Where is Palestine in Critical Terrorism Studies? A roundtable conversation

ABSTRACT

Our ethical responsibilities as researchers within or related to the study of “terrorism” could not be clearer than in moments when the “terrorism” label is used to justify mass killing and destruction. The state of Israel has relentlessly continued to bombard Gaza since 7 October 2023 and, with the support of Western nations, built consensus around framing all Palestinians as (potential) terrorists. In light of the horrors that the world is witnessing today, and the lack of engagement with Palestine in Critical Terrorism Studies research, we ask, how does – and should - Palestine feature in Critical Terrorism Studies scholarship? How can we, as researchers and educators, facilitate deeper conversations that challenge hegemonic and racist framings of “terrorism”? This roundtable discussion brings critical, anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and queer scholars together to discuss 1) the exclusion of Palestine from the critical study of “terrorism” and 2) the significance of the Palestinian struggle for liberation for all researchers invested in the critical study of “terrorism”. We call for more serious engagement with Palestine and acknowledge that such a call is inseparable from a commitment to anti-colonial scholarship and activism.¹

KEYWORDS:

• Palestine
• Critical Terrorism Studies
• Zionism
• racism
• coloniality
• liberation

Introduction

Alice Finden, Rabea Khan, and Amna Kaleem

Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) has been an important space for calling out the stark Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism of Western states under the guise of “countering terrorism”. Since CTS’s inception, scholars have demonstrated how the psychological, embodied, epistemic and structural violences of the “war on terror” have been built on Islamophobic tropes where broadly imagined “suspect communities” are expelled from the liberal state as “potential terrorists”, and “traitors” to the national community (Breen-Smyth 2014; Hickman et al. 2012; Monaghan and Santos 2020; see also Hillyard 1993; Nguyen 2019). Going even further, CTS scholars have shown how the very field of Terrorism Studies relies upon the subjugation of forms of knowledge that challenge the US-led militarised status quo and delegitimises and essentialises non-western forms of politics as “apolitical”, “irrational”, and “religious” (Jackson 2012; Jackson et al. 2009; Stampnitzky 2013). However, CTS’s engagement with Palestine, and the question of Israeli settler colonialism, has been limited. This is despite, as Pappé (2009, 127) notes in this journal, the framing of “Palestinian Terrorism” being so pervasive: “a quarter of the global outfits described as terrorists by the US state department are Palestinians”.

As Pappé (2009, 127) further explains, within American and Israeli governmental, media and civil society spaces, the very concept of Palestinian history and nationalism is construed as “terrorism”, where Palestinians are constructed as prone to violence (see also Baker 2010). As Marusek (2018, 68) also notes, US and Israeli terrorism “expertise” on Palestine has been key in the development of a broader “Islamophobia industry” (Lean 2012). These dominant forms of settler colonial knowledge production rely upon the epistemic destruction and mistranslation of colonised societies. They further produce a racialised framing of collective guilt which renders marginalised groups, such as the Palestinian people, as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers by default (Monaghan and Santos 2020; Wolfe 2006). Such a framing has facilitated the current bombardment of Gaza, wherein Israeli defence ministers have ordered a complete siege on the Strip, which UN experts have characterised as collective punishment and the ICJ has ruled a plausible violation of the Genocide Convention (Al-Kassab 2024; Reuters 2023).

As Palestinian and Arab scholars have further argued, the current Israeli bombardment since 7 October 2023 – which has killed in excess of 34,000 people at the time of writing, including thousands of students, teachers and academics, and has destroyed Gaza’s universities, libraries, archives and museums – must be understood as a part of the longer, systematic destruction and erasure of Palestine and Palestinian knowledge and traditions of learning, or, as Scholars Against the War on Palestine have termed it, “scholasticide” (Desai 2024; Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor 2024; Scholars Against the War on Palestine 2024; see also Baker 2010; Desai and Shahwan 2022). Our engagement with Palestine is therefore urgent because the scholasticide we are witnessing in Gaza is accompanied by a more diffuse form of epistemic violence that makes the former invisible. The framing of the genocide of the Palestinian people as a “counterterrorism” operation has created a discourse akin to the post-9/11 “politics of anti-knowledge” rendering all attempts to contextualise it as suspect (Stampnitzky 2013, 186–187; The Times of Israel 2023; TOI Staff 2023). This is reflected in the different ways academics and non-academics have been targeted for expressing solidarity with Palestine, from people losing their jobs to being arrested under states’ counter-terrorism legislation worldwide (Brismes 2024; Hearst 2023). As scholars in this roundtable show, these colonial processes of erasure, destruction and purposeful misreading of Palestinian culture and history are not merely examples of the reliance upon the subjugation of knowledge within the Terrorism Industry,² but going further, this roundtable understands the colonial imagination of Palestine itself as critical in the development of Terrorism Studies as a discipline.

A call for a deeper CTS engagement with Palestine, then, also constitutes a call for CTS’s engagement with postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-colonial scholarship and activism. As recent interventions have already pointed out, CTS’s engagement with such approaches has been limited (Finden et al. 2024; Khan 2021, 2024; Mohammed 2022). Indeed, now more than ever, there is an urgent need for CTS to embark on its decolonial turn. However, CTS cannot embrace this turn without also engaging with one of the most current and egregious cases of ongoing apartheid and settler-colonial violence: Palestine is one of the clearest and most obvious cases of settler colonialism in practice (Abu Moghli 2023; Erakat et al. 2023). It is also one of the clearest cases in which “terrorism” discourses have been instrumental in justifying state-sanctioned violence, such as dispossession, incarceration, and extrajudicial executions. CTS cannot claim to be welcoming of decolonial approaches if it does not, at the same time, acknowledge that Palestine is and needs to be at the heart of any discussion of decoloniality and its connections to discourses on “terrorism”.

As contributors in this roundtable note, “terrorism” has historically been a discursive weapon to wield against anti-colonial movements and groups (see also Dunlap 2016; Ghosh 2017; Husain 2021; McQuade 2020). Counter-terrorism, then, has been the material weapon that has been, and, in the case of Palestine, continues to be, wielded against anti-colonial resistance. It is, in the case of Israeli state violence, one of the main tools of the settler-colonial project. Such projects historically always accompany the genocide of their indigenous inhabitants (Schotten 2018; Wolfe 2006). The recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) case brought forward by South Africa, which accuses Israel of genocidal acts, has helped frame Israeli state-sanctioned violence in its much broader, settler colonial history. However, we must not forget that international political and legal institutions ultimately bolster colonial visions through their counterterrorism practices or, as the Gaza Link (2024) put it: “International law is but a mere reflection of the inherent injustices embedded in the global power dynamics towards the Palestinian cause. Palestinians, along with their supporters, must not embrace it as a central tenet or guiding framework for their national liberation struggle.”

