Terror with Arun Kundnani

Transcript

Terror with Arun Kundnani

Emmaia Gelman: [00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. On today’s show, I’m joined by Arun Kundnani, who is also a member of the collective of the Institute, to talk about the idea of terror, the terminology of terror, the idea of the war on terror, and how they relate to Zionism.

Arun is a writer and a thinker whose work is on race and racial capitalism, Islamophobia, surveillance, political violence, and radicalism. So Arun, welcome and thanks so much for this conversation.

Arun Kundnani: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Emmaia Gelman: Let’s introduce your writing on this subject a bit. Arun wrote a recent article that is sort of a jumping off point for our conversation today and that we’ll post in the show notes titled “Israel, U. S. campuses, and the fragility of the colonizer.” It’s in the New Arab. In that piece Arun looks at how in the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians, college campuses have become a place where people who protest genocide, discuss Israel as a settler colonial state, or oppose the U.S.

[00:01:00] sending weapons to Israel or just call for ceasefire are being branded terror supporters. And that term tells us is that we need to think about the longer running war on terror to understand how people who protest genocide are being set up as enemies.

Arun is the author of a book that helps us do that. It’s called The Muslims Are Coming!, you have to say it with the exclamation point, which was first published in 2014. It really laid out how the war on terror, which started with the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq and then Afghanistan, normalized policing people inside and outside of the states carrying out that war. And it showed how the war on terror uses old colonial ways of thinking about who’s a citizen, who’s included in the state, who gets protected.

So we’re going to try and use those two pieces, the article and the book, to try to understand how the War on Terror frames how we get to talk and think about Zionism in this moment. Arun, can you start us out with some background on what’s happening on college campuses right now as people are [00:02:00] challenging Zionism and in response being defined as terror supporters?

Arun Kundnani: I think it’s been a remarkable thing, actually. I would say over the last 10 years, there’s been this upsurge of activism with groups like Students for Justice of Palestine, Jewish Voice of Peace, Not In My Name, and so on. That have made the question of Palestine, , one of the central issues for campus politics.

And that mobilization has been probably the key reason why especially among young people the usual kind of Zionist arguments don’t work anymore, right? They’re not working anymore. You know, we’re seeing opinion polls repeatedly now that the majority of young people think of the current war as a genocidal war. They see Israel as an apartheid state and so on. And there’s also a gradual shift of opinion amongst older people as well. But the cutting edge of this change in American public opinion is happening with young people, and I think it is down to those groups.

Alongside that is the kind of pro-Israel groups in the United States that [00:03:00] historically have secured public support for Israel through various kinds of propaganda, they find that losing that propaganda war on campuses have turned instead to coercion rather than persuasion, right?

They’ve turned to using their power as donors using their power to influence legislation to apply coercion, to try and censor. Students involved in this activism or worse, we’re even hearing proposals to criminalize groups of students for justice for Palestine under the terrorism legislation, the material support statute that was part of the terrorism legislation introduced in the 1990s, right? 

So we know the litany of measures that are already happening, you know doxing of students disciplinary measures for students job offers rescinded. And so on and we’ve seen the people who lost their jobs already for not being sufficiently repressive of those students.

Emmaia Gelman: The law that you mentioned prohibits what’s called material support for terror, which specifies organizations that can’t legally be supported with funding or [00:04:00] aid. But that’s not the only way that people are being accused in this case, right? There’s also an ideological accusation that by supporting the idea of resisting colonialism, that people fall into the category of terrorist or terror supporters.

Arun Kundnani: There’s a long history to this. Especially in recent decades that, mainstream political opinion in the United States thinks of the relationship between insurrections and insurgencies and the state. The term terrorism as a kind of political idea goes back to the aftermath of the French Revolution.

