The Palestinian liberation struggle is a fundamental class and anti-colonial issue. First-time guest to the podcast, Professor Omar Zahzah, talks with Steve about the active collaboration of Silicon Valley tech giants with the US and Israeli governments to censor and suppress anti-Zionist narratives. 

"What these companies are doing is digitally amplifying a physical process of settler colonial dispossession." 

Omar goes beyond labeling digital censorship as simple political bias. He argues that Silicon Valley's actions are a direct extension of imperialist goals in Palestine: the erasure of a people, their narrative, and their history. Big Tech is not a referee – not even a biased one. It is an active combatant. 

Omar provides a sharp critique of how the language of safety and anti-racism is co-opted and weaponized. Online platforms use terms like "harassment" and "hate speech" to silence criticism. 

In their discussion, Omar and Steve apply Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony to the digital sphere. They analyze how Big Tech platforms shape our "common sense," not just through outright censorship, but through algorithmic curation, shadow-banning, and overwhelming activists with trolls and bots, waging a "digital war of attrition" that drains energy and shifts perceptions. They also suggest the potential TikTok ban is not just a US-China trade issue but a symptom of a crisis of hegemony. 

Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, organizer of Lebanese Palestinian descent, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University. Omar has covered digital repression in relation to Palestine as a freelance journalist since May 2021, with work appearing in such outlets as Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, CounterPunch, and more. Omar holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. 

His recently published book is Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle 

@dromarzahzah on X    

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today's

guest is an author. He is also a professor, and more

importantly, he is an activist. And he's got a great analytical

framework for understanding the suppression and the social media censorship, quite

frankly, that has gone on regarding the Palestinian struggle for liberation

and quite honestly, the genocide of the people of Gaza that

we've been able to watch live streamed mostly for the last

couple years. And he's written a book called Terms of Servitude:

Zionism, Silicon Valley and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. My

guest, who you may have heard of before, is Omar Zahzah.

He's assistant professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities, and Diasporas (AMED) Studies

at San Francisco State University. And the book traces the timeline

from the Sheikh Jarrah uprisings of 2021 to the beginning of

October 2023 to the most current developments to explain social media's

role in advancing and suppressing Palestinian narratives. So without further ado,

let me bring on my guest, Omar. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. We have tried really hard over the years to cover this in the

best way we could. We are a macroeconomics podcast that does the interdisciplinary natures

of struggle. We are also a podcast that focuses on class struggle. And this

is very much a class issue. This is very much an issue that people

with a socialist worldview would find incredibly important to their way of life, their

ideological framework for how they view the world. A dialectical perspective, for sure, here

will allow people to understand how we got here, not just "Whatever happened on

October 6th?" They will really, truly understand all the things that led up to

the point where we are. And your book is really fantastic. We've covered a

lot of AI issues and we've covered a lot of social media suppression issues,

algorithm issues, censorship, et cetera. But this is at a whole different level because

this is covering up for a genocide. This is literally silencing people who are

in a desperate attempt trying to feed themselves, much less get healthcare and just

make it to the next day. We're not even talking about, "Hey, I'd like

a career. Hey, I'd like to be able to buy a ping pong table

or I'd like to enjoy video game." We're talking about people trying to survive

one day to the next being literally silenced by huge, huge media companies with

government intervention and a whole host of actors that are working collectively together, from

Silicon Valley to the White House. And obviously the least able, if you will,

the least financed, the least capable of resistance, are forced to not only resist

the oppression that they feel on a daily basis from the bombs and from

the other militarization of the region, but also from these tech oligarchs who have

silenced the cries for justice. Tell us about what brought this book into being

and give us a little bit of background for why we should be paying

attention to this.

Thank you so much for that question. As you noted in your introduction of

the text, this really began for me in 2021. Some of your viewers may

recall that it was at this time that you started to see protests by

Palestinians who were opposing their looming expulsion from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of

Sheikh Jarrah. And a big part of their demonstrations, their protests, their activism, was

the use of social media. Now keep in mind that this followed on the

heels of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, which I think had also kind of

primed us globally for broader structural conversations about racism. Not just being a question

of interpersonal attitudes, but really about a system, an overall structure of oppression, exploitation

and ultimately state-sanctioned violence and even death. And so all of that's to say

that by the time 2021 comes around in a kind of larger global sense,

people, the general public here, I'm saying, I think were already primed for related

conversations about other forms of systemic and structural oppression. And so 2021, the timing

of it I think lines up very nicely in this regard because people are

ready to hear differing perspectives on what the nature of the Palestinian struggle really

is. And shifting it from a lot of the liberal bromides or honestly the

Zionist propaganda that is perpetrated by the legacy corporate media towards really shifting our

perspective to understanding that first and foremost this is about settler colonization. And this

is about a process that has been in place since the Nakba of 1948.

And even prior to that, when you have preceding regime of British imperialism that

first begins to welcome and work to institute what will become the ascension of

the Zionist project in Palestine during its own mandate. So it's been an unrelenting

process of settler colonization that is abetted by imperialism and shifting from the imperial

mandate of Great Britain at the time, now the United States, which is entered

as the current global superpower. So a lot of background. But what happens is

essentially that these organizers, these activists, take to social media in 2021, protesting their

situation, but also protesting the way that the Palestinian narrative has been consistently misrepresented

within legacy corporate media, within the sphere of politics at large. And they're effective.

