A War Draft Today Can’t Work. Let Us Count the Ways.

Congress should stop making futile attempts to salvage, much less expand, the current failed registration system

by Edward Hasbrouck Posted onJuly 03, 2024

Reprinted from Responsible Statecraft with the author’s permission.

Two proposals that would radically alter the current system for registering Americans for a future draft were introduced recently in Congress without any hearings or debate.

They raise practical issues about whether any draft today would even be possible.

As part of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, the House voted this month to make registration with the Selective Service System of all draft-eligible men ages 18-26 “automatic.” In addition, the version of the NDAA on its way to the Senate floor would expand draft registration to include young women now, too.

Debate about the draft has typically been framed around whether the U.S. “needs” a draft. Debate about women and the draft has been framed around whether women “should” be required to register. But the bigger question we face is three fold: will women sign up voluntarily (if in fact registration is not “automatic”), is “automatic” registration based on other databases feasible, and can registration or a draft – for men and/or women – even be enforced.

When I was invited to testify before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) in 2019, I told them that “any proposal that includes a compulsory element is a naïve fantasy unless it includes a credible enforcement plan and budget… Women will be more likely to resist being forced into the military than men have been, and more people will support them in their resistance.”

Antiwar feminists have long identified militarism and war with patriarchy, and women have been an important part of movements against the draft even when only men were being drafted. At its national convention in 2022, the National Organization for Women adopted a resolution which “calls for an end to mandatory Selective Service registration” and supports the Selective Service Repeal Act of 2021.

The sole purpose of the Selective Service database is to enable prompt, provable delivery of induction notices to individuals selected by lottery, if and when Congress activates a draft. Provable delivery by certified letter or personal service, not by email or phone, is necessary to provide evidence of receipt sufficient to prove to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that failure to report for induction was “knowing and willful” – an element of any criminal violation of the Military Selective Service Act.

I was one of only twenty people prosecuted in the 1980s for openly refusing to register for the draft. Our public statements were used to prove that our refusal was “knowing and willful.” Non-registrants would learn from our show trials that there was safety in silence as well as safety in numbers.

Compliance has continued to fall, and enforcement of the registration requirement was abandoned in 1988. As a result the Selective Service database is so inaccurate and incomplete that it would be “less than useless” for an actual draft, as Dr. Bernard Rosker, the former Director of the Selective Service System, testified to the NCMNPS.

Men are currently required not only to register when they turn 18, but also to report to the Selective Service System, within ten days, every time they change their address until they reach age 26.

“Absolutely nobody” tells the Selective Service System when they move, as the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee noted in his statement opening a hearing with members of the NCMNPS in 2021. Most induction notices would either be returned as undeliverable or delivered to registrants’ parents at addresses where registrants no longer live. And no doubt many parents, as I pointed out to the NCMNPS, would destroy an induction notice to protect their child against being drafted.

The Selective Service database does not include many young men who don’t register voluntarily, especially in states such as California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, which don’t require registration with Selective Service as a condition of obtaining a driver’s license. But laws in other states that automatically register drivers with the Selective Service System produce the opposite error of over-inclusion.

For example, not all driver’s license holders are eligible to be drafted. Foreign students and H-1 visa holders, many of whom are draft age, are considered “non-immigrants” who are neither eligible to be drafted nor required or permitted to register. Registering all applicants for driver’s licenses in some states has produced a list with hundreds of thousands of draft-ineligible non-immigrants who could legally ignore any induction notice.

“Automatic” registration sounds seductively simple. In practice, trying to base Selective Service registration on other existing federal databases would be a recipe for an even greater fiasco.

Aggregating and matching data collected for unrelated purposes and maintained in different formats is hard. The track record of large federal information technology projects is poor.

The bill that has passed the House would grant the Selective Service System unprecedented authority to issue regulations requiring any other federal agency or entity to hand over, in bulk, any records that might identify or locate potential draftees.

At a minimum, this would need to include Social Security and IRS records. Immigration and visa records would also need to be matched and parsed by Selective Service to separate draft-eligible immigrants from draft-ineligible non-immigrants. Still, the resulting list would have out-of-date addresses for many potential draftees.

In the U.S., unlike some other countries, only individuals subject to Selective Service registration or under court supervision after being convicted of a crime are required to report to any government agency each time they change their address.

The NCMNPS studied the option of “passive” registration for a draft based on other existing databases, but eventually ruled this out as an option. A memo from the NCMNPS research staff, released in response to one of my Freedom Of Information Act requests after the NCMNPS disbanded, concluded that no other federal agency even tries to include up-to-date addresses for all U.S. residents in its records.

Only those who were assigned male at birth are eligible to be drafted or required to register with the Selective Service System. But no current Federal database reliably indicates sex as assigned at birth.

Individuals can self-select their preferred gender marker – “M”, “F”, or “X” – to be used on U.S. passports and Social Security records, without regard for sex as assigned at birth. The same is true of driver’s licenses in California, and of records kept by a growing number of other states and foreign countries. Births are recorded with state and local offices, not federal agencies. No state or federal agency has copies of birth certificates for those born abroad.

