Your death will serve as its own justification
I have six new shorts and poems up at Flaming Hydra this week.
Luke O’Neil
Paid Hell World subscribers can read a couple of them down below. Here's an even newer one.
This is my blood
I marvel at the design of our weapons. So sophisticated they can transform any man woman or child they pummel into a terrorist. Writing in their flight between launch and concussion an entire alternate history of a life.
Just as the cop's bullet convicts you of a crime. Its presence in your body evidence enough that it belongs there.
A violent transubstantiation.
Jake Romm of the great Protean Mag joins us today to write about that very concept at length in the wake of Israel's horrific and indiscriminate terror attack on Lebanon this week.
"The hollowness and malleability of the term [terrorist] means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition... a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely: if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable."
Earlier this week I posted this great piece of reporting by Sam Stecklow of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute and Chris Faraone of The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism concerning attempts at police reform in Massachusetts.
In 2020 the state passed new police certification rules meant, at least in theory, to keep track of bad officers, something you would think would be standard, and prevent them from serving elsewhere after being disciplined. But today the comprehensive employment history – including all allegations of misconduct against officers – is still neither being collected in full nor made available to the public, enabling cops with potentially serious abuses on their record – or not on them as the case may be – to move around from job to job.
They write:
Beyond failing to collect the employment history data for all officers, POST appears to have violated at least the spirit of the statute that created it, according to some experts, by severely curtailing the amount of disciplinary information it collected from local departments.
This means that, while “wandering officers” who were fully disciplined by their agencies and then moved to another are represented in the database, that definition excludes the vast majority of police misconduct complaints — which are not sustained by their agencies.
The same regulations POST passed in February 2023 also require the public database to include “complaints against the officer” and “the nature of any discipline imposed as a result” — clearly envisioning the database including cases in which the officer is not disciplined at all. POST began collecting spreadsheets from departments around the state containing all of their responsive complaints.
But that same month, a letter from Zuniga went out instructing departments to start over — and provide far less information. “Please note that we are only requesting that you submit sustained disciplinary records as part of this resubmission,” he wrote. “POST will only publish ‘Sustained’ records, and those are the ones that need to be validated at this point.”
Read the rest here.
Your death will serve as its own justification
by Jake Romm
In April 2024, the official Israeli government Twitter account posted the following above a video of Columbia University students protesting against Israel’s genocide:
The statement—which, in context, implicitly calls for violence against Columbia students—merely copies the one in the original post by Zionist agitator Shai Davidai. Both the State and its minion are wrong.
We are familiar with the idea of “terrorist groups,” which have been the great bogeyman of the collective Western conscience since, at the very least, 2001 (although the specter of terrorism began haunting the Western mind many decades prior). According to Israel and the U.S. this designation includes groups ranging from Hamas and Hezbollah to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to ISIS, among many others. These groups not only operate in different geographical terrain, they also have wildly different goals, alliances, support bases, and methods. To pair together, for example, Hezbollah and ISIS—two groups that, for years, fought against one another in Syria—under the same ideological heading would require an incredibly incoherent understanding of the ideology that terrorism allegedly is.
But this is just Zionist propaganda, and like all Zionist propaganda which has as its core the exercise of the power of domination and thus has no need of reason, the claim fulfills its libidinal and propagandistic function the further removed from reason it becomes. No, the real definition of terrorism, any knowledgeable reader knows, revolves around a set of tactics. But this definition yields similarly incoherent results.
Consider the text of Israel's Counter Terrorism Law of 2016. According to the Israeli law, a terrorist organization is one which carries out or threatens to carry out an attack against persons or property with 1. “a political, religious, nationalistic or ideological motive”; and 2. “the intention of provoking fear or panic among the public or with the intention of compelling a government or other governmental authority…to do or to abstain from doing any act.”
For the purposes of the law, leadership of, membership in, or even material or moral support for a terrorist organization is enough to land a person in prison. Likewise, an individual who engages in a “terrorist act” (one of the five enumerated types of attack against persons or property) with the requisite intent is also liable for terrorism regardless of whether they are a member of or support a terrorist organization.
