The first time I understood what Palestinian “terror” meant to the rest of the world, I was watching a Palestinian child die.

Ten years earlier, on September 30, 2000, twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was trapped with his father beside a concrete cylinder at Netzarim Junction in Gaza. Jamal al-Durrah raised an empty hand toward the gunfire, Muhammad leaning into him because that is what a child does. A father is supposed to protect their child from all the world’s evils. The camera caught another burst, a cloud of dust, and Muhammad folding into his father’s lap. Killed by Settler Terrorists.

The footage entered Palestinian homes at the beginning of the Second Intifada. And ten years later, I was old enough to understand that the boy on the screen looked more like me than the soldiers did. Was I the same agent of terror? Could I be killed too? The occupation had an army, settlements, prisons, checkpoints, and the power to decide when Palestinians could leave one town for the next. Yet the violence that required explanation was ours. And so, I learned early that terrorism would not be assigned according to who had frightened whom. A Palestinian child could be shot before the world’s eyes and still enter history as scenery for a story about Palestinian violence. A scenery too dull, to clouded by facts and ornaments of violence, to disrupt the scheduled reminder that the West is heralding in freedom for the world under mountains of dead bodies.

As a Palestinian, I do not need to search the history books to understand the weaponization of language or the forms terror takes. I have watched armed Israeli settlers descend on Palestinian villages, burn homes and olive groves, steal livestock, assault families, and drive people from land their families have lived on for generations, only for the Palestinian who defends his family or his land to be murdered and named the aggressor. They want us to lay down our weapons and walk willingly toward slaughter so our killers may drink from the well of our grief and grow stronger with every Palestinian who dies obediently. But we are not sheep, nor is our blood the price we must pay to convince the butcher of our humanity.

The killings at the Munich Olympics in 1972 helped give modern terrorism its most enduring public image. Black September murdered eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team and a West German police officer. There is no liberation in the murder of civilians and no honest reason to pretend otherwise. The attack was also the first of its kind broadcast live to a global audience, and nearly 900 million people watched Palestinians become the face of a new international menace. In the days that followed, Israel bombed and raided PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon, destroying houses and bridges and killing perhaps more than 200 people, including women and children. One atrocity became the event that changed how the world understood terrorism. And it was the permission slip for the world to kill Arabs under the guise of retaliation, a retaliation that could go on for decades with no mind the women, children, and families that would be aggrieved by what they would describe as ‘terror’.

Washington demonstrated this again in the span of forty-eight hours. On August 24, 2026, the United States removed Syria from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, where it had remained since 1979. The same announcement revoked the designation of al-Nusra Front, also known in its later form as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which had once been al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria. Its former commander, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is now Syria’s president and gladly smiles next to President Trump in the Oval Office.

Al-Sharaa did not travel backward through time and unjoin al-Qaeda, but his history became tolerable once the United States wanted a government in Damascus that would fight ISIS, lick the boots of Israel and the United States, and open the country to Western capital. Here, terrorism is defined as who is useful to furthering colonial goals, and who is not/who stands in the way.

Two days later, the United States designated Palestine Action under the post-9/11 executive order used against ISIS and al-Qaeda.

America’s terrorism laws were built in layers, usually when fear made scrutiny feel unpatriotic. Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996, giving the Secretary of State the power to designate foreign terrorist organizations and making support for those groups a federal crime. After September 11, the PATRIOT Act pulled expert advice into the definition of “material support,” while George W. Bush’s Executive Order 13224 gave the government another route through asset freezes and transaction bans. Section 2339B now threatens twenty years in prison for providing a designated organization with services, training, or advice. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court held that the law could even stop people from teaching the PKK how to use international law to resolve conflicts peacefully. Palestine Action came through Executive Order 13224, which defines terrorism broadly enough to include conduct dangerous to property or infrastructure when it is intended to pressure a government. No prosecutor had to convince a jury that breaking equipment inside a weapons factory had terrorized anyone. Treasury issued the designation, froze whatever property it could reach, and made nearly every transaction with the organization forbidden. And what does American law call the millions murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan beneath a star-spangled banner? It has no word for them. Terrorism, apparently, begins when someone interferes with the machinery doing the killing.

Palestine Action has broken into weapons factories and British military facilities, damaged equipment, thrown red paint, and encouraged others to interfere with the companies arming Israel, ie: Palestine Action has tried to stop the moral catastrophe of our time – the American-backed Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians. So we’ve learned, terrorism is violence by the disfavored. When Washington finds a use for the person who committed it, the designation can be retired in time for the investment conference. When an activist damages the machinery of a favored state, vandalism acquires the moral gravity of al-Qaeda.

In undergrad, I took a course called Terrorism, Torture, and Violence. Terrorism was presented as a problem of definition. Who commits it? Must it target civilians? Must it be committed by a nonstate organization? Does political motivation distinguish terrorism from ordinary crime? The questions multiplied because every definition became inconvenient as soon as it was applied consistently.

 

The term itself was first coined to describe the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, when a government directed violence against people it declared enemies. Terrorism began as a description of state violence. Modern counterterrorism has largely corrected this historical embarrassment by granting the state an exemption. If terrorism is political violence intended to frighten civilians or coerce a population, then a uniform cannot possibly make the act disappear. Thus, if the definition excludes states, the organizations capable of leveling cities to the ground, mowing down children, maintaining concentration camps, starving populations, and driving millions from their homes, they receive an exemption to feign retaliation for a Nakba that started many, many, many years earlier.