Therefore, trying to determine who is, and who is not, required to register would lead to a gender-judging quagmire.

The perceived availability of a draft enables planning for unlimited wars, without having to worry about whether people will be willing to fight them. But it’s long past time, as I told the NCMNPS, to recognize that – like it or not – draft registration has failed. A draft is not a viable policy option to rely on in military planning, even as a fallback. Rather than making futile attempts to salvage, much less expand, the current failed registration system, Congress should repeal the Military Selective Service Act.

Edward Hasbrouck is the editor and publisher of Resisters.info, the most comprehensive independent source of information about the draft and draft registration in the U.S. since 1980. He was convicted and imprisoned for 4 1/2 months in 1983-1984 for willful refusal to submit to registration with the Selective Service System. He is a member of the War Resisters League and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

 

Another American War in the Middle East?

by Juan Cole and Tom Engelhardt Posted onJuly 04, 2024

Originally appeared at TomDispatch.

Though I was never in the U.S. military, my life experience has been American wars, wars, wars, and more wars. I was born during World War II. I was in grade school when the Korean War took place. I still have a faint memory of a photo of a gleaming American soldier’s face from that unsettled conflict. (It might have been on the cover of LIFE magazine.) I was a protesting youth in the disastrous Vietnam War years. And that was just the beginning. Skipping over events like the invasions of Panama and Grenada and the first Gulf War of the 1990s, in my years running TomDispatch, I’ve dealt with a seemingly never-ending series of all-American wars (which, by the way, never – no, never – turn out “successfully”). From Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa, America’s post-9/11 war on terror proved to be a genuine hell on Earth. If you don’t believe me, just check out the figures on deaths, direct and indirect, from those decades of horror that the invaluable Costs of War Project has put together.

And what lessons have been drawn from all of that? Only that this country should pour ever more staggering sums into a Pentagon budget that’s already larger than those of the next nine countries combined and still rising, support military bases across the planet, and… well, you get the idea, right?

And it never really ends, does it? In fact, as Tomdispatch regular Juan Cole, creator of the must-read Informed Comment website, points out today, this country could well be on the verge of – yes! – yet another conflict from hell, this one in – would you even believe it? – the Red Sea area. After all, almost unnoticed here, American planes have been unsuccessfully striking at the Houthi rebels in Yemen for months now, while American naval ships continue to patrol that sea (as the disaster in Gaza only grows ever worse). As retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian Bill Astore wrote recently at his Bracing Views substack, “How would I feel as a Navy officer covering the flanks of Israel so that the IDF [the Israeli military] can concentrate its forces in murderous assaults on Gaza?” How, indeed? It’s possible that, if things go as they so often have in these years, all too many American naval officers will indeed find out. Now, let Cole take you into another world about which most Americans know next to nothing where, in the months to come, we might indeed find ourselves at war. ~ Tom Engelhardt

---

Turning the Red Sea Redder

Will America’s Backing for Israel’s War in Gaza Torch the Red Sea Region Too?

by Juan Cole

In mid-June, the Associated Press announced that the U.S. Navy had been engaged in the most intense naval combat since the end of World War II, which surely would come as a surprise to most Americans. This time, the fighting isn’t taking place in the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans but in the Red Sea and the adversary is Yemen’s – yes, Yemen’s! – Shiite party-militia, the Helpers of God (Ansar Allah), often known, thanks to their leading clan, as the Houthis. They are supporting the Palestinians of Gaza against the Israeli campaign of total war on that small enclave, while, in recent months, they have faced repeated air strikes from American planes and have responded by, among other things, attacking an American aircraft carrier and other ships off their coast. Their weapons of choice are rockets, drones, small boats rigged with explosives, and – a first! – anti-ship ballistic missiles with which they have targeted Red Sea shipping. The Houthis see the U.S. Navy as part of the Israeli war effort.

The Gate of Lamentation

In a sense, it couldn’t be more remarkable, historically speaking. Modest numbers of Yemenis have managed to launch a challenge to the prevailing world order, despite being poor, weak, and brown, attributes that usually make people invisible to the American establishment. One all-too-modern asset the Houthis have is the emergence of micro-weaponry in our world — small drones and rockets that, at the moment, can’t be easily wiped out even by the sophisticated armaments of the U.S. Navy.

Another is geographical. The Houthis command the Tihamah coastal plain, the eastern littoral of the Red Sea. It stretches from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (the entry point to that sea from the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean) to the Suez Canal, which connects the shipping in those waters to the Mediterranean, and so to Europe. The Bab el-Mandeb, known for being treacherous to navigate even in the most peaceable of times, is said to mean “the Gate of Lamentation,” and these days, it’s living up to its name. Keep in mind that 10% of world seaborne trade flows through the Suez Canal and, perhaps even more importantly, 12% of the world’s energy supplies.

