Lion Imagery is Promoting Belligerence
Ah, the lion. It’s associated with majesty, power, and tradition. It’s also associated with aggression, violence, and force. World Lion Day, a day dedicated to lions, is on August 10. But the promotion of lions can be problematic to human cultures. In human geopolitical conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, comparing oneself to a lion is often used to glorify gratuitous belligerence. Both sides of the conflict use lion imagery for this purpose. In fact, lion imagery is common enough that attacks on lion-like qualities as virtuous can help rebrand peace.
On the Israeli side, Daniel Pipes describes his desire to give a knockout blow to the Palestinians, forcing them to surrender. He asks, “Can lions reform hyenas”?
Pipes’ and similar rhetoric — presenting the desire for fierce aggression as almost virtuous, and the restrained approach as cowardly — means many Israelis have difficulty when they try to reach out with empathy. This article describes Israel’s lack of connectedness with Palestinians and the trouble even Israeli intelligence has in so much as comprehending Palestinian sensibilities.
A Palestinian response to these Israeli efforts also uses the lion image. “Hamas are lions, you will end up in the garbage can.” This is an apt description of lions. Lions make unprovoked attacks that kill other large carnivores, creating what even scientists have termed a “landscape of fear.” Usually, they detest these animals’ carcasses. One type of predator they kill is the spotted hyena, which is also an important scavenger. Their slaughter of hyenas can lead to an accumulation of rotting carcasses. According to one visitor to Africa, “The camp we visited…had had its hyena population severely reduced by the lions. Around the waterhole there were carcasses rotting everywhere. It looked like a war had taken place. No hyenas equals a big mess.”
Unintentionally, the quote about Hamas carries the implication of further cluttering Palestine with garbage. The anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins undertook an extensive study of garbage imagery and actual garbage in Palestine. Her book describes Palestine as being under “waste siege,” in the larger context of Palestinians being a rejected people. But who will fight the lions, clean up the waste, and break the siege?
The standard imagery of peace — doves, lambs, olive trees, and non-militant women — carries the implication of powerlessness. This branding is hindering peace efforts. At the grassroots level, these efforts are the strongest when they are based on a mindset of curiosity and cooperation rather than surrender and compromise. The most effective peace advocates are willing to look beyond appearances and break their own side’s cultural purity taboos for the opportunities. I believe the spotted hyena — an animal with these qualities that is strong enough, in large numbers, to hunt Cape buffalo and stand up to lions — can be a very powerful image of peace in this conflict.
As a counterpoint to the standard aggressive, maximalist narratives, I promote an alternate narrative of power by alliance, gained by the gentle. The aggressive narrative stereotypes the Middle East as being more “savage” than the West and therefore requiring a more brutal approach. This is one reason I tell a story from the even more savage Wild, Kenya’s Masai Mara. On several social media, I compare myself to Waffles, the gentle hyena matriarch of the Mara’s Serena North Clan. Waffles is one of the most peaceable hyenas in Michigan State University’s animal behavior study, and also one of the most successful. She rose from the lowest-ranked female to North Clan’s queen, reigning for many years. Her descendants still occupy the highest ranks in the clan. Yes, the gentle are still around. Not only can they survive, but they can sometimes even thrive. Here are some stories from the researchers about Waffles. Why emulate the Lion, when one can instead emulate her?
I am also influenced by the chapter “Morals and Weapons” in King Solomon’s Ring by the Nobel Prize-winning animal behavior scientist Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz describes well-armed social animals as having developed a greater inclination to refrain from harming one another. The better-armed and more social the animal, the stronger their natural inhibition from killing. Doves, who will fight to the death when confined together, normally lack the ability to kill and therefore the instinct to refrain. Wolves, who expose their vulnerable necks when they wish to surrender, are Lorenz’s example of a well-armed animal with perhaps a higher inhibition from killing than humans. Later, it was discovered that spotted hyenas, with their bone-crushing bite, also have an elaborate greeting ritual of exposing their vulnerable parts to others’ jaws.
The gentle, collaborative temperament can even be successful in the Middle East. An example is Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, chief European Jewish rabbi of Mandatory Palestine and one of the foremost rabbinical thinkers of the twentieth century. In Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution, Yehudah Mirsky describes how the Jewish community of Rav Kook’s time was fractured into numerous, hostile religious and secular movements. Kook spent much effort in bringing these groups together. Although he interacted little with the local Arab communities, he also stood up to his own side against anti-Arab hate. When one of his contemporaries published a sketch in which Arabs were given the blanket designation of “the enemy,” Rav Kook criticized him sharply. He wrote that this approach’s “benefit is zero, and damage, incalculable.” He promoted “the paths of peace and brotherhood, which we encounter among the genuinely practical men…[including] the Arab inhabitants of the land, of course (I mean) the best of them.”
The belligerent narrative, including imagery such as the Lion that glorifies aggression, is even dismissing major strains of history. World Lion Day is not helping. The narrative of peace needs to be a forceful counterweight.