They do start to affect narrative shifts. And they're so effective at it through

using platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter at the time, now X, that legacy corporate

media begins to take note, begins to platform them increasingly more. And they also

prove themselves to be savvy at navigating those terrains, redirecting the questions, right, rejecting

the propaganda, or what the critic Steven Salaita has referred to as the prerequisite

to speaking that Arab individuals are often confronted with. Like you need to speak

on a particular script, you need to condemn a particular project before we will

allow you to say what you really came to say, to challenge the injustice

that you're facing. They turn all of that on its head and they expose

it for what it is in real time. And so all of this continues

to have vast gains for shifting perceptions of what the Palestinian struggle is really

about. And of course, as a result of this success, these same Big Tech

companies that had initially made these counter-hegemonic opportunities possible try to roll back those

gains by engaging in increasingly collective forms of censorship. So you see blanket censorship

of posts about Sheikh Jarrah, of posts about the Israeli occupation forces incursion into

the Al-Aqsa Mosque, of the bombing of Gaza that happens in 2022. You start

to see an increasing social media blackout, the suspension of accounts, the deleting of

posts, the banning of prominent Palestinian accounts. All of this happening at such a

rapid scale that it's very clear that there is a coordinated attempt to silence

these dissenting voices. Again, what is unique about this moment in time, we're still

in 2021, 2022, is that this happens at such a scale that legacy corporate

media also has to take note of this silencing. So they begin to report

on it. So we start to get our first peek behind the curtain, our

glimpse into the fact that these Big Tech companies that had really branded themselves

on providing the instruments of democracy, are engaging in a mass censorship of people

righteously resisting their colonial dispossession at the hands of a settler colonial state. And

this kind of contrast between, on the one hand, the promise, and if you

want to get a little cynical about it, the false branding, but also arguably,

the potential of these platforms to work in a certain way, to be re-appropriated

in a particular form by activists, and the actual practices of these companies when

they see their platforms utilized too successfully for purposes to which they were never

intended to be put. Because, of course, the point of these products is to

keep us passively consuming, just mindlessly scrolling. And they often try to discourage political

engagement in general, or at least political engagement that is serious, that is sustained,

instead of something that will work towards sensationalism and keep us kind of anxiously

glued in that regard. So that contrast became really intriguing to me, and I

started to think there was something to this dynamic that not only needed to

be commented upon, because we had a lot of writing already coming out about

this seeming contradiction between what social media could be and how it's actually being

implemented and what that means for Palestine, but I was thinking that it would

be important to start to think about a larger project that put the clearly

targeted censorship that Palestinians are facing on these platforms into conversation with other interventions

about Big Tech and how Big Tech fortifies systems and structures of racism and

dispossession. So I'm thinking here of studies like Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology, studies

that really talked about how despite its propaganda, Big Tech is often the main

culprit in fortifying the various systems that it claims its products will allow for

people to challenge. And I felt that what was happening to Palestinians needed to

be engaged in a sustained way in this broader context and put into conversations

with these broader interventions into the oppressive machinations of Big Tech as it is,

precisely because what these companies are doing is digitally amplifying a physical process of

settler colonial dispossession.

That is very powerful. I was trying to figure out how to frame the

digital colonization, the settler colonialism. And it just dawned on me. You said a

couple words in there that I think tie together really, really well and are

super important. One of them, you said hegemony, and that harkens back to Antonio

Gramsci. And we have been focused on very heavily on the impact of cultural

hegemony lately, not only in the economic space where these frames and these kinds

of statements and concepts and institutions all reinforce the hegemonic view of neoliberalism. In

fact, the ruling class uses these things as a means of disciplining us and

so forth. And we could see this kind of rise of a fascism in

terms of the brutality and crackdown on people with differing opinions outside of that

hegemonic state. I'm curious, could you speak a little bit to hegemony here and

how this kind of dynamic is playing out in terms of the common sense.

Of course, we all are kind of led to believe that Israel is the

victim here, which is rather comical if you've had any historical framework of the

comings and goings of the region. What are your thoughts on how cultural hegemony

and in particular some Gramscian views of how this is playing out?

Yeah, it's a really rich and at the same time very important dynamic to understand

classically the concept of hegemony, referring to how systems of belief that are most beneficial

to the political sphere are replicated and sort of maintained within the cultural realm, the

one that is seemingly disconnected from politics. In the Palestinian context, I think we put

rightfully as critics a lot of emphasis on legacy corporate media because it's the main

instrument of manufacturing consent for various imperial projects that the US either directly undertakes or

supports as part of its broader program of geo-imperial domination. And the Palestinian context is

one of those. And it's a very unique case in point in the sense that

what types of media maneuvering the Palestinian context has resulted in oftentimes an outright erasure

of Palestinian perspectives and voices within the corporate legacy media channels. And when they are

engaged in this very piecemeal, sensationalized way that ultimately continues to reaffirm the larger Zionist

narrative. Things like thinking of the Israeli state as this poor besieged bastion of democracy

that is simply trying to do the best that it can while being confronted by

all of these aggressive and hateful and subhuman anti-Semitic peoples who have no culture aside

from hate. And you can keep tropifying this on and on and on because I

think it's been so culturally distributed that we understand how it works, even if we

are also critical of it. So that had been one of the main instruments of

maintaining this broader cultural normalization of thinking about Israel and the Palestinians or even just

the Arabs, because oftentimes Palestine is erased. We don't call it Palestine. Right? But thinking

it in a particular way. And then you start to have the sort of introduction

of these other platforms that are supposedly able to kind of allow for us to

redirect that so ostensibly provide an opening to enable people to somewhat subvert some of

the terms of the hegemonic worldview as we have come to know it, as it

has come to be normalized. But then of course, what you start to see is

precisely these very platforms are actually just as invested in perpetuating the ultimate implications of

this initial form of hegemony. Now they can't do it as overtly. They can't do

it as directly. First of all, because there's so many people actually using these platforms.