What we might call the Battle of the Tihamah has already lasted seven months and, surprisingly enough, given the opponents, its outcome remains in doubt. The Associated Press quotes Brian Clark, a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute and a former Navy submariner, as expressing concerns that the Houthis are on the verge of penetrating American naval defenses with their missiles, raising the possibility that they could inflict significant damage on a U.S. destroyer or even an aircraft carrier. Repeated American and British air strikes against suspected Houthi weapons sites in and around the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, have so far failed to halt the war on shipping. Even high-tech American Reaper drones are no longer assured of dominating Middle Eastern airspace since the Houthis have shot down four of those $30 million weapons so far.

Idling the Suez Canal

Given how little Americans generally know about Yemen, some historical background is perhaps in order. The Houthi movement has its roots in Zaydi Shiism, which took hold in northern Yemen in the 890s. (Yes, the 890s, not the 1890s!). Today’s Zaydis are upset by Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Last December, large crowds of them came out in the Zaydi stronghold of Saadeh and other northern Yemeni towns to protest Israel’s intensive bombing of that 25-mile strip of land. Waving Yemeni and Palestinian flags, they pledged support against “the armies of tyranny,” shouting, “We closed Bab el-Mandeb, O Zionist, do not approach!” and “The Yemeni response is legitimate, and the Red Sea is forbidden!”

The Houthis have indeed struck commercial container ships in the Red Sea, even seizing one, the Galaxy Leader (which, believe it or not, they turned into a tourist attraction). They also sank two cargo ships, killing three crew members. Although they maintain that they are only hitting Israeli-owned vessels, most of their attacks have, in fact, targeted the vessels of unrelated third parties like Greece. Their strikes have, however, caused a major disruption in world trade.

The Houthis have also fired large numbers of ballistic missiles at the Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat, idling it since November. Some five percent of Israel’s imports once arrived through Eilat. Now, such trade has been rerouted to Mediterranean ports at a distinctly higher cost, while southern Israel’s economy has taken a big hit. Gideon Golber, the CEO of the Port of Eilat, demanded that the United States intervene. And Israel is anything but the only country to suffer from such attacks. Ports such as Massawa, Port Sudan, and Berbera in the Horn of Africa have also become ghost towns, while the traffic through the Suez Canal is now so light that Egypt, which collects transit tolls, is suffering significant economic damage.

In addition, those Houthi strikes, local as they may seem, have had an impact on global supply chains. Insurance costs have risen radically, with crushing war-risk premiums. Ocean container ship rates surged this spring, as companies involved in the trade between Asia and Europe have been forced to avoid the Suez Canal and instead take a far longer route around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Atlantic coast of Africa. Shanghai to Rotterdam rates skyrocketed from $1,452 for a 40-foot container in July of last year to $5,270 in late May 2024.

Revolutionary Shiite Islam

The present militia commander in Yemen, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, considers himself part of a Shiite revolutionary tradition that goes back a long, long way. So, to truly grasp the dangers of the moment for the U.S. Navy in the Red Sea, it makes sense, believe it or not, to momentarily journey deep into history.

Last year, al-Houthi observed the death in battle of the founder of his tradition, Zayd Ibn Ali, in the year 740. His “movement, renaissance, jihad, and martyrdom,” he said, “made a great contribution to the continuity of the authentic Islam of Muhammad… He faced tyranny and had an impact on instituting change.”

A generation of Americans involved in the Middle East has come to understand that there are two major branches of Islam, the Shiites and the Sunnis. Neither is monolithic, with each branch having several denominations. The division between the two goes back to questions about the succession to the Prophet Muhammad (who died in 632). One faction of early believers invested leadership in senior disciples of the Prophet from his Quraysh clan. Over the centuries, these became the Sunnis.

Another faction, which gradually evolved into the Shiites, favored Muhammad’s son-in-law and first cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Seeking a dynastic succession, they invested leadership in Ali’s descendants through the Prophet’s daughter Fatimah. Most Shiites historically acknowledge 12 Imams or leaders of the dynasty. The Zaydis, however, accepted only five early Imams.

Unlike the Shiites of Iran and Iraq, Yemen’s Zaydis never had ayatollahs. Nor did they curse Sunnis, with whom they often had good relations. The Zaydi branch of Shiism in Yemen was led by court judges or qadis, typically hailing from a caste of putative descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, the Sayyids or Sadah, who emerged as mediators in tribal feuds. Critics of today’s Helpers of God government in North Yemen allege that, despite its populist rhetoric, it is dominated by a handful of clans who consider themselves descendants of the Prophet, including the Houthis themselves.

Saudi Hegemony and the Rise of the Houthis

Forms of Arab nationalism and a rhetoric of anti-imperialism are anything but new in Yemen. After World War II, with European empires weakened, a desire for independence swept the Global South. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt emerged as the nationalist leader who finally kicked the British out of his country, inspiring so many others in the region. Egyptian-backed young officers in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, staged a coup in 1962 against a hidebound theocratic leader who had long kept the country in a state of isolation. In the process, they drew it into a civil war between republican nationalists and royalists. Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all backed the royalists, but some 100,000 crack Egyptian troops won the day for the young officers before withdrawing in 1970.

In 1978, Colonel Ali Abdallah Saleh, a politician in North Yemen, launched an internal coup within the officer corps there and appointed himself president for life. His corrupt government, putatively a secular Arab nationalist one, would receive billions of dollars from the fundamentalist royalists of Saudi Arabia.

