,  Gaza,  an often multi-week ordeal.

“Understandably,  given the situation on the ground,  with the desperate needs of the people and the lack of alternative transport,  donkeys and horses are working in appalling conditions – suffering malnourishment,  dehydration and excruciating wounds from the heavy loads they carry and pull,”  Collins said.

Donkeys and horses plodding through the dusty streets of Rafah tend to look as if they just stepped out of the Old West,  but Rafah in truth has had donkeys plodding through it since the Bronze Age,  3,000 years before there was a U.S. or an Old West frontier.

Reservations vs. the cavalry?

To what extent the Gaza war can be likened to an Old West reservation uprising followed by a U.S. cavalry response,  as some would have it,  may be debated forever;  but some comparisons can be made.

Opponents of the Israeli Defense Force response to the October 7,  2023 massacre of 1,200 Israeli campers and kibbutz farm workers by the Hamas militia ruling Gaza since 2005 tend to like the Old West analogy,  viewing Gaza and the West Bank region as reservations for displaced Palestinians.

Those favoring the Old West analogy also tend to see the war underway ever since as a “genocide,”  though almost as many Palestinians––about 1.8 million––live within Israel,  exclusive of the West Bank,  as the 2.1 million believed to be in the Gaza war zone.

Frontier wars were not one-sided

Those favoring the Old West analogy likewise tend to perceive as “good guys” waging a “resistance,”  in hindsight, any Native Americans who raided remote farms and homesteads,  raping and kidnapping settler women and children,  sometimes burning whole families alive in their houses and barns.

Native Americans themselves tend to take a more nuanced view,  not least because many of the victims of raids and frontier uprisings were Native Americans from tribes oppressed by larger tribes,  who had intermarried with settlers,  joined or even built churches, and become assimilated into the culture of the alleged invaders,  who protected them from their old tribal enemies.

Sitting Bull,  Chief Joseph,  & Geronimo

Among both the Old West settlers and their Native American foes,  there were factions agitating for intractable war to the death,  most obviously those shouting “The only good Injun is a dead Injun!,”  indiscriminately driving any and all Native Americans,  no matter how assimilated,  into reservations along Trails of Tears,  or simply massacring any who lived near possible gold deposits.

Contrasting with the death-to-all factions were those––more than over-simplified popular history tends to remember––who were willing to cut deals,  share resources,  and adapt to change.

Among them,  eventually,  were the war chiefs Sitting Bull,  Chief Joseph,  and Geronimo,  who saved their people and the viable remnants of their cultures by declaring,  in the words of Chief Joseph,  “From where the sun now stands,  I will fight no more forever.”

Westerns end sooner

What tends to be overlooked in hindsight is that the Old West range wars between the nomads who followed the bison migrations and the settlers who ran cattle and sheep essentially reprised millennia of conflict in the Middle East.

           (See An Unnatural Order:  The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature by Jim Mason and The Origins & Spread of Domestic Animals in Southwest Asia & Europe.)

            Those fights too were among nomadic herders,  like the ancient Hebrews before they built Jerusalem and other settlements,  and ethnic groups who built cities earlier,  like the Egyptians,  Hittites,  and Babylonians,  then marched out to subjugate their less settled neighbors.

From the historical perspective,  the Bible,  the Torah,  and the Quran are all basically versions of a multi-generational episodic western,  set in a time before six-shooters and cowboy hats,  and in a place more than just a long cattle drive from any railroads.

But even the bloodiest westerns tend to end with fewer deeply held grudges and a lot less killing.

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