The Most Vegan Army in the World
Mondoweiss September 2019
The IDF is also issuing leather free combat boots and wool free berets to soldiers who register as vegan, so they can march into battle knowing that no living creature has been harmed in their provisioning.
Ahmad Safi, the Executive Director of the Palestinian Animal League, perhaps best encapsulates the IDF’s breathtaking hypocrisy around veganism in his piece “On the ‘IDF’s vegan warriors’: A vegan Palestinian’s perspective.” In describing a BBC special on the “vegan warriors” of the IDF, Safi notes, “I was somewhat baffled by a particular passage in the article, taken from a radio interview which said of one of the vegan soldiers: ‘Her diet is so important to her that had the army not been able to provide conditions that had harmed no living creatures, she might not have enlisted in a combat unit.’ The only way in which I can interpret this is that the soldier in question does not consider Palestinians to be ‘living creatures.’” The IDF not only dehumanizes Palestinians, it goes one step further to objectify and place them outside the sphere of living beings, humans and non-human animals, that deserve moral consideration. Such an act is heinous, but should come as no surprise from an institution whose chief of staff is a vegan philosophy major who also happens to be best-known for destroying refugee camp homes with a hammer.
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