It is more or less inevitable, in mainstream conversations surrounding Palestine, that the question of “terrorism” will make a large and pronounced appearance. Even among those left-leaning liberals willing to acknowledge the seventy-six years of colonial aggression that Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Israel, anxieties about the matter of terrorism loom large. Isn’t it important, liberals ask, that we at least acknowledge that Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other groups are recognized terrorist organizations? Isn’t the terrorist status of these groups something that all reasonable people, including leftist supporters of Palestine, can be expected to concede from the outset? And besides, strategically speaking, wouldn’t this concession actually help pro-Palestinian activists to gain public credibility by clearly differentiating the struggle of ordinary Palestinians from the brutality of actors like Hamas?
What follows is a sketch of several reasons why we should not only resist this line of questioning, but begin refusing the category of “terrorism” as such. This is not, to be clear, because it is untrue that Hamas and other state-designated terrorist groups have at times committed terrible crimes against civilians. (They have.) Rather, it is because closer inspection makes clear that the word “terrorism” adds precisely nothing useful to our understanding of these crimes, and in fact substantially diminishes our ability to analyze their background and significance in helpful or productive ways. Far from providing us with some kind of moral or legal baseline for conversations about the plight of Palestinians or the ethics of armed struggle, the concept of terrorism functions precisely to preclude serious analysis of the political conditions under which Palestinians and other oppressed peoples live and fight—while effectively enabling a perpetuation of those conditions under the familiar banner of national security and the liberal discourse of human rights.
First of all, it must be emphasized that “terrorism” has no stable or internationally recognized definition. Numerous efforts have been made to codify a binding legal definition of the term, but have in each case been thwarted by powerful states—notably the US—who fear that any meaningful definition of the term (e.g., “the deliberate harming of civilians as a psychological war tactic”) would implicate their own armies no less than their enemies. Most powerful state and non-state actors target civilians with some regularity, whether via direct combat, extrajudicial torture networks, or sanctions regimes designed to harm vulnerable populations for political effect. And regrettably enough, the US and its network of client states—Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others—are often world leaders in this regard. It makes perfect sense, strategically speaking, why US officials would oppose any actionable definition of terrorism that did not make de facto exceptions for these regimes.
Second, “terrorism” precludes any consideration of the political grievances, objectives, and demands for which specific states or groups are fighting. The question is not whether groups like Hamas, the African National Congress (ANC), and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) have at times committed terrible atrocities. Of course they have—albeit on a far lesser scale than their more powerful state oppressors. The question is what purpose is served by branding these groups “terrorist organizations”: that is, by defining them always and only in terms of their worst atrocities, rather than by the objectives for which they fight. The answer, as should be obvious, is that the terrorist label functions to shut down political analysis, allowing Westerners to turn aside from the historical oppression to which these populations have been subjected and instead imagine them as bloodthirsty “savages” whose militancy is a priori inexplicable and whose demands cannot therefore be met with anything other than intensified forms of repression, violence, and state terror.
Third, by the same token, the “terrorism” label hampers our ability to see and address the root causes that give rise to violence (and are themselves forms of violence), thereby ensuring the prolongation of conflict and the continuation of terrible suffering on all sides—however unevenly distributed. Even, for argument’s sake, if one cares only for the well-being of Israeli Jews and regards Palestinians as nothing more than disposable “human animals,” the fact remains that even Israelis will never be fully secure until the deep grievances that generate resistance groups like Hamas are addressed head-on. Massacring Palestinians in Gaza may fleetingly satisfy the bloodlust of Benjamin Netanyahu, but it will do absolutely nothing to make a single Israeli (much less Palestinian) safer. On the contrary, it will powerfully reinforce Palestinian desperation, dispossession, and justified rage, which will inevitably spawn heightened forms of militant resistance in the future.
Fourth, “terrorism” dehumanizes the populations to whom it is applied, disproportionately in Islamophobic and/or racialized ways. When Israeli or US or Ukrainian soldiers commit atrocities against civilians, their crimes are reflexively framed as “collateral damage” or, at worst, as horrific acts of individual soldiers which in no way reflect on the states or populations they serve. Yet when Palestinians or majority-Muslim groups commit similar atrocities—or even when they engage in entirely legitimate forms of violence, as did Hezbollah in its 1980s attacks on occupying Israeli forces—their crimes are seized upon at once as somehow “revelatory” of violent pathologies supposedly at work across entire regions, nations, or ethno-religious communities. This is propaganda at its purest: When Israeli occupation soldiers snipe journalists, torture children, and drop white phosphorous on population centers, we are told that they do so despite who they truly are. When Palestinians behave similarly—far more rarely, far less systematically, and in the context of resisting military occupation—it is suggested that they do so because of who they are. Israelis can never be terrorists, no matter how many atrocities they proudly and publicly perpetrate on defenseless Palestinian civilians. Palestinians will always be terrorists, no matter what forms of resistance they adopt, for the simple reason that they are a majority-Muslim population fighting state actors who—it has been decided against all evidence—cannot possibly qualify as terrorists.
Finally, “terrorism” is a political weapon deployed by powerful states against weak ones as a means of imperial control. Once smaller states like Iraq have been designated by Western powers as “state sponsors of terrorism” (a designation that often has nothing to do with actual conduct, as is plain from the fact that the US regards Cuba but not Saudi Arabia as one such sponsor), they quickly find themselves economically, financially, and politically isolated from the rest of the world. Not content simply to cut off its own political relations with states it deems sponsors of terror, the US routinely coerces other countries into doing the same—or else find themselves next on the imperial chopping block. Having isolated its smaller geopolitical nemeses in this way, the US and its allies then wreak years of havoc on these states’ populations (principally in the form of murderous sanctions regimes and preemptive invasions), blackmailing the world community into silence and inaction as maximum pain is inflicted on faraway civilians in a calculated effort to force their leaders into accepting US hegemony.
If “terrorism” had any stable meaning, it would surely (and predominantly) describe what the US and its allies do with pride and regularity around the world: depriving faraway populations of food, water, and medicine in a bid to weaken their leaders; waging decades-long wars of aggression to remold the geopolitical landscape; backing, arming, and propping up genocidal regimes as they slaughter their minorities and political rivals; treating water facilities, electrical plants, UN shelters, and hospitals as regular military targets; presiding over a global shadow network of torture, abduction, and extrajudicial assassination; facilitating and financing the growth of groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban for geopolitical ends; sanctioning ICC officials who dare to investigate these criminal behaviors; and, finally, demonizing, deporting, and denying basic asylum rights to the untold millions of refugees these behaviors inevitably produce.
But terrorism is clearly not a meaningful word. By this point, it’s hardly even a coherent concept. Rather, it’s a political bludgeon selectively weaponized by powerful states to discredit political opponents, dehumanize the populations those opponents represent, obfuscate the root causes of violence, and give pro-Western powers a pass to continue entrenching and expanding the global imperial nightmare they have created—all while framing themselves as vanguards in a heroic battle of Good against Evil, Civilization against Savagery, Democracy against Autocracy, and Liberty against Terror. While some Western leftists, most famously Noam Chomsky, have made admirable strides to reclaim and repurpose the term through the language of “state terrorism,” it seems increasingly doubtful that the word’s decades of propagandistic and Islamophobic coating can be so easily scrubbed off. For the foreseeable future, we would be better served by simply dropping it from our political lexicon.