Secondly, because there have been so many gains in terms of the dissemination of different

materials that show people conditions that do contravene some of the more basic tenets of

what this initial propagandistic narrative had been. So they can't necessarily always engage with the

same maneuvers, but they can do things like they can censor. They can shadow ban.

They can blacklist. And that erasure can also still have implications. One of the other

ways that I think about hegemony in the book, and I write about this a

little bit in the introduction, is, in addition to that particular political definition, which also,

of course, entails the need to mount a counter-hegemonic cultural offensive to spread these counter

narratives that are going to advance vis-a-vis a word position. One of the other ways

I get into it, though, is just the fact that there's so much capture that

these platforms have on our social imaginations, on our understanding of how we think about

the world around us. This is going to sound maybe a little bit almost supernatural

or so, but the different newsfeeds that we have kind of become their own kind

of default for how we conceptualize the organizing of discourse or how we think about

how can we put information together in a readily accessible way? Because they provide a

template for us to think about newer forms of communication and the dissemination of information.

So they also have a hegemonic influence in terms of how they relate to the

way that we see and understand the organization of the world. And so when they

practice these forms of censorship, they can also have, even if it's a less-noticed influence,

they can still have an influence in our sense of, okay, what do we prioritize?

What do we think more or less about? What are we seeing more in our

algorithmically curated feeds? What are we not seeing as much of? What happened to that

Palestinian journalist I followed a few months ago? I haven't heard anything from them. I

haven't seen them. Maybe you'll remember to seek out their page, but maybe you'll forget.

And that's also going to subtly start to code your own sense of political urgency,

your sense of the need to take immediate action. So they have, I would say,

seemingly more subtle means of still advancing a particular hegemonic understanding in line with what

the status quo requires for people within the West to think. Because ultimately we need

to come back to supporting the Israeli colonial project. But I would say that precisely

because of their subtlety, I felt it was important to mount kind of a sustained

engagement with them and exposing them for what they are, which is still an instrument

of advancing a hegemonic understanding that through these practices that disabuse the Palestinians engaged in

righteous dissent from being able to advance their own counter-hegemonic narratives that, as we've seen

over the past few years, have been increasingly successful in changing perceptions of Palestine, even

as the situation itself on the ground continues to remain dire and unfold in newly

horrific ways as the genocide continues.

You said something really important, and I want to touch on this as a follow up. Gramsci did

talk about a war of position and a war of maneuver. And I'm curious, what do you mean

by that when you're referencing it here? Because I think it's fascinating. I still would really love to

know a deeper understanding of that whole framework of those two. I know one is kind of appealing

to the elites, trying to get them to change the way they behave. And I know the other

one is just straight-up revolution. Can you help me better understand what you mean by that?

Yeah, definitely. In this context, I'm using it loosely. And the reason that I'm

using it loosely is I'm referring to, I would argue it's operating on multiple

senses of the term, because on the one hand, there is a broader Palestinian

undertaking to shift the narrative and for supporters of the Palestinian liberation struggle to

really continue to try to attack the centers of power and shift and challenge

and repurpose a lot of the ways that those centers of power have framed

our understanding of these political conditions up to this point in time. So I

think that probably converges with the first instance that you're referring to, which is

perhaps the swaying of elites, the shifting of their perspective, because certainly there is

this idea that the more people that are activated, that see things for what

they really are, the more potential you have for making change. I would also

say that in my writing, and just in general in my journalistic career, I've

been very influenced by the Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, who himself is also very

much a Gramscian and has an important book, I believe, called These Chains Will

Be Broken that's about Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. And he talks about these

prisoners as Palestine's organic intellectuals. So that's referring to another Gramscian concept of the

organic intellectual, somebody who emerges from particular situations to become the kind of spontaneous,

embodied intellectual that represents a particular form, form of dispossession within a particular social

context. So in this case, Baroud talking about Palestinian Prisoners as the organic intellectuals

of Palestinian struggle. That kind of gets me to the second point, which is

that Palestinians as a colonized and occupied people are engaged in multiple forms of

resistance, all of them legitimate, because again, this is an anti-colonial struggle.

Sure.

So there are some who are engaged in revolutionary military, anti-colonial struggle, and then

there's the grassroots and different activists all over the world, Palestinian journalists. So it's

working on all multiple aspects of kind of cultural agitation. So I do think

that obviously there is a direct revolutionary component to it as well, but I

think we need to understand it in the multiple senses precisely because we have

a full and diverse array of Palestinian cultural resistance that is being practiced and

all of it to advance the ultimate goal of Palestinian liberation.

Thank you for that. It was excellent. Very well stated. You talk about breeding trolls

for the startup colony, and we have a person on our team who was raised

up in the Hasbara. You know, it really was put through the kibbutz and through

all the other things that trained him up to be kind of in that space.