This all seems perfectly reasonable—unless you start to think about it. There is, simply, no way to sufficiently circumscribe this definition of terrorism such that it includes groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and excludes groups like the IDF or the U.S. military, which, as the authors of this definition, Israel certainly intends to do. When the IDF bombs a hospital or school in Gaza (as they've just done yet again today) and kills those inside and in the vicinity, it is manifestly doing so with “a political, religious, nationalistic or ideological motive” (the extermination of Palestine and the entrenchment of Jewish supremacy) and with the intention of compelling a government (here, Hamas, the governing authority of the Gaza Strip), "to do or to abstain from doing any act” (surrendering to Israel and ceasing its armed resistance). When Israel recently detonated booby-trapped pagers and other electronic devices all across Lebanon— killing, maiming, and blinding thousands, without distinction between civilian and combatant—they very plainly did so with “the intention of provoking fear or panic among the public.” One might object that provoking fear or panic may have been merely a side effect of the attack, and that the primary motivation was to secure a military advantage by disrupting Hezbollah’s communications network, thus exempting it from the definition of a terrorist act, but the drafters of the Israeli law would disagree: “It is immaterial whether [one of the two] motive[s] or objective[s]…was the sole or principal motive or objective for the act or the threat.”
This definition, then, is similarly unserviceable. But, as we know from so many years of “war on terror” programming, there is an important moral difference between terrorist groups and “legitimate” militaries, which is that terrorists target civilians. As President Biden put it three days after October 7th, “Terrorists purposefully target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war — the law of war. It matters. There’s a difference.”
Adherence to the law of war, in particular the prohibition on targeting civilians, also fails to provide a sufficiently bounded definition. Medical journal The Lancet estimated that, since October 7th, the deaths of upwards of 186,000 Gazans are attributable to Israel. This estimate was published in July, and was based on data from June at the latest—the number of dead is now surely, intolerably, higher. This estimate also does not take into account the many tens of thousands more who have sustained life-altering or terminal wounds or who suffer from disease and malnutrition directly resulting from Israel’s destruction of public infrastructure and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. In August, the Gaza Health Ministry stated that around 70% of the roughly 40,000 dead are women and children (the number does not reflect the actual number of the dead, only the number the Health Ministry, its capacity severely hampered by the ongoing genocide and destruction of Gaza, has thus far been able to count). When looking at the Lancet estimation, even if Israel eliminated every single Hamas fighter per the pre-war estimates of the group’s military strength—roughly between 24,000 and 30,000—this would only account for 16% of the total number of those killed by Israel in the course of the genocide.
These numbers alone should preclude any reasonable person from believing the claim that “Israel does not target civilians” and “upholds the law of war.” But, Israel claims, the high civilian death toll is purely the result of “Hamas’s use of human shields." The IDF only targets Hamas fighters, the argument goes, and if civilians die, that’s too bad, Hamas should not have stood so close. Even leaving aside the significant video and forensic evidence of IDF soldiers murdering civilians—as well as the significant first hand evidence, from both victims and perpetrators, of the IDF committing the war crimes of rape and torture in the Sde Teiman detention camp—we can be certain that the IDF is not following the law of war as it regards civilian casualties simply based on the types of munitions it uses.
As Dylan Saba and I wrote in January, “Israel’s use of large-payload munitions in densely populated urban areas fails the distinction test [did you intentionally or indiscriminately target civilians or civilian infrastructure] in the same way that the use of, say, nerve gas also fails distinction. The comparison is instructive: if one were to release nerve gas into an urban area with the intent of killing only soldiers, reasonable observers, and indeed the law itself, would dismiss the intent as irrelevant in the face of the inherently indiscriminate nature of the weapon. Likewise, Israel’s use of 2,000-pound “dumb bombs” (i.e. non-guided bombs) in Gaza—each with a lethal fragmentation radius of roughly 1,200 feet—violates the principle of distinction.”
The pager attack in Lebanon similarly violates the principle of distinction in its means: because the IDF had no way of knowing the whereabouts or the possessors of the booby-trapped pagers at the time of their detonation, largely in dense urban areas, the attack was indiscriminate. Again, to put this in the vulgar terms of numbers, the two-day pager attack alone wounded well over 3000 people and killed 37 (so far—many of the wounded are in critical condition), including medical personnel and young children. In comparison, Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which has kept a running list of the officially named Israeli dead since October 7th, attributes 18 deaths to Hezbollah, only 6 of which are civilians (this excludes the civilians killed in Majdal Shams, the Druze village in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, because the cause of their death remains in dispute).
