Beyond Agent vs. Instrument: The Neo-Coloniality of Drones in Contemporary Warfare

Niklas Balbon

Aug 3 2022 •

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On the 7th of December 2021, a new coalition government in Germany took office that contractually agreed on equipping the German military with armed drones (Koalitionsvertrag 2021: 149). To people familiar with drone programs of countries like the US, this might not seem like a newsworthy decision. However, given the year-long—and in part bitterly held—debate around the acquisition of armed drones in Germany (Franke 2021), it underscores an important point: armed drones are a highly contested technology. In fact, evaluations of drones range all the way from the most humane and accurate mode of warfare (Strawser 2012) to “inherently colonialist technologies” (Gusterson 2016: 149). While far away from unanimity, there has been a recent shift in scholarship on drones, which increasingly investigates its ties to neo-colonialism (Shaw 2016; Gusterson 2016; Parks 2016; Vasko 2013; Akther 2019; Espinoza 2018). However, literature on the coloniality of drones remains unspecific on the question of whether drones should be seen as a tool or as a driver of neo-colonialism. For instance, Akther identifies drones as “the latest technological manifestation of a much older logic of state power” (Akther 2019: 69), which implies an instrumentalist view. In contrast, other scholars argue that the development of drones has influenced our understanding of what constitutes legitimate warfare (McDonald 2017: 21), thus offering a substantivist view on technology. These diverging claims raise a fundamental question about the relationship between military technology and neo-colonialism: can military technology be seen as more than a mere tool to achieve neo-colonial ambitions?

To answer this question, I conduct a case study on drone technology, which has been discussed as an instance of the intersection of neo-colonialism and technology. The case study design is fruitful because it allows for a high degree of detail and contextualization (Gerring 2007: 103) while granting the possibility to test the theories (Muno 2009: 119) of instrumentalism and substantivism. As I will show, neo-colonial theory presupposes an instrumental character of the means through which colonial relationships are being maintained. Accordingly, drones can be seen as instruments of neo-colonialism, as they give the Global North new means to assert necropower, (re)create peripheries of insecurity and engage in social policing and ordering. However, the potential for instrumentalization of drones should not overshadow their own transformative character. As I will show, the development of drones has led to a discourse around unilateral, precise, and surgical drone warfare, which changed perceptions, policies, and interpretations of law on what constitutes legitimate warfare and intervention. Therefore, I argue that we should conceptualize drones both as instruments as well as drivers of neo-colonialism, thus challenging the dichotomy of instrumentalist and substantivist views on the nexus of neo-colonialism and technology.[1]

To make this case, I will start by reflecting upon the theoretical foundations of this essay (neo-colonialism, instrumentalism, substantivism, and agency) and by showcasing that neo-colonial theory implies an instrumental understanding of technology. This will be followed by investigating how drones can be used for neo-colonial purposes. Finally, I will illustrate the transformative character of drones and discuss its implications for our understanding of the relationship between technology and neo-colonialism.

The Continuation of Colonialism by Other Means

In 1965, Kwane Nkrumah introduced the concept of neo-colonialism as “imperialism in its final and perhaps most dangerous stage” (Nkrumah 1965: 1). For Nkrumah, colonial relationships between states did not end with the formal process of decolonization. Instead, a post-colonial state is “in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside” (Nkrumah 1965: 1). Accordingly, the transition from formal colonization to neo-colonialism only changes the means through which colonial power relations are maintained, but it did not end colonial aspirations of the Global North per se (Rahman et al. 2017: 9f.). In Nkrumah’s work, neo-colonial means are foremost of economic nature (Nkrumah 1965: 239ff.). In this tradition, scholars have pointed out a multitude of mechanisms through which the global north exerts influence on economic decision-making of post-colonial countries (Chang 2002: Stiglitz 2003). However, neo-colonial scholarship has also considered other means, including those of cultural, political, and militaristic nature (Uzoigwe 2019: 66). This is important to recognize as there is no a priori justification to focus the study of colonial continuities solely on economic mechanisms. Neo-colonialism can thus be understood as a regime of interconnected economic, political, and cultural mechanisms, through which colonial power relations are (re)constructed in a (formally) post-colonial age. Or to put it in Clausewitzian words: neo-colonialism is the continuation of colonialism by other means.