As scholars in solidarity with Palestine then, we recognise that a sustained and critical engagement with Palestine that situates Israeli counterterrorism within the broader global legitimisation of racialised and Islamophobic terrorism discourses is key. As we see an unprecedented amount of violence directed at the Palestinian people in the name of countering terrorism, it is imperative that we question this narrative and call out the racism and colonial oppression hidden behind the moralising discourse of Israeli “self-defence”, as well as the international political and legal structures that provide legitimacy to terrorism discourses. Indeed, Israeli settler colonial violence in Palestine makes it necessary for the CTS community to take stock of our normative responsibilities. Such an engagement would also contribute to CTS’ original mission to provide a platform for emancipatory research that is rooted in normative and ethical commitments and the recognition of “terrorism” as a problematic label whose discourse has targeted minoritised and marginalised communities, both historically and at present. Indeed, the CTS sub-discipline started with an “emancipatory commitment to ending avoidable human suffering” (Jackson et al. 2009, 224). As critical scholars, it is our responsibility to resist the oppression of settler colonial knowledge that continues to define who deserves to be humanised and who gets condemned to death as the savage “other”/’terrorist’. This is, thus, an invitation to the CTS community to demonstrate the intellectual and moral courage Jackson et al. (2009, 227) called for two decades ago and engage with Palestine to resist both material and epistemic forms of violence.

Palestine and the discourse of terrorism

Lisa Stampnitzky

The language of “terrorism” suffuses discussions of Palestine, and Gaza. But “terrorism” is not just an objective category or a neutral descriptor of events in the world. As has been shown by a growing body of research (much appearing in this very journal), the labels of “terrorism” and “terrorist” have embedded within them a politics and a deep set of meanings. This essay looks back at how this category came to be constructed, and how the meanings that came to be embedded within it enable it to have certain effects in the world. It examines how Palestine came to occupy a central role within the discourse of “terrorism”, and how “terrorism” came to be seen as almost a synecdoche for Palestine, as the result of a discursive campaign by Israel in the 1970s and 1980s.³

As the problem of terrorism became a key site of concern in the 1970s, the surrounding discourse was highly contentious. The very definition of “terrorism” was (and still is) widely contested, with key disagreements centring on whether states could act as terrorists, and whether national and anti-colonial resistance movements should be considered terrorist. Although many states sought to make use of this new language to delegitimise insurgent religious and national movements, Israel was one of the first, and most successful, in engineering this strategy. Israel’s interventions into the discourse of terrorism had a very particular aim: not only to delegitimise Palestinian resistance, but to equate Palestinian resistance (and sometimes even Palestinian existence) with terrorism. In so doing, Israel aimed to interpellate the “Western world” as their allies in what it would frame as a “civilisational” struggle against terrorism so understood (Stampnitzky 2013).

One key moment in advancing this approach was the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on terrorism, sponsored by the Jonathan Institute, an Israeli think tank funded by a future primie minister (Netanyahu 1981). While formally a non-governmental organisation, the Jonathan Institute had close ties to the Israeli state. The 1979 conference received significant media coverage and was attended by prominent American experts and political figures, including several members of congress, future president George H.W. Bush, and representatives of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who helped carry these narratives back to the U.S. and publicise them there, and internationally.

The goals of the conference were to awaken the Western world to the problem of terrorism as defined by the conference organisers – an international network with the Soviet Union at its heart, and the Palestinian cause (along with other anticolonial and nationalist movements) at its front line. Speakers framed terrorism as not just a certain type of tactic, such as irregular violence, or attacks on civilians, as it had commonly been understood previously, but as a global threat aimed squarely at civilisation, democracies, and “the West” (Netanyahu 1981; for critical analysis see; Jamshidi 2023; Stampnitzky 2013). Although this may seem (and indeed was) hyperbolic, it was also effective, so effective that this framing continues to shape how we talk about “terrorism” today. As Pranay Somayajula (2023) has recently written,

To invoke the word “terrorism” within the conventional bounds of liberal discourse is to bring the debate to a screeching halt … There is no spectrum of acceptable opinions, no room for reasonable disagreement when it comes to terrorism. There are only two sides - those who are with the terrorists, and those who are against them.

The meaning of “terrorism” was thus reframed to be a civilisational struggle – the “West” against the “rest”. Rather than simply referring to one side in a dispute, or acting as a label for those who make use of certain tactics, this reframing aimed to make the “terrorist” the “enemy of all”. This occurred alongside a reframing of the “terrorist” as an identity, drawing upon highly orientalised ideas about Arabs and Muslims as irrational and inherently violent.

Part of the effect of the language of terrorism is to accuse those so labelled of engaging in violence irrationally, for its own sake, rather than viewing them as rational actors with political goals. As I have shown previously (Stampnitzky 2013), over the course of the 1970s, terrorism was redefined, from being an “act” that any type of actor (potentially even armed groups one might hold sympathy for, or even states) could commit, to an identity. And once this has been established, we can see the move away from seeing any need to understand terrorism as an act with political or historical causes, and instead something that is simply “evil”, existing outside of history and politics, with the implication that terrorists commit terrorism because they are terrorists. The label of terrorist thus has the dual function of delegitimising, or even erasing, Palestinian resistance as a legible political project, and legitimating ultimate violence against those so labelled. As Edward Said wrote in 1979,

Zionism first refused to acknowledge the existence of native inhabitants in Palestine, and when it did, it recognised only native inhabitants with no political or national rights; insofar as these natives claimed rights, the West was instructed systematically in equating the struggle for those rights with terrorism, genocide, antisemitism.

(Said 1979, 230–231)

The discourse of terrorism not only condemns, it produces an understanding of the “terrorist” as irrational, motivated by pure hatred, rather than political, historical, contextual reasons, who therefore cannot be reasoned with. The label of “terrorist” flattens all those so labelled into a single, inhuman category of actor who cannot be engaged with through ordinary political means, but must only be destroyed. As Tareq Baconi recently noted,

In his first speech after the attack, the US presid­­­­­e­­­­nt described Hamas as “pure evil,” comparing its offensive to those of ISIS; he also likened October 7th to 9/11 and repeatedly referred to widely discredited claims of brutality to stir up orientalist and Islamophobic tropes in an effort to justify the ferocity of Israel’s response.

(Baconi 2023)

We can further see how such an approach easily slides into broader colonial discourses of viewing the other as unhuman, or animal (Barkawi 2016; Megret 2006), as in the label of “human animals” applied to the residents of Gaza by Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Aljazeera 2023; MEE Staff, 2024).

Not only has “terrorism” come to be almost automatically, even necessarily, attached to any mention of Hamas, but Hamas, and therefore “terrorism”, have been turned into a metaphor for Gaza, and for the Palestinian people as a whole. This has deep consequences for the language most commonly used to speak about Palestine and Gaza today. And insofar as “terrorism” and “terrorists” are conceptualised as evil, irrational, unpredictable violence that cannot be countered through ordinary means, this language has discursively enabled a strategy of wholesale destruction: of “terrorists,” of Hamas, and of all of Gaza, which is equated with the above.