The Helpers of God party militia, or the Houthis, arose among the Zaydi Shiites of northern Yemen in the 1990s as a backlash against the inroads that neighboring, wealthy Wahhabi Saudi Arabia had made. That country’s Wahhabism had arisen as a puritan reform of Sunnism in the eighteenth century. Saleh allowed its missionaries to proselytize the Shiite Zaydis, provoking the anger of the latter.

Under the influence of the anti-Saudi Houthi family, Zaydi militiamen based in Saadeh in Yemen’s hardscrabble north turned radical, coming into frequent conflict with the Yemeni army. When the Arab Spring youth revolt overthrew Saleh in 2012, the Houthis’ political wing sought influence in the new government. But in September 2014, impatient with an interminable reform process aimed at drafting a new constitution and electing a new parliament, the Houthis marched into the capital, Sanaa, and took it over. Behind the scenes, they had allied with the deposed president, Saleh, before his death, and the army faction still loyal to him, which gave them access to billions of dollars in American-supplied weaponry. By early 2015, the Houthis had expelled Saleh’s successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, from the capital and made an unsuccessful bid to take over all of Yemen from Saadeh in the north to Aden in the south.

Meanwhile, their dominance of North Yemen proved unacceptable to the Saudis and the allied United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose secular potentate, Mohammed Bin Zayed, had long despised such Islamic political movements. As a result, those two countries launched an air war against the Helpers of God in the spring of 2015. The ruinous Seven Years War that followed would displace millions and endanger even more millions with food insecurity and disease. It failed, however, to dislodge the Helpers of God and, by 2022, a truce was finally agreed to. Perhaps thanks to that painful experience, the Saudis have declined to join the Americans this year in the Battle of Tihamah. And in some fashion, the Houthis’ experience of the intensive aerial bombing tactics of Saudi Arabia and the UAE years ago undoubtedly left them with particular sympathy for the Palestinians under incessant Israeli air assault in Gaza.

An Alliance of Resistance

Both the Saudis and the Emiratis saw the Houthis as a mere cat’s paw for Iran. Although the Iranians did indeed offer them some support, this was a distinct misreading of the relationship between Sanaa and Tehran. At the very least, Iranian aid was dwarfed by the billions of dollars in weaponry Washington provided to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in those years.

In reality, the Houthis are homegrown Yemeni nationalists, having even attracted some Sunni tribes into their coalition. Still, their current leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, has clearly been influenced by aspects of Iran’s political radicalism and chants “death to America” and “death to Israel” just the way Iran’s clerical leader Ali Khamenei does. Like the regime in Iran, the Houthi government has no respect for domestic human rights or dissent. Although there is no command line from Tehran to Sanaa, the Houthis do loosely form part of Iran’s “alliance of resistance” against Israel and the United States. However, it’s not clear that Iran, closely allied with Russia and China and covertly exporting its U.S.-sanctioned petroleum to China, ever wanted international shipping costs to double, thanks to the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, something which hurts all three of those countries.

Despite the Houthi appeal to religious identity, it’s also mainly a movement of Arab nationalists, which helps to explain its deep sympathy for the Sunni Palestinians as fellow Arabs. In an interview at the beginning of June, Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi condemned Israel for its genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and its targeting of the West Bank and Palestinian East Jerusalem. He similarly denounced Washington as an imperial partner of Israel and an enabler of its crimes, as well as a hypocrite in theoretically promoting respect for the rule of law, while dismissing or even threatening international courts and supporting crackdowns at American colleges and universities when their students protested Israeli policies. He also praised the resistance of the vaguely allied forces of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shiite militias. In the process, he vowed that however intense American (and British) air attacks on Yemen became, he and his movement would never back down from their support of the Palestinian people.

At the moment, the situation in the Red Sea remains militarily muted, but it has the potential to become one of the most dangerous in the world, rivaling those in Ukraine and Taiwan. In the meantime, it remains a drag on the global economy, while helping to contribute to stubborn inflation and supply-chain problems.

Significant Houthi damage to a U.S. naval vessel at any point in the future could plunge Washington into warlike acts that might risk direct conflict with Iran. President Joe Biden could, of course, lower the temperature by moving far more strongly to end Israel’s total war on Gaza, an intolerable affront to norms of international humanitarian law that only strengthens the vigilantism of the Houthis and their like. While the ongoing Israeli assault should be ended to prevent further death and looming mass starvation in Gaza, it should also be ended to forestall yet another ruinous American war in the Middle East.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).

Copyright 2024 Juan Cole

 Fanon Goes to Palestine

by Randy Shields / July 4th, 2024

Decolonization is always a violent event.
– Frantz Fanon

From Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, I substituted Palestine and Palestinians for “colonized” and Israel and Israelis for “colonizers.”

For the Palestinians, to be a moralist quite plainly means silencing the arrogance of the Israelis, breaking (their) spiral of violence, in a word ejecting them from the picture. (page 9)

The Israelis are no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared. (page 9) (Me: it’s already happening as thousands of Israelis in the past nine months have gone back to their ancient homelands of Rockaway and Woodland Hills.)