This understanding of neo-colonialism implies an instrumentalist view of the means through which (neo)colonial power relations are maintained. It assigns agency to the colonizing subjects while reducing the mechanisms through which colonial power is exerted to mere tools, thus offering a distinction between colonial aspirations and colonial capabilities. When looking at the intersection of neo-colonialism and military technology, the instrumentalist character of neo-colonial theory corresponds with instrumentalist views on the relationship between war and technology. Instrumentalist theory conceptualizes technology as a neutral tool, which can be used by actors to achieve a variety of ends (Bourne 2012: 142). This principle can be illustrated by the National Rifle Association in the United States, which argues that it is not the gun that harms people, but the person using the gun (Jones 1999: 70). In instrumentalist theory, technology is understood as “subservient to values established in other spheres i.e. politics and culture” (Jones 1999: 70), which means that technology as such is not involved in the construction of social norms on the use of violence. Rather, the use of technology is determined by socially constructed norms (Bourne 2012: 143). Despite their resonance in the literature (Jones 1999: 70), instrumentalist accounts of the relationship between war and technology do not remain uncontested. As hinted at in the introduction, they are challenged by substantivists (also known as deterministic) understandings of technology (Bourne 2012: 143). Substantivist approaches identify technology as a driving force of social change and thus war (Jones 1999: 108). Accordingly, substativist theory understands technology as more than just a mere tool and attributes technology with agency (Bourne 2012: 143).

As agency is a very contested term in the social sciences and in philosophy, it is worth taking a closer look at what the concept means. Understandings of individual agency range all the way from voluntarism, which sees society as the mere sum of decisions of autonomous individuals, granting them full agency; to determinism, which sees individual decision-making as solely determined by societal structures and norms, thus neglecting individual agency (Sibeon 1999: 139). Embarking from a social-constructivist perspective, I join deterministic theories in acknowledging the importance of social norms and structures in influencing the decision-making of individuals (March/Olsen 2004: 3; Dahrendorf 1965: 45f.). Nevertheless, we should not fall into a deterministic trap, thinking that this denies individuals any form of self-determined decision-making or agency (Weissmann 2020: 47). Additionally, as structures and norms are social constructs, individuals also possess agency in their (re)construction (Hess et al. 2018: 253). Therefore, I reject both a strictly voluntaristic as well as a deterministic view on agency. The identification of agency is further complicated by the question of whether material objects can possess agency, as for instance argued by Latour (2005), or if agency is exclusive to humans. Based on the understanding of agency introduced above, it is possible to conclude that the ability to make autonomous decisions should not be seen as a necessary condition for agency. Instead, it can be argued that by influencing the construction of social norms, even material objects can possess agency.

The understanding of agency introduced above corresponds with both instrumentalist and substantivist theories. From an instrumentalist perspective, it is possible to argue that agency lies exclusively with humans because they construct norms about the instrumentalization of technology. A substantivist perspective challenges this assumption by arguing that technology determines the construction of social norms and therefore deserves to be attributed with agency. In the following, I will examine both assumptions by looking at the nexus of neo-colonialism and drone technology.

New Methods for Old Games? Neo-Colonialism and Drone Technology

As argued above, the concept of neo-colonialism implies an instrumentalist interpretation of the means through which neo-colonial power relations are maintained (e.g. technology). Indeed, the literature on drone technology[2] offers accounts that support this claim. For instance, there is a growing amount of literature that ties drone technology to neo-colonial forms of necropolitics (Allinson 2015; Espinoza 2018; Qurratulen/Raza 2021; Wilcox 2017). Deriving from Foucault’s notion of biopolitics (Foucault 1976), Mbembe developed the concept of necropolitics to problematize how (colonial) states subordinate the lives of people they deem worthy to die, to people they deem worthy to live (Mbembe 2003). Accordingly, the “ultimate expression of sovereignty resides (…) in the power to dictate who may live and who may die” (Mbembe 2003: 11). Necropolitics are a decisive characteristic of colonial rule (Mbembe 2003: 18), which for example could be observed in the province of Punjab in colonial India, where the British colonizers terrorized and killed parts of the population to protect themselves and their colonial rule (Condos 2017). In Punjab, the British established a practice of ‘cannonading’, during which Indian rebels and individuals suspected of undermining the British colonial state were placed in front of a cannon and brutally killed (Condos 2017: 158).

