Weaponizing Crocodiles Against Israel

Just when I thought I'd seen it all, here's something that took me completely by surprise - and what was subsequently revealed totally floored me.

How dangerous are crocodiles? The other day I was researching them and I received a nasty surprise. I didn't think that crocodiles were especially harmful unless you're actually encountering them in the flesh (unlike alligators, which even in the flesh are much more manageable). Little did I realize that I was about to discover how crocodiles are being used as a weapon against the Jewish People.

The Nile crocodile actually lived wild in the Land of Israel until the beginning of the 20th century. They were found in an area near Caesarea, which in antiquity was called Crocodilopolis by Strabus and Crocodilion by Pliny. The Roman settlement was subsequently destroyed in the Muslim Arab invasion of the 7th century, and when there were last crocodiles at the turn of the 20th century it was known as Zor al-Zarqa. Today, it is known as Nachal Taninim, the "Crocodile River." It's not entirely clear, though, whether the crocodiles that lived there were originally native to this country, or whether they were brought here by the Romans for entertainment and subsequently escaped into the wild. 

While researching the answer to this puzzle, I came across an article titled "Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870–1935)." It was written by Elizabeth Bentley, currently a postdoctoral fellow in social and cultural analysis at NYU, and it appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, an academic journal based in Ramallah and published by the Institute for Palestine Studies. Bentley is currently developing her article into a full-length book, titled "The Last Crocodile in Palestine: Envisioning Extinction in the Ruins of Empire.”

Bentley's article is about much more than just zoology. The author explains that through her "analysis of extinction rhetoric, this article attenuates pernicious forms of “slow violence” against Palestinian life and land that are not easily captured in news headlines." She argues that "the Palestinian crocodile extinction story is intertwined with violent histories of colonial resource extraction, racialized labor exploitation, and indigenous human dispossession." That's quite an extraordinary charge, so let's see how Bentley backs it up.

I. The Last of the Crocodiles

The article begins by describing how at the Jerusalem Zoo, the sign at the crocodile enclosure states that “In 1905, the last crocodile was hunted in Israel by residents of Jisar-A-Zarka.” It's obviously not an accurate sign, since Israel did not exist in 1905 (and neither did the town of Jisar-A-Zarka, which was built to rehouse the Ghawarna Bedouin tribe that had formerly lived in the crocodiles' habitat). But according to Bentley, there's something much more sinister going on: a Zionist plot to delegitimize the Palestinians.

"The Biblical Zoo’s account erases the web of historical relations that led to this extinction beginning with one crucial fact: the market for late Ottoman Palestine’s small and dwindling crocodile population was overwhelmingly driven by colonialists rather than the indigenous population. By invoking and isolating the Palestinian identity of the hunters who allegedly killed the last crocodile, the Israeli zoo poster implies that Palestinians were responsible for Nile crocodiles’ regional extinction."

Amazing. A single poorly-written sentence in a sign (which doesn't even appear in the Hebrew text) is now evidence of a "slow violence" campaign to slander Palestinians. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill!

But let's see how inaccurate the zoo's sign really is. Bentley is correct that, although the Ghawarna Bedouin were the ones who actually hunted the last crocodiles, the market for the last of the small and dwindling crocodile population was overwhelmingly driven by (European non-Jewish!) colonialists. But the reason why the crocodile population was dwindling was because of the Bedouin!

There's a reason why the Germans and French and British used Bedouin hunters. It's because the Bedouin already had a long tradition of hunting wild animals in general and crocodiles in particular. The Europeans didn't recruit hunters from the Old Yishuv! There has never been a tradition of hunting wild animals in Judaism, unlike in Arab and Bedouin culture, where it plays a very significant role. 

As Bentley herself notes, the Ghawarna were renowned as hunters. And the crocodiles were eating their goats and sometimes even their people, which gave them very good reasons for hunting them. Unlike mammalian predators such as lions, crocodiles never learn to fear humans. To this day, many hundreds of people are killed by crocodiles in Africa every year. Crocodiles and humans simply cannot coexist peacefully. That is why the crocodile population in Zor al-Zarqa was dwindling.

Thus, the Jerusalem Zoo's sign is not distorting anything. Yes, it was Europeans who paid for the last few crocodiles and accelerated their end, but it was the Bedouin who were both originally and ultimately responsible for their decline and extinction.

And it's not just crocodiles. The reason why the Syrian ostrich was driven to extinction across the entire region is because of the Bedouin (who believed that the bird's fat has medicinal powers). The reason why the Asiatic cheetah was driven to near-extinction across the entire region is because of the Bedouin (who became even more efficient hunters once they acquired guns). The reason why the Arabian oryx was driven to near-extinction across the entire region is because of the Arabs. The reason why the Syrian brown bear was driven to near-extinction across the entire region is because of the Arabs.