“Terrorism” as Anti-Palestinian racism: Zionism and the war(s) on terror

Heike Schotten

A substantial literature across disciplines has articulated Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism. This racism operates, in substantial part, by stigmatising Islam as a “terrorist” religion and/or Muslims as innately “terrorist.” This racialisation is sometimes considered an artefact of the twenty-first century Global War on Terror (GWOT) initiated by George W. Bush. But the US’s GWOT is intertwined with and indebted to an earlier war on terror, begun in the 1970s by Israel. That is, the GWOT version of “terrorism” as a name for Islam, Muslim “fundamentalism,” or some catch-all category of Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, and anyone who “looks like” them, is an artefact of Zionism.

Well before 11 September 2001, Benjamin Netanyahu rose to the centre of an Israeli-orchestrated international propaganda campaign. The aim of this campaign was to define “terrorism” in the global arena as civilisation-destroying violence committed by “savage” Arabs and Muslims who are aligned with Communists and other “totalitarians” (US foreign policy concerns at the time) (Brulin 2015; Gabay 2018; Herman and O’Sullivan 1989; Jamshidi 2023; Kumar 2020; Netanyahu 1986; Stampnitzky 2013). This campaign was orchestrated primarily through the Israeli government-funded Jonathan Institute, a think tank named after Netanyahu’s brother, the only casualty in a highly successful Israeli anti-“terrorism” operation (Stampnitzky 2013). Leveraging Jonathan’s (or, more familiarly, Yoni’s) death by turning it into a martyrdom, the Institute set about manufacturing “terrorism” as Arab and Muslim savagery in the same way that so many Right-wing “civil society” astroturf movements operate: via conferences, media dispersion, public commentary and political punditry, cooptation of academic knowledge production, and the willing cooperation of state powers (Aked 2023; Ali et al. 2011; Bulkin and Nevel 2014; IJAN 2015). Most prominently, the Institute hosted two “international terrorism” conferences, one in 1979 in Jerusalem, and another in 1984 in Washington, D.C. Through the work of these conferences (and especially the second, which was later published as a wildly successful mass market paperback in the US entitled Terrorism: How the West Can Win [Netanyahu 1986]), “terrorist” was established as an essentialist identity category, naming a fundamentally evil person who commits incomprehensible and inherently unjustifiable violence against “innocents” (Stampnitzky 2013). At these conferences, participants frequently conflated “terrorism” and Nazism, thus further qualifying Palestinian and Arab political violence as genocidally antisemitic.

This campaign was extremely successful (Herman and O’Sullivan 1989; Kumar 2020; Stampnitzky 2013). Its success should reframe our understanding of both the geopolitics of 11 September 2001 and international culpability for the GWOT. As we now know, Israel capitalised on the events of 9/11 to solidify its own, pre-existing war on terror and forge an even tighter alliance with the US (Kaplan 2018). This means that the GWOT is not simply a US imperial venture but, also, a joint Israeli-US colonial/imperial project. That project is a global fight against the civilisationalist enemy, the (Communist) Nazi “terrorist” Muslim/Arab/Palestinian savage.

Understanding this discursive history explains why Palestinians resisting occupation, colonisation, and dispossession – armed or otherwise – are routinely, mind-numbingly demonised as “terrorists” by Israel. Indeed, virtually everything Palestinians say or do is deemed “terrorist”, from writing a poem (Al-Jazeera 2018) to being autistic (MEE Staff 2023b) to grieving the police murder of one’s autistic son (The New Arab staff 2023) to practising field medicine (Mackey 2018). This history explains why Israel declared six Palestinian human rights groups, including the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, Defense for Children International-Palestine, and a sustainable agriculture organisation to be “terrorist organisations” (Buttu 2022). It explains why, in an already-forgotten episode of Israeli repression in the West Bank, the Israeli army besieged the densely populated Jenin refugee camp in June 2023, destroying the camp’s infrastructure, killing and injuring tens of Palestinians, and rendering whole families homeless (Gill 2024).

Most urgently, this history explains why we are witnessing a wanton genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza right now, accomplished via monstrously cruel and depraved tactics of war including deliberate starvation and deprivation of water to a civilian population (Republic of South Africa 2023). It explains why 100 Israeli doctors published an open letter demanding that their government bomb Gaza’s hospitals: because they function as “terrorist nests” (MEE Staff 2023a). It explains why the Israeli army, after demanding evacuation of al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital, knowingly left five infants in intensive care to die (they were found, 17 days later, decomposed in their tiny beds, some still hooked up to IVs or oxygen tubes) (Salam, Abdelkader, and Mulligan 2023). Indeed, UNICEF has declared Gaza a “graveyard for children” (Elder 2023). According to some analysts, Israel is committing entirely new war crimes that have not yet been codified in international law, from scholasticide (the systemic destruction of educational sites and institutions, Desai 2024) to medicide (the complete elimination of a functional medical system, Munayyer 2024).

The rationale for this ghastly horror show is “terrorism,” or the bogeyman of Hamas. Of course, Hamas did attack Israel on 7 October 2023. But this only confirms the point rather than refuting it. “Terrorism” is the name by which Palestinian existence and resistance to Zionism is characterised, automatically de-legitimising both and rendering them an abomination. From this perspective, it does not matter whether Palestinians are writing poems, documenting human rights abuses, harvesting olives, or taking up weapons to resist their occupier, as is sometimes the case in Jenin or Gaza. As I have argued elsewhere (2018), this is the essential ideological function of “Terrorism”: to characterise the existence and resistance of the colonised as a threat to the survival and flourishing of colonial “civilisation”. “Terrorism” therefore justifies all sorts of cruelty and punishment – occupation, segregation, surveillance, checkpoints, incarceration, disappearance, dispossession, home demolitions, torture, targeted assassinations, massacres, and genocide – and absurdly renders them righteous.

This history also reveals the importance of discourse to power’s materiality. The problem with this “terrorism” discourse is not that it is erroneous, overgeneralising, or biased. Rather, this “terrorism” discourse is better understood as another front of Israel’s ongoing genocidal destruction of Palestine, an effort that did not begin on 8 October 2023, but has come into flagrant, visceral view since then. As the Israeli propaganda-generated racist epithet for Palestinians, their existence, and their resistance, “terrorism” functions to disqualify Palestinians as human, as oppressed, and as indigenous to the land. It disqualifies Palestinian existence and resistance as innately savage, evil, unthinkable, inhuman, irrational, barbaric, and outside the bounds of rational, liberal, humanitarian civilisation. It is a term used to demolish Palestinians discursively, so as to facilitate their material destruction in the land of Palestine.