However, as the example of drone technology shows, necropolitics is not exclusive to the age of formal colonization but can still be observed as tools of neo-colonialism today (Vasko 2013: 86). Espinoza argues that within the ‘global war on terror’, drones are used to identify and attack people that are deemed dangerous and thus subordinate to the national security of the west (Espinoza 2018: 383). Beyond targeted killings, this logic of protection is taken even further by so-called ‘signature strikes’—a version of drone warfare in which unknown individuals are identified and targeted by drones because they resemble characteristics similar to those of terrorists (McQuade 2021: 2). In a case study on drone warfare in the Afghan region of Uruzgan, Allinson shows how Afghan military-aged men are essentialized as “a threat that must be eliminated by death” (Allinson 2015: 126) and consequently met with lethal force. The similarities between the necropolitics during the time of formal colonialism and current necropolitical forms of drone warfare can therefore be seen as an instance of the neo-colonial instrumentalization of drone technology.

Necropolitics further manifest themselves through assigning the colonized others with spaces of insecurity, while creating spaces of security for colonizers (Mbembe 2003: 26ff). As pointed out by Fanon (1967), this practice of spatialization is an integral part of colonial endeavors that can also be observed in neo-colonial drone warfare (Akther 2019; Gregory 2017). With the help of drones, states can create neo-colonial spaces, where racialized groups are subject to surveillance and state violence (Akther 2019: 65). Drones are therefore constitutive for the construction of global peripheries that are subordinate to the security of the center, i.e. western nation-states (Akther 2019: 65). The resulting construction of socio-spatial inequalities between center and peripheries resembles practices observed during the formal age of colonialism and can thus be seen as another instance for the neo-colonial instrumentalization of drone technology.

A final example of the neo-colonial instrumentalization of drones can be seen in their use for social ordering and policing. This is important to recognize because the impact of drone warfare on civilians goes far beyond lethal violence (Cavallaro et al. 2012: 73ff.). In a case study on the effect of drones on civilians in Afghanistan, Edney-Browne found that drones have an ordering and policing effect on civilians in two ways. Firstly, populations that are aware of the possibility of them being surveilled by a drone at any given time, change their behavior by avoiding social gatherings and not leaving their houses at night (Edney-Browne 2019: 1942). This benefits western militaries as it makes civilians restrained from forming groups that could organize resistance (Edney-Browne 2019: 1349). Secondly, the possibility of signature strikes forces Afghans to consider their appearance to drone operators and self-police their behavior to avoid being identified as possible threats (Edney-Browne 2019: 1350)—a behavior similar to what could be observed during the time of colonial air policing in the early 20th century (Edney-Browne 2019: 1350).

In sum, the above-mentioned practices of necropolitics, peripherization and social policing and ordering provide evidence for an instrumentalist view on drone technology. As demonstrated, the phenomena per se are not new. Instead, drone technology provides new opportunities to pursue colonial ambitions. Nevertheless, this should not lead us to the conclusion that drones are mere instruments of neo-colonialism, as I will show below.

More Than Means to an End? Drones and the Construction of Norms

Despite their potential for instrumentalization, the transformative character of drones should not be overlooked. The development of drones has led to a discourse around so-called humane forms of warfare that are characterized by “efficiency, surgical precision, and minimal casualties” (Parks/Kaplan 2019: 4). This is important because through promoting the idea of ‘clean wars’ (McDonald 2017), drones have changed our collective perception of what forms of violence are deemed appropriate (Bode/Huelss 2018: 404f). and thus promoted neo-colonial intervention. To understand this normative shift, it is necessary to unpack how drones have influenced our perception, policies, and interpretations of law on the use of violence in international relations.

