Donkeys generally tend to characterize humility and redemption; in Jewish custom, the Messiah will arrive on a white donkey.
However in these days’s “land of the Bible,” donkeys have turn out to be sufferers of the struggle in Gaza and, increasingly more, objectives of the rising settler violence within the West Financial institution.
Take what came about in December 2025 close to Jaba, north of Ramallah. Whilst a Palestinian kid watched, seven Jewish settlers from Gur Aryeh, a small unlawful outpost, reportedly led away his circle of relatives’s 3 donkeys.
When an Israeli peace activist later arrived on the scene, she discovered one of the most donkeys with a rope across the animal’s neck and in serious ache. She later advised me how she needed to avert her eyes as she shone the flashlight on the afflicted donkey for the rescue staff from the Beginning Over Sanctuary, a nonprofit devoted to treating and rehabilitating animals in Israel, the West Financial institution and Gaza.
The donkey didn’t live on the adventure to the clinic.
Whilst violence towards animals has a tendency to be noticed as distinct from that directed at people, the 2 phenomena are deeply intertwined. As any individual who research settler colonial violence along political ecology and human-animal relationships, I argue that Israeli settlers’ assaults on donkeys in addition to the care they observe towards those animals expose how colonial dispossession occurs and is in flip naturalized at the floor.
A donkey owned via a Palestinian herder from Deir Istiya within the northern West Financial institution in June 2025.
Irus Braverman, CC BY-SA
Harming animals thru direct assault, deprivation, seizure and compelled separation has lengthy accompanied Israeli violence towards Palestinian communities. All through the Nakba in 1948, during which 750,000 Palestinians fled or had been displaced from their land via Zionist forces, farm and home animals had been killed, seized, left with out care or pushed to hunger.
A equivalent development has passed off within the struggle on Gaza following the assault via Hamas and different militants on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. By means of August 2025, as many as 97% of livestock in Gaza had been killed thru bombing, hunger and the destruction of agricultural infrastructure, in keeping with the Euro‑Mediterranean Human Rights Track. Farms had been razed, and cats and canines had been left to fend for themselves as households had been many times displaced from their properties via the Israeli airstrikes.
Sporting the load for millennia
Donkeys, particularly, raise a deep historical past within the area and these days face heightened vulnerabilities.
First domesticated roughly 7,000 years in the past within the Horn of Africa, they reworked human mobility and are nonetheless essential within the day-to-day lives of thousands and thousands of deficient other folks around the globe.
To Palestinians, donkeys have turn out to be trademarks of “sumūd,” or steadfast staying power – an ethic they frequently emphasize to explain day-to-day lifestyles below Israeli profession.
Outstanding Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish stated in a tv interview in 1997: “I wish I was a donkey. A peaceful, wise animal that pretends to be stupid. Yet he is patient, and smarter than we are in the cool and calm manner he watches on as history unfolds.”
Amid the ruins in Gaza and with gasoline scarce, donkeys have supplied important shipping for the injured in addition to for items and assets.
Palestinian political analyst Ahmed Najar put it aptly on July 20, 2025: “My mother, who is in Gaza, cannot walk. Since October 2023, my family has been displaced seven times. Every time the bombs fell too close or the leaflets rained down warning my family to flee, the only way she could be moved was on a donkey. … (In) the dust and the terror – donkeys became ambulances, buses, lifelines.”
A Palestinian guy rides a donkey-pulled cart previous a broken U.N.-run faculty within the Jabalia refugee camp within the northern Gaza Strip on Would possibly 31, 2024.
Omar al-Qattaa/AFP by means of Getty Pictures
The December abduction of a donkey in Jaba used to be no longer an remoted incident. Settlers ceaselessly clutch and thieve donkeys, along different livestock, in raids on Palestinian pastoralist communities, particularly within the Jordan Valley and Hebron Hills.
Since October 2023, such assaults have intensified considerably. In March 2025, U.N. businesses documented the robbery or killing of greater than 1,400 sheep and goats in a single Jordan Valley assault.