Israel only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat. Israel’s naked violence only gives in when confronted with greater violence. (page 23) (Me: actually it doesn’t take nearly as much as Hezbollah helped Israel discover in 2006.)

Palestinians have had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now they decide to express themselves with force. In fact the Israelis have always shown them the path they should follow to liberation. (page 42)

Palestinians register the enormous gaps left in their ranks as a kind of necessary evil. Since they have decided to respond with violence, they admit the consequences. (page 50)

The work of the Israelis is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the Palestinians. The work of Palestinians is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the Israelis. (page 50) (Me: actually years ago Hamas accepted a “hudna,” a long-term truce based on the 1967 borders.)

(Me: actually Palestinians are much better people than Israelis.)

Violence is a cleansing force. It rids Palestinians of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence. (page 51) (Me: Palestinians’ 2018-2019 Gandhian non-violent Great March of Return was met with Israeli snipers killing 223 and injuring over 9,000 others.)

Whatever gains the Palestinians make through armed or political struggle, they are not the result of Israel’s good will or goodness of heart but to the fact that it can no longer postpone such concessions. (page 92)

Toward the end of The Wretched of Earth, Fanon details the diabolical tortures inflicted on Algerians (many by doctors, of course) and elaborate brainwashing techniques utilized by the French. For this paragraph on brainwashing, there’s no need to even substitute Palestine and Palestinians for Algeria and Algerians:

Algeria is not a nation, has never been a nation, and never will be. There is no such thing as the ‘Algerian people.’ Algerian patriotism is devoid of meaning. (page 214)

The world must unite to defeat Israel. The openly ethno-supremacist and genocidal actions and comments by Israel and its supporters are what happens when Israeli war crimes and human rights violations are allowed to fester for over seven decades. Israel is as if the Nazis were allowed to survive and continue their genocidal ways. Israel must be delivered its Stalingrad.

Randy Shields just released second book is Barackodile Tears: Obitchuaries on the Obama Years. He is also the author of Some Fantastic Place: Essays on Non-humans and Yahoomans. He can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. Read other articles by Randy, or visit Randy's website.

Refusing the Language of Silence

The colonial application of digital technologies spurs Palestinian resistance

by Omar Zahzah / July 4th, 2024

It’s an increasingly familiar contradiction: digital platforms that position themselves as an accessible alternative to corporate media emerge as new censors in their own right. Social media and the internet make it possible to disseminate material that would otherwise have been suppressed, thereby helping to bring alternative conversations to the fore of mainstream awareness. And yet, for all of their hype and propaganda, the parent companies of these popular digital platforms are no less dedicated to the preservation of an imperialist status quo than their institutional predecessors, with all of the attendant silencing and repression this entails.

Big Tech’s handling of content critical of the Zionist state’s latest genocide of Palestinians in Gaza—described by former United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunnes as “the first genocide in the history of humanity that is livestreamed on television”—reveals that silencing is the norm. In this way, Big Tech companies reinforce Israeli settler colonialism through systemic anti-Palestinian policies. I analyze the meeting point between Big Tech and Zionist oppression of Palestinians as digital/settler-colonialism.

An Egregious Culprit

Facebook acquired Instagram on April 9, 2012, and rebranded itself as Meta on October 28, 2021. In addition to these other changes, the company has consistently worked to facilitate the censoring and repression of Palestinians on its platforms—often with deadly consequences. Israel relies on membership in WhatsApp groups as one of the data points for Lavender, the AI system it uses to generate “kill lists” of Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are not required to verify the accuracy of the “suspects” generated by the AI program, and make a point of bombing them when they are at home with their families. Another AI program, insidiously named “Where’s Daddy?,” helps the IOF track Palestinians targeted for assassination to see when they’re at home. As blogger, software engineer, and Tech for Palestine co-founder Paul Biggar notes, the fact that WhatsApp appears to be providing the IOF with metadata about its users’ groups means that Meta, the parent company of the messaging app, is not only lying about its promise of security but facilitating genocide.

This complicity in genocide has also assumed other, sometimes more subtle guises, including systematic erasure of support for Palestine from Meta’s platforms. On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian American software engineer, launched a lawsuit against Meta when the company fired him after he used his expertise to investigate whether it was censoring Palestinian content creators. Among Hamad’s discoveries was that Instagram (owned by Meta) prevented the account of Motaz Azaiza, a popular Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza, from being recommended based on a false categorization of a video showing the leveling of a building in Gaza as pornography. Improper flagging based on automation is one of the key mechanisms by which pro-Palestine content is systematically removed from Meta’s platforms.

On February 8, 2024, The Intercept reported that Meta was considering a policy change that would have disastrous implications for digital advocacy for Palestine: identifying the term “Zionist” as a proxy for “Jew/Jewish” for content moderation purposes, a move that would effectively ban anti-Zionist speech on its platforms, Instagram and Facebook.

