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

My guest, who you may have heard of before, is Omar Zaza. He's assistant professor of Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas, Ahmed Studies at San Francisco State University.

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.

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 Shoarah. And a big part of their demonstrations, their protests, their activism, was the use of social media.

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 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.

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 Stephen Salaida 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.

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.

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 Rua Benyamin'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. 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 still race. 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 Ramzi 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, Baru 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 Cadman. He's one of the people on our team here at Real Progressives and works on this podcast, Macaron 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 there. 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 pan 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 Mariam Maura, 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 Hasbro 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? 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.

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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. 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 waiting 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 predated 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. 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 where.

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 man, 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.

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 timber 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 in to the US democracy, the less it looks like a democracy and the more you realize that it's not a democracy at all.

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 gen.

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 nilly 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 reappropriation 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 slope. 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 Amay Cesair, 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 Umbaida, Gestapo, the reattempted 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 Zaza. 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 dromarzaza. I'm on Facebook and Instagram. Omar Zaza. I have a Blue sky account. I believe it's also Dr. Omar Zaza.

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 and Cheese and the founder of the nonprofit Real Progressives which sponsors this podcast.

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So on behalf of my guest Omar Zaza, myself Steve Grumbine, on behalf of the podcast Macro and Cheese, we are outta here.