“Terrorism” is the reason why Palestinians and anyone who defends Palestinians are called upon, instead, to condemn Hamas, 7 October, or antisemitism, as if nothing else mattered, as if nothing else were true. But as Palestinians have been saying, in counting the seemingly endless days of this current chapter of the ongoing Nakba, “it has been 75 days and 75 years” (Smiry 2023). “Terrorism” erases those 75 years. It erases the fact that Palestinians resist their oppressors because they are colonisers, not because they are Jews. It starts history on 7 October 2023 (just as, in the US, “Terrorism” was used to start history on 11 September 2001). It explains why Palestinians are silenced and those who defend Palestine are censored and punished.

But Israel’s grisly, heinous Gaza onslaught also reveals the futile aspiration of all settler colonial regimes, what Patrick Wolfe (2006) famously describes as “the elimination of the native”. Israel’s self-proclaimed goal in Gaza – to eradicate Hamas – is the only conceivable course of action in response to its own carefully curated characterisation of the entire population as “terrorist” (Gill 2024). Because such elimination can never be fully achieved, Wolfe reminds us that settler colonial conquest must be understood as a structure of power, not a one-and-done event. What must actually be eliminated, then, if there is to be any semblance of justice in this world, is neither the Palestinians nor Hamas but, rather, the racialising apparatuses of settler colonialism – in this case, Zionism and its “terrorism” discourse – that facilitate and justify these recursively unsuccessful, irredeemably vicious attempts to wipe entire peoples from the face of the earth.

Terrorism and the (non)permissibility of negotiations

Sophie Haspeslagh

The framing and listing of Palestinian non-state armed groups as terrorists is deeply intertwined with the emergence of international proscription worldwide. During the Cold War and President Reagan’s administration, a number of conservative think tanks in the United States crystalised the idea of Soviet-supported Palestinian terrorism (Gearty 2008, 562; Stampnitzky 2013). This discursive construction was later crystalised in national listing regimes. First in the United Kingdom in 1984 when Prime Minister Thatcher expanded the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism prohibition to “international terrorists”, listing groups such as the Palestinian Liberation Organisation alongside the African National Congress and others. But while national proscription regimes existed previously, and have deep links with colonial times (Stampnitzky 2013), it is the passing of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 1373, following the World Trade Centre attacks in September 2001, that embedded listing regimes in the international system. It was the first time in the United Nation’s existence that article 51 on the right to self-defence was invoked in the context of violence by a non-state actor (Haspeslagh 2021b). Because UNSC 1373 was passed under Chapter VII it became mandatory for all member states to develop their own listing regimes of designated terrorist organisations against non-state armed groups and individuals. Soon afterwards, Hamas’ military wing was proscribed in the UK and in a number of other countries.

This decentralisation was done with no agreed upon UN definition of terrorism or who should be considered a terrorist. In effect, letting nation-states define who is a terrorist. This has allowed governments to frame political opponents, journalists and human rights advocates as “terrorists” (Bowring 2010; Hocking 2003; Sullivan and Hayes 2010). The listing by Israel of six Palestinian NGOs working on human rights in 2021 is a clear example of this (Reuters 2022).

Proscription criminalises any politics associated with the group, so everything is pushed underground. In the Basque country for example, political, cultural and youth organisations associated with the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA – “Basque Homeland and Liberty”) were also listed as terrorist entities (Haspeslagh and Dudouet 2015). Since the proscription of Hamas’ political wing in the UK in 2022, this has increased the sense that anyone supporting analogous objectives, such as the right of Palestinian self-determination, is suspicious. We have seen similar dynamics taking place of how proscription can have transversal impacts stigmatising communities, and creating “suspect communities” (Hillyard 1993) of diaspora groups for example with the Tamils and Kurds (Nadarajah 2009; Sentas 2014, 2018).

The terrorist label has led to a form of extreme vilification of non-state groups (Haspeslagh 2021b). There is no longer a conflict, the listed group is decontextualised as just terrorists. Terrorism becomes the problem. You get rid of the terrorists; you get rid of the problem. The “terrorists” are demonised to an extent where they are considered – and thus treated – as not human. Communities associated with the group are routinely dehumanised. In Colombia being associated with “terrorists” was seen as giving a green light for killing by paramilitary forces (Haspeslagh 2021a). This idea that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza” or that the people of Gaza are “human animals”, which emerged after the abhorrent Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, is an extreme version of this and has laid the foundation for the indiscriminate bombing and siege of the territory (Karanth 2023).

The terrorist entity is considered to be beyond the pale of dialogue, completely irrational. One cannot engage with them or count on them as a possible negotiation partner. Because the terrorist tag amalgamates the acts of terrorism with the actor – rendering them one and the same – change cannot happen (Haspeslagh 2021b). It makes negotiations appear impossible for the public but also for the proscribed group. Since Hamas’ electoral victory in Gaza in 2006, Western states have had a “no contact” policy with the group. This non-engagement by EU states and others with Hamas has pushed the group towards Iran and other similar actors. The group became increasingly stuck in what researchers have described as an “echo chamber of like-mindedness” making the group more “entrenched and intransigent” (Gunning 2010, 97). Proscription regimes have reduced the space for diplomacy with Hamas. Diplomats with no contact policies depend on second or third-hand sources to form an understanding of the group (Stock referenced in Haspeslagh 2013).

What is less understood is how the “terrorist” tag hugely bolsters the “other side”, the state. The asymmetry is deepened and the unconstrained side is encouraged in its military strategy (Haspeslagh 2021b). The Israeli post-October 7th response being supported and justified as a counter-terrorism operation is a case in point. This “state of exception”, supposed to be temporally bound, becomes the norm (Agamben 2005), but over time, it also leads to a policy strait-jacket. The government is faced with a very narrow set of options, there is no space to change its strategy if it eventually realises that a military solution is elusive.

To create the possibility for negotiations there needs to be a radical shift in discourse through a “linguistic ceasefire” which has three central components (Haspeslagh 2021a). First, to recognise the conflict and re-contextualise, and thus re-politicise, the group in the conflict. Second, to drop the terrorist label by using other types of characterisations and thirdly to separate the act and the actor, so continuing to condemn violent actions but not the actor itself as inherently violent – allowing for change to take hold (ibid). But we know that negotiations and the use of conflict resolution tools are extremely rare in conflicts described as Islamist (Nilsson and Svensson 2020). So, while this “linguistic ceasefire” happened in Colombia with the FARC, it is much less likely to happen in a context where the “Islamist” label, rooted in racist othering, compounds the terrorist one (See Stampnitzky, this volume).

