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Silicon Valley and the Israeli Occupation w/ Omar Zahzah | American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello American Prestige listeners, it's Derek.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am joined today, and very grateful to be joined by Omar Zazza.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is the assistant professor of Arab Muslim ethnicities and diaspora studies at San Francisco State University.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he is the author of the book we'll be talking about today, terms of servitude, Zionism, Silicon Valley, and digital settler colonialism, that's a mouthful.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the Palestinian liberation struggle.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Omar, thank you so much for coming on the program.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's great to be here.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congratulations on the book certainly very timely and I wanted to talk a little bit about that.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know the genesis of this book of three dates, the ongoing genocide and Gaza.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So talk a little bit and we'll talk about the process of writing it while that was going on.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But talk a little bit about what prompted you to write this book.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know you talk about the shakes you're out.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: of evictions and that incident is bringing some awareness of what digital media can do both for and against the Palestinians.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what were some of the things that influenced you in this topic?
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, as I've been noting, I really wrote this book and I feel like it's at least the product of two kind of in some ways opposed moments and the first is precisely as as you say, I began thinking about a project like this shortly after the beginnings of the Shakespeare uprisings, which I'm sure your listeners are familiar with this, but just in case very quickly around 2021 you start to have.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: activism and demonstrations around the looming expulsions of Palestinians from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shaqshara.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this follows on the heel of the George Floyd Apprisings in 2020, which you know, had prompted this kind of broader cultural and global reckoning with
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: questions of white supremacy, structural oppression that I think really paved the way for kind of broader reckonings with other paradigms of oppression to be confronted in sort of novel forms from what we'd seen previously.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so,
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think with the Shikshurah uprisings, the unity and to father that grew out of them shortly thereafter that kind of asserted that we as Palestinians no matter where we are, whether in the diaspora, you know, whether in the homeland or all one people.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: all of that I think was in many ways kind of part and parcel of broader reckonings with oppression that we're interfacing with new and emergent forms of media.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, what I felt during that time, you know, shortly after the beginnings of the shift to raw demonstrations,
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: which had their own kind of recorded patterns of suppression, which I'll talk about in just a second, but, you know, first I want to kind of note that in that time, even as, you know, activists were dealing with undocumented, very intense forms of repression, including, you know, as we may forget, given the context now, you know, another bombing campaign within the Gaza Strip
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: What was happening was a real narrative shifts and you were seeing media being used in these savvy ways by Palestinian activists, which was relatively novel, right, this very intentional use of both the Mergent Digital Media and Legacy Media playing them off of one another in very sophisticated ways and in a way that was really having a lot of concessions in terms of the broader cultural
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: and redefining in real time for the broader public, I should say, the question of Palestine from being something that he was more closely to kind of traditional liberal narratives about co-existence or this kind of intransigence to an actual ongoing system of dispossession and violence.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I was really responding, excuse me, to that moment and kind of the underlying sense that even as there's a lot of oppression happening, things are about to change and the change is inevitable right.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, say something else that emerged from that moment and then I'll get to the kind of second phase that this book responds to was that you start to really have.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: bigger legacy media reporting on the censorship practices of social media companies.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the companies, for example, that are owned by meta of Facebook and Instagram, what at the time was Twitter is now X.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You start to see along the lines of the Shikshurra protest,
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: and the kind of subsequent forms of resistance, mass censorship, right?
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: So mass censorship, but post-Sobot Shia Shura, mass censorship about posts, about incursions into the Alexa Moss, even censorship around posts about the bombings of Gaza, right?
