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ABSTRACT
This article traces the genealogy of 21st century “terrorism” discourse to mid-to-late 20th century neoconservative thought and Israeli propaganda, arguing that Zionism is the disavowed rhetorical, political, and affective centre of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The paper further analyzes Zionism and the “terrorism” discourse to which it gives rise as extinction phobias, or moralised narratives of existential threat that explain the voluminous, horrific violence unleashed by the GWOT, the persistence of the GWOT’s signature racisms (anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian racism), and the world-destroying violence unleashed by Israel on the Gaza Strip most spectacularly in 2023–24. The article concludes by explaining the implications of this genealogy for efforts to classify white supremacist violence as terrorism and scholarly accounts of terrorism in the fields of TS and CTS.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Muhannad Ayyash, Susanna Bohme, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, and Emmaia Gelman and for their incisive readings and criticisms of previous versions of this article, all of which improved it tremendously. Thanks to Omar Baddar, Joseph Brown, and Anna Meier for help via last minute consults and fact-finding missions I would not have successfully completed on my own. Two anonymous reviewers valuably helped me hone this article’s argument and contribution. This issue’s co-editors, Rabea Khan and Sarah Gharib Seif, provided sage editorial guidance to this article and visionary leadership and political courage to this special issue, daring to not only imagine it but also bring it to beautiful, successful fruition.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Darryl Li argues that US anti-terrorism laws are “anti-Palestinian at the core,” noting that “The anti-Muslim thrust of ‘War on Terror’ policies was built on a pre-existing foundation of hostility to the Palestinian liberation movement” (Citation2024, 3). “Nakba” is Arabic for “catastrophe,” the term used by Palestinians to name their 1947–49 ethnic cleansing that established the state of Israel. In an article first accepted and then censored by the Harvard Law Review, Rabea Eghbariah (Citation2023) argues that Palestinians’ experience of the last century provides a new, paradigm criminal violation for the international order: just as the Nazi holocaust established the paradigm of genocide and the South African regime produced the paradigm of apartheid, so too does Zionism proffer the paradigm of Nakba.
2. The important volumes Collateral Language (Citation2002) and Globalizing Collateral Language (Citation2021) thoroughly interrogate the vast rhetorical and ideological transformation of the US political landscape wrought in and through the War on Terror by examining its crucial keywords but neglect a consideration of the very term “9/11” itself.
3. Several commentators have argued that Oct. 7th was akin to if not worse than the Nazi holocaust (Elbe et al. Citation2023; Patt and Steir-Livny Citation2023). Tellingly, a profusion of American and Israeli commentators, including President Joe Biden (Citation2023) and Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan (Citation2023) have claimed that Oct. 7th is Israel’s 9/11. Bringing it all together, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared Hamas simultaneously to be ISIS, worse than ISIS, as well as “the new Nazis” (Citation2023b).
4. Khan’s title and subject, “the essentialist terrorist,” is a play on Edward Said’s review, entitled “The Essential Terrorist” (Citation1987), of Benjamin Netanyahu’s (Citation1986) book Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Khan’s critique of what he calls the HIT Lit (the Highly Influential Terrorism Literature) is modelled upon and inspired by Said’s far-sighted critique of this literature’s origins in Netanyahu’s discourse. More on all this below.
5. He is most often “he,” also. On the gendered formations and functions of anti-Muslim racism, see, e.g. Aziz (Citation2012); Puar (Citation2007); Puar and Rai (Citation2002); Thobani (Citation2020).
6. This framing helps identify another distinctive feature of extinction phobias and Right-wing discourses more broadly: their appropriation of the Left’s language of freedom and oppression to serve reactionary ends, a purposefully misleading rhetorical strategy (Robin Citation2018).
7. In Queer Terror (2018), I argue this is the logic of settler colonial genocide. For a compendium of Israeli incitations to genocide during the Gaza Nakba, see Law for Palestine (Citation2024). For an exhaustive summary of the genocidal acts and strategies undertaken by Israel during the Gaza Nakba, as well as a detailed assemblage of “Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others,” see South Africa’s Application Instituting Proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (Citation2023).
8. James Lobe (Citation2003) observes that neoconservatism is marked by stark moral binaries, understanding politics and history as “a permanent struggle between the forces of good and evil, light and dark.” More specifically, neoconservatism holds “a Manichean view of a world in which good and evil are constantly at war and the United States has an obligation to lead forces for good around the world” (Citation2016), a view that also entails “a belief in the moral exceptionalism of both the United States and Israel and the absolute moral necessity for the U.S. to defend Israel’s security” (Citation2016). As Griffin, Miller, and Mills put it, “the neocons all have something of a shared vision in the belief that Western democracies are embroiled in a Manichean struggle against Islamist totalitarianism. This political struggle, it is claimed, is comparable with the struggle against the Soviet Union and the revolutionary left during the Cold War, when hardline anti-communist ideology helped forge transatlantic networks of militant ‘Cold Warriors,’ many with roots on the radical left” (Citation2017, 220).