Once again, the attempt to circumscribe the definition fails. Even the idea that a terrorist must be a non-state military actor as opposed to a presumptively legitimate state actor fails to provide a useful analytic framework. On the one hand, plenty of non-state military actors operate with the material and moral support of the West, and some countries have been declared by the U.S. and Israel to be, in their entirety, “terrorist states” (most notably Iran).
So what, then, is a terrorist if they cannot be meaningfully distinguished from the very states that claim to fight them? Terrorist is perhaps best understood as a kind of empty signifier: a word with no fixed meaning, but with a more or less reliable function in Western discourse nonetheless. As Edward Said stated in a 1984 conversation with Studs Terkel, terrorist “now stands for everything that we not only don’t know and don’t like, but it’s associated with groups of people…and specifically Arabs.” He continues, “[in the lead up to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israeli journalists] started to use the word terrorist instead of using the word Palestinian, and terrorist then became a species of vermin or cockroaches…And one Israeli journalist said that this made it possible for them to bomb refugee camps because if you assume in advance that they are terrorists…then you’re bombing them to clean them out.”
As Said correctly points out, “terrorist” comes to mean groups of people who, like animals (recall Yoav Gallant saying “we are fighting human animals”), exist outside the law, and are thus afforded no protection, even though their supposed violation of the law is, as discussed above, one of the things that allegedly constitutes the status in the first place. And, like the animal, the "terrorist" is also exempted from a number of moral prohibitions—namely, the prohibition against murder. The word, Said suggests, acts as a moral short circuit which enables us to treat those who we have designated terrorists, literally, like animals: beings which are incapable of political-goal oriented activity, who are driven by irrational hatreds and with whom rational communication is not possible and who, if they pose a danger, must be eradicated.
The hollowness and malleability of the term means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition (not too dissimilar from the definition advanced by the Israeli Counter Terrorism Law) that a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable.
This circularity of the definition allows the designation to justify violence against entire populations both ex-ante and ex-post. Hamas and all of its supporters and members—military and government—have been deemed to be terrorists, and these “terrorists” control Gaza. Thus the bombing of the Gaza Strip can be, at any time, permitted. (Indeed Israel engaged in seven major military operations in Gaza since Hamas’s election in 2006.) Gaza, however, is populated primarily by ordinary civilians as well. But the circularity of “terrorist” occludes this fact: once there exists a category of persons upon whom one can inflict violence by virtue of their status rather than their actions, violence becomes constitutive of the status itself.
The rhetoric following the pager attacks on Lebanon provides a clear example. In a press briefing in the wake of the attack, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said, in an apparent endorsement of the operation, that “No country, no organization should be targeting civilians. Terrorist members of a terrorist organization are legitimate targets…” The sentiment was echoed in the pages of the Atlantic. “[The attack] maimed thousands of fighters,” they wrote. It's an assertion based on no evidence—and in tension with the numerous civilian casualties—save for the fact that the attack was nominally directed against “terrorists.” Former Knesset member Effi Eitam stated it even more clearly (we can always trust Israeli Hebrew language media to lay the genocidal rhetoric bare): “None of these people there are innocent. It's not some bomb that hits the street (...) it's accurate, it's humiliating, discouraging, compensating…”
To have been harmed by the pager attack means that one is a terrorist, because the pager attack was directed against terrorists. This is the logic of genocide: we have marked all terrorists for death, a status only we can impose or remove, and thus your death will always serve as its own justification.
Terrorist has come, then, to be a status crime, a legal designation which stands in for racial or ethnic status. The “law of war” definition, though equally as inadequate as the others discussed above, is instructive. There is a concept in international law, the hostis humani generis (“enemy of all mankind”). Originally, the phrase referred to pirates, those who swore no allegiance to any particular nation and who engaged in criminal actions against the ships of all states (maybe an anachronistic term here, but we’ll use it for clarity’s sake) for their own personal gain. The pirate not only positioned themselves against the international community, but, in so doing, against the law itself. As such, the nations of the world agreed that the pirate, the hostis humani generis, was not entitled to the protection of the law, and could be killed or detained by any nation at any time—indeed, nations had an affirmative obligation to do so. In addition to pirates, the concept has been employed to describe génocidaires from Nazi Germany to Rwanda, and crucially for our purposes, “terrorists.”