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: People having their accounts suspended, blocked, you know, they're post-deleted, giving very unsatisfactory answers.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this happened at such a scale that legacy media outlets were forced to actually report on it.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, you start getting narratives that now are very familiar, but at the time it was relatively novel that you'd be able to get these companies to make these kinds of concessions and they said, okay, we recognize there's been overreach, but as the result of a glitch, so you get variations of that kind of narrative.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think fast forward several years up to this point in time.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is all kind of part for the course and we're sort of used to these things.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: But at that time, again, you have for the first time an acknowledgements, you know, by the largest kind of cultural centers of the dissemination of information, basically documenting archiving that there is very much a Palestine exception to the usage of social media.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so at that moment, all of these things kind of stuck out to me and I thought, you know, kind of in the same way that we're starting to have other studies and recordings about how big tech facilitates particular patterns of racial dispossession and oppression and spite of its own propaganda of being kind of this counter-hegemonic force, this new democratizing force,
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thought that what we're seeing with the mass censorship of Palestinians and post about Palestine was its own form of a kind of racial and colonial exception of the rights of a particular people at their struggle that
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, a form of oppression that big tech was not only not emulatorating, but directly facilitating.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that kind of got me to think about a project that would eventually become terms of servitude.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: But as I started working on that project and really based on
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Several different examples, you know, pieces that I had written for outlets like Al Jazeera.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: The first one was called Digital apartheid and this was in 2021 as well.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was talking about these forms of tech repression as digital apartheid.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I ended up replacing that paradigm with digital settler colonialism, which we could talk about in just a second.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I can see the projects based on these articles.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I pitched it to a publisher.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then after the book is accepted by the censored press in seven stories press, as I start working, as I'm working, I should say about a year into it, the latest genocide begins.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in that moment, I talk about this in one of the earlier chapters, refusing to language of silence.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I basically had a period where I found myself unable to complete it, just because what all of us were confronting in terms of the horrors of real-time genocide,
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: not the first genocide that has launched by the Zionist project, but I think in many ways the most insidious and one in which all other instances of mass extermination and violence kind of build upon themselves to realize what we're seeing now, right?
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I kind of found myself initially unable to keep writing.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I paused it briefly, not sure when I would be able to come back to it, but then eventually as I also write about in the book,
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: think realizing very unfortunately that there wasn't going to be a period where a larger power, right, some larger so-called democratic power was going to step in and kind of stop this slaughter, you realize that.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is going on for the long haul and as a result, everybody needs to use whatever platforms they have at their disposal, do whatever they can, you know, to raise their voice against what is happening.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I realized that terms of servitude was one such platform that I had and so I needed to finish this book, you know, even as it felt.
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: While the discordant at times to be shifting registers between this, I recognize now perhaps overly idealistic idea that if there's just enough information things will change, but at the same time, also working with that necessity that we need to keep raising our voices.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that really led me to kind of push this book through to its conclusion.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are definitely things that I look back on and I can see how it's the product of at least two different moments.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do think that I am a little bit in some ways less idealistic and in some ways more than when I started the project.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in a nutshell, that's kind of the broader context for working on this and I'm happy to kind of unpack more aspects of that broader trajectory.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, so I actually wanted to go into some deeper background, but I think maybe since you already brought it up, this might be a good place to talk about why you made the shift from calling a digital apartheid to digital, et cetera, settler colonialism and give people a context for what those terms as you can see with the mean and why one is preferable to the other.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: certainly.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I will say that I don't think that digital apartheid is an accurate per se, but I do feel that it isn't complete.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what I mean by that is that certainly you have apartheid, you know, as an integral component of the Zionist project.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But apartheid in and of itself is
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: technology within a broader process of settler colonial violence and dispossession and so Zionism ultimately is about the seizure and transformation of the Palestinian homeland and the elimination and expulsion of the indigenous peoples, the Palestinians.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: So apartheid as a process as a structure
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, it is in and of itself part of a broader system of violence which is settler colonialism.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so in the same way that this transpires physically, I realized that there is also a digital animal on right.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so obviously Zionism and the the broader interest that converge with Zionism
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: as much as they can, kind of isolating and eliminating Palestinians from the digital sphere.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that desire and that notice up around days, it were emerges from a broader settler colonial imperative, which is part of the ultimately it is about the complete elimination of the Palestinian presence, right?
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Physically culturally and now digitally as the digital emerges as an offshoot of the broader cultural apparatus.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I want to take a step back and talk about sort of the early days of the internet and even pre-internet.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you do talk about Edward Said, who's somebody, I don't think we talk enough about on this program.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this gives me an opportunity to bring him into a conversation.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But sort of, you know, his critique of the media pre-internet media landscape and the ways
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: completely from discussions of Palestine.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So maybe we could put this in a bigger context of what this discourse has been like throughout.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then sort of talk about the early days of the internet when you get, you do get the emergence of
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: outlets that that cover the Palestinians story, but you also get the images of places like Canarium, it things like canariumish and campus watch that are basically their police speech and you know put it risk anybody who is deemed to be talking about Israel and unfavorable term.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's let's start with the bigger context and then kind of move into early internet days.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, a great question.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So certainly, you know, I mentioned this throughout the book, the thought and the criticism of Edward site has been very pivotal to this project.