When it’s the Jacobin terror in that situation, it’s, state terror. It’s not the terror of non-state actors. But by the late 19th century, we get something very much like of modern concept of terrorism, , applied for the first time, really, to anarchist groups who, at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 19th century, are carrying out assassinations of presidents of Tsars, you know, McKinley, U.S. president assassinated by anarchists. And there’s a kind of international network of anarchists who are doing this, and the police [00:05:00] forces of the major powers in Europe, the United States, and so on start to use this word terrorism to describe this method of political violence, and it becomes really the way that these police forces around the world for the first time start to collaborate to do counter terrorism. By the middle of the 20th century, you get the use of the word terrorism to talk primarily about anti colonial movements who are engaged in armed struggles against European colonialism. That’s happening in various places Ireland Algeria India Kenya, and so on.

So colonialism is a violent process, right? To occupy country to steal people’s land and so on necessarily requires violence because people don’t typically consent . So what the word terrorism enables is to make a distinction between the violence that the colonialists are carrying out, which is then just perceived as the normal kind of business of the state. And then terrorism becomes the word to describe the violence that emerges in response to that. The connotation of the [00:06:00] word terrorism there is, this violence is somehow fanatical extremist and immoral. That is the kind of framework that continues to the present In the question of Palestine, it really becomes the language that Israel uses.

Especially after 1967 to describe armed groups engaged in countering Israeli colonialism. In fact, in the United States, the word terrorism isn’t really used. To describe that kind of violence in Palestine at that time in the U. S. News media, they’re not talking about terrorism in Palestine. They’re talking about, you know, guerrilla warfare or something like that, which is a more accurate term, in fact but they start to use the term terrorism to describe things like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. So it is groups that are emerging out of that moment in the late sixties, early 1970s, within the United States engaged in political struggles that have taken on a violent quality. And then a key turning point is in the early eighties when in fact the current prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu organizes a couple of conferences in Washington DC, the [00:07:00] aim of which is to associate the concepts of terrorism with nationalism and Islam. And to say that, the violence that is going on in Palestine is an expression not of a conflict over the military occupation that Israel has carried out, but is an expression of Arab and Islamic culture that is inherently fanatical and violent and leads to terrorism. And actually behind it all is the hand of Moscow as well to kind of fold it into the Cold War at that time. So that’s when we get for the first time this attempt to align the idea of terrorism with Islam. And then, of course after 9/11 that idea intensified much more with the war on terror. That begins with the war in Afghanistan in October 2001. 

Emmaia Gelman: You’ve talked about how the idea of terrorism folds in both anti-Muslim racism, probably more specifically now anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-communism. But what’s the target of that defense? Is it attacking the left? [00:08:00] Is it attacking anti-colonialism? Is it a Cold War defense? How should we understand that now? 

Arun Kundnani: I mean, I think, you know, that’s the power of the word terrorism is that it’s the language of the state, it enables the state to make certain forms of violence visible and certain forms of violence invisible and typically its own violence invisible, right? No one uses the word terrorism without hypocrisy, that’s just a feature of the term that typically the most virulent users of the term terrorism are themselves also involved in what would have to be called terrorism, if you were using the word objectively, right? And so the example of the Irgun and then the Stern gang is a perfect illustration of that. The state of Israel was founded through what would have to be called terrorism.

One of the great purveyors of the use of the word terrorism to demonize its opponents, because if you get the dictionary out and look at what does terrorism mean, it will say something like it’s the use of violence against civilians to achieve political goals through spreading fear, intimidation, or [00:09:00] acts of violence. So there’s something theatrical about it. It’s violence that’s shown to the world to achieve some kind of political goal. So in the war on terror, we went to war in Iraq. We began that war in 2003 by talking about shock and awe, right? Shock and awe is about sending a message to display the power that the United States is capable of to achieve a political goal. The political goal was to remove the Saddam Hussein regime and create a new regime in Iraq that would be more to the US is liking, right?

So it was political violence, theatrical to achieve a political goal. Civilians were killed in their hundreds of thousands. It was terrorism, but carried out in the name of a war on terrorists, right? So, this is the kind of paradox we keep running up against. And this is why, I think that the word is pretty useless for those of us who believe in the liberation of people and believe that it is justified for us to struggle against state violence. I think the word terrorism is useless for that purpose.