The revelation came as a result of a January 30 email Meta sent to civil society organizations soliciting feedback. This email was subsequently shared with The Intercept. Sam Biddle, the reporter of The Intercept piece, notes that the email said Meta was reconsidering its policy “in light of content that users and stakeholders have recently reported,” but it did not share the stakeholders’ identities or give direct examples of the content in question. Seventy-three civil society organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, 7amleh, MPower Change, and Palestine Legal, issued an open letter to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to protest the potential policy change.

“[T]his move will prohibit Palestinians from sharing their daily experiences and histories with the world, be it a photo of the keys to their grandparent’s house lost when attacked by Zionist militias in 1948, or documentation and evidence of genocidal acts in Gaza over the past few months, authorized by the Israeli Cabinet,” the letter states.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2020, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) launched a global campaign entitled “Facebook, we need to talk” with thirty other organizations to pressure Meta not to categorize critical use of the term “Zionist” as a form of hate speech under its Community Standards. That campaign was prompted by a similar email revelation, and a petition in opposition to the potential policy change garnered over 14,500 signatures within the first twenty-four hours.

In May 2021, Biddle also reported that despite Facebook’s claims that the change was under consideration, the platform and its subsidiary, Instagram, had already been applying the policy to content moderation since at least 2019, eventually leading to an explosive wave of suppression of social media criticism of Israeli violence against Palestinians that included the looming expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli Occupation Forces’ brutalization of Palestinian worshippers in Al Aqsa mosque, and lethal bombardment of the Gaza strip in 2021.

Still Denied: Permission to Narrate

These 2021 waves of anti-Palestinian censorship across digital platforms prompted me to write an op-ed for Al Jazeera. I connected Palestinian History Professor Maha Nassar’s analysis of journalistic output related to Palestine over a fifty-year span to social media giants’ repression of Palestine. What Nassar found—thirty-six years after the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said declared that Palestinians had been denied “Permission to Narrate”—was that an overabundance of writing about Palestinians in corporate media outlets was belied by how infrequently Palestinians are offered the opportunity to speak fully about their own experiences. I argued that the social media censorship of Palestine was a direct continuation of this journalistic anti-Palestinian racism despite the pretext of and capacity for digital platforms to serve as an immediate and widely accessible corrective to the omissions of corporate media. Palestinians are doubly silenced by social media censorship, once again denied “Permission to Narrate.”

Before, the sole culprit was the corporate media. Today, it’s matched by Silicon Valley.

I identified this phenomenon as “digital apartheid.”

At the time, I assumed this would be a one-off piece. The wide-scale social media censorship of Palestine in 2021 certainly seemed to be an escalation, but it also came on the cusp of what felt like a global narrative shift in the Palestinian struggle. Savvy social media use by Palestinians resisting displacement from Sheikh Jarrah made Palestinian oppression legible in seemingly unprecedented ways, which in turn helped promote increased inclusion of Palestinian voices and perspectives within corporate media outlets such as CNN.

So when Big Tech companies such as Meta tried to backpedal by ramping up censorship as Israel increased its colonial violence, it felt like a desperation born of unsustainability. Yes, Big Tech was erasing Palestinian voices, taking the baton from corporate media in an astoundingly egregious fashion, but this had to be temporary. Surely, the increased support for the Palestinian struggle born of a paradigm-shifting moment would eventually compel social media giants to desist.

To state the obvious, this was not the case, and what I thought would be a one-time topic became the focus of repeated freelance journalistic output. I wrote articles for Mondoweiss and The Electronic Intifada about various forms of digital repression, from blacklisting and harassment by online Zionist outfits such as Stopantisemitism.org and their affiliate social media accounts to deletion and censorship of Palestinian content on platforms like Meta and X (which was still Twitter at the time the bulk of these pieces were written).

It became all too clear that what had at first seemed like an escalation was now routine, as social media giants continued to heavily repress Palestinian voices, often around particular flashpoints such as Israeli bombardments of the Gaza strip—the so-called “mowing of the lawn.” Increasingly impressed by how digital repression of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine content on social media platforms acts as an extension of Israel’s lethal colonial violence and racism against Palestinians, I started to think that a book about digital repression of Palestine and Palestinians could be a timely contribution to the critical trend towards analysis of how Big Tech reinforces systems of structural oppression. As writers, we approach broad topics with particular fascination, even obsession. Given my own interest in Big Tech’s role in suppressing the very narrative shifts on Palestine it inadvertently served to operationalize, as well as the potential friction between the imperially derived norms of censoriousness that govern corporate media and newer digital platforms, the vast bulk of my work focused on social media.

To be sure, there is no shortage of analysis about tech repression of Palestinians, by writers and academics like Jonathan Cook, Anthony Lowenstein, Mona Shtaya, Nadim Nashif, and Miriyam Auoragh (to name but a few). It is also crucial to center the necessary advocacy by organizations such as the aforementioned 7amleh, which is leading the charge to protect Palestinian digital rights, and the #NoTechforApartheid campaign. But I felt that a book about this topic published in a space not exclusively dedicated to Palestine could accomplish the modest task of helping affirm the relevance of digital repression of Palestinians and their allies to broader conversations about how, for all of its pretensions, Big Tech is a central cog within rather than a corrective to different systems of oppression and extraction. Indeed, as critics of technofeudalism and surveillance capitalism note, Big Tech’s predilection for exploitation arises from how it works within capitalism rather than displacing it outright.