• 13:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one I say of his that I draw on is the 1984 piece, Permission to Narrates.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in that work, site makes the argument that Palestinians have been denied what he calls permission to narrate.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: that when you have a particular political context, in this case, looking at the Palestinian struggle, it's not enough just to have information.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You also need narratives, right?
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because narrative is what gives coherence to pieces of information or to the facts, right, as he terms them in the essay.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so,
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: What site argues is that, you know, in the case of Palestine, what has happened is that, you know, although there is a lot of information that is analyzed that is presented within the legacy media or the corporate media, Palestinians themselves are routinely, you know, have their voices omitted, they're raised, they're silenced and this silencing, the steel legitimization, the cultural, the legitimization right that is routinely practiced by the legacy media.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: In turn kind of facilitates this other related process of delegitimization, which is the normalization of narratives that really contradict what the actual facts are.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So for example, this.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Kind of this notion of Israel as this unimpeachable bastion of democracy that always acts in the greater interest of, you know, the so-called democratic project that could do no wrong that is simply besieged, you know, by these armies of fanatical anti-Semitic terrorists, right, the erasure of Palestinians in turn.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: helps to facilitate the cultural maintenance and propagation of these propagandistic narratives.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, this is also related to what Herman and Chomsky have referred to as manufacturing consent, these analyses really build upon one another and kind of illustrating a broader political function to the legacy media.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, sides essay is one of the most pivotal I think in understanding how legacy media has for decades really acted as a delegitimizing force in relationship to the Palestinian struggle.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, Palestinians have often had to work against a very hostile media environment and be very savvy in terms of how they repurposed or how they redirected.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: the the machinations of legacy media under the broader imprimatur of US imperialism.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you have this context in which media, you know, in and of itself, works to manufacture consent, partly through the erasure of the Palestinian perspective, the end not to say as well, you know, the demonization of, you know,
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: to this ongoing process of dispossession.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you start to have the emergence of the internet, right?
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And especially in its early days, there are these narratives that the internet represents kind of a new counter-hagemonic force, right?
• 17:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an emergent form of media.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it could have a democratizing potential that will counter, in many ways, the
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: kind of limited folk eye of the legacy media of the corporate media.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, Palestinian certainly do take advantage of it, right?
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I talk in the book about this, how particularly during the time of the the second and the father and the early 2000s, you also start to have the emergence of a vibrance, you know, online Palestinian identity.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And part of this is precisely that the internet emerging forms at the time, you know, from email to eventually what becomes blogging, very concretely allow people to bypass kind of the material constructions of military occupation, you know, including the perfuse and the checkpoints that are imposed during the antifada and but there is also this element of the fact that.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: these new forms of media allow people to respond increasingly in real time to the strategic misrepresentations of corporate media, right?
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, you have lists served drawing, you have journalists who are able to interface with, you know, Palestinian activists or journalists themselves who are starting to continue to issue corrections.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there is this
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: to the mainstream Western media's facilitation of Zionist settler colonialism.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: But as your question, I think, a stutally notes, you also have this kind of double-sided quality to the internet.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: The ability of the internet to be weaponized to be gained also for the interests of the Zionist project.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what we start to see really with the emergence of sites like Canary Mission, right, which I talk about, you know, kind of realizing how I was one of the earlier batches of organizers who had been added to that site when it came out around 2015.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, then you have the emergence of newer sites, kind of in that mold like stuff anti-Semitism.org.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this kind of
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: gets me to what I think is perhaps a second or at least a sub aspect of digital settler colonialism, which is precisely how these emergent technologies not only enable settler colonialism through the willful cooperation of the big tech industry, but also just in the ways that these spaces can be weaponized in and of themselves through Zionism.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: See...
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I guess I would say very egregious and outlandish forms of targeting doxing and harassments can really be allowed to transpire without much thought as to how outrageous it really is.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the fact that you've had groups of people just have it be normal, that they can be blacklisted and doxed, you know, for organizing, for Palestine, for activism, for Palestine.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: and has that happened for many years really without causing that much of a stir outside of, you know, perhaps a dedicated slew of independence, media, and activist organizations, right?
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, the I will definitely say that the percentage of concern is increased, especially post-October 7th, but for many years, this kind of continued relatively unabated, right?