As pointed out by Chamayou, public opinion on the use of force in foreign policy is heavily shaped by the fear of losing their own troops (Chamayou 2013: 127f.). This makes the drone the optimal weapon for intervention as it removes troops from battlegrounds and eliminates any chance of reciprocity, leading to a ‘unilateralization’ of violence (Chamayou 2013: 13). Additionally, the alleged precision of drone technology allows governments to present drones as the solution to the problem of collateral damage (Espinoza 2018: 377). This is important because it seemingly increases the congruence of drone warfare with the liberal values of the western public (Agius 2017: 371). In conjuncture, these factors can be seen as constitutive for a normative liberalization of our perception of when the use of violence is deemed appropriate (Bode/Huelss 2018: 405). The translation of this normative shift into policy becomes visible when looking at the proliferation and the use of drones. For instance, the Obama administration had administered ten times more drone strikes than the previous Bush administration (Purkiss/Serle 2017), despite its seemingly more liberal stance on foreign policy. The change of policy is accompanied by a change in interpretations of international law. This was necessary because—be it for manned or unmanned weapons—international law requires justification for (violent) intervention in foreign countries (Hajjar 2017: 72ff). To describe the process of states re-interpreting international law to legalize their actions such as drone warfare, Hajjar has coined the term “state lawfare” (Hajjar 2017: 61). For instance, Israel and the United States have re-interpreted the right of self-defense to accommodate for conducting drone operations against non-state actors within countries that they have not been attacked by (Hajjar 2017: 64ff).

The abovementioned examples illustrate that drones pose transformative power regarding the construction of norms in warfare. But how does this tie to neo-colonialism? As explained in the previous section, drone warfare can be regarded as inherently neocolonial (i.e., necropolitics, peripherization, social policing). The transformative power of drones however questions assumptions that drones are only involved in neo-colonial power relations as instruments. Because drone technology causes a liberalization of norms, policies, and interpretations of law on warfare, it can be argued that drones do not merely execute, but also actively promote neocolonial violence. In other words: by inflicting normative changes on the use of violence, drones have contributed to a normalization of neo-colonial warfare. Therefore, they should be regarded both as an instrument and as a driver of neo-colonialism and attributed with agency. This offers valuable insights into the relationship between military technology and neo-colonialism in general: instead of thinking about technology and neo-colonialism in the dichotomous categories of instrumentalism and substantivism, we should embrace an approach that considers the co-constitutive relationship between the two. Both perspectives offer valuable insights into the relationship between neo-colonialism and technology and must not be seen as mutually exclusive. Simply put, military technology both executes and constitutes neo-colonialism.

Conclusion

By conducting a case study on drones, I have investigated the relationship between military technology and neo-colonialism and examined instrumentalist and substantivist theories on technology and war. The case study shows that the dichotomy between instrumentalism and substantivism is overly simplistic and cannot accurately capture the relationship between technology and neo-colonialism. Instead, I have argued that drones provide an example of military technology that executes and drives neocolonial power relations. These results are important as they underline that military technology, even (or especially) when described as humane and precise, can never be politically neutral. The multilayered relationship between military technology and neo-colonialism further indicates a fruitful avenue for future research. For instance, despite being touched upon above, the role of capitalism and the military industry remains under reflected. In this regard, the role of the drone industry is to promote the narrative of a ‘clean war’ to increase revenue from drone sales. Questions like this can help to better understand the multilayered entanglement of neo-colonialism and technology and should thus be investigated in future research.

Footnotes

[1] This technopolitical understanding of drones leads to a more nuanced analysis of multiple agencies involved in neocolonial drone warfare. From a critical perspective, this is crucial as it helps to assign responsibilities as well as to identify points for resistance and emancipation. Accordingly, I situate myself within the domain of critical scholarship, which – alongside knowledge production – regards emancipation as a fundamental scientific objective (Horkheimer 1992: 58; Fierke 2015: 180f.).

[2] As pointed out by Chamayou (2013: 13), drone technology encompasses a variety of remote-control devices that operate on land, in the sea, and in the air. In this essay, I restrict myself to the analysis of unmanned, airborne drones that can be used for surveillance and to apply lethal force through rockets.

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Further Reading on E-International Relations

The Meaning of US Drone Warfare in the War on Terror
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‘Drone Vision’: Precision Ethics Theory and the Royal Air Force’s use of Drones
The Coloniality of Gender and the Politics of Difference
The Use of “Remote” Warfare: A Strategy to Limit Loss and Responsibility
Do Advances in Synthetic Biology have the Potential to Transform the Future of Warfare?