Refusing the Language of Silence

So, on October 13, 2022, I did something that many writers do: I pitched a book of critical essays based on these articles about the digital repression of Palestine to a press. The pitch for Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle was accepted by The Censored Press and its partner, Seven Stories Press, in just over a month’s time.

Then, just a few days shy of one year later, Israel began its current genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Suddenly, putting words together felt both impossible and vampiric.

How could I think of making language in the face of the unspeakable?

Something in myself closed off. For the next few months, I moved with the sureness of abandonment. I attended demonstrations, co-organized events, planned campaigns, and continued to think of ways to keep Palestine in the classroom. But a book was the last thing on my mind. In fact, for a time, I couldn’t even write at all. Editors commissioned pieces from me, but all I could do was watch the cursor blink as the emails piled up and then stopped altogether after the solicitors finally learned the language of my silence.

The epiphany is a standard (if at times hackneyed) component of narratives. But fiction and experience share a dialectical relationship. Each one helps us make sense of the other.

Several important developments helped inspire a shift in my consciousness.

For one thing, I could never really escape from the task at hand, even as I did my best to hide. Lying in bed with no light but the dim blue glow of the phone to view recordings of atrocity upon atrocity, then digital restriction or outright deletion of the material in question, I realized that I was a near-constant witness to the very dynamics about which I had been trying to avoid writing.

Being asked to give feedback on brilliant writing by comrades in Palestine reminded me that writing and analysis play a particular role in liberation struggles.

I eventually came to realize that in addition to the immeasurable toll of physical destruction and extermination, the Zionist state’s latest genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is intended to inspire fear and surrender. Therefore, it is incumbent upon all people of conscience to use their platforms to advocate for Palestinian liberation and resist genocide. I have always identified as a writer, first and foremost. I realized that Terms of Servitude is a unique platform I have at my disposal to help advance this goal, however modestly.

And lastly, as a vast wave of criminalization of support for Palestine broke out across the United States, digital repression was once more at an all-time high. The egregiousness of Meta’s potential policy change, which prioritizes the protection of a colonial ideology under hate-speech frameworks while colonized Palestinians are undergoing genocide, is sharpened when we consider the ways that the company has already been enabling the Israeli state’s latest genocidal campaign: For instance, as reported by Zeinab Ismail for SMEX, Meta updated its algorithms following October 7 to hide comments from Palestine, ensuring that comments from Palestinians with a minimum 25 percent probability rating for containing “offensive” content were flagged, while the number was set to 80 percent for all other users.

Digital/Settler-Colonialism at Work

After October 7, my previous use of the term digital apartheid no longer felt adequate. Apartheid is one aspect of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, not the totality. Apartheid is an instrument of settler colonialism. Zionist-aligned tech suppression serves to alienate Palestinians from the digital sphere, but simply attributing this discrimination to “apartheid” obscures the full scope of violence that the Zionist enterprise poses to Palestinians. The term settler colonialism incorporates apartheid as part of a broader apparatus of violence, including land theft, elimination, and, as we continue to see play out in real-time, genocide. What Palestinians are up against is not (only) “digital apartheid” but a colonial application of digital technologies.

In 1976, Herbert Schiller explored how communications technologies function as a new weapon of Western imperialism, allowing a specific cadre of US governmental and corporate elites to use the global propagation of broadcast systems and programming as a means of securing US hegemony. Recalling the historical connection between the US government, military, and corporate capitalist interests and the development of the internet, Schiller’s insights are directly applicable to contemporary digital systems.

In 2019, Michael Kwet categorized the actions of Big Tech companies as “digital colonialism.” Using South Africa as a case study, Kwet compared the extractive attitude of tech companies that provided technology and internet access to South African schools for the purposes of enacting surveillance and data mining to the colonial corporatism of the Dutch East India Company. By “digital colonialism,” Kwet was referring to how Big Tech is one contemporary means by which counter-democratic US corporations engage in extractive processes against the rest of the world to shore up profits and ensure their dominance.

Kawsar Ali used the term “digital settler colonialism” to refer to “how the Internet can become a tool to decide who does and does not belong and extend settler violence online and offline” (p8). My framework combines these insights to explain how the digital dimensions of the Palestinian liberation struggle reflect a meeting point of colonial and settler-colonial designs.

I use the term digital/settler-colonialism to categorize this dynamic. I realize the phrase is far from perfect. For one thing, it’s rather indecorous. Frankly, it’s clunky.

Nevertheless, I believe its aesthetic shortcomings are compensated for by analytical precision, for digital/settler-colonialism captures the convergence of US Big Tech digital colonialism and Israeli settler colonialism. In doing so, it foregrounds the aggregate nature of the material conditions opposing Palestinian digital sovereignty.

Imagine a Venn diagram whose two spheres are digital colonialism and settler colonialism. Digital/settler-colonialism is the area formed where the two overlap.