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I do think, you know, as your question helps set up, it's precisely because of the type of sustained demonization and de-legitimization that we've seen practice through cultural forces like the legacy media that in turn allowed for these novel forms of weaponization of online and digital media to
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: not only to thrive, but to thrive with relative impunity, right?
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think now that we're seeing so much targeting to the extent to that.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: even people who may have not been as involved with the Palestinian struggle prior to the latest genocide are now facing some forms of repression that were previously reserved for people who did these these forms of organizing more regularly.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even such I think what we're dealing with is a very sustained form or series of forms of harassment that have been allowed to thrive relatively unchecked.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'd say that's also the result of
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: different forms of media, the legitimization working hand in hand with one another.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's delve a little bit into that and the social media, I mean, I do want to get into sort of where these companies have now started to take a direct role in targeting and killing people, but let's start with the social media aspect of this.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: the talk, you know, when social media emerged and even still in some instances, you get a lot of talk about, this is the great leveler, this is the thing that allows people to organize, to get around censorship, to get around government blocks, and it's not
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It never quite seems to work out that way.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so when we talk about it in the case of the Palestinians, was there a moment where this technology actually was sort of open to that space?
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the tech companies came in and shut it down.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or as you've observed this, has it always been kind of policed in this way by companies like Meta and Twitter, X, whatever.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a great question.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think to kind of put it in a nutshell, and then I'll expand on this a little bit, the real story of social media and Palestinians is a story of
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: group of people resisting colonization who were able to use an emergent platform in such a savvy way as to really turn the old propaganda narratives about their cause on its head and to do it in a way that really captured hearts and minds and continues to do so.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's also a story of how the companies that run these platforms started to realize that this was the case and began to clamp down more and more I think to me that's the most accurate way to put it because.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think we can really deny that social media makes it possible to spread more information in real time, right?
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what Palisthenian's did.
• 23:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: In precisely the same way that they would use the embattled site of legacy media, right, to advance their narrative in spite of the fact that you're contending with such a hostile space even when you do that.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: social media becomes an emerging form of media that also needs to be met and utilized head on as part and parcel of the broader Palestinian struggle, which includes consciousness raising, right?
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: That said,
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think one good example of how this played out would be on the site that we now call X, you know, was Twitter at the time.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I talked to Palestinians and Gaza, including
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they told me how Palestinians in Gaza for many years took to Twitter.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this was intentionally Twitter, because there was already this awareness that Facebook, you know, what we now refer to as meta was a hostile space.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'll get into the kind of genealogy of that in a second, because I think that that's also important.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they sort of realized that Facebook in and of itself would not be the ideal platform.
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: which, you know, I think we've seen used to break crucial information regarding other struggles over the years.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: They realized that this could be a good platform in order to spread awareness about
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, bombing campaigns and the Gaza Strip, the realities of the siege, basically all of the things that legacy media tended to omit.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, I, through these interviews, people revealed to me how they applied a very sophisticated and savvy understanding of narrative.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: to these digital platforms to increasingly raise public consciousness about bombing campaigns in the Gaza Strip by Israel, to spread awareness about the horrific situation of
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Gaza under the occupation, under the siege, you know, not to mention the literary assault.
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, they had analytics like, you know, how much does it take for a post-to-go viral, you know, at the time, what do we need to be posting in order to make sure there's maximum spread?
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I say this.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: not to suggest that there's something artificial about the information, but precisely to show just how dedicated and savvy people can be against the odds, because they're working against what was almost a total media blackout of reporting on Gaza.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they realize this is how we can do it with these tools, that are supposedly democratic, that are supposedly counter-hegemonic.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's put that to the test.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what I talked to, you know, when I interviewed Palestinians in Gaza about this, what some of them said was that even as there is this sense, of course, you know, the genocide continues, it's horrific, but there is this real also sense of we were able to affect the narrative change and we, you know, the grassroots did this, right, in a lot of ways precisely because we
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: broke information that now can't be retracted, right?
