Israel is a leader in lab-grown cultured meat. But according to at least one academic, this is symbolic of Israeli colonialism.
Yes, really.
Efrat Gilad is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Bern. She wrote "A Colonial Legacy of Cultured Meat" describing how Israel's meat industry, including its recent leadership in lab-grown cultured meat, is really all just a history of Jewish colonialism.
Without the politics, the article would be a pretty good overview of the history of the meat industry in Palestine since Ottoman times. But instead, it is a screed about how evil Jews have upset the wonderful balance of nature in Palestine by introducing a meat-based diet into the region.
You see, native Palestinians didn't consume much meat. But the evil Ashkenazi Jews who selfishly returned to Palestine to save their lives from pogroms brought with them a love of meat, and that transformed the country into something it was never meant to be.
In Europe, Jews had been associated with the cattle trade since the Middle Ages. But in Palestine, consuming meat depended on Palestinian peasants and regional Arab breeders. Jewish actors (importers, butchers, religious authorities, urban officials) tried to gain more ground in the country’s meat trade. In the 1930s, Jewish cattle dealers began to import cattle from Europe, relying on their old continental networks. By shipping in animals from overseas, Jewish dealers expanded Palestine’s regional trade into a transcontinental trade. This ...allowed Jewish dealers to penetrate the country’s meat trade by importing to Palestine European bovines three times the size of local species....Tel Aviv, for example, was the settlement’s most important city financially, demographically, and also in terms of meat consumption. Its emerging meat infrastructures – especially its slaughterhouse built in 1931 – facilitated the expansion of the city, and by proxy, the entire Jewish settlement.Rather than a land of milk and honey, settlers hankered for meat as the material manifestation of arriving at a utopia of prosperity and plenty. Increasing Jews’ access to meat in Palestine under British rule may have been against economic ideals, but still served the Zionist goal: the expansion of the settlement and the colonization of Palestine.
I suppose that their draining the malaria-infested swamps was also a colonialist interference to destroy the natural beauty of Palestine.
Gilad goes on to describe the austerity period after the War of Independence when there was very little meat, and Israeli attempts to create vegetable-based substitutes, as a precursor to today's cultured meat industry. She includes this marvelous cartoon from Maariv in 1949:
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“We have been informed of the invention of “artificial meat” in our country, and it was produced from mushrooms and eggplant..” - “What kind of animal is this?” - "It's an artificial cow!" |
On its website, the company recalls how it entered the meat business: Until 1948 meat supplies depended on “Arab agriculture and nomadic Bedouins. But with the creation of the state, this main source of meat disappeared”. Echoing the hegemonic Israeli stance, Tnuva’s website reduces Palestinians to a “source of meat” and their forced exodus to a “disappearance”.
If you write a history of meat that doesn't center Palestinian suffering, you must be a racist colonialist pig.
In short, when Zionists import beef, it is colonialist. When they try to create ersatz substitutes, it is colonialist. When they lead the world in cultured meat, it is colonialist.
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| Anti-Zionist glasses are a requirement for academia |
Her very thesis that meat is an alien part of the Middle East diet brought in by colonialist European Jews is another manifestation of viewing the world through anti-Zionist glasses. The consumption of meat in Arab countries today roughly corresponds with wealth, not historic diet habits. The per capita consumption of meat in Gulf states - almost all of it imported - is not much different than that of Israel.
And guess who consumes the most meat in the Arab world? Palestinians, by far!
No doubt, Gilad would blame Israel for irrevocably ruining the diet of the natives.
As countries become richer, they buy more meat. It has nothing to do with colonialism. It has everything to do with the crazy idea that people like meat.
Ascribing Jewish colonialist and racist motives for what is a consumer preference and economic issue is just a more sophisticated - and academically approved - version of antisemitism.
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