And then he broke free and now he's an advocate. His name's Jonathan Kadman. He's

one of the people on our team here at Real Progressives and works on this

podcast, Macro N Cheese with us as well. It just sort of was a shocker

to me, even though I knew some of this stuff. It was just really shocking

the level of depth that they go with this kind of approach to, I don't

know, brainwashing, creating a narrative, if you will, that suits Israel, suits the Zionist project.

And it always brings to mind the concept of counter revolution. People always wonder why

revolutions end up violent. Why? "Oh, you know, when this guy took over, it was

like totalitarian," or it was this or it was that. But they never go back

to. To understand what a counter-revolutionary force does and how it rips apart the gains

of the revolution, so to speak. And in this case, you watch the Palestinians and

the activists that are fighting to bring awareness to this using TikTok and other things.

And lo and behold, the hegemon, the counter revolution, kicks in. The monarchist, it's a

bad term, but you get the gist. They decide, okay, let's use our power within

the kind of blending of state and industry with Silicon Valley and these AI firms

and these other Silicon Valley kind of cyber warfare units, and they ratchet up and

now all of a sudden they counter the gains through TikTok and through everything else.

But they use, of course, hegemonic words to make it seem like "We're doing this

to protect the children from really bad actors on TikTok and we're saving us from

China, who's abusing their access and so forth." But they're not really telling the truth

because at the end of the day what they're doing is silencing resistance, silencing struggle.

Trying to put a wet blanket on that. Breeding trolls for the startup colony. I

love that. Cyber warfare in the age of Hasbara 2.0. Can you talk about that?

Thank you so much for that question. So, starting with the title, it was a

little bit of a punny sort of tongue in cheek, but it was a refutation

of one of the big lines of Zionist tech propaganda, which is to think of

Israel as the startup nation. And I talk a little bit about that book, that

so-called study that really is basically just a paean to Israeli tech and startup culture

and basically talking about how its militarism is part of what gives it, you know,

this "innovative capability," like culturally, of course, because it is a work of propaganda. It's

not going to acknowledge that the conditions that it's describing and the things that it's

referring to are all processes of colonization. So I was saying in that chapter, hey,

you know, we're not dealing with a startup nation. Israel's a settler-colonial state. This is

the startup colony. And part of the strategy that this colony uses is to breed

trolls again because we have this adage of, "Don't feed the trolls. Don't engage with

trolling." But trolling is really a top-tier strategy of Zionist cyber warfare. And I talk

about this constant barrage of propaganda as a form of cyber warfare. Hasbara 2.0, you

know, there I pull from the digital anthropologist Miriyam Aouragh, who wrote this essay called

Hasbara 2.0. And basically she was reflecting on what happens when you see, let's say,

the mostly complete capture by Zionism of legacy corporate media narrative. Right? And I say

mostly because she reworks Herman and Chomsky's concept of manufacturing consent a little bit to

say that the very fact that the legacy corporate media is so driven by numbers

is a capitalist venture in and of itself, sometimes predisposes it to platform dissenting views

for the sake of increasing its ratings. So they'll never literally eliminate every dissenting voice

possible, but they can by and large have this capture by Zionist propaganda because this

supports the imperial project. So she talked about Hasbara 2.0 as the continuing attempt to

by Israeli state actors, Zionist forces to maintain the narrative control the generally largely unchallenging

narrative control they saw in legacy corporate media to bring it into the emerging Internet

technological context. So when you start to have the rise of blogging, where it's no

longer, for example, just the news channel, but maybe those reporters start to be able

to have blogs. They can start to report things more in real time. So she

talked about the informational strategies, the propaganda strategies that Zionists use and how they are

specific to the increasingly rising moment of the Internet as we were seeing it at

that point in time. So essentially what I was describing in that chapter is how

we can think about Internet trolling. The direct and intentional encouraging of Zionists, of Israelis,

often of young Israelis, to take to prominent sites to engage in pro-Israel messaging through

institutions like Hasbara Fellowships. These are often paid undertakings. You have the Israeli military itself,

the occupation forces, maintaining various websites engaging in propaganda through their various digital platforms. And

a lot of this also entails putting emphasis on making sure that you have a

large amount of people who are going to sites that are platforming a dissenting view

about the Palestinian struggle and attacking them, essentially delegitimizing them, engaging exactly in the type

of what I would say gaslighting that you were describing earlier. You know, "Israel is

a democracy. Israel was attacked. Israel is a beacon of hope, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera. This is pro-terrorism, et cetera." And to kind of engage in this, perhaps

you could think of it as a kind of digital war of attrition. Right? [Hmm

mmm] Because there's two things that can happen. Maybe you get somebody to disengage a

little bit or to reconsider. I think that's less likely, especially when you're attacking a

very outspoken prominent voice who's informed on what's happening. But you could potentially scare off

other potential supporters or you could wear those people down. And so one of the

things that we've seen, especially since the start of the latest genocide, and some of

the people I've interviewed in the book have dealt with this at length. They describe

how there's been a real refinement of the ability to create AI bots. And they

took these Palestinian content creators, described how their page would be swarmed with these bots

when they would post anything about the genocide. And they said, it's very clear they

were bots. I mean, this was too coordinated. It was happening too quickly, too fast.