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, post can be deleted.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, accounts can be banned, but the information, you know, the awareness, I should say, that people gain that the reversible.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, even as I was talking to people in the midst of an unfathomable genocide, what, you know, this is, again, awesome, a nappy of the gospel and disability, but he said in many ways, you know, in terms of the narrative we want.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, that was striking even to me because again, I think maybe I had internalized some of the kind of sense of defeatism perhaps that can sometimes come when you're
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: dealing with such unfathomable odds or I should say speaking about it because I'm not in the middle of Gaza myself.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I feel that I had perhaps internalized more defeatism than the people that I was interviewing and so that's one thing awesome told me, you know, no, we've won.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And actually, we need to thank every person in Gaza who's ever taken out their phone because what we're seeing now in terms of the broader shift in consciousness, that was something that we brought about directly
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: organizing an activism and applying narrative activism through these digital technologies.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, of course, we've seen what exes become, right?
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even in 2021, 2022, you saw increasing censorship of that platform.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I talked to others in the book who were using Twitter at that time
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: real-time savvy app, I would say, right?
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so they realized, like, even news couldn't move that fast, so we had to post about just basic things, you know, what was bombed most recently, where, you know, who, who do we need to check on?
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We would be posting all of that to Twitter, and those things were getting increasingly abandoned censored.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it is very much a story about
• 29:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: how companies became savvy, increasingly more savvy to how their platforms are being used.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: For purposes, they weren't supposed to be used for, right, to counter settler colonialism and military occupation, and increasingly came to clamp down.
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I mentioned meta, I think meta is interesting because it's the most,
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: unapologetic and obvious about this right if you see the ways that it moves the way it's normalized the criticism the banning excuse me of the criticism of Zionism on its platform which I think is also having implications in terms of twitch.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I wanted to talk about meta sort of a special case because it's such a good example of the weaponization of, you know, sort of the, you know, what your title is is playing on the terms of service.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: or the community standards, or the title of your book kind of is a plan on terms of service.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this weaponization of these things to shut down voices that they basically don't want on the platform.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, let's get into meta for a second.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, they will come back when we talk about AI certainly as well.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But let's talk about meta for a second.
• 30:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely.
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you have meta, you know, as I had mentioned is basically the most upfront about this.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's put it that way.
• 30:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think there can be a little bit more merceness.
• 30:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: about this, sometimes regarding other platforms, but meta is basically pretty explicit and direct about the fact that it censors in this way, and that buy in this way, I mean, in terms of the restrictions of post by Palestinians or about Palestine, and that it's really normalized the censorship of those posts, right?
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the mid 2010s, let's say, believe about 2015, you know, you have this Facebook delegation, you know, this Facebook at the time, so the company sends some representatives to Israel to discuss what was built as
• 31:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: the use of its platform to insight terrorism, right?
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the delegation is a so-called counterterrorism venue, right?
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, really it's around that time that you start to see increasing outcry by digital rights organizations talking about how
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: not only Facebook was standardizing its censorship, you know, which was increasingly lopsided against Palestinians, right?
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that you're also seeing Palestinians jails for incitement on social media.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Around this time, you see the appointments of
• 32:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: help start the cyber units, you know, which really streamlined the process of criminalizing Palestinians for social media.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: You see the appointment of Palmer to Facebook's oversight board, which also had raised outcry by organizations, activist organizations.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you see all of these moves, not just these moderation moves, which are escalating, but you also see these policy moves that really seemed solidify Facebook's dedication to Israel first and foremost.
• 32:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, in 2016, you have the appointment of Jordan and a cutler to the position of, but now it's met as head of Israel and the Jewish diaspora, right?
• 32:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the intercept has done really good recording on cutler and her role, not only in moderation, you know, which includes
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: people have argued, you know, direct censorship of post-biorganizations like students for justice and Palestine, but even other meta policy heads for other countries, you know, have gone on the record and really complained about how much leeway seems to be given to Israel.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, they'd say if I'd said half of the things that Kotler said about what I'm here to do, you know, to advance the interest of a foreign government.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this would not
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: be allowed to fly.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yet we seem to have an official who can, you know, proudly talk about, you know, having ties to these really government and doing Israel's bidding.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that doesn't have any kind of consequences very much normalized within the platform.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I do think that is really important as a case study.
• 33:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: of the normalization of what I'm referring to as digital settler colonialism, basically all of the ways that these big-tech companies can streamline these really colonial process through the digital erasure of Palestine and Palestinians.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that there's a danger with that too, not just in terms of meta's own actions, but how
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you see a successful company doing something, it normalizes it for all of the other companies.