FRANTZ FANON’S INSIGHTFUL ANALYSIS: 5 TRANSFORMATIVE LESSONS FROM ‘THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH’

IKRAAM SHARIF (AUTHOR), CHARLIE SØRENSEN (EDITOR)
November 22, 2023

Frantz Fanon examines the effects of colonialism in his book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (TWOFE) by reviewing the decolonisation process and global advancements in freedom. This book also emphasises how colonialism reduced the human dignity of those violently colonised and the clear need for a robust response to remove colonialism as well as its overall effect on the psyche of the people.

Frantz Fanon was a well-known author and scholar. He was born in 1925 and raised in Martinique’s French territory. Thus, his firsthand experiences with racism, colonialism, and the regal control of global powers directly influenced his commitment to the topic.

This book review discusses the varied concepts of colonialism, violence and psychology and the book’s relevance to society to summarise the book’s impact.


“In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are loved.”J.P Sartre & F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
The Dynamics of Violence and Decolonisation in Fanon’s Perspective

In the first chapter, ‘Concerning Violence’, we are introduced to the first concept – violence. Frantz Fanon emphasises how decolonisation is inherently violent. Colonialism is fierce from the start and never stops being violent. He notes that “their [the colonies] first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together […] was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and canon” (Fanon, 1963, p.36). Violence is the only way for it to end.

He emphasises the value of self-respect and self-discovery, one of his defences against violence. This focus deserves praise since it is global and addresses all colonised people. According to Frantz Fanon, excessive violence enables the colonised to realise that he is not who the coloniser has made him believe he is via belittling, vilifying, and punishing him.

To “[drive] into the locals’ heads the concept that if the settlers were to depart, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality,” the coloniser not only “distorts, disfigures, and destroys” pre-colonial history but also psychologically degrades the native (Fanon, 1963, p.210). Here, Fanon creates a striking portrait of the colonised people’s lack of regard for themselves before the liberation that violence grants them. He emphasises that the colonised should not look up to or idolise the settlers.
Fanon’s Exploration of Colonialism’s Psychological Impact

The native is free from “his inferiority complex and his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect,” according to Fanon, who describes violence as a “cleaning force” (Fanon, 1963, pg. 94). Once more, Frantz Fanon uses emotive language that tremendously appeals to colonised readers. To portray something as unpleasant and destructive as violence in a good light is an intriguing idea.

A revolution’s use of violence can bring people together and spark a national movement where they can vent the repressed wrath caused by colonialism. Sonnleitner notes in ‘Of Logic and Liberation: Frantz Fanon on Terrorism’ that it is “personally therapeutic” (Sonnleitner, 1987, p.291). Using the adjective “therapeutic” to describe something violent and oppressive, such as colonialism, can arguably be disrespectful to the colonised.

However, whether you agree with Fanon’s moral argument when colonised people have been denied a means of expressing their sentiments for so long, his claim that violence fosters self-respect can be valid.

Fanon claims violence must be acknowledged. As we have seen, he contends that using violence brings about self-respect, self-discovery, and independence. Yet, he goes on to devote chapter five, ‘Colonial World and Mental Disorders’, to the mental illnesses and disorders that are direct results of violence in colonial times.

As readers, we are simultaneously being considered to understand that Fanon is arguing the justification of violence to gain self-respect and how it can damage the psyche of the native people – so which one is it? Does violence damage the mind of the colonised, or does it leave the colonised the ability to fight for freedom and against oppression?
Reconciling Violence with Mental Health in Colonial Contexts

Fanon claims violence must be acknowledged. As we have seen, he contends that using violence brings about self-respect, self-discovery, and independence. Yet, he goes on to devote chapter five, ‘Colonial World and Mental Disorders’, to the mental illnesses and disorders that are direct results of violence in colonial times.

As readers, we are simultaneously being considered to understand that Fanon is arguing the justification of violence to gain self-respect and how it can damage the psyche of the native people – so which one is it? Does violence damage the mind of the colonised, or does it leave the colonised the ability to fight for freedom and against oppression?
Frantz Fanon’s Legacy and the Continued Relevance of ‘The Wretched of the Earth’

Fanon maintains that the atmosphere of a “Manichaean world” (Fanon, 1963, pg. 41) is a primary reason for the general decline in mental health throughout the colonial era. This analogy is for the colonial world, which is morally distinct and geographically separated into two zones.