And they're all just almost copy-paste the same type of comment. But they're happening on

such a scale that it's overwhelming. You can't delete all of them. You can't block

every single account. And then you go and look at them and they don't even

seem like they're a real person. But again, there's so many of them. So I

was saying, you know, this is trolling as a strategy for the startup colony. To

what extent is it successful at the literal level of numbers? It's a little bit

hard to say, but it's very clear that it does take a toll and it

does force you expend energy in directions that take away from your ability to continue

to do the type of messaging that you're doing. Or even perhaps it may chip

away a little bit at some of the viewers who may get a little bit

nervous about what's happening. And we've even seen. I believe it's in this chapter that

I talk about, too, how the Israeli government just invested. I forget the exact number,

but it was, I believe, over a hundred million in its Hasbara efforts. Right. Its

propaganda efforts digitally, with a huge emphasis on the Internet. So it's clear that this

isn't going away. It's only escalating.

At the same time, I do think it remains to be seen just how successful those

efforts are really going to be, especially at this moment in time. I feel like sometimes

as, and I just say this as somebody who's been looking at statements over the years

that thinkers have made where, okay, now we've crossed the Rubicon, everybody has seen all there

is to be seen, there's no turning back. And yet you see that the status quo

kind of continues. And yet I still feel like there's just something to this moment. The

genocide is so blatant. The damage, the destruction, the violence, the viciousness, the sadism. It's clear

that there's no rationale other than complete and utter wanton destruction and obliteration of an entire

people. I don't really know how much getting a bunch of people to swarm a Palestinian's

Instagram page is going to change at this point. You can't really take away the fact

that so many of us have seen those images coming out of Gaza. It is important,

I think, to identify trolling as a strategy and also as I talk about in other

chapters, how it's directly practiced by sites like Canary Mission or Stop Antisemitism, these blacklist sites.

But is it really going to convince people that what is happening right now is not

a genocide? And is it really going to be able to shift public perspective back toward

the initial hegemonic, propagandistic view? I'm pretty doubtful of that.

One of the things I can assure you of just having been, you know,

in my own way, deep in fighting to get eyes on the situation, there

is a fatigue that kicks in. There is a there-is-no-hope kind of approach to

things, because every door is locked with a terms of service or locked with

a shadow ban or locked with gatekeepers. And after a little bit of time,

you figure you see all these college students rising up. You see all these

teachers rising up. And then you see teachers simultaneously getting fired, students expelled, and

police, militarized police in the US in particular, washing these people right out of

the picture and making, once again, First Amendment speech illegal because the cry bullying

that goes on in the Zionist project. "No, I don't feel safe." "I don't know

what to tell you there, man. I mean, are you the one that's killing

people? Are you over there pushing people in a direction that causes pain yourself?

Is this a little bit of you telling on yourself here, or is this

just a strategy?" But ultimately, the idea of silencing is real. I know when

we started our Facebook page, we had 125,000 followers. We had 30 million people

come through the door whenever we would put stuff out there, whether it was

live streams or whether it was posts or articles or memes, whatever. And little

by little, Facebook kept hitting us with terms of service violations, and they took

away our nonprofit status in terms of our ability to fundraise on the platform.

And then people just started to say, "Well, it's because, you know, you guys

are too..." You know, they would always come up with some reason why it

was our fault that we were being silenced. And that's just a microcosm of

a larger issue. It really is a tactic in this new connected internet phase,

where social media is used both as a means of collecting information on us,

but also as a means of trying to organize. I'm curious, as you move

forward, how do you see terms of service being used to weaponize against those

voices fighting for Palestinian liberation?

I think you've really hit the nail on the head because terms of service,

or also community standards, which is sort of an affiliated concept, a lot of

these platforms, all these platforms draw particular conditions under which people can use their

products. And these include conditions that you are not allowed to transgress. Although these

are ostensibly free products to use, we know that that's not really the case.

We know all of the data that they collect on us. We know all

of the things we pay for in terms of time, in terms of attention,

in terms of the targeted advertisements that is being served up to us and

the impact that can have. But, you know, ostensibly these are free platforms and

we are allowed to access them according to their terms as private companies by

meeting particular conditions which include how we engage. And so what we're seeing increasingly

is a growing explicitness with which these companies are applying concepts like you described

earlier, like the feelings of safety or the protecting people from harassment or attack,

to inoculate against the possibility of criticism of Zionism, a settler-colonial ideology, a political

ideology being entertained. So one of the things that I wrote about is Meta's

updated guidelines on how it will permit criticism of Zionism to occur on its

platforms.   Now, the ostensible terms of this are, you know, Zionism cannot be

used as a proxy for Jewish people. So you cannot have anti-Semitism, hatred of

Jews, bigotry against Jews, that's fine. But this concept is really being stretched in

a way to where it's patently clear, if you actually look at the literal

level of language, that in a lot of ways it's already accepting this false

conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Meta is a prominent company, prominent big tech company.

It's a giant. And the fact that it came out with these guidelines, one

of the things I write about is, I believe the phrasing is "denial of

right to exist." I need to look at the exact wording. But it did

have something against right to exist, which ultimately refers to this point about, you

know, Israel's so-called right to exist. And so you can't even access this platform

unless you tacitly agree to this rhetorical trap, this false construction that talks about

the right of a settler-colonial state to exist, which is bizarre. That's completely outlandish.

