the terrorists we are

10 Oct, 2026

People often talk about what radicalized them on podcasts and whatnot and ever since reading Pirate’s radicalization moment (in the left direction) a few months ago, I’ve been thinking about my own moment which I believe I’ve finally identified: It was the start of the current Palestinian genocide. My belief in the universalism of human rights (that they would apply to me) was shaken occasionally by the “Suliman, the terrorist” jokes, but those were just jokes, right? Whereas the genocide presented a rupture for me. I’ve (crudely) written about the response to it in the former Nazi countries on the first anniversary of the genocide here which felt daring at the time—abstract as it is. Yet here I am, three years in, and still writing about the machinery of White and Jewish supremacy because it hasn’t ceased crushing people who look like me under its gears for the grave crime of being Arab or, worse, Palestinian.

I’ve started my political journey in my teenage years as a social democrat, meaning a liberal who believes in a welfare state under capitalism, believing liberal democracy to be the optimal peaceful mechanism to turn political attitudes into power and the court system to settle disagreements mostly justly, but what completely shattered my world and the belief in some sort of secular justice from existing institutions was seeing people who resembled me, my father, and my brother be rhetorically built up as the worst the human mind can imagine, deserving of unspeakable cruelty across generations with no grace for what kind of reaction that inevitably conjures.

One of the obstacles to getting a Westerner to question the validity of a settler-colony claiming dominion over a native population is that they would consequently have to question the validity of most of the states in the so-called New World because (almost) all of them are settler-colonies claiming dominion over native populations they have since decimated. It would shake up their entire conception of themselves and their privilege. It would mean that the majority of their societies’ relative wealth was attained, contrary to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, through expropriation,¹ ethnic cleansing, genocide, and slavery. It would make them contend with the various forms of apartheid that plague their societies. And they cannot handle that.

Victims of violence have to conform to an expectation of how victimhood is to be performed before they’re considered legitimate victims. From gender-based and state-sanctioned violence under so-called democracies to resistance of colonialism and slavery, there is a set of shifting expectations of how a real victim is ought to be or behave and anyone outside the confines of this conception is a liar or, if they’re Arab, a terrorist. When the recent genocide in Palestine began, there was a rush in pro-Palestinian circles to center child, elderly, and female suffering because those were viewed as untainted by the Palestinian man’s bloodlust—or rather what the Palestinian man is considered capable of. Soon enough, after the women were demonized by accusing them of using their children as “human shields,” activists shifted to mainly centering child suffering, as absurdly futile as it seemed given the discursive position of the adults in their lives. But the best Westerners in power could give in response to news of orphaned and/or mutilated children were empty words of grief for child suffering as they were signing off on bombs to be delivered to the entity causing their suffering whilst affirming Israel’s “right to exist” and “right to defend itself.”

In the meantime, all kinds of genocidal proclamations were being made by Israelis across the political spectrum because Zionism is a far-right ideology indistinguishable from German National-Socialism or Italian Fascism in its drive for homogeneity, racial supremacy, authoritarianism, and brutality. You may have left-wing fascists who want more public spending on social services for their citizens and a secular government, and you may have right-wing fascists who are against abortion and for the Scripture’s primacy. But at the end of the day, the fascist will believe in their variety of fascism and they will want to realize its goals. The Zionist state can’t ensure its Jewish character (the aesthetic of Jewishness) if more than half the population on the land it currently claims for itself is not Jewish and absolutely subservient,² despite the fact that most of them are functionally slaves and the reason for Israel’s prosperity (like all prosperous states maintain underclasses within or without them). Whatever their views on other “issues,” the Zionist will always seek out purifying and cleansing the land from the terrorist Arabs. But I digress.

The Palestinian man is an irredeemable devil. He dares to fight back and that’s a sign of the dark forces within him. He commits acts of terrorism that are only terrorism because he’s Arab. If his oppressor Israel commits them, it’s called self-defense. We wouldn’t want history to start at any other time than when the oppressed react to their oppression. Any other timeline would be antisemitic and blood libel! Any other human being wouldn’t react the same way under the same circumstances that Palestinians, especially those living in Gaza, have been living under for 78 years of a never-ending, ongoing calamity, of course. It becomes habitual or even progressive to paint “terrorism” as an Arab pathology that the Arab man needs to be cured of instead of seeing the acts of a desperate people with no peaceful avenues for making themselves heard for what they are—desperate actions. Once the oppressor is gone or indefensible, liberals will have always been on the side of the oppressed.

Pointing out the hypocrisy of labeling one side’s acts as terrorism while the other’s are self-defense assumes that we are dealing with equal parties in—as the West loves to call it—“the conflict.” The power imbalance has never been greater. A Zionist expressing support for Israel is not brave. They’re preaching to the institutional choir. The anti-Zionist, on the other hand, is accused of being genocidal because they want a brutalized people to be seen as humans worthy of dignity. The Zionist backs an entity that possesses nuclear bombs while the anti-Zionist backs a people fighting tanks with Molotov cocktails, makeshift rifles, and pebbles. The anti-Zionist, which for the longest time mostly meant “the Arab,” is held to a standard that no Zionist, or White person, is ever held to. But it’s only our love for barbarism that drives us to behave this way. Civilized people drop bombs on and incarcerate children whereas savages like us throw pebbles.