And there’s a whole load of words we can use instead. We can talk about political violence. [00:10:00] We can talk about guerrilla warfare. The violence of the state is always on a far greater scale than the violence and non state actors.

Emmaia Gelman: I want to turn to the idea that some people like people who are quote unquote at risk of being radicalized are foreign to the idea of freedom or foreign to the body of people who know how to do democracy right. This is like a key neoconservative idea that you have to be culturally prepared and trained to do democracy right.

Radicalization is an idea that we’ve been steeped in for the last 20 years, maybe longer. It’s the heart of the idea that the state should be involved in surveillance and that the nation is always on the defensive. Explain how that lays the groundwork for the current use of the notion of terror to shut down anti genocide organizing and to portray students and faculty as a danger to democracy or a danger to the university, essentially as irrational.

Arun Kundnani: One of the things that’s interesting about it is that it’s it’s something that draws in both conservative constituencies and liberal constituencies as well. Firstly, right, [00:11:00] because you are trying to tell a certain story about the origins of what you call terrorism. You’re not just, seeing it as. an evil that cannot be explained, right? You’re saying there is some kind of psychological and cultural process that leads to it, that government interventions can, tackle that.

It doesn’t just have to be a military response. It can also be , these responses at the level of community policies and so on, right. So it’s sucked in a good section of liberal opinion into supporting that version of counterterrorism policy as well. So one of the characteristics we’re seeing at the moment is the way that , major liberal institutions are responding to the current situation in Gaza by demonizing protesters, by saying that people who are opposing the genocide, who are calling for a ceasefire is somehow complicit in supporting a Hamas agenda. And for liberals to be saying that speaks to the extent to which this language of radicalization has reached across the political spectrum.

You know, the question of Hamas is obviously central to this, right? Hamas is part of a longer history of [00:12:00] Palestinian armed groups that have attempted to counter the colonialism that Palestinians have experienced. it has entered the political vacuum that was opened up by the PLO’s absorption into becoming an element of the occupation through the Oslo peace process, right?

The process that created a space for a new armed group to emerge, that would continue what the PLO had been doing before. Now, the narrative we tend to get on Hamas instead is that because Hamas is an Islamic, and since it’s emerged, especially in the 21st century with the war on terror, the story has been it’s violence is worse than the PLO precisely because it’s Islamic and not secular like the PLO was. I mean, the PLO at the time that it was engaged in violence was never described as moderate in its violence by Israel or by people in the U.S. It was described as extremist in exactly the same way that Hamas is now, right? But the retrospective story is, that while the [00:13:00] Hamas is far more dangerous and fanatical. Because it’s violence is informed by some kind of Islamic ideology, right? Now that kind of thinking, actually doesn’t stand up factually, or historically but we get this story that Hamas is uniquely violent because of its, its religious motivation, and that is directly tied up with the idea that we’ve had really since the nineteen nineties about how Islam is prone to radicalization and therefore terrorism. I think that’s a crucial part of the story here. 

Emmaia Gelman: You’ve made pretty clear how Hamas gets constructed and in fact all resistance gets constructed as terror and how that notion of terror sort of stands in front of a state and its violence making it harder to see state violence. Let’s move that analytical lens over to look at Zionism. How does the popularization of what we might call the terror frame guide popular understanding of Zionism? How does it work to naturalize violence in the service of Zionism?

Arun Kundnani: I think it becomes the way that the violence that [00:14:00] is practiced every day as part of the occupation just becomes the normal background that we don’t need to comment on, that the news media don’t need to report on and that doesn’t seem like political violence, which is what it is.  And of course there’s a an interesting kind of projection here, right?

That’s at the heart of this, which is, everyone understands, I think, that the state of Israel was created through political violence, right, including the killing of civilians, you know, the bombing of hotels and so on mass violence that looks very violent, very similar in its kind of basic physical features. So there’s a kind of disavowal at the heart of Zionism about the origins of how the state of Israel was created you know, through the 1940s. And of course the elimination and expulsion of 1947-1948, that violence is known but disavowed, right?