That's not to say that Zionism played no role in ecological destruction. Inevitably, when large numbers of people come to live in an area, this takes a toll on the environment. And in the early 20th century, as around the world, a lot of mistakes were made in environmental management. But Jews in the Land of Israel never targeted wild animals. They never stoned hyenas to death, as many Palestinians like to do, or stole birds of prey from the nest, as is common in Arab countries. And it was the Jews who pioneered wildlife and nature conservation in Israel, which is vastly superior to that in any Arab country.

II. The Distortion of History

Bentley is very concerned about the erasure of Palestinian (by which she means Palestinian Arab) history. "The crocodile served as a reptilian conduit for rewriting – and claiming ownership over – Palestine’s past, thereby de-Arabizing the history of the coastal marshlands. The more scholarly, research-based colonial literatures often included uneven literary historiographies of references to local geography and the crocodiles; these jumped from Greco-Roman to medieval Crusader to nineteenth century European-authored texts, omitting or glossing over periods in Palestine’s history characterized by Arab rule."

It's fair to criticize distortions of history. But it is extraordinarily hypocritical coming from Elizabeth Bentley.

The word "colonial" appears in the article a remarkable 103 times. Bentley does not apply it to the Muslim-Arab invasion of Palestine in the seventh century. But she does apply this highly-charged term equally to both European (British and German) colonialists and to Zionists. She makes no distinction whatsoever between Europeans who were extending their reach to foreign lands, and Jews who were fleeing persecution and returning to their ancestral homeland! (See this article by the ADL which details why the term "colonialism" is utterly misleading and wrong when used with regard to Zionism.)

In fact, Bentley does not even make any mention whatsoever of Jewish historical roots in Israel. Her only reference to the Bible is bizarre: "Palestine’s crocodiles are perpetually entangled in “naturecultures” – real or imagined – that do not readily lend themselves to fantasies of a pristine, empty land or an original biblical past." But in which way is the Biblical past a "fantasy"? There really was a Biblical history of Israel - in which Jews lived there! While there it's not clear if Biblical Israel had crocodiles, there is no doubt whatsoever that it had Jews. Bentley is critical of how Europeans de-Arabized history - and yet she equally de-Judaizes it!

III. The Zionist Crocodile Plot

The colonialists who paid the Bedouin to hunt the last of the crocodiles were British and German. But Bentley then smoothly transitions to Zionist colonialists. Bentley notes that a Zionist zoologist, Fredric Bodenheimer, observed in 1935 that no more crocodiles would ever be found, due to the swamps having been drained. According to Bentley, "because of Bodenheimer’s subject-position as a Zionist zoologist and the connection that he forms between Palestinian crocodile’s extinction status and the drainage project, Bodenheimer’s text reflects the continuation and evolution of the colonial zoological project in Palestine, which until this point was primarily executed by European Christians... The story of Palestinian crocodile extinction also continued on the ground through the environmental politics and policies of the Zionist settler-colonial project as it gained a stronghold over British Mandate Palestine." And so now the "colonialists" responsible for the extinction of the Palestinian crocodiles include the Jews.

Now, first let us note that no Jew was ever involved in any crocodile hunting. And the last crocodiles were killed before the swamps were drained in the 1920s. Furthermore, while part of the reason for draining the swamps was to reclaim land for development, the primary reason, for both the British and the Jews, was to eradicate malaria. And while the Ghawarna did not care to lose their land for the sake of eradicating malaria (since they apparently had a certain immunity), the other Arab residents of Palestine were certainly very much benefiting from its eradication. In some Arab villages, one of every six children would succumb to the illness within their first few months.

Yes, the Ghawarna received the raw end of the deal - as did many people around the world during the global population development of the early twentieth century (and the Ghawarna received a much better deal than did most Jews in Arab lands!). But the story of how they left is much more complicated than Bentley makes it appear. And the Zionists had absolutely nothing to do with the extinction of crocodiles.

IV. The Schmitz Transfer

In a 2020 workshop in Palestinian Studies at Brown University, Bentley invokes another aspect of the "Palestinian" crocodiles to slander Israel. This is with regard to one of the last crocodiles, whose hunting was commissioned by Father Ernst Schmitz, a German naturalist and priest. Along with many other taxidermy specimens that he had collected, it was housed in St. Paulus hostel’s basement museum, and was used for science education at the adjacent Schmidt School for Palestinian children. In 2017, the collection was transferred (or, as Bentley writes in quotation marks, "transferred," apparently to delegitimize it) to the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History and Center for Biodiversity in Tel Aviv. Bentley presents this as another example of Zionists acting unjustly and effectively stealing from Palestinians. According to Bentley, "the German Association of the Holy Land (DVHL) invoked property laws to defend their decision to permanently loan the taxidermy to the Israeli museum." 