Prevent’s legacy of labelling Palestine solidarity as extremist

Layla Aitlhadj

Introduced in 2003 as one of four arms of the UK’s counterterrorism strategy CONTEST, Prevent diverges from its counterparts – Pursue, Protect, and Prepare – by operating within the realm of precrime. Prevent is rooted in the premise that pre-emptive intervention can forestall individuals from engaging in terrorist activities before any intention arises. Since 2015, the statutory imposition of the Prevent Duty has obligated specified authorities in the UK, including educators, healthcare professionals, and social workers, to undertake measures aimed at “preventing people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism” (HM Government 2023). In practice, this entails the obligation of these public sector workers to report individuals exhibiting indicators of extremism to Prevent officers, who are essentially counterterrorism operatives within a framework that has long characterised not only the Palestinian population, but also those advocating solidarity with them as extremist (Hooper 2016).

Although integrated into the broader framework of the counterterrorism strategy, Prevent notably operates outside the oversight of the Independent Reviewer for Counter Terrorism legislation. Consequently, it has predominantly served as a political instrument rather than contributing to genuine national security objectives. Employing entrenched historical and subconscious biases, with racial and Islamophobic undertones, Prevent exploits a fearful narrative. It propagates the erroneous notion that public service employees bear a degree of responsibility for national security through their duty of care or safeguarding obligations.

The “indicators of extremism” that form the basis of Prevent are exceptionally broad, as is the current accepted definition of “extremism”: “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs” (Home Office 2023b). A set of 22 ideological and behavioural traits developed after a small study within the National Offenders Management Service (NOMS) indicate the ideas and actions that fall into this dragnet (Lloyd and Dean 2015). Despite the study only being meant for application in prisons (Dean, Lloyd, and Feve 2021), these 22 factors, known as the ERG 22+, which include broad and subjective “concerns” like a “need for identity, meaning and belonging”, “going through a transitional phase” and the “need to redress injustice” have been rolled out nationally as part of the Prevent training. These indicators are therefore engrained across public services, casting a suspicious lens over all those who interact with them – especially if they are Muslims. These factors have netted mental health issues, as well as religiosity – including clothing, facial hair and so on – and, counter-intuitively, have turned “an increased interest in religion”, namely Islam, into a behaviour linked to “risk”. In effect, young people who choose to advocate against injustice such as the injustice faced by the Palestinian people, or who are simply navigating their way through life while also being religious and/or politically aware, are being managed using parameters developed for prisons. The issue is not just confined to the UK as Prevent is recognised as best practice for CVE and PVE in the US and across Europe.

Despite mounting evidence of the detrimental effects of Prevent, there has been no retreat from its enforcement and Prevent remains opaque and difficult to challenge, its statistics both divisive and delusional. For example, it is impossible to prove that Prevent works – one cannot prove that a crime would have taken place, had Prevent not intervened; such statements would be entirely based on supposition, not evidence. And yet Prevent referrals of six to seven thousand individuals last year, of which over two thousand are children under the age of 14 (Home Office 2023a), are used repeatedly to justify it within a greater political national security agenda. This overarching agenda increasingly conflates extremism with terrorism, despite the absence of a universally accepted definition of extremism, legal or otherwise. Consequently, the criteria for inclusion in Prevent’s dragnet are subject to constant shifting, allowing for the arbitrary targeting of individuals based on political expediency rather than objective or legally challengeable standards.

Indeed, a new non-legal definition of extremism was recently announced by Michael Gove, in his new role as secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which shifts the focus of extremism from individuals to institutes. The suggested organisations that he thinks should be placed on an “extremism list” have all demonstrated solidarity with the plight of the Palestinian people. Gove, who advocates being a Zionist as “common sense”, has repeatedly targeted and securitised Palestine solidarity actions (Jewish Chronicle 2024). In 2011, he halted a Palestinian literary festival via his Department’s Prevention of Extremism Unit (Foyle 2016), one of many examples cited in the long history linking Prevent to Palestinian activism. In 2015, he began trumpeting a law to suppress the BDS movement (Coolness of Hind 2016), which delivered the Anti-BDS Bill last year.

The impact of Prevent on Palestinian activism was clear as early as 2016, when a schoolboy in Luton was questioned by Prevent officers for wearing a Palestinian wrist band (The Independent 2016). In 2021, as students across the globe, including the UK, expressed solidarity with Palestinians who were being displaced from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah to make way for Jewish settlers, the threat of Prevent referrals was mobilised. The number of bonafide Prevent referrals as a result remained low but the Prevent environment was documented by Prevent Watch, CAGE and other NGOs. Furthermore, it was documented the Counter Extremism Unit – then under the leadership of Simcox – was instructing the education sector how to deal with Palestinian activism, and it was “confusing it with antisemitism” (McNeil-Willson 2021). One such case was a 12-year-old child who was questioned by an officer alone at school because she set up a Whatsapp group in solidarity with Palestine. The officer told her that she was lucky not to be down at the police station dealing with hate crime despite there being no evidence of any hate crime having been committed.

Incidences like these against individuals not only lead to potential self-censoring of the individual involved but of their wider communities. In 2023, a report by Amnesty International refers to this chilling effect of Prevent as a result of Palestine solidarity as reported by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies representative (2023). It supports the report by Rights & Security International published the year before in 2022, which documents the chilling effect with a common theme being Palestinian solidarity and those involved in the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign were notable and justified given that training materials for spotting signs of extremism includes the national Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) logo (Aked 2020). Such materials are key to normalising solidarity with Palestine as extremism and have been seen as early as 2016 when “Vocal support of Palestine” and “opposition to Israeli settlements” were given as discussion points when looking at examples of extremism in Prevent training documents (Department for Education 2016).

The use of Prevent in the current context of Palestine reveals how it is used to leverage and invoke the national security surveillance system. Shortly after October 7, schools were issued letters from police and local authorities instructing teachers and education staff that “with our Prevent duties in mind” and “as per our recent Prevent training” teachers and staff were to “be vigilant” (Open Rights Group 2023). The Secretary of State for Education sent a letter to the Vice Chancellor of universities also reminding them “to exercise their Prevent duty” and “be vigilant about speakers” (BRICUP 2023). Almost six weeks later, MET Terrorism chief Dominic Murphy leveraged Prevent directly to try to “prove” a “higher threat of terror attacks” (Bentham 2023).

However, this number is not evidence of a threat or of violence. At the most basic level of intellectual reason, such links are impossible to prove. Rather, these referrals are a direct reflection of how fear is being harnessed to cement Prevent and make it seem necessary. More than this, in its targeting of Palestinian activism, Prevent is acting as a funnel into the national security surveillance system, while self-justifying in the process. This is best summed up by Murphy, who, in boasting of 70 referrals, also indicated that this movement meant “a large number of younger people … into Prevent for the first time” (Bentham 2023, my emphasis). Notably, this trend is further underscored by an extraordinary directive issued by Waltham Forest council to school headteachers, stipulating that Prevent referrals should only be initiated where genuine concerns of radicalisation exist. This implies a notable surge in misguided referrals stemming from discussions on Palestinian activism and pro-Palestinian sentiments (Letter sent to schools by The Prevent Team at London Borough of Waltham Forest).