Palestinian shepherds frequently journey their donkeys when taking their flocks out to pasture. However as settler harassment has larger, often performed via armed settler shepherds driving on donkeys themselves, Palestinians infrequently take their flocks out. With grazing routes rendered bad, Palestinian-owned donkeys are left at the back of, frequently spending their days tied to a tree – nonetheless beloved, nonetheless named, however not shifting throughout a panorama that has turn out to be adverse. They stand as quiet reminders of a disappearing pastoralist custom.
‘Freedom flights’
A brief distance from Jaba, a reputedly other donkey tale unfolds. On the Beginning Over Sanctuary in central Israel, volunteers get ready donkeys for “freedom flights” to Europe.
Since 2018, the charity has operated as Israel’s greatest donkey sanctuary, rescuing and rehabilitating animals subjected to abuse, forget and difficult exertions, in particular from the rustic’s south. For the reason that early 2020s, the Israeli sanctuary has periodically arranged rehoming tasks for the donkeys, moving them via airplanes to spouse sanctuaries throughout Europe. After a yearlong pause amid war-related disruptions, and newly beaten with injured donkeys pouring in from Gaza, the Beginning Over Sanctuary just lately resumed the flights, airlifting the rescued donkeys to sanctuaries in France and Belgium.
Once I visited the sanctuary in December 2025, there have been 800 donkeys in place of dwelling, many rescued via infantrymen or casual networks encountering the injured or deserted animals close to struggle zones.
A donkey and cat on the Beginning Over Sanctuary in Herut, Israel, on Dec. 16, 2025.
Irus Braverman, CC BY-SA
Whilst the donkey rescues performed via the Beginning Over Sanctuary are obviously motivated via what its employees describe as a deep love for donkeys, a number of Palestinian analysts and citizens body those rescues very otherwise. For them, a donkey taken from the Palestinian group represents any other type of settler dispossession, without reference to whether or not that removing is performed thru acts of care via sanctuary employees close to Tel Aviv or thru bodily violence via Jewish shepherds within the West Financial institution.
The strain between the cruelty towards Palestinian-owned animals via violent settler shepherds and the compassionate rescue of Palestinian-owned animals via Israeli animal activists exposes how animal and human lifestyles are mutually entangled, and morally charged, inside the buildings of what I and lots of others see as Israel’s settler colonialism.
The donkey stands on the heart of those tensions: an emblem, significant other, laborer, witness, goal of violence and object of compassion.
Normalizing dispossession
In the meantime, a 3rd donkey tale has been unfolding within the rural landscapes of the Israeli occupied West Financial institution, the place Jewish settlers increasingly more use donkeys whilst grazing sheep around the contested terrain. Settler shepherds on donkeys lead their herds around the open hills in scenes that intently resemble Palestinian herding routines, that have been as soon as not unusual in the similar spaces.
An Israeli settler driving a donkey herds his flock of goats and sheep close to an outpost within the occupied West Financial institution on June 29, 2025.
Menahem Kahana/AFP by means of Getty Pictures
The resemblance is especially hanging as a result of many Palestinians at the moment are barred from working towards their pastoralist traditions in spaces the place settlers proceed to roam freely. The settlers’ use of donkeys inspires a biblical previous whilst recasting pastoralist kinds of land use as their inherited birthright, at the same time as Palestinian pastoralism is increasingly more framed as backward, ecologically destructive and unlawful.
Donkeys thus play an frequently overpassed function within the broader shift in settler technique unfolding around the West Financial institution prior to now decade or so – and increasingly more since October 2023 – during which small shepherding outposts have moved from the margins to the middle of agreement growth. In recent times, herding has turn out to be a key software for claiming territory past the established settlements, permitting settlers to regulate huge swaths of land with minimum infrastructure. Those outposts now shape a innovative technique for what The Dad or mum has described as the biggest land seize within the West Financial institution since 1967.
Past their subject material results, such pastoralist practices via the settler shepherds assist normalize this land seize. Donkeys, sheep and cows, along olives and different herbal entities, are a part of ongoing ecological conflict that naturalizes each Palestinian dispossession and settler reclamation, as I discover in an upcoming instructional paper within the magazine American Anthropologist.
Within the occupied West Financial institution, as in all different puts, human and animal vulnerabilities are intertwined. A donkey could also be flown to protection, however the people who trusted her stay in peril. The animal’s rescue, as such, finds traumatic asymmetries about who will get stored and who’s left at the back of.