What would be the cure for our barbarism? Nobody would think that ending apartheid and abolishing the settler-colony would be part of it. No, the Palestinian man simultaneously doesn’t exist and is the biggest threat to the settler-colony for inexplicable reasons. His mere existence makes Israeli civilians and Zionist Jews in Brooklyn scared! That’s the extent of the satanic powers within him. It’s unclear why the Southern Lebanese man feels such impassioned and vitriolic hate for the Zionist who occasionally occupies his land, surveils everybody he knows with buzzing drones, and massacres his people for fun. It’s also incomprehensible why the Syrian man expresses such solidarity with the Palestinian plight. The Zionist entity hasn’t occupied a part of his country for half a century at all and definitely hasn’t expanded its so-called buffer zone up to the capital despite the sham government expressing commitments to non-aggression and cooperation shortly before that. The Zionist entity doesn’t bomb the fuck out of his people’s cities for no reason other than bloodlust and the expansionist compulsion to make Greater Israel a reality. No, the Arab man must be a terrorist who hates the only Jewish state on the planet. He must be a Hitler-worshiping antisemite with an annotated copy Mein Kampf!

Antisemitism allegations are a timeless tool for silencing us, especially the ones living in the West and they start with us young. They accuse us of antisemitism as if antisemitism isn’t a product of European racialization of the Other of which we are a part of. Germans and Austrians in particular carry a “guilt” for their barbarity that they now instrumentalize our lack of participation in their “guilt” circlejerk as a weapon in their arsenal to ensure we know that we don’t belong here—for the crime of not wanting them to wash themselves off their “guilt” at our expense. We are treated as if we committed the Holocaust and are even punished for it with a settler-colony dispossessing our people of their homes. What’s worse, we are treated as if our words of hatred for the actions of the self-proclaimed Jewish state and its ideology could lead to a second Holocaust as if the Zionist project hasn’t been genocidal in practice since its inception and literally involved in the Final Solution to the century-old Palestinian Question as we speak. As if we have the means to be genocidal against a nuclear power even if Levantine Arabs actually wanted to pursue a genocide. Our words receive more persecution than the bombs they drop on our families. The Palestinian children throwing stones at the Zionist tanks receive more media attention than the tanks crushing them do. Even Edward Said, academia’s Arab darling, wasn’t spared from this.

Why do we even coddle the Zionists in their absurdities? Why should we shut down antisemitism allegations for opposing Israel’s existence just because it chooses to legitimize its every action with Jewish divinity and defines itself through Jewish aesthetics? As I wrote that rhetorical question, I found myself rhyming together parallels with equivalent, White Christian occupations of our lands, but I had to stop myself right there: I’m not playing that game. Whether Israel is Jewish or Hindu doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s a state with the resources and aims to eradicate us and our identities, and push us out of our ancestral, indigenous lands. The Western ambition to maintain a military base in the Levant doesn’t override our connection to the land.

I’ve long found myself seeking legitimacy for my decolonial politics in Jewish activists and intellectuals instead of emphasizing the people actually being erased by the Zionist machinery. It is beyond a doubt that a coalition with Jews who have a spine by coming out against this form of White supremacy is extremely valuable. But it gets to a point where we start seeking out a White person’s validation of our reality as if they’re impartial or more trustworthy than us who have “skin in the game.” Nobody is impartial in war or any political conflict whatsoever, so why should their voices carry more weight than the Brown people who have been risking their lives to get the word out for close to a century now? It’s racism shrouded in concern over “objectivity.” It’s the age-old racism that we are too backwards to understand our oppression or resist it politely. And maybe we are. If this is what polite society is capable of, then we should want no part in it. Let’s proudly be the savages we are either way!

Yes, we have made progress in terms of awareness of the Palestinian plight and Israel’s aggression. Now I don’t have to assume that nearly everyone I meet—who is roughly my age—is going to justify genocide and ethnic cleansing in cold blood at some point in our relationship. But will a seminar or lecture about this topic at a university not discuss “the conflict” between bad “both sides” of which the Palestinian one is worse? Naturally. Not to speak of any material consequences for standing up for this issue. But any persecution I might experience pales in comparison to what a Palestinian endures on a daily basis, especially in Gaza. Things have gone too far, even by Israeli standards. Staying silent on this for personal benefit is deplorable at this point. How can anyone shrug this off unless they’re a monster?

If even mutilated children are impure and future HAMAS bombs, how can we three-dimensional humans compete? Evidently, we will never be the perfect victims that the establishment wants us to be. We must be subservient to their occupation because anybody who doesn’t want to standby as they’re being dispossessed, dehumanized, and eventually annihilated is a savage and a terrorist, or a terrorist/Islamist sympathizer if they happen to be White. No amount of degrees or genteel respectability will save any of us from the eventual slip-up that will be our professional end (for the privileged among us) or literal end (for those who depend on foreign aid which top donating countries have now gutted anyway). At the end of the day, every Arab is a terrorist, a terrorist farm, or a terrorist-to-be. Polite society may phrase it differently or avoid saying it outright at all, but the end result is all the same.