An illustrative example is that of an 8-year-old autistic child who was referred to Prevent when their teacher showed them a newsround clip of what had happened on 7 October shortly after the incident. The child shouted out “yey” during the video and this resulted in an immediate Prevent referral. Justification for the referral was compounded when the mother expressed that she told her children to only discuss such matters at home (i.e. Palestine/Israel), which exemplifies the chilling effect felt by Muslim families, rather than clandestine harmful discussions being had at home. The school later pointed out that their misinformed referral was a direct result of the “panic” felt by staff when they were issued with guidance post 7 October on making referrals to Prevent in light of Hamas now being a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. This deliberate conflation of crimes such as glorification of terror groups with pre-crime Prevent and Palestine as a topic of discussion led to such panic.

Prevent has placed innocent individuals in a legislative vacuum that is much closer to the children of Palestine and Palestinians than anyone wants to see or experience. Moreover, the recent redefinition of extremism represents a strategic manoeuvre aimed at targeting organisations and structures that offer support to individuals advocating for Palestinian rights. This shift carries significant ramifications that cannot be understated.

Coloniality and (im)permissible violence in international relations

Somdeep Sen

After Hamas’s “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” on 7 October 2023, many have wondered, under what circumstances is violence permissible in international relations? Western governments, public intellectuals and commentators have been unequivocal in their declaration that the Hamas operation was not an act of resistance. Neither was it an outgrowth of a history of a crippling 16-year siege over the Gaza Strip or a longer 75-year history of settler colonial domination over Palestine/Israel (Sen 2020, 54–88). This was violence without politics, history, or context; or rather, it was violence for the sake of violence carried out by a barbaric faction that enjoys the suffering of “those who enjoy the good things in life” (Cohen 2023). Yet, such condemnation of Hamas’s actions should not be viewed as a pronouncement that violence is entirely impermissible in international relations. Be it a global history of colonial genocides (Wolfe 2006), the surveillance, policing and war-making that has accompanied the effort to combat “global terror” (Collins and Sen 2021; Stampnitzky 2013), or the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza after 7 October, they all seem to suggest that massive levels of state violence aimed at humiliating, torturing, injuring, maiming, and killing the “‘other” is sometimes perpetrated with relative impunity and is not entirely “out of step” with the norm in international politics. Armed resistance too can occasionally be deemed sacrosanct. And, as has been the case with Ukraine, it can be celebrated as a legitimate act of bravery against an invader and occupier (EC 2023). Then why does Palestinian resistance languish beyond the bounds of permissible political conduct in international relations?

The answer lies not in the nature of the 7 October attack. Indeed, this time around, the symbolic potency and material impact of the Hamas operation cannot be underestimated. But no manner or scale of Palestinian resistance has ever enjoyed universal legitimacy as acts of bravery against invasion, occupation, and siege. Instead, I would suggest that the (im)permissibility of violence in international relations is rooted in the (im)permissibility of the political project from which this violence emanates. Herein, the stigmatisation of Palestinian resistance (Ayyash 2023) mirrors a long-standing “legacy of colonial hostility” towards all manners of “anti-colonial insurgent politics” – often viewed in the coloniser’s narrative as simply venal, cancerous, disorderly, and devoid of any legitimate political purpose (Sen 2022, 212–213).

This narrative was apparent, for instance, in Political Trouble in India 1907–1917, a report by James Campbell Ker prepared for the British colonial administration and Criminal Intelligence Offices documenting “nationalist revolutionary activities” in India. For Indian nationalists these “activities”, which included armed robberies and plots to assassinate colonial officials, were an integral facet of an auspicious struggle to dismantle British colonial rule in India (Ker 1917, v). Yet, the report frames them as devoid of any substantive political purpose and primarily as seditious acts of mutiny, conspiracy and anarchism, ideologically driven by “murderous propaganda” rooted in an unreasonable canonisation of Indian civilisation and racial hatred of Europeans (Ker 1917, xiii-xiv). Of course, such narratives of the savagery and anarchy of the colonised’s insurgent acts then served as a justification for the coloniser’s violence – violence deemed ultimately necessary to ensure order and the authority of the colonial state (Habib 2019). A similarly antagonistic conception of anti-colonial insurgent politics is present in the writings of David Galula, a Lieutenant-General in the French army between 1939 and 1962. Galula’s works are often considered seminal in shaping present-day counterinsurgency doctrine and strategy. Yet, his “seminal insights” build on his recollections of French colonial “pacification efforts” during the Algerian war of independence (Galula 2006 [1963] , iv-vi). And, in relaying the workings of the insurgent, he too accords little by way of political legitimacy or purpose to the activities of the Algerian nationalist, often characterising them as simply “noisy” and “incoherent” acts of terrorism that only promote instability (Galula 2006 [1963]), 15–16).

The brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was also accompanied by such a discourse. While a central chapter in the Kenyan struggle for independence, British authorities portrayed the uprising as no more than a “barbaric tribal response to the pressures of modernisation, as a reversion to primitive superstition and blood-crazed savagery caused by the inability of the Africans to cope with the modern world” (Newsinger 1981, 159). Even during the Mau Mau trials, the British colonial administration made a concerted effort to keep politics out of the courtroom. During the court proceedings there was no mention of the political movement, “the cause they fought for”, their “political motives, rights or grievance”; thus, once again, perpetuating the perception that insurgent violence was devoid of any politics other than barbarism and savagery and justifying the coloniser’s actions aimed at humiliating, torturing, injuring, maiming, and killing the insurgent (Anderson 2005, 290–291).

In the same vein, returning to Palestine, the question of the (im)permissibility of violence has nothing to do with the scale, timing, political impact, or the human cost of a particular insurgent act. Instead, it has to do with the (im)permissibility of Palestinian struggle for liberation i.e. political project from which Palestinian insurgent politics emanates. Here the contrast between the widespread condemnation of Palestinian armed resistance against Israel and celebration of Ukrainian armed resistance against Russia is particularly instructive. Ostensibly, both manners of resistance are politically driven to oust an occupier and invader. Yet, Ukrainian resistance is often viewed as not just a quest for liberation from Russian imperialism and occupation. Rather, the fate of the Ukrainian struggle is discursively tied to the fate of the European civilisation. And solidarity with Ukraine, then, was obligatory “not because this was the moral response to imperial aggression” (Sen 2024, 492; see; Du Bois 1899) but because they were blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and civilised like “us” Europeans (Arab News 2022). It is, after all, this presumption of European co-fraternity that led European Union President Ursula von der Leyen to declare that Ukrainian resistance was a bulwark of “modern reality and the strong tides of European history” against Russian aggression and had a “a higher power on its side” (Von der Leyen 2024).