But you can check the statement from the DVHL online, and you can see for yourself how she is distorting things again. Bentley has completely omitted the real reason for the transfer. The DVHL explains that the reason why they transferred the collection is that it had been severely neglected in the basement of the hostel and was falling apart. It was the Steinhart museum that offered to both restore the specimens, and also to put them on display for the general public and give them much greater exposure:

At that time, the Association’s main concern was to protect such a valuable and unique scientific collection showing species that are extinct nowadays. Due to the fact that the Association lacked the means for the necessary restorations, and to avoid moving the collection outside the Holy Land, it arranged with the museum to have the collection maintained and restored at the expense of the museum. DVHL gave its consent that the animals are temporarily exhibited to the general public, so as to shed a spotlight on the fauna and historical species found in the Holy Land.

As I can attest from running the Biblical Museum of Natural History, taxidermy collections require specific conditions and care. Maintaining the appropriate temperature and humidity, protection from humans and most of all protection from insects are all of crucial importance. The transfer of the Schmitz collection was desired by its owners for the benefit of the collection, not part of a nefarious Zionist plot against Palestinians.

V. Conclusion: An Anti-Zionism revealed as Israelopathy

Among all the distortions in Bentley's scholarship about crocodilian settler-colonial violence against Palestinians, one stands above the rest. Muslim Arabs invaded Palestine in the 7th century. And the Ghawarna, as Bentley observes, were actually a quasi-Maroon community, largely descended from refugees who had fled oppression in Africa and elsewhere within the last few centuries. Yet she classifies the Ghawarna as indigenous Palestinians, whereas Jews fleeing oppression in Europe and returning to their ancestral homeland are "settler-colonialists"!

Such double-standards are close to the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. But personally, I dislike the misleading term "antisemitism," which was itself created to justify it. I prefer to use the more accurate term "Judeopathy," or, in this case, "Israelopathy" - a pathological obsession with delegitimizing and demonizing Israel using irrational and hypocritical arguments.

It seems that zoology is the latest (and perhaps most bizarre) expression of this obsession. I already published an article, "Is Zionism guilty of zoological extermination?" against such accusations by others. The urge to vilify the world's only Jewish state is always seeking new tactics, and even animals are brought in for this hateful task.

VI. Postscript: The Shocking Revelation

Of course, dishonest academic scholarship used for anti-Israel and antisemitic agendas are nothing new. And I was not at all surprised to learn that Elizabeth Bentley is also co-editor of Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging (Duke University Press 2021), in which her introduction notes that secular Zionism has "steadily made it impossible to imagine an Israel that is both Jewish and democratic," whereas an Islamist framework may be "critical to achieving a fully inclusive Palestinian political project or perhaps even an eventual one-state solution to the conflict." 

In this vein, she describes a chapter in which the authors sympathetically explain how the religious beliefs of the Islamic Jihad movement have contributed to the "anticolonial heart of Palestinian nationalist activism" and its "sacral politics of liberation." Palestinian nationalist activism, which cares negligibly about Palestinians who suffer in other countries or from the brutal regime of Hamas, and which is part of a larger Arab (and global) antisemitism that has persecuted Jews worldwide for millennia, is, we are told, actually about anticolonialism and liberation. It is not surprising that a person who makes effort to interpret everything about Zionism in the worst possible light simultaneously judges everything anti-Zionist in the best possible light. (Note that this article also describes the activities of both the PLO and Islamic Jihad, which included numerous targeted killings of civilians and children, as "military action against Israel.")

But then I learned something truly shocking.

Before writing this response, I decided to reach out to Elizabeth Bentley with some of my criticisms. She wrote a warm and friendly but unhelpful response in which she said that her article was limited in scope and she'd be happy to discuss the topic if we ever meet, but that meanwhile she does not have time to respond. But she prefaced this with a shocking revelation - that she is Jewish. And Orthodox. And a fan of my work! I was floored. (UPDATE: I subsequently discovered that she went to YU!)

Elizabeth Bentley is clearly someone who deeply cares about social justice. She's been involved with art projects for Israeli and Palestinian youth aimed at building peace across differences. And it's very hard for me to be harsh on someone who wrote so warmly to me. But it's heartbreaking that even a Jew who is connected to her Jewish identity can become so enmeshed in an Israelopathic worldview. It's tragic that such a person empowers haters of the Jewish People to legitimize Israelopathy by dressing it up as anti-colonialism. I will be sending her a link to this post, and I hope that she will reconsider her approach.

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