But in the case of the pirate and the génocidaire, the concept was attached by means of conduct that was anathema to ideals of international comity. In the case of terrorism, it attaches, as we have seen, not through any particular conduct, nor through any particular set of beliefs, but due only to opposition to whichever power carries the prerogative of designation. It thus becomes a status crime, one which attaches regardless of any action and which can therefore be imposed upon anyone at any time, from individuals to entire peoples. It becomes, as we are seeing in Palestine and Lebanon, a means of dehumanizing and casting entire populations outside the protection of law.
In 1948, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s mission to Palestine, Jacques de Reynier, visited the “Prisoner of War” camps that had just been set up by the nascent Israeli state. The camps were hastily and crudely organized, with prisoners crammed into flimsy, poorly erected tents. Summary executions, especially of “able bodied men” were routine. Those who managed to avoid execution were impressed into forced labor, i.e. slavery, and tasked with supporting the wartime economy of the very state that was in the process of stealing their land and murdering their people.
In one of his monthly reports, de Reynier noted that the Israeli military “treated all Arabs between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five as combatants and locked them up as prisoners of war.” While Israel made no distinction between civilian and combatant in its treatment of prisoners, there was, as Salman Abu Sitta and Terry Rempel note in the Journal of Palestine Studies, “never any question about the civilian status of the internees." De Reynier observes in an early report that the men captured “had undoubtedly never been in a regular army.” The Israelis were equally aware of this, and indeed their own reports explicitly distinguished “combatants” from “noncombatants.” Moreover, Sitta and Rempel continue, “prisoners classed as noncombatants who came under suspicion of having been fighters were routinely shot on the pretense that they had been attempting to escape.”
For the IDF in 1948, to be Palestinian meant that one was, at the very least, detainable—and to be a detained Palestinian fighter meant, per force, that one was killable as well. The world had only just experienced the Nazi Holocaust, driven by racial ideology and an expansionist settler-colonial regime. The Zionist movement internalized both the racial ideology and the settler-colonial aspirations of its European origins, but the Nazi Holocaust had made it uncouth to articulate the former as an explicit justification for extermination. The pre-state Zionists’ legal designation of all captive Palestinians as combatants, then, served as a way of marking all Palestinians for death within the sterile lexicon of the law.
Plus ça change.
Jake Romm is an associate editor Protean Mag.
As we've seen in the way students have been treated on campuses throughout the country over the past year, American citizenship will not protect a person from being deemed a terrorist, in the way Romm discusses above, simply for the act of protesting.
We’ve long known that Palestinian lives are seen as less valuable in the west but an American can forfeit their own higher status by sympathizing with or protesting for them too much. We also already knew that but still.
I'm reminded now of what I wrote on October 9th of last year.
Violence comes in many forms and can be either slow and grinding or sudden and percussive. What a victory of messaging it is then to be able to define what violence is and what violence is not and expect for good reason that much of the western world will adopt your terms. Leaving your enemy having to fight back against a force that isn't even hitting them.
I think it should go without saying that I abhor war crimes against civilians even in what I consider to be a just cause of liberation. And Palestinians yearning for escape from decades of oppression and confinement and apartheid is indeed a just cause.
I also think that it is very convenient that the dominant power in any given conflict almost always gets to commit their own war crimes from a remove via blockade and sanction or missile and bomb. Each resulting individual civilian death observed from an abstract sanitized distance in the form of a building collapsing. Being made to collapse.
A lot of people are wedded to this idea that it’s somehow so much worse to be brutalized or killed by a man standing there in front of you than by a pressed button or pulled lever. Or to be systematically killed by laws and policies of indifference or outright malevolence.
Is shooting a man in the head more or less just than locking him in your basement without food or water? Surely he'll live somewhat longer in the latter scenario but he will nonetheless surely die. Having been killed.
So yes of course I abhor violence. I simply wonder why we are being press-ganged into a moral jury for one kind of violence and not the countless other examples of the more invisible kind. Invisible to those of us observing from afar that is. The killings that aren't even really happening if you squint just so.
Protean Mag is a great leftist literary magazine that you should definitely check out by the way. They've published my stuff a few times as well as this review of my Welcome to Hell World book. It's probably my favorite thing ever written about my work.
Ok paid subscribers can stick around for more below from me. Thanks for being here either way.