Yet, despite a well-documented history of Israeli settler colonial rule and occupation of Palestine, no such allowances were made for Palestinian insurgents or the wider political project of Palestinian liberation struggle. In fact, any attempts to provide a contextual background to the events of 7 October, have been roundly silenced and censured as tantamount to support for a proscribed terror organisation (i.e. Hamas). This has included individuals, who have participated in Palestine solidarity activism or expressed support for Palestinian rights, being arrested under counter-terrorism legislation (see “Palestine Uncensored”). Neither has von der Leyen been keen to draw parallels between the nature of the Russian military aggression and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Why? Because Palestinians do not look like “us” and the fate of their political aspirations is not tied to metropolitan futures. On the contrary, in the imaginations of the metropole, Palestinian insurgency is much more reminiscent of venal, cancerous and disorderly acts of violence perpetrated by the “darker peoples” of the colonies. Just like the Algerian, Kenyan, and Indian anti-colonial resistance then, Palestinians’ violence is also viewed as noisy, but ultimately incoherent and lacking any political ideology other than a murderous propaganda of unreasonable hatred. And, just as the coloniser’s violence in response to anti-colonial insurgency in the colonised’s sector was deemed necessary in ensuring order and authority, so too is the violence of the Israeli state in Gaza rationalised as essential, to both eradicate the cancerous insurgent (i.e. Hamas) and restore order.

Retrieving Palestine’s message of liberation

Akram Salhab

Labelling organisations as “terrorist” is a continuation of a long tradition in Western political and legal thought which places certain groups outside the protection of the law in order to justify unbridled violence against them. When the term is applied to peoples as a whole – the “human animals” of Gaza, amongst whom there are “no innocents” - it signifies a wholesale rejection of their very claim to humanity and any right to protection under humanitarian or human rights law (Karanth 2023; Omar 2023).

The exclusionary purpose of the sociolegal category of terrorism is most clearly illustrated in modern times by the War on Terror. Its legal infrastructure was based on a narrative which argued that existing laws of armed conflict designed to govern war between sovereign states are unworkable in the more complex “new wars” between states and “non-state actors” (Kaldor 2005). This was said to necessitate an overhaul of existing legal structures in favour of “greater flexibility”, which has meant fewer rights for those targeted by arbitrary kidnapping, drone strikes etc (Kaldor 2005, p?).

Such manoeuvrings were possible because the laws of armed conflict are themselves state-centric. The framework is set in the work of influential Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, whose writing prioritised the rights of states over those of occupied and conquered peoples on the basis that the maintenance of social order took precedence over the instability of struggles for freedom (Nabulsi 2005, 142, 151). This negation of a right to resist finds perhaps its most extreme articulation in the concept of hostis humani generis or “the enemy of mankind”, a legal category associated since antiquity with piracy and employed by the sixteenth century Italian legal scholar Alberico Gentili to rationalise the exclusion and punishment of non-state actors. Crucially, Gentili’s work was revived in the mid-nineteenth century by scholars seeking a legal foundation for British imperial expansion and then again by those justifying the depredations of the War on Terror (Vergerio 2022, 248).

The lineage of this categorisation – from piracy through to colonised peoples – was part of a state effort to confront the challenge posed by such groups to the international order. Piracy, for example, “posed an impediment to the smooth flow of commerce, wreaking havoc on trade and disrupting imperialism’s maritime zones of capital accumulation”; Native American “savages” stood in the way of the United States’ western expansion and the population of the Middle East became “terrorist”’ when their activities challenge Western imperialism, geopolitical dominance and projects of resource extraction (Krever 2023).

In addition to these very material motivations, however, castigating pirates, indigenous, and colonised peoples as uncivilised, brutal and savage was also intended to discredit the alternative vision their societies and worldview offered to the prevailing order of imperial exploitation and permanent war. Pirates, and others to whom hostis humani generis was applied, therefore had to be defeated both practically and ideologically. For example, the British state and its nascent propaganda system went to great lengths during the famous 1696 piracy trial of Henry Every to combat the “potent myth of the patriotic pirate that was gaining ground at home and in the colonies” and that had proliferated in the public imagination through the numerous songs, novels, and plays lauding his exploits (Burgess 2009, 888).

Yet state propaganda was unable to prevent the infiltration of ideas from the margins of the imperial world-system. Histories of both transatlantic piracy, as well as the pirate societies off the Madagascar coast, have explained how the complex, often highly democratic and egalitarian forms of pirate self-rule can stake a better claim to the origins of Enlightenment thought than the coffee houses and salons of Europe (Linebaugh and Rediker 2012). Experimentation with “new ways of organising social relations” was not occurring “in the great cities of Europe, still under the control of various “ancien regimes” but in the multilingual, multi-ethnic crews of pirates ships whose members were “tossed together in situations where the rapid creation of new institutional structures was absolutely required … [the] perfect laboratories of democratic experiment” (Graeber 2023, 24). The case has also been made that indigenous thought has likewise been an unacknowledged source of inspiration for many of the key ideas of the Enlightenment (Graeber and Wengrow 2021).

Threats to imperial ideological hegemony held particular potency when coming from movements articulating clear liberatory alternatives. For example, the Haitian Revolution at the end of the 18th Century was initially characterised by European observers and historians as a brutal attack on the white community on the island, epitomised by the 1804 massacres that accompanied Haitian Independence (Daut 2020; Geggus 2002, 31–42). However, as the institution of slavery came to be seen as morally indefensible, scholars began instead to depict the Haitian Revolution as an inferior copy of the French Revolution, attempting to claim the struggle of Haitian slaves as a European endowment. In a similar “diffusionist” reading, some historical accounts of the anticolonial revolution of the 20th Century have regarded Third World national liberation as merely a failed imitation of European nationalism (Mantena 2016). Colonised people, in this formula, can only be conceived of as terrorists or unsuccessful state builders, seeking but failing to imitate Europe and without their own political ideas or agency.

We can see many of these same stereotypes and historical processes distiled in the example of Palestine, whose people have time and again faced the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism and its Western imperialist sponsors, as well as the degradations of their falsified histories and relentless propaganda. Western misinformation about Palestinians magnifies the violence of the colonised to legitimise the exterminatory war being waged on them, even as the world witnesses Israel’s genocide in real time on their television screens. The label of “terrorism” has served to justify this violence by reducing Palestinians to an inexplicably bloodthirsty people that must be destroyed, first in Gaza, but soon in the remainder of occupied Palestine and beyond. Lost in this dehumanising rhetoric is any serious engagement with Palestinian political thought or an attempt to understand why Palestinians are resisting, and what vision of liberation they are fighting to achieve.