It's bizarre, but it's not totally surprising because, you know, again, we've seen Big

Tech as an industry increasingly lean into the normalization of Zionism and the suppression

of Palestinian voices. And after this happened, I also wrote about how later on

you had the game streaming platform Twitch also published their own policy regarding the

criticism of Zionism on their platform, which is, if you have the misfortune of

sitting down to read it, you know, I feel like I should buy you

some Tylenol or something because it's just so mealy mouth[ed]. It's so contradictory. But

ultimately what the impact of even these convoluted expressions do is to create a

sense of anxiety or discomfort. Okay, maybe this is a little too complicated. Maybe

I shouldn't be wading into it, right? So these terms of servitude or these

community standards, particularly when they're applied in this deceptive way that is meant to

gently condition us toward a particular political direction or away from a particular political

direction, they do have an impact on our sense of political understanding and our

sense of the actual political status quo. So that's why I was also interested,

in the book, and looking at academics who had thought about content moderation not

just as literal removal of posts, but also as something that has a direct

tie to the way that we engage in and practice discourse. You know, in

the so-called real world or the offline world. These things can have larger impacts

than just the specific usage of the platform. Even though in the specific usage

of the platform we're already seeing this creep of the acceptance of the relative

impunity of the settler-colonial state and the inability to criticize its conduct, or else

as Zionist rhetorical tactics practiced for years before this. You know, we're going to

be accused with weaponized accusations of things like harassment, even discrimination, when the irony

being that we are the ones calling out discrimination and oppression and racism in

the first place. We're having the logics of anti-racism, of protecting marginalized communities be

weaponized precisely to work in the service of racism and marginalization. And I will

just say that's, I think to me, really part of the insidiousness of the

Zionist project in general and how it's been able to weaponize various cultural aspects

of our engagement with social justice struggles. It's a tendency that has pre-dated the

digital sphere. And so it should, I guess, be no surprise that it has

now infiltrated the digital sphere so effectively. But it has done so also at

the discretion of corporate elites who want to protect their bottom line above all

else and who have made the conscious choice. This gets into my usage of

the term digital settler colonialism. Part of what I emphasize is that we need

to see this as the constant, as the explicit and direct choice of the

big tech oligarchs to partner with a project of settler colonialism, dispossession and genocide.

Each accusation is basically a confession, isn't it? I hate to bring up Orwell.

It's so easy and low-hanging fruit and I'm not going to use the book

here. I'll use the movie. When they're burning pieces of news or burning old

thoughts that they're trying to erase from the current narrative so that you can't

go back and you're destroying history. You're rewriting history. You're rewriting words. You're eliminating

words. And it goes back to your "Hey, you know this one Palestinian reporter

I was following suddenly been silent for a couple months. Wonder if he's alive

anymore?" And most people don't have the brain space to be able to hold

that. And it's just gone. It just doesn't exist anymore. And you have no

breadcrumb trail how to find back to where you were. And a lot of

just erasing. And we talked about kind of erasing the Palestinian history. I mean,

we've talked about it many times how the bombing of birth records, you name

it, has basically sought to erase the Palestinian people altogether. But I want to

kind of lump that concept in of erasing Palestine, which is another one of

your well-written chapters, to kind of go in with another component here. I want

to blend these two thoughts together. And that's the TikTok ban that you talk

about later in the book. Because I want to bring Gramsci back, that kind

of crisis of hegemony. He spoke very, very eloquently about the crisis of hegemony.

And this is kind of what happens when the hegemon feels like their power

over the narrative is loosening. And so what do they do? They use fascism.

They bring fascism's tactic. They bring fascism into the mix here. Relating the TikTok

ban, as you decry "US imperial anxiety here," right? That right there speaks to

hegemonic crisis and the crisis of hegemony. And it also some of those Orwellian

themes where they're basically erasing the people. They're trying to gain control of the

platforms. That's a lot there, but I think there's meat on the bone. What

are your thoughts as it pertains to that crisis of hegemony and the tactics

they use to play with the TikTok ban and sell it to these Zionist

oligarchs and so forth? I would just love to hear your insights.

We're in a moment where so many things are being besieged. But I also think

one of the fascinating things about this moment is precisely that we are kind of

getting a peek behind the curtain into how hegemony works, precisely because it is not

working in certain spaces where there had been the expectation that it would. I mean,

the TikTok ban really emerges within a broader context of politicians raising an uproar about

the fact that the youth, you know, younger people, are getting exposed to or even

creating content of their own that is critical of the hegemonic Zionist narrative. And they're

so concerned with the fact that this is happening that they're calling for bans of

the platform. And this directly, of course, converges with the broader US imperial competition with

China, which is emerging as a powerful rival. And of course, part of the terms

of the ban to sell to an American company, of course, that's just literally the

consolidation of platform capitalism, right?

Yes.

That's a different aspect of digital colonialism altogether. We need to be the hegemon digitally.

So I find that so fascinating, very telling. And you know, of course you had

things like Greenblatt from the ADL saying, "We have a TikTok problem. We need to

get our best minds, you know, to work countering this slew of messaging that the

youth are increasingly seeing and creating." So I definitely think it's a really fascinating real

time peek behind the curtain about how hegemony is supposed to work and what happens

when it starts to fail. What do you do? You resort to measures like this.

"We're going to ban the platform. We're going to have it sell to an American

company. We are going to appoint more people affiliated with the Israeli project to moderate."

And this is of course also part and parcel of the broader dynamic that I

refer to as "erasing Palestine" in the chapter that you mentioned. And what I meant

by that is that it's not just Palestinians and Palestinian voices and perspectives that are

erased. It's the very concept or the idea of something called Palestine that gives all

of us, all of those people, something that binds us. This idea of a homeland,

this idea of being engaged in an anti-colonial struggle for a homeland that eventually will

be liberated, part of the broader project is to erase the very existence of that

idea as well as to erase as many Palestinian voices, records and perspectives as possible.

