‘This is not a pig’: Settler innocence and visuality of zoos

Themed section on Visual rhetoric and rhetorics of the visual

Abstract

Settler innocence is the primary organising principle of Israel’s space production. To construct themselves as innocent political actors, oppressors disavow, justify, and deny their responsibility for oppression. The rhetoric of settler innocence allows Israel, a settler colonial state responsible for the dispossession and military occupation of Palestine, to present itself as the “only democracy in the Middle East”. In this article, I perform a visual analysis of the Zoological Center Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan and the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo to examine how zoos, inherently violent colonial institutions, reproduce settler innocence. Entrenched in Israel’s national projects of linking modernity and Biblical antiquity, zoos naturalise settlers, normalise indigenous displacement, and obscure colonial violence.