9. Arendt recognised this weakness in her text and attempted to rectify it; the result was The Human Condition which, along with her other lectures and writing on Marx, was originally planned to reveal the “Totalitarian Elements in Marxism.” This was a text she failed to write and, ultimately, “her analysis of what it was about Marxism that contributed to totalitarianism was never explained in print” (Canovan Citation1994, 64; see also Gleason Citation1995, 112–3). These texts (Origins, The Human Condition) taken together with On Revolution, all written around the same period, make it difficult not to see Arendt as an American Cold War liberal (Moyn Citation2023) and a neoconservative, anti-Marx polemicist (Schotten Citation2018, Chapter 1).
10. The Institute was named for Netanyahu’s brother, the only casualty during an Israeli military “counterterrorism” operation. For a description of this event and Jonatan's celebrity that critically exposes and yet simultaneously reproduces the toxic affective power of “terrorism” discourse, see the postscript to Joshua Cohen’s novel, “Credits and Extra Credit,” in The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (Citation2021, 227–228).
11. e.g.: Paul Johnson, Henry “Scoop” Jackson (often considered the political hero of an earlier generation of neocons), Richard Pipes, Bayard Rustin, George Will, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and, of course, Netanyahu himself.
12. This “moral relativism” was unfolding at the United Nations General Assembly, which had recently passed a resolution condemning state violence against anticolonial liberation movements as “terrorism.” The UN debates were one factor motivating Netanyahu to consolidate an understanding of “terrorism” that would uphold Zionist interests (Kumar Citation2020).
13. Benjamin Netanyahu, Preface, International Terrorism, p. 1.
14. Johnson, “Seven Deadly Sins,” p. 15. Paul Johnson, a prominent British Catholic public intellectual, is one of a not insignificant minority of Catholic neoconservatives. While not all neoconservatives are Jewish, most are. Yet they share a material agenda with Evangelical Protestants vis-a-vis Israel and Zionism, which has led to political alliances between neocons and the Christian Right. Neocons also share an ideological or moral agenda with Catholics who, some argue, are drawn to Leo Strauss for his moral thinking (Heilbrunn Citation2008, 93) (Strauss is a major intellectual influence for some neoconservatives [Norton Citation2004]). Strauss himself was an ardent Zionist: “As a university student, he was a follower of the right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, who argued that Theodor Herzl’s vision of a peaceful Israel with Jews and Arabs working side by side was a pipe dream. It was a stance Strauss would never jettison,” viewing Israel as “an outpost of the West surrounded by mortal enemies” (Heilbrunn Citation2008, 94).
15. Heilbrunn notes that while “it’s never been necessary to be Jewish to be a neoconservative … neoconservatism is nonetheless intimately linked with the memory of the Holocaust and the Allies’ failure to save the Jews during the war” (Citation2008, 116).
16. Note again the substantial presence of neoconservative thinkers and policymakers presenting at the second Jonathan Institute conference: Paul Johnson (again), Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lewis, Eli Kedourie, Charles Krauthammer, Walter Berns, Midge Decter (again), and of course, Netanyahu himself.
17. Judging by his current rhetoric, Netanyahu’s views have not changed much over the course of half a century, despite significant historical changes; see, e.g. his Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Battle of Civilization” (Citation2023a).
18. The contemporary conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism by the Israeli government and mainstream Zionist organisations like the Anti-Defamation League represents the current version of this argument and, according to Maryam Jamshidi (Citation2023), constitutes the successor chapter to “terrorism” in the discursive front of Israeli warfare. In this construal, Palestinians commit violence against Israelis because they are Jewish, not because they are colonisers. This confirms the fundamentally antisemitic nature of Palestinians and of Palestinian “terrorism”, which has no other rationale or explanation other than a senseless hatred of Jews because they are Jews.
19. Many of Bush’s speechwriters were neoconservatives, including Michael Gerson and David Frum (who coined the infamous term “axis of evil”) (Lizza Citation2001). The 9/20/2001 speech was written by a team headed by Gerson (Max Citation2001).