The author describes this dichotomy when he writes about how the settler’s realm is physically advanced, secure, and clean, and it is abundant with all the resources required for a sustainable way of life; “a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things” whilst the town of the colonised is “a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute … hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light” (Fanon, 1963, pp.38–39).

The juxtaposing language used to explain the opposite nature demonstrates how the settlers could prosper in the land that belonged to someone else – the natives. Essentially, “Manicheism […] dehumanises the native [and] it turns him into an animal” (Fanon, 1963, p.42). Thus demonstrating that colonisation has dehumanising effects on the people and the nation and causes negative emotions such as bitterness and resentment.

As a psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon holds the same position that the brutality of colonialism has contributed to an increase in mental illnesses and disorders. In chapter five, Fanon meticulously identifies the subtle differences among the many instances of mental illness brought on by colonial violence.

Fanon is aware of a direct relationship between the two concepts, which tends to have a long-lasting effect even after decolonisation. Therefore, Fanon’s claim that violence is a “cleansing force” (Fanon, 1963, pg. 94) is weak because he has already explained in detail how targeted acts of violence and an overall climate of physical insecurity cause a wide range of mental disorders, such as depression, PTSD, hallucinations, and many others.
The Algerian War: A Deep Dive into Colonialism’s Psychological and Physical Traumas

In his book, Fanon explores the Algerian War and how colonialism is a “fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals” (Fanon, 1963, p.249). As the war for freedom progressed, there was significant damage to the people that left them institutionalised in hospitals. He writes case studies on person B, an Algerian man who had “insomnia and persistent headaches” (Fanon, 1963, p.254) and how B’s wife had been “dishonoured” by a French officer who told B to forget about her (Fanon, 1963, p.255).

This is another illustration of the heinous atrocities of colonialism. The fact that B’s wife is raped to get close to B underlines the utter dominance of the French colonists over the Algerian people. However, it is interesting to note that in all his cases, Fanon focuses on the impact of the physical violence of colonialism and does not include how sexual violence was used in the Algerian war.


This point is not to diminish the physical violence of colonialism. But if violence is to be considered, all types of violence must be included – especially sexual violence. Branche explores in ‘Sexual Violence in the Algerian War’ (2009) how sexual violence was prevalent in the Algerian War and how “rapes happened, and repeatedly happened” (Branche, 2009, p.248).

She explores how the systematic use of sexual abuse was a technique of cruelty and humiliation (for both men and women) committed by the French army. It was a brutal, dehumanising, and consistent torture, and although death was typically the outcome, it was not the intended outcome.

Colonialism directly links to other types of violence different from physical violence. Branche examines this when Fanon does not discuss it in his book, though it is crucial to understanding colonialism and violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Branche, R., 2009. Sexual Violence in the Algerian War. In: D. Herzog, ed. Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, Genders, and Sexualities in History. [online] London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp.247–260. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234291_10.

Burke, E., 1976. Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’. Daedalus, 105(1), pp.127–135.

Fanon, F., 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Ighilahriz, L (2001) Algérienne (gathered by Anne Nivat), Paris: Fayard/Calmann-Levy.

Sonnleitner, M.W., 1987. Of Logic and Liberation: Frantz Fanon on Terrorism. Journal of Black Studies, 17(3), pp.287–304.

REVIEWS

Visualising Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation

by Ramona Wadi

MEMO

November 13, 2024




Book Editor(s):Aline Batarseh, Jessica Anderson, Yosra El-Gazzar
Published Date:September 2024
Publisher:Haymarket Books
Hardback:392 pages
ISBN-13:979-8888902509


Khaled Adnan’s hunger strike in 2012 was the impetus for Visualising Palestine’s enduring project which depicts Israeli colonialism and the Palestinian experience of living under colonial rule. Unlike the statistics we are used to associating with Palestine, which render Palestinians faceless numbers with no identity, Visualising Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2024) uses statistics to illustrate the human experience. Research and compelling graphics have rendered the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle both relevant and prominent.