So what I was arguing is that in the digital sphere, in the same way

that settler colonialism in other physical context has meant the destruction of universities, the bombing

of libraries, the assassination of intellectuals and scholars, all of that, the digital sphere also

needs to undergo a total erasure of anything related to Palestine, not just because of

the holding of Palestinian identity, but because of the presentation of this broader anti-colonial ideal

that binds an indigenous people in resistance together. The point is to expunge that completely

from all platforms that's the process that I was referring to as "erasing Palestine." The

TikTok ban, I think, is a really good example of the powers that be mobilizing

in real time to make sure that happens. And we're getting such an interesting view

into it precisely because we don't get to see behind the curtain quite as much

as we have now. Whenever I talk about this, I always think it's really important

to reaffirm that this total erasure is never really going to be possible. They can

ban an app. They can ban a platform. The organizers, dissenters are always going to

find a new means of re-appropriating a particular form of media to advance a narrative

of dissent. I mean, the very fact that 2021 played out in the way that

it did is a testament to that. And that was at a slightly different moment

of the broader hegemony that social media held on our cultural understanding of the world

around us. And now we're seeing a different kind of timbre and character to big

tech social media as an industry under the current administration that we have. But nevertheless,

Palestinians were able to do it before and to do it brilliantly and to do

it in such a way that it had real impact. They're continuing to do it

now, even in spite of all of this opposition. So erasing Palestine is never going

to be a complete fait accompli, even as there's going to be a lot of

gains in terms of the ability of the powers that be to do that. They

will not be able to quell resistance and the savvy, creative insurgency of Palestinians engaged

in narrative resistance.

Yeah, very well stated.  Omar, I want to lead us to the end here,

and I want to make a couple statements and I want to let you

have the last word, but one of the things that I have also been

focused on this podcast is the lack of real democracy in the world, quite

frankly. But in the US in particular, in the US being an empire, its

lack of democracy has a broader impact, a broader footprint on the world as

a whole, in that the people that live here, they may get a black

eye for the people that are in power. But the more you dig into

the US democracy, the less it looks like a democracy and the more you

realize that it's not a democracy at all. Gilens and Page study came out

back in 2014 from Princeton showed quite frankly that voter populist ideas have a

"near zero impact" on public policy in any way, shape or form. We can

see that those of us have eyes to see that are not trapped in

the Matrix can clearly see that we can't vote our way out of this.

If we could have all the students around the country protesting to end a

genocide or end funding of a genocide, or end the kind of censorship that

is occurring, it would be gone by now. But alas, that's just not happening.

There are powerful interests at play that dwarf and trump any other ideas or

hopes and aspirations. And people keep pouring themselves into what I believe is a

tool for manufacturing consent for manufacturing and maintaining that hegemonic control. People have convinced

themselves, because that's the way hegemony works, that this is their own ideas, that

they are the masters of their universe, failing to understand the impact of these

tools and these apparatus. I don't even know the right way of framing that.

But the tools of hegemony that keep folks in control.  How do you envision

real, meaningful winning of this? I mean, these are resistance without necessarily a goal

of victory. They're resistance because what else are you going to do? You have

to resist. But I'm curious, what do you think defines victory in this space?

Wow, that's a great question. A lot to work with there.

Sorry about that. It's my MO.

No, no, yeah, no, no worries. I think first and foremost, the ultimate real goal has

to be the total liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, the full right

of return of all Palestinians. I mean, the end of the genocide, all of that. The

end of the latest genocide, I should say, because, you know, the Israeli state was forged

and maintained through genocide. I think that needs to be thought of as the ultimate goal

in terms of thinking about the Palestinian struggle. As far as the broader political narrative battles,

I don't know if I can speak to what a total victory would look like within

that context, but it certainly has to mean the ability for shifts in consciousness to realize

meaningful consequences in terms of action. We don't just need to raise people's consciousness. We also

need to make sure that shift in consciousness leads to real consequences in terms of action

that go beyond-I don't know if I should call it the voting trap-but let's say, like

the kind of the voting bubble that I think you were describing, where it's just a

matter of, "Let's get the right people in office and then everything will be better." Because

we've seen time and time again that investment in Palestinian death and dispossession is very much

a bipartisan product. It is baked into the US imperial project, and it is therefore baked

into the very character of US electoral politics as we know it. The idea that we

simply vote in the right person and, you know, that's where we have to hang our

hats in terms of the ultimate outcome, I think is completely misguided for that reason. What

we need to do is continue to make sure that we are advancing narrative shifts and

also engaging in meaningful organizing and activism of all forms that shut down business as usual

and really force people to take account of what is happening. And that forces politicians to

use the power that they do have to actually dissent in meaningful ways and not just

give us mealy-mouthed PR statements that don't say anything while using far too many words and

make us feel better about ourselves. I know that's not a specific, explicit outcome in terms

of victory, which I think you were asking, but I definitely think that we need to

not lose sight of the fact that all of these shifts in consciousness that are made

possible and facilitated by the savvy re-appropriation of digital technologies, we need to continue to make

sure that they are translated into meaningful action and consequences that forces the powers that be

to take note and act accordingly. The only power we really have is people power. And

so long as we continue to surrender that to this empty hope that one politician within

this inherently corrupt system is going to come around and change things, I think the more

we continue to sell ourselves short and to shortchange the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and

liberation.