There’s a way that every act of violence that is carried out like that is kind of an unwanted reminder of [00:15:00] Zionism’s own history, and I think that’s part of why there’s so much irrationality around the way that Zionism thinks about terrorism here. It’s because there is this truth about Zionism’s own history that’s constantly has to be carefully suppressed 

Emmaia Gelman: In your piece in The New Arab, you talk about the fragility of the colonizer, which is a reference to this idea that we’re familiar with from discussions of white fragility, in which efforts to confront, even to talk about structural racism, racialized power, get derailed by the call to attend to the hurt feelings of white people who feel accused by it.

You write that the fragility of the colonizer is not the product of a rational mind, and I do think a lot of us have turned to psychological explanations to try to understand what’s going on in this maddening moment. How does fragility help us understand what’s happening?

Arun Kundnani: It’s been very striking over over the last few months that the merest assertion of Palestinian identity or push back against what Israel is currently [00:16:00] doing gets read by Zionists and adjacent liberal figures in American public culture, like the New York Times, it gets read as something way more threatening than it could reasonably be. For example, the Palestine Writes Literature Festival that took place, in fact, before October 7th at the University of Pennsylvania, was described as a kind of gathering of antisemites, a forum for the expression of hatred of Jews and violence and so on, right? When in fact it was a gathering of people to talk about literature. The reaction to the slogan from the river to the sea Palestine will be free, right? The idea that that is a kind of coded call for genocide. The idea that wearing a keffiyeh is somehow an affront to Western civilization or something like that.

So what is going on there, it seems to me is just kind of strange combination in Zionism of at least at times this claim to see Israel as part of Western civilization and claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East and to be this kind of [00:17:00] upholder of Western liberal democratic values. But that kind of language coexists with the Might is Right discourse, right? That well, Israel can only exist so long as it’s willing to continue to use absolute violence without consideration for international law human rights and so on.

You know, the sort of markers of liberal values, what you get then is a kind of psychological repression of the reality of that as we know, when you have a psychological repression, that stuff comes out in other ways, right? Irrational ways. And that is what leads to this kind of fragility to the Zionist mindset. I think that there is, the slightest assertion of Palestinian identity, slightest criticism of Israel, the slightest organizing to oppose what Israel is doing is, an existential threat to every Israeli. Is interpreted in that way, we’re completely beyond the bounds of what would be plausible readings of, what’s going on.

It’s actually, in addition to portraying challenges to genocide as threats to Israelis, they’re actually constructed [00:18:00] as threats to Jews in the U. S. Like the idea of terror lines up sides, right? It lines up the idea of the liberal state against the illiberal outside threat, Muslim threat, Palestinian threat, communist threat.

Emmaia Gelman: One of the things that it seems important to identify in looking at how this war on terror conversation teaches us about Zionism is not just how it makes Muslim ness or Palestinian ness appear threatening, but conversely how it so insistently identifies Jewishness with the state. I’m not saying it does that correctly or honestly, but it invents a Jewishness that’s totally integrated with the state and then insists that it’s anti semitic to resist state violence.

Arun Kundnani: Yeah, the way that we understand antisemitism and how that relates to the question of terrorism, right? A series of terms here get linked together, right? The notion of terrorism with all the baggage that that term is now acquired and in particular, its relationship to Arabs and Muslims and so on. Threads through then to a certain way of understanding what [00:19:00] antiemitism is. The discourse coming from Zionism today, basically says what Israel is fighting in Gaza is essentially a continuation of the struggle against Nazis, right. So that kind of idea captures this, that, when we think about antisemitism as a form of racism, we’re thinking of it as something that is associated with Muslims in particular, or Arabs in particular, as particularly prone to for cultural reasons, right? And it’s almost as if the reality of European antisemitism becomes secondary to that. You know, remember that line from Netanyahu, that in fact, the Nazis got their antisemitism from the Palestinians, right?