The United Nations still has no universally accepted definition of terrorism, but, we (common people everywhere) know it when we see it. However, states disagree over who must answer for it and whether anti-colonial movements can be reduced to the tactics they use, and whether the armies of powerful nations should ever be made to stand alongside the people they bomb (the short answer is: they shouldn’t).

But that order of questions seems like fraud, no? In 1970, Richard Carleton asked why Palestinians would not sit down for peace talks with Israel. Kanafani told him that what he was describing was surrender. Carleton persisted, asking why talking was not preferable to fighting. Kanafani answered, “That is kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck.”

Kanafani was not arguing that everything done by the neck becomes just, moreso that our necks could not be stepped on so long without fighting to come up for air – and don’t place us when they do. Kanafani, and those before and those still fighting after him, refuse to treat the rightful resistance for air to breathe, for freedom, as the beginning of violence. Colonial power survives through this false beginning.

Britain once called the Mau Mau as terrorists while confining Kenyans in detention camps and torturing those resisting colonial rule and land theft. In 2013, the British government finally admitted that Kenyans had been tortured and abused by the colonial administration. It paid £19.9 million to 5,228 survivors. The apology came after Kenya was independent and the people Britain tortured had grown old and died. By then, “Mau Mau terrorist” had finished the work for which it was invented.

France called the FLN terrorists while refusing to call Algeria a war. For decades, France referred to eight years of colonial warfare as “the events” or as operations to maintain public order. It sent 1.5 million conscripts to preserve 132 years of colonial rule, practiced torture, and denied that a war had occurred until 1999. Why are the colonial powers allowed to condemn the violence produced by its rule while its occupation, torture chambers, executions, and massacres are ‘revenge’ for the occupied not thanking their jailers for the uncomfortable cells?

Even Nelson Mandela, who had served twenty-seven years in prison, become president of South Africa, and helped dismantle apartheid, still required a special waiver to enter the United States because of his anti-apartheid activities. A congressional report acknowledged that American law continued to treat the ANC as a terrorist organization because it had used armed force against apartheid. America required eight more years after Mandela left office to decide this was an affront.

Then there is Menachem Begin. The Nobel Committee’s own biography states that the Irgun, Israeli Terror Organization, under Begin “resorted to terror” against British authorities and Palestinian Arabs. Begin later became prime minister of Israel. In 1978, the Nobel Committee gave him the Peace Prize. It did not take the Irgun’s dead out of the ground first to ask them if their deaths were peaceful.

The lesson is not that every liberation struggle was righteous in every act. The lesson is that “terrorist” has never been a permanent description but rather one that follows power. The power that rides on horseback to spread democracy among an axis of evil.

That is why Palestine Action’s designation should concern even those who feel no attachment to the organization or its tactics. Categories of political repression rarely remain confined to the first people placed inside them. Once the state establishes that property destruction or economic boycotts undertaken for a political purpose may be treated as terrorism, the inquiry shifts away from whether anyone was terrorized and toward whether protected interests were obstructed. The category can then travel from sabotaging a weapons factory to blocking its shipments, funding those who organize the blockade, or defending them in public. Each extension will be presented as narrow and exceptional until dissent itself is removed from politics and placed within national security. You may believe ‘terrorist’ could never reach you because you have killed no one and frightened no one, but those facts no longer matter as to who receives the label. One day the state may call you a terrorist simply for making its violence harder to carry out, and by then the law will have been trained on people you were encouraged not to defend.

In 1948, early Zionist Terrorist/Settlers descended upon the town of Deir Yassin, its hills the few remaining witnesses of Palestinian blood that drowned the soil. Palestinian men were paraded and lined up before being shot into the graves they were forced to dig, pregnant women who had their babies torn from their bodies, boys and girls forced to watch their families murdered. This was a single instance of settler terror, and it has been repeated in some form or another every day for eight decades, manifesting from those who profess to be chosen.

In 2015 in Duma, Israeli settlers firebombed the Dawabsheh family home at around two in the morning. Eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabsheh burned to death in his crib. Is this not terror? Where is the United States to label Israel a ‘state-sponsor of terror’? But wait, Israel has always been in bed with its largest financier; and now, it’s Syria’s turn.

But settler terrorism is still presented as a deviation from Israel rather than one of the methods by which Israel takes Palestinian land. In the first four months of 2026, the United Nations recorded around 190 settler attacks per month, putting the West Bank on course for more than 2,000 attacks this year. Violence has spread deeper into Areas A and B, the fragments Oslo supposedly placed under Palestinian administration. Ben-Gvir wore a noose-shaped pin while wanting to hang Palestinians, the same man that wanted to construct a moat of imported crocodiles (the domestic ones were hunted to extinction by Israel) around Palestinian prisons.

Twenty-six years after Muhammad al-Durrah died in his father’s arms, the men with guns and bombs still control who is labeled a terrorist and who should die in the comfort of their peaceful surrender to the sword at their neck. One day they will call you a terrorist too, so do not wait until then to understand what they were doing to us.

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