Yeah, you know, I don't want to expand this beyond the scope, but let's

just be fair. We all are oppressed. We all, as working people, are oppressed.

We all are alienated from our work, alienated from the fulfillment of all that

we could be as people, as cultures, as families, as communes, if you will,

affinity groups, et cetera, we're all oppressed. But when you see the major oppression

that you see the systematic erasure and the genocide occurring in various places, I

mean, it's happening in Africa as well. But these are all parts of colonialism,

imperialism, of capitalism, of hegemonic elitism, the elite capture of society. For me, I

just... I guess I don't know how to hit the alarm clock to wake

[up.] I mean, I'm sure there's many areas that my alarm clock needs to

still go off on. Like, I don't think anyone has a total awareness of

everything. They'd be some superhuman, some God, if you will. But how do we

make people wake up and realize that while they're partaking in these things and

they're enjoying these things, then in reality, even though they're one step above the

pig slop, they are still amongst the pig slop. You know, they are not

out of harm's way. I just can't express this deeply enough that just because

you see slaughter going on over there doesn't mean that you're not an eighth

of an inch away from a police state slaughtering you for different reasons. Like,

they came for this group first and I didn't say anything. They came for

this group, I didn't say anything. And then finally they came for me and

there was no one there to help me. How do we make people realize

this isn't just a Palestinian struggle, this is a struggle for all of us?

That's a great question. I think it ultimately comes down to understanding that the

US support of the Israeli project, precisely as you're saying, it's not just about

what happens to Palestinians in Palestine, right? If you think back to the words

of the great anti-colonial writer/thinker Aime Cesaire, right? He talked about the imperial boomerang.

The violence that you see practiced by Europe in terms of other continents across

the globe comes back home. And of course, in that text, discourse on colonialism,

Cesaire also makes clear how the endpoint of capitalism is fascism, because you have

this process of inherent exploitation and oppression that necessitates the exploitation of large swaths

of people and the incentivization of that exploitation and oppression. I think part of

what has to happen, and it's not just a matter of individuals doing something

in terms of pointing it out to other people, it's also, I think, incumbent

upon all of us to continue to ask ourselves, "What are the real connections

we can draw between what's happening to Palestinians and what is happening right here

at home?" And I think, as you're saying, we're all oppressed and exploited in

some way, of course, to differing degrees. But largely speaking, we exist in a

capitalist society. We exist within an inherently violent imperialist political status quo. And we

can think about things like one of the frameworks that organizers will often use

is, "Let's think about how many billions of dollars we're giving to this settler

colony to engage in its processes of colonization, apartheid and genocide, while, you know,

we struggle to make rent while we face all of this medical inequalities," so

on and so forth. So one aspect is to think about how do we

redirect some of that because... And think about the development of community empowerment as

opposed to the incentivization of imperial exploitation getting us to actually rally around that

and fight for that. But secondly, to also understand how violence against Palestinians is

inherently an act of violence against all of humanity, not just because it corrodes

the possibility of a truly collective sense of justice, but also on a very

practical level, because we are seeing the great damage that it wreaks upon our

already compromised political state of affairs. Right? I'm thinking, for example, of the deportation

of people for their views on Palestine. You know, the kidnapping of them by

the Gestapo, the re-attempted deportation of people, you know, outspoken activists for Palestinian freedom,

for example, Mahmoud Khalil, like all of those things are having direct impacts on

us, on our ability to exist with a relative measure of so-called protection of

speech, even as we know we've never fully had that and we don't exist

in a just system or full democracy as propaganda is, want to have us

believe we're seeing even more of a crackdown at this moment than what we

have seen periodically throughout history happen. So I think one way is also to

think about how the unjust and inherent violence that is inflicted upon Palestinians by

Israel, the toll that takes to maintain in order to continue to ensure the

US's hegemony at all costs, is inherently something that is going to continue to

have devastating impacts upon all of us. And so we need to challenge the

Israeli project for first and foremost what it is doing to Palestinians. But we

also need to understand that there is no bottom to what the defense of

settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide will resort to in order to defend itself. And

the complete aiding and abetting of this settler colony that has become really the

core of US electoral politics and politics as we know it. We're seeing the

extremes that desperation can lead to. We need to fight back because if we

don't really, in many ways all of us are going to be implicated in

the aftermath that will necessarily entail the increasing corrosion of rights and freedoms. So

it really is something we need to fight back on.

That's wonderful. And on that happy note, believe me, that was fantastic and

well stated. I'm going to go ahead and close this out, folks. The

book we're talking about today is Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and

Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle by Omar Zahzah, my guest.

Omar. Where can we find more of your work?

So I would say I have accounts on the usual social media platforms. I'm on

X, Dr. Omar Zahzah. I'm on Facebook and Instagram. Omar Zahzah. I have a Bluesky

account. I believe it's also Dr. Omar Zahzah. Haven't really gotten it up and running

very much yet I mostly use these outlets to more so to find information and

consume news, you know as much as they will allow news at times. So I

would say really the best place to keep a lookout for my work is to

go to sites like the Electronic Intifada or Mondoweiss or Palestine Chronicle where my new writing usually

appears. And of course to follow if you don't already Project Censored, where I will

occasionally also have new media appear from.

Fantastic. All right, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of

Macro N Cheese and the founder of the nonprofit Real Progressives which sponsors

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Omar Zahzah, myself Steve Grumbine, on behalf of the podcast Macro N Cheese,

we are outta here.