So, that becomes the story. And there’s a particular way that that becomes powerful. Because of how we have come to understand anti racism in the United States where racism is not a power struggle between different groups fighting over the basic structures by [00:20:00] which society’s resources are distributed and allocated, but instead the prevailing way we think about racism in the United States is it’s a belief or attitude that someone holds something inside their head. And those beliefs and attitudes are unconsciously held, right? If that’s your view of what racism is and if you add to that the idea that we manage questions of race in the United States through representatives that can speak on behalf of different ethnic or religious or racial groups. And we defer to their authority to, identify and propose the remedies for this problem of unconscious Racism. And that situation, all it takes is for pro Israel groups to plausibly claim to be speaking for Jews in America, even though, of course, they speak certainly not for all Jews. To say that criticism of Israel is antisemitism that of course, like any other form of hate speech needs to be censored and so on. That view of anti racism totally ignores the question of power of structure of all [00:21:00] these things that are central to how racist oppression works.

Within that framework, there’s very little space to talk about the experience of Arabs, the experience of Muslims, the experience of Palestinians in the United States at this moment, when people have been killed for being Palestinian, when the merest efforts to act in solidarity with people in the Middle East has been demonized, suppressed, censored, if not criminalized and that is about racism as well. That’s about a power relationship, a structural relationship with how the world is organized. And so part of this is also about transforming our understanding of what anti-racism might mean.

There is a, story to be told about how Zionist organizations in the United States have been able to to say that we represent Jews in the United States and kind of substitute the question of, the Jewish experience in the United States with something slightly different, which is the the question of what is Israel’s needs in terms of its relationship with the United States and to essentially become the propaganda necessary to ensure that the United States [00:22:00] continues to fund Israel lavishly and to give it diplomatic and military cover at the international level. 

Emmaia Gelman: So if the War on Terror is centered on the idea of a liberal state, a modern, secular, Western state, what do we make of Christian Zionism, which is so rooted in white Christian nationalism, not secular, not liberal, although quite Western? How do those two things square?

Arun Kundnani: The war on terror always had these different ways into it. From different ideological positions. And that’s part of what you need to be true. If you’re going to have a dominant ideology and take a dominant position across the whole political spectrum, which is what the war on terror did. There is the liberal entry point, how we need the war on terror to uphold Western, liberal, secular democracy and so on. There’s also the Christian Zionist entry point that you know, Israel needs to be defended in order for the second coming of Jesus of course, it’s not going to go too well for the Jews who were instrumentalized in that process.

It becomes a way for a [00:23:00] Christian politics to feed into a Zionist politics. Within that the notion of terrorism is almost identical with the notion of Islam, right? The two kind of collapse into each other. Islam is presented as not actually a religion. After all, if it were a religion, it would be entitled to certain protections under the first amendment. So the position is it’s not actually a religion. It’s an expression, a direct expression of Satan essentially, it’s evil. And so any form of violence against it is doing God’s work. So we’re in this kind of apocalyptic worldview. It becomes important for the kind of foot soldiers of the war on terror, the people who turn up around the U.S. organizing around mosques and, violence against Muslims and that kind of everyday Islamophobic reality in the United States, but they also, to some extent, influence the thinking of the U. S. military in certain strands.

That has, more disturbing consequences in terms of decision making by military people who have the capacity for much greater violence. And, seems perhaps to have [00:24:00] shaped some of the, the actual military thinking around the war on terror. So that’s another part of the story.

Emmaia Gelman: You’ve pointed to the idea of terror as a way of talking about security, a repressive security state that actually recruits liberals, recruits people who think of themselves as being against racism, being for rights. It recruits them into this conservative project as supporters. Zionism in the past has been considered a liberal to progressive project to support itself, right?