There is, of course, no single definition of what Palestinians mean or have meant by liberation, but rather a rich canon of thought with common themes woven together across Palestinian history. Since the mass expulsion of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, liberation has been inseparable from the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes. “Liberation and return” was the slogan of the Palestinian Revolution launched from Palestinian refugee camps at the end of the 1960s and the first thing young Palestinians would be taught were the names and geography of the ethnically cleansed villages from which they originated.

This same revolution – unified under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – repeatedly set out the institutional arrangements through which it believed true human liberation from Zionism could be realised. For example, the 1969 meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) – the PLO’s parliament – undertook a wide ranging debate about the form of state that should come post-liberation. Despite differing proposals from Palestinian political factions regarding the secular/democratic, bi-national, socialist and/or Arab character of the proposed state, there was agreement that Palestinian liberation would need to both overcome social and economic injustices, as well as provide a model for democratic intercommunal coexistence (Khaduri 1973).

Fragments of a Palestinian vision of liberation can be gleaned from numerous other cultural sources, such as the bitter realisation by the protagonist in Ghassan Kanafani’s play Return to Haifa that one has to first liberate oneself in order to liberate one’s homeland (Kanafani, Harlow, and Riley 2000). Another recurring motif is the transcending of borders found throughout Palestinian culture, most tangible in the moments when Palestinians break through the confinement to which they have been subjected, both by Israel and the reactionary Arab states. In 2011, when Palestinian refugees marched en masse to Israel’s northern border with Syria, crossing it despite the minefields in their path, their gesture was recognisable to all Palestinians and:

[…] made public the private heart of every Palestinian citizen, who has lived each day since 1948 in the emergency crisis of a catastrophe. Waiting, and struggling, and organising for only two things: liberation and return. (Nabulsi 2011)

What do such moments mean to Palestinians living under perpetual bombardment, siege, occupation and exile? Writing in the aftermath of Israel’s occupation of Gaza in 1956, Palestinian communist poet Mouin Bseiso captures the moment that Israeli soldiers withdrew after three months of massacres, arrests, wanton violence but also strong resistance from Palestinians:

The day became a national holiday…while the thunder started pounding, mixed with the sound of explosions that.shook the windows of the city. Nature was bringing out all the rain, lightning, and thunder it had stored in her chest…to contribute, along with the occupied city, to the evacuation of the Israeli occupier from its land. With the rain that started falling that day…the imprints of the occupation’s iron heels were washed from the streets of Gaza and from its land.

People went out hugging each other in the rain, and the Gaza Strip, with its villages, its camps, and its schools, became Gaza once again…and on the first morning in which you wake up and walk freely in its streets, regained from the hands of the occupiers, you could still feel the city’s wounds bleeding… but her smile that day…was bigger than her wounds…and brighter…no one can describe the joy of a city…liberated by her own blood…other than the city itself.

From her chest and from her forehead ran… the first thread of blood… which met other threads of blood… to weave into the flag of Palestine raised high in the Gaza sky. Gaza had overcome that morning. Its own tragedy was that it had paid a heavy price for the expulsion of the occupier…the price of its freedom. (Bseiso 2014, 55)

Envisaging such moments of liberation, and working to realise them, drives Palestinians on in their struggle for freedom, return and national self-determination. Millions around the world share the Palestinian aspiration, and understand Palestine as a symbol of a people who refuse to surrender despite the most appalling violence, a commitment to liberation against all odds. It is incumbent on all those teaching about Palestine and anticolonial history, or undertaking public advocacy for Palestinian justice, to return to Palestine’s message of freedom and ensure that – despite the propaganda – it finds its way to the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Amna Kaleem’s work is supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Somdeep Sen’s work is supported by the Independent Research Fund, Denmark.

Notes on contributors

Layla Aitlhadj

Layla Aitlhadj is the Director and Senior Caseworker at Prevent Watch, a community-led initiative which has supported individuals affected by the Prevent programme in over 600 cases. Layla has led this support, litigation and advocacy work. She has published extensively on the British government’s counter-extremism policy Prevent Duty, including the People’s Review of Prevent, an alternative to the widely boycotted official review of the policy.

Alice Finden

Alice Finden is an Assistant Professor of International Politics at Durham University. Her work focuses on colonial patterns of counterterrorism and forms of everyday violence. She is the co-editor of Methodologies in Critical Terrorism Studies: Gaps and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. She is one of the co-convenors of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group.

Sophie Haspeslagh

Sophie Haspeslagh is a lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She focuses on the impact of counterterrorism on conflict resolution and the transition of armed actors away from violence. She is the author of Proscribing Peace: How listing armed groups as terrorists hurts negotiations (Manchester University Press 2021).

Amna Kaleem

Amna Kaleem is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Politics and IR, University of Sheffield. Her work focuses on the securitisation of citizenship and the everyday impacts of counter-terrorism policies on communities. She is one of the co-convenors of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group.

Rabea M. Khan

Rabea M. Khan is a lecturer in International Relations at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research interests include Critical Terrorism Studies, Critical Religion, Post- and Decolonial Theory as well as Gender and Race. She is one of the co-convenors of the BISA Critical Studies on Terrorism working group.

Akram Salhab

Akram Salhab is a Palestinian organiser, researcher and PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London focusing on internationalism, solidarity, popular organising and Palestinian anticolonial thought and practice.

C. Heike Schotten

C. Heike Schotten is Professor of Political Science and Affiliated Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a member of the organising collective of USACBI, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, and the founding collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Somdeep Sen

Somdeep Sen is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University in Denmark. He is the author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the anticolonial and the postcolonial (Cornell University Press 2020). His research focuses on race and racism in international relations, settler colonialism, urban politics, postcolonialism and decolonisation.

Lisa Stampnitzky

Lisa Stampnitzky is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism” and articles in journals including Security Dialogue and Theory and Society. Her second book project, How Torture Became Speakable, aims to explain how and why the U.S. turned from an epistemic politics of plausible deniability to one of strategic acknowledgement in the post-9/11 war on terror.

Notes

1. This Roundtable was originally co-hosted by the BISA Critical Terrorism Studies Working Group and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) on 1 December 2023 on Zoom under the title “Terrorism, Counter-terrorism, and the permissibility of violence”. Special thanks to BRISMES organisers Neve Gordon, Amy Brickhill, and Paola Rivetti who helped with the organisation and hosting of this event. Thank you also to the participants and audience members of the roundtable upon whose request we decided to write-up and publish the roundtable discussion in this format.

2. The “Terrorism Industry”, a term first coined by Herman and O’Sullivan (1989), refers to an ever-growing industry which profits from 1) the acceptance of “terrorism” as a political reality and legitimate category of political violence 2) the inflation of the threat that this category can pose to all societies (see also Khan 2024, 14).

3. This discussion draws upon my book Disciplining Terror, especially Chapter 5, “Terrorism fever”: The first War on Terror and the politicisation of expertise (Stampnitzky 2013).