• 34:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So meta doing this so unabashedly so proudly, I think gives license for other big tech companies first and foremost concern with their success to do the same.
• 34:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this leads sort of naturally I think into a bigger discussion about the linkages between these rarely security state and this will take us into discussions about the use of AI and the other technologies that are being used to kill people now in Gaza.
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the link between the Israeli security state and these tech companies
• 34:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in all sorts of ways, I mean, there's connections that we talked to these companies regularly or we interact with them regularly.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there's also people going from the IDF's unit 8200, the sort of electronic warfare unit, getting jobs in high-level jobs in companies like Meta and other Silicon Valley firms can you.
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: the idea for these really security state and and these tech companies.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, definitely.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think at this point, it's pretty straightforward that there is a revolving door between, you know, something what between, for example, unit 8200, which is this
• 35:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, Israeli cyber warfare, cyber security division, right?
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the largest big tech companies globally, right?
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the number of veterans of that unit that are appointed to these companies is pretty high and.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's basically an entrenched feature of the big tech industry at this point in time.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you also have, you know, to return to meta in terms of its top brass, you know, you have
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Israeli individuals on the board, you have people, you know, like cutler with direct ties to the government who are enforcing, you know, a lot of moderation policies and a validly doing so under the, you know, explicit admission, right, of doing, of working for the best interests of the Israeli states.
• 36:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you have things like, you know, believe it was Paul Begar, who.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: had broken the story about how WhatsApp metadata was being provided by Meta as part of the targeted kill list of where's daddy, which was one of the AI targeting programs that enables the occupation forces to track people targeted for assassination even when they're at home and you know, to target them accordingly.
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you have this revolving door of officials, you have these companies willingly providing data, you have the use of AI to create these kill lists and companies that are willingly facilitating this process.
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't talk about this at the book because the story had
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: broken then, but one of the things I also reported later for electronic and to father was that Dell hardware is being used to power a lot of these, you know, AI programs as well.
• 37:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not a question of how are these companies, you know, directly implicated in the genocide.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's, I think at this point, that a question is how are they not, right?
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's definitely a lengthy track record that we could go through.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things that also wanted to do in the book, and this is kind of how I tried to repurpose the term digital settler colonialism is not just to use it to refer to how digital technologies enable colonial processes, but also to think about how
• 37:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: this particular enabling is facilitated through a collaboration, a collaboration between the US, you know, big tech industry and these really colonial projects, right?
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, there's a lot of entrenched interest in this.
• 38:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bottom lines that are being pursued, but nothing about this is inevitable, right, and everything every step of the way is the result of concrete choices that have been made by these companies to continue to facilitate this process of violence, dispossession, and now genocide.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I want to talk a little bit about the use of social media, which is coming to the US now, but has been the case in Israel for some time, I mean, I don't want to say it's just coming to the US now.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the wrong way to phrase it.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Trump administration is certainly
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: making greater use of social media for identifying people who are saying things that they don't like and need to be dealt with Mahmoud Khalil, for example, or in really any, anyone in the U.S. on a semi precarious basis, a student visa, or anything else that the government could revoke and kick them out or having their social media scrubbed, we're hearing about
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, scrawly looking at people's phones when they try to come into the country and sort of looking at their Looking at their posts and restricting access to the United States on this basis and one of the things that you talk about in the book is like this is not a subject that that is Coming out of the blue people have written about
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: government's using social media to track and identify dissidents or, you know, people that they would like to have a conversation with.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there is a huge blind spot when it comes to Israel or specifically when it comes to more specifically when it comes to the Palestinian discourse.
• 39:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: As you note in the book, there's been writing about, you know, the way the Russian government does this kind of stuff or the way, you know, the other government's sort of
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: not a lot that anybody's willing to say about the way Israel has done it or now the way the U.S. is doing it increasingly with respect to the Palestinian cause.
• 40:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can you talk a little bit about that phenomenon?
• 40:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the things I really wanted to do with terms of
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: basically produce a work of tech criticism that put the Palestinian struggle into the broader conversation of tech criticism as it were.
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Precisely because as you note, what I'd started to see is that at times there
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: really was an omission or a gap, right?
• 40:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: People would be writing about things such as the ways that tech can be used to fortify political oppression, and Palestine, which it seems like, in many ways, you know, such a clear example of that was not discussed.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I was thinking, for example, of, you know, Charleston, Class B's, book custodians of the internet, which I think is a very important study of content moderation, but,
• 41:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: that work.
