On “Failed Silences”  – Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle, by Omar Zahzah (review)

Robin Gabriel

Omar Zahzah’s introductory chapter begins with the assertion that “Palestine is a series of failed silences.” As a guiding ethos of the book, this statement anchors Palestinian resistance in the imminent failure of Zionism, an optimistic outlook one may not expect from such a critical text. Terms of Servitude clarifies, situates, and narrates what amounts to anticipated moments of censorship within a climate of overwhelming repression. As Zahzah argues so effectively, digital repression is not ancillary to larger struggles; it is a key site of struggle itself. Utilizing Ruha Benjamin’s framing of technology as a tool of racialization by which race likewise becomes a technology (i.e., a “means to sort, organize, and design a social structure”¹), Zahzah argues that “social media censorship of Palestine must be understood as corporate acceptance of the Zionist project’s settler-colonial racialization of Palestinians.”²

Utilizing a range of critical cultural studies methods and piecing together years of critical journalistic reporting and scholarship, Zahzah interrogates how Big Tech is not only a hegemonizing tool, but has itself become hegemonic. In other words, Big Tech is not only a site through which meaning is produced, shared, and negotiated, but is “increasingly all-encompassing, exerting an outsized influence on our social and political lives as well as our imaginations.”³ In addition to theoretical critique, Zahzah archives and catalogues instances of repression, highlighting how 2021 marked a shift in the tactics of censoring Palestinians, particularly the wielding of “community standards” policy vis-à-vis reportage on home demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah. He argues that the policies emergent within this period set the precedent for how Big Tech would supress news on and from Palestine, particularly during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Perhaps the most significant theoretical contribution of Terms of Servitude to Critical Zionism Studies is the concept of digital settler colonialism, which refers to the “confluence of US Big Tech corporate hegemony and Zionist settler colonialism, particularly through way of censorship.”⁴ Here Zahzah makes the argument that digital settler colonialism is partially facilitated through the “terms of service” (i.e., terms of mediation) that govern social media spaces, which attempt to keep users passive and captive to imperialist Big Tech. 

The book is organized into three main sections: “Understanding Digital Settler Colonialism,” “Paradigms of Suppression, Narratives of Resistance,” and “Fighting Back.” The first section interrogates social media as heir, not as foil, to corporate media. While it is true that social media has been a key tool in making Palestine globally legible, Big Tech has also provided a platform for state-sponsored Zionist propaganda (hasbara). Big Tech does not offer a value-neutral platform, despite its many efforts to evade recognition of this fact, but rather uses mediation to curate and censor content in the pursuit of profit. As Zahzah contends,

maximum profit and the genocide of Palestinians are two separate goals, even as they often overlap through the economic incentivization of imperialist militarism. Thus, at least in theory, it is possible to undermine digital settler colonialism by refining the potential instability between digital colonialism and settler colonialism, making the operation of the former process too costly when it facilitates the latter.⁵ 

Indeed, it is in view of this distinction that certain modes of sustained, movement-based intervention (e.g., boycott) may be conceived and carried out. 

The second section, “Paradigms of Suppression, Narratives of Resistance,” seeks to further clarify the ways in which Zionism operates through digital platforms, advancing an understanding of censorship (and thus, Zionist repression) as, like capitalism, nimble and adaptive. He warns, “even critical perspectives can be tolerated if not coopted, absorbed within an increasingly centralized neoliberal and corporate grammar of assurance that deflects the question of power.”⁶ In one of the book’s most compelling chapters, “E-Racing Palestine,” Zahzah argues that Palestinians are uniquely racialized on digital platforms through targeted silencing. When such platforms are called out for this practice, platform spokespersons try to erase Palestine yet again by insisting on the separate, random nature of such tactics, which they argue are not tantamount to suppression. (Here, Zahzah specifically cites Meta’s response to Middle East Eye’s inquiry in December of 2024.) Insisting on the sustained characterization of individual acts of digital silencing and suppression as digital settler colonialism, Zahzah highlights the importance of movement work in strategically drawing connections between these ostensibly disparate practices in order to reveal them as concerted structures. What appears to us now as an “explosion of censorship” must be exposed for what it is: the increasingly publicized process of Zionist capitalist moderation.⁷ 

In line with the historical-structural approach associated with Frederik Meiton’s Electrical Palestine⁸ and Ronan Shamir’s Current Flow,⁹ Zahzah offers a brief history of the advent of the Internet in Palestine, which coincided with the signing of the Oslo Accords. From the outset, the very infrastructure of the Palestinian IT sector relied for bandwidth and connectivity upon Israeli companies, thus limiting its liberatory potential.¹⁰ The sector has in turn not surprisingly became a site of intense surveillance by the Palestinian Authority, a de facto arm of the Zionist settler state.

In the third and final section, “Fighting Back,” Zahzah forms and assembles a toolbox for the reader, closing his intricately researched project with a tempered optimism rooted in struggle that mirrors his particular, relentless engagement with study and movement work. He argues,

It is this faith in the steadfast struggle by Palestinians and their allies, not by technologies themselves or their owners and developers, that motivates Zahzah’s claim that digital settler colonialism, and settler colonialism with it, are doomed to failure. Here Zahzah provides the example of the organizers of #NoTechforApartheid, whose sustained rejection of alienation from the products of their digital labor enabled them to wage a campaign against Project Nimbus, the Israeli government cloud computing collaboration with Google and Amazon. He posits in turn that the stubborn insistence on rendering digital repression visible through journalism and social media have ensured that a Palestine advocacy organization like Samidoun and a news and historical analysis platform like the Palestine Pod are still active. 

Throughout Terms of Servitude, Zahzah performs a critical cultural studies pedagogy, inviting the reader into the rigorous process of cultural critique. In line with cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s assertion that culture is a “terrain of struggle,”¹² Zahzah offers an understanding of digital technologies not simply as sites of resistance or repression, but as spaces of contestation wherein resistance actively changes the conditions of what is being resisted.¹³ Indeed, this phenomenon is situated within a legacy of Palestinian resistance with and through tools and systems that were never designed for (Palestinian) liberation. Through commitment to a rich and cross-disciplinary politics of citationality, Zahzah revises the process of research into trans-spatial and -temporal dialectic. While the book could engage more substantively with others in technology studies beyond Tarleton Gillespie’s Custodians of the Internet¹⁴ (notably, Jonanthan Crary’s Scorched Earth,¹⁵ Robert Wilkie’s The Digital Condition,¹⁶ and Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein’s Digital Militarism¹⁷), Zahzah is clear in the “Note on Process” that his intervention is largely to stitch together the vast archive of journalistic articles on Palestinian digital silencing. Terms of Servitude is sure to become a foundational text in Critical Zionism Studies, providing not only critical analysis and information, but a methodological map for how to conduct the caliber of cultural critique which our movements require.