It’s historically framed as a Jewish liberation project, and that is increasingly fallen apart. It’s fallen apart partly because of the increased popular understanding familiarity with the idea of settler colonialism, and also because its racism is so evident, the anti Palestinian, anti Arab, anti Muslim racism, and because the incredible violence that we’re witnessing on social media especially just doesn’t stand up to the idea that Israel is a liberation project. So Zionism and Zionist institutions are in a kind of crisis. Does [00:25:00] framing opposition to Zionism as terror now bring back those liberal supporters? Is that part of the project here?

Arun Kundnani: The language of terrorism was deliberately promoted from the late 1960s onwards by Israel as a way to block thinking in the U.S. that focused on the political issues, the fact of a military occupation, the fact of human rights abuses and so on, right? And instead thinking of it in terms of the fanaticism of Palestinians, right? That was the move. One thing to think about here is did that stop working once the United States, its own war on terror kind of ran to the ground?

We have to remember that in the 1980-s the U.S. had its first war on terror, the one that Reagan talked about that was very much tied up with what was happening in terms of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and Hezbollah’s response to that. And, and so we had a war on terror in the 1980s that was, that didn’t involve any acts within the United States, [00:26:00] but was about the U.S. military being targeted in the Middle East. Nevertheless, this whole story of terrorism was conjured up and associated with Islam. And that’s the kind of first iteration of this. 

Now that version of the war on terror that runs through the 1980s and then feeds into a whole lot of post-Cold War language up into the nineties around the new threat of Islam, the clash of civilizations, the Samuel Huntington stuff. That was encouraged by Israel and highly favorable to Israel’s propaganda interests. Then we get the war on terror, which again, you know, Israel lobby is central to shaping a lot of the thinking of the war on terror, like the post-9/11 war on terror. And that war on terror like kind of takes over American life in a way that the 1980s one didn’t. Huge numbers of American people are actively involved in warfare in that war on terror. Millions of Americans come to understand that this is bullshit the idea that we’re going to go and fight a war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan makes no sense.

So by the [00:27:00] time you get to I don’t know, like 2011, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that this was a terrible mistake, that the United States should not be involved in military action to combat terrorism. And the basic ideological foundation of the war on terror has basically been called into question, if not discredited. Now if you want to talk to Americans about terrorism I think you’ve got an uphill battle. Of course that term still has its ideological power but if you want to not just say, oh there’s terrorism, but starts to talk about how we need to go after it with the military because it’s his absolute evil that can destroy entire societies, it’s harder to play that now, right. 

So that’s been one of the factors why, even though you have October the 7th, which is, you know, serious, mass incident of violence with many victims and so on, there’s a brief period where there’s kind of national outrage in the United States, but it hasn’t been enough to get [00:28:00] American opinion as supportive of Israel as you might have expected a few years ago. 

So what I think the language of terrorism does more is not win public opinion, but win elite opinion. Within elites, it’s a kind of congealed ideology that’s been handed down now for, you know, for generations and there’s a kind of reflexive understanding of how terrorism provides this kind of language of the state. And that’s why it’s a way for Israel to bring states in. And that’s where its power lies. Now it’s not in world public opinion anymore. It’s in state opinion, elite opinion. Because of the relationships that it’s built up that way. That’s where I would say the real work is that the terrorism discourse is doing actually at this point.

Emmaia Gelman: Thanks. That makes all kinds of sense in this time when mass movement is struggling so hard to make a dent in policy. And as we keep hearing decision makers using the same reductive and racist language of terror and self defense, quote unquote, on repeat. Thanks so much, Arun, for unpacking this. Really appreciate your thinking and writing [00:29:00] here.

Arun Kundnani: Thanks Emmaia. Thank you for having me. 

Emmaia Gelman: Listeners, you can look in the show notes for Arun’s article, Israel, U. S. Campuses and the Fragility of the Colonizer, and also a link to the book, The Muslims Are Coming, which lays out some of these ideas in really clear terms and with lots of historical and specific examples. Thanks so much for joining Arun Kundnani and me, Emmaia Gelman. Look for lots more episodes on keywords coming up and visit our website at criticalzionismstudies.org

Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.