20. Some of these more well-known anti-Palestinian racist tropes are neoconservative inventions. For example, during Israel’s 2014 genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Netanyahu disputed the reality of the massacre unfolding at his command by dismissing accurate news coverage of it as Palestinians’ manufacture of “telegenically dead” babies. Related to the incessant if false claims that Palestinians use civilians as human shields during combat, both attempt to blame Palestinians for their own deaths, displacing Israel’s brutality onto the Palestinians as if it were they who had no regard for human life. Notably, Netanyahu took the phrase “telegenically dead” from neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, who first used it in an editorial in the Washington Post (Buttu Citation2014); Alan Dershowitz has recently recycled it with regard to the 2023–24 Gaza Nakba (Morgan Citation2023).
22. Israel calls these routine military crackdowns “mowing the lawn,” an expression that makes clear not simply that Israel expects Palestinian resistance but also that it views Palestinian resistance as a mundane, manageable problem, no different from a property-owner’s obligations to keep his garden tidy.
23. See, e.g. Blazakis (Citation2021); War and Zolyniak (Citation2023).
24. One essay in a recent critical TS methodologies volume purports to examine how Palestinians are constructed as a “terrorist ‘other’” via interviews with Palestinian women living in the West Bank. The interviews seem intended to humanise Palestinians to a primarily Western audience, but nowhere does the essay actually name or analyse the political actors, institutions, and discourses that produce Palestinians as “terrorists” to begin with (Ryan Citation2016). Remarkably, then, the only essay in volume’s “Postcolonialism/Decolonialism” section sidesteps the question of colonisation entirely.
25. As Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson notes, CTS scholars largely “agree with traditional accounts of terrorism that something like terrorism exists and that it is possible to identify it” (Erlenbusch-Anderson Citation2014, 476). On the challenges and possibilities of studying “terrorism” not as an ahistorical essence but rather as an apparatus of “variable discursive and non-discursive practices whose meaning is determined within a network of concepts, ideologies, interests, and rationalities,” see Erlenbusch-Anderson (Citation2016), 114. For an example of critical, empirically grounded, theoretically sophisticated study of the long social construction of terrorism that does exactly this, see Erlenbusch-Anderson (Citation2018).
26. Anna Meier (Citationthis issue) argues that this commitment to the “transferability” of definitions of terrorism is a central component of whiteness as expertise, which fails to consider how white supremacy, imperialism, and settler colonialism “have constructed the category of terrorism expertise, and indeed the idea of terror, in the first place.” While Meier’s specific subject is the “transferability” of “terrorism” to white supremacist violence, her point is generalisable, since CTS scholars are committed to a “transferable” definition of terrorism, just a better one than those proffered in TS. This shows up as whiteness when, for example, CTS scholars take their “emancipatory” commitments to non-violence and human rights to mean that they should actively intervene in the policy world to create … more humane terrorism policy? It is unclear. But as Kodili Chukwuma (Citationthis issue) accurately notes, such a normative imperative echoes colonial logic of liberal universalism and liberal ideas of emancipation. For especially clear discussion and analysis of how whiteness and white supremacy reproduce themselves in counterterrorism policymaking spaces, see Hannah Wright (Citationthis issue).
27. Zoe Samudzi makes a similar argument for the field of Genocide Studies, which also has yet to reckon with the question of Palestine. Echoing Eghbariah’s observation (Citation2023) that the colonial underpinnings of the term “genocide” are what allow so many to continue to question if it is the correct designation for what is happening in Gaza, Samudzi writes that “With Gaza, and in the broader discourse around Palestine, the coincidental recognition of genocide as the ‘crime of crimes’ and a definitional near-singularity of Nazi violence elides acknowledgement of a constructed asymmetry in genocide recognition: a failure to robustly confront the mass violence intrinsic to the Westphalian order” (Citation2024, 7).
28. In the summer of 2023, the state of Georgia charged 42 Stop Cop City protesters with “domestic terrorism,” charges that come with 35-year prison sentences (Lennard Citation2023; Stepansky Citation2023).
29. See, e.g. Husain (Citation2020); Rao (Citation2021); Shamas and Ismail (Citation2021); Statement of AMEMSA Groups (Citation2017).
30. As Hil Aked puts it, “These schema invite us to see any ideology besides liberalism as merely one expression of a single phenomenon of ‘extremism’” (Citation2017, 174), meaning this landscape is not quite as spacious as my metaphor might suggest. Rather, liberalism is simply the clear and smooth road ahead of us, with “extremism” menacing from off the beaten path on either side.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
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 (USA). She is the author of Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (Columbia UP, 2018) and a member of the founding collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which supports the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, racial, and gendered knowledge project.