Campaigns such as those opposing Meta’s prohibition on critical use of the term “Zionist” demonstrate the looming threat of digital/settler-colonialism at work. By applying public pressure to discourage tech moguls from implementing terms of service and community guidelines that mirror Israeli colonial and apartheid policy, these campaigns reflect the unique danger posed by corporate digital colonialism coming together with Israeli settler colonialism. But they also demonstrate how resisting digital/settler-colonialism can work by leveraging the potential friction between the imperatives of digital colonialism and settler colonialism. This approach echoes the framework of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, which prioritizes economic and political pressure as a means of ending Israeli colonial impunity and making investment in Israeli apartheid and military occupation too costly.

After all, while US tech companies are no friend to Palestinian liberation (not to mention any other freedom struggle), they’re also not a settler-colonial state dedicated to the elimination of an Indigenous people. They’re corporations driven first and foremost by the pursuit of unrestricted profits.

Granted, Israel has been deeply enmeshed in the tech world even as its tech sector has taken significant hits. The refinement of tech, particularly for purposes of rights deprivation, has granted the colonial state a unique global capital. For instance, though Israel is not a member of the imperialist North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a 2018 arrangement enables Israeli companies to sell weapons to NATO countries vis-à-vis the NATO Support and Procurement Agency. Writing in Electronic Intifada, David Cronin reports that Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems had procured new deals with NATO member countries since the start of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and that NATO itself had expressed considerable interest in increasing collaboration. NATO military committee chair Rob Bauer even voiced admiration for how the IOF’s Gaza division used robotics and AI to monitor what he referred to as “border crossings”—a euphemism, as Cronin rightly notes, for Israel’s corralling of colonized Palestinians into the world’s largest open-air prison and maintaining the inhumane blockade to which it has subjected Gaza since 2007. And despite claims to the contrary, Israel has long deployed Pegasus spyware, used by repressive regimes the world over to target activists and journalists, as a tool of digital diplomacy. Inseparable from Israel’s routinized and continuously refined surveillance of Palestinians, Pegasus has also been used to deliberately target Palestinian activists involved in human rights work. Predictably, NSO Group, the cyber-(in-)security company that developed Pegasus, is capitalizing on Israel’s genocide and engaging in various PR and lobbying efforts to rebrand itself, hoping to overturn the US government’s sanctioning of its product.

The central role tech plays in Israel’s competitive status and reputation is also bolstered by how, for all of their bluster about supporting free speech, Big Tech companies generally have a habit of maintaining cozy relationships with oppressive regimes. For all of these reasons, the overlap between Israeli colonial designs and Big Tech operations can be considerable. For example, as Paul Biggar observes regarding Meta, the company’s three most senior leaders have pronounced connections to the Israeli state. Guy Rosen, the Chief Information Security Officer who Biggar identifies as the “person most associated” with Meta’s “anti-‘anti-Zionism’” policies, is Israeli, lives in Tel Aviv, and served in the IOF’s infamous Unit 8200. Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave $125,000 to ZAKA, one of the organizations that fabricated and continues to spread the October 7 “mass rape” hoax. Sheryl Sandberg, former COO and current Meta board member, has been on tour spreading the very same propaganda. Biggar argues that these ties help explain the ease with which the IOF seems able to access WhatsApp metadata to slaughter Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately.

But a convergence model is helpful in two respects. First, it helps recenter complicity—tech companies don’t have to facilitate Israel’s settler colonialism; to do so is an active choice on their part. Furthermore, maximum profit and the genocide of Palestinians are two separate goals, even as they can often overlap through the economic incentivization of imperialist militarism. Thus, at least in theory, it is possible to undermine digital/settler-colonialism by refining the potential instability between digital colonialism and settler colonialism by making the operation of the former process too costly when it facilitates the latter.

Resisting Digital/Settler-Colonialism

Social media has taken on an even more outsized role in this latest iteration of Zionist genocide. Palestinian journalists from Gaza use it to document genocide in real-time—even as they are directly targeted by Israel and subjected to frequent communications blackouts. Younger generations use it to find and share information about Palestine that is otherwise hidden by the corporate media. And, recalling Franz Fanon’s analysis of how the Algerian Liberation Front repurposed the radio, which began as an instrument of French colonial domination, in order to affirm dedication to the Algerian revolution, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni resistance fighters use social media to strike a powerful blow to the image of Israeli and US military impunity.

Of course, consciousness-raising has its limits. Western governments remain unwilling to meaningfully reverse support for Israel despite a vast trove of digital and analog documentation (not to mention the recent ruling by the International Court of Justice). This reflects the degree to which these governments’ functioning is predicated upon the dehumanization of Palestinians, an awareness powerfully captured by Steven Salaita’s description of “scrolling through genocide.”

But the reconfiguration of the conventions and possibilities of communication posed by Big Tech hegemony means that digital spaces remain a central avenue of global interconnection. As such, Palestinian access to social media and the internet continues to be obstructed by the powerful. And resisting digital/setter-colonialism in pursuit of Palestinian liberation remains a paramount undertaking.

First published at Project Censored.

Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, organizer, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University. Omar’s book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle, is forthcoming from The Censored Press, in partnership with Seven Stories Press, in fall 2025. Read other articles by Omar.