Veterinizing the Settler State: Biopolitics, Care, and Killing in Palestine-Israel

Drawing on three multispecies cases in Palestine-Israel–the fallow deer, the griffon vulture, and the free-roaming dog–this article depicts veterinary governance as constitutive of the settler state. Specifically, the article identifies three interrelated but distinct technologies of veterinary power: biopolitics, enacted through population management and selective reproduction; pastoral power, exercised through intimate care and detailed surveillance; and necropolitics, manifested in practices of extermination. The article argues that veterinization advances and naturalizes the state’s settler ecologies. In Palestine-Israel, this dynamic is especially visible in the state’s peripheral regions, in territories it has occupied since 1967, and along the Gaza border.