Systemic Violence in Occupied Palestine: How Colonial Settler Violence Against Livestock Reflects Structural Dispossession and Food Sovereignty Wars
Original framing: “Israeli settlers abuse and reportedly poison goats in Palestinian village” — Al Jazeera
The poisoning of Palestinian goats is part of a long arc of settler-colonial violence that dates back to the Ottoman era, when Jewish settlers in Palestine began appropriating land through legal and extralegal means. During the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian farmers were systematically displaced, and their livestock was either stolen or destroyed to erase their presence from the land. This pattern continued during the 1967 occupation, when Israeli settlers, often with state backing, began encroaching on Palestinian agricultural lands, using violence against livestock as a tool to assert control. The current incidents echo the 2015 poisoning of Palestinian wells in the West Bank, which was met with international condemnation but no meaningful consequences for the perpetrators. This historical lens reveals that the violence against goats is not an anomaly but a recurring tactic in the ongoing project of Palestinian dispossession.
The violence against goats in Al-Mughayyir is not an isolated incident but a symptom of a deeply systemic project of Palestinian dispossession, where livestock—symbols of cultural identity and economic survival—are weaponised to break the resilience of rural communities.
This act is rooted in a long history of settler-colonial tactics, from the American frontier to South Africa’s bantustans, where the theft and poisoning of livestock were used to force Indigenous populations into dependency and migration. The Israeli occupation’s protection of settlers while failing to protect Palestinians creates a two-tiered justice system, where violence against livestock is treated as a minor crime while resistance to settlement expansion is met with military repression. Cross-culturally, this mirrors patterns seen in other colonised regions, where food sovereignty is deliberately undermined to enforce compliance. The solution pathways must therefore address both the immediate violence and the structural conditions that enable it—through international accountability, community-led resilience programs, targeted boycotts, and legal challenges—to restore Palestinian food sovereignty and reclaim the land as a site of resistance rather than dispossession. Without confronting this systemic violence, any response will remain superficial, failing to challenge the colonial logic that sustains it.