The introduction notes that, while the Palestinian struggle is gaining prominence globally, Palestinians are facing even more repression. And statistics do not convey the human and political experience: “The human brain is not designed to comprehend mass atrocities, yet we seem to give numbers immense power to describe reality.”

Visualising Palestine uses graphics to depict the truths concealed within the statistics. The book consists of twelve chapters, each dealing with a specific reality of colonialism and the Palestinian experience. Each chapter is accompanied by an introduction that summarises the context of the infographics, contextualising with quotes, historical overviews and explanations of Israel’s colonial policies and violence. Aptly, settler-colonialism is the first theme, with graphics showing the sheer scale of destruction in terms of land and people: “Sometimes, the systematised violence of settler- colonialism unfolds incrementally while, other times, it erupts into “genocidal moments” of mass killing and expulsion, as we are witnessing at the time of writing this book.”

The maps dealing with forced displacement show settler-colonialism prior to Israel’s establishment in 1948, which creates cohesion in terms of imparting the reality of Zionist settler-colonialism and how the settler-population increased as Palestinians had their permits revoked and were forcibly displaced. The book draws upon Salman Abu Sitta’s research on the depopulated villages to imagine the Palestinian Right of Return in the infographics, Return is Possible – an important inclusion because colonialism can be reversed.

Against a backdrop of the anti-colonial movement from 1945 to 1968, the book shows how several countries were gaining independence even as Israel gradually implemented apartheid policies. “Oppression in Palestine is a structure, not an event, and apartheid is a system of control that permeates every aspect of Palestinians’ daily life, from the mundane to the monumental.” The Palestinian Authority’s collaboration with Israel is one of the issues depicted in the infographics, showing “the PA’s lack of practical or moral authority in the struggle against apartheid” against a backdrop of corruption and security coordination with Israel.

The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine: Background, Details, and Analysis

The chapter on Gaza is of immense significance. The infographic, “Gaza’s Untold Story”, pays attention to the enclave’s refugee history since the Nakba. “A surreal and cruel geography emerges where generations of Palestinian refugees live and die within walking distances of homes Israel prevents them from reaching,” the book explains. The infographics take the reader on a journey through Gaza’s history, the illegal blockade and its consequences, and Israel’s military bombardments, telling some of the stories linked to the killings of Palestinian civilians, up to the ongoing genocide in Gaza which started in October 2023. “Decades of impunity for Israeli war crimes paved the way for the unfolding genocide in 2023,” the book states.

While the book relies on themes, and it does so with impeccable attention, the clarity with which the colonial context is explained allows the reader to easily link one facet of colonial violence with another. The chapter dealing with “Ecological Justice”, for example, is the culmination of what the 1948 Nakba eventually cost Palestinians in terms of loss. Land is continuously usurped into the Israeli colonial enterprise, while Palestinians face political, territorial and economical loss. This chapter also allows for connection and collective efforts to emerge, as the book notes how planting parks over indigenous territory is one of the features of colonialism. In colonised Palestine since 1967, 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted, which is equivalent to 33 times the size of Central Park in New York City.

The sheer amount of information collected in this book is astounding, but it also reflects the accumulation of ramifications of colonialism in Palestine. The chapters on Palestinian political prisoners and Israel’s silencing of Palestinians and support for Palestinians; the latter also affecting non-Palestinians, are particularly important. Complicity with Israel is also explored in the infographics. Several examples are given in the book – one that stands out in terms of international collaboration with Israel is titled “Moving the Goalposts: Delaying Palestinian Football Justice” which describes the bureaucracy employed by FIFA to avoid applying its own rules on hosting matches on another member’s territory. Instead of applying its limitations to Israeli settlement teams, FIFA formed a committee in 2015 to deliberate the matter, only to block a motion two years later.

What stands out in this collection of infographics is the urgency with which Palestine should be considered. Too much time has been wasted by the international community allowing Israel to not only expand its colonialism, but also to continuously expand what the international community allows in terms of international law violations and war crimes. Politicians speak in generalised terms and from a pro-colonial framework. Visualising Palestine’s infographics imparts the magnitude of Israeli colonialism’s violations, in a way that leaves no space for doubt but all the opportunity to learn and mobilise.

by Ramona Wadi
walzerscent

Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine

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 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.