• 41:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think a lot of other traditions of tech criticism, you know, we tend to see critiques of Russia or, you know, we'll see critiques of China, right?
• 41:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: These places that happen to be the US's enemy in terms of, you know, an imperial kind of rivalry, right?
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: oftentimes tech criticism I found with you, you know, along kind of these lines, where the culprits that could be named were also the ones that, you know, imperialism had already rendered very nicely to be, you know, a villain, you know, and yet when you have something,
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: like the Zionist project, like the suppression of Palestinians, which again, when you look back over the history of meta, which we discussed, in relationship to how it's just so clearly advanced a project of both censoring Palestinians and working in direct consort with the Israeli government to help facilitate its own project of criminalizing Palestinians for social media use, right?
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: of suppression of political rights, right, of freedom of speech.
• 42:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that tech companies are willingly facilitating, yet we don't see a lot of discussion of that.
• 42:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And to me, I mean, we do, but you know, not as much as there could be.
• 42:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And to me, it really seemed like what happens now, where you have a political moment like this, where an administration like the Trump administration can
• 42:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, egregiously streamlined things like targeting people for their postings about Palestine on social media using that as a rationale for kidnapping, disappearing for deportation,
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: That political reality is enabled by those other silences, right?
• 42:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Precisely because we've had a situation where for so long it was routine, it was normalized, to apply a double standard when it came to Palestine and to the rights of activists and organizers for Palestine.
• 43:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: That double standard, you know, becomes entrenched in the broader cultural mainstream, right?
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so,
• 43:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would say that, in part, what we're experiencing now, where it's become so normalized to have this type of broader political censorship and surveillance, is precisely because we've had so much silence and such a kind of taking for granted that it's fine for people who support Palestine to have their rights suspended in this way.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, you know, this is never the reason you should support a cause first and foremost, but you know, this is exactly what people in the movement have said for years.
• 43:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you allow this to happen, you know, this is not going to stay limited to Palestine.
• 43:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is going to bleed out.
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what we're experiencing right now is precisely that bleeding out.
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think as we come to an end here and folks should pick up the book and it really does put all of this stuff into a great context for people who are concerned about this issue.
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what should people be aware of?
• 44:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I assume most of the people who listen to this show or probably on social media, many of them may wish that they were not on social media like me.
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, probably they interact with these companies on a regular basis and you know, what your people kind of look out for or be aware of or even try to do to help rectify what seems like an increasingly dire situation where, you know, this is just being.
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: With the narrative, the more the narrative seems to break through the harder the boot comes down to try to snuff it out.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what are some things that just, you know, people can be aware of or try to do to rectify that?
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think one thing is to understand ultimately that
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not the platforms that are at issue here in terms of advancing change, right?
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's really always been the creativity and the determination of Palestinians to secure their own freedom first and foremost that led to the narrative shifts that we're experiencing today.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: The fact that social media facilitated those shifts,
• 45:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: is to certain extent it's a variable.
• 45:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that there is a lot of despondency that can emerge from seeing just how complicit these companies are and just how willing they are to ultimately suppress the rights of Palestinians and increasingly all of those who support their cause.
• 46:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one thing we can take away is that, you know, from this is that
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Liberation isn't something that's going to come from a platform, right?
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the end of the day, there's going to be a new platform tomorrow, most likely, right?
• 46:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe all of the platforms I've written about will be outdated, but what isn't going to change is the need to continue to support freedom and liberation, and there are many avenues from which we can do that, even as these companies become increasingly sensorious, right?
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have other ways of raising our voice, of amplifying the struggle,
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: and of supporting Palestinian freedom no matter the cost.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I would just say, you know, don't lose hope, don't despair, and understand that there's always going to be more to life than social media.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that they're cracking down, I think, just shows how out of touch they are with the political emergencies of the current moment.
• 46:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's always something we can do despite that.
• 46:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think, I mean, to just add to that, I think that the hopeful thing to me here is that despite the heavy hand, despite the efforts to shut down Palestinian voices, to shut down even pro-Palestinian voices, wherever they're coming from, the message is still breaking through.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like public opinion is shifting.
• 47:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: There has been a measurable effect.
• 47:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We haven't seen it at the level of policy because I could go into a whole host of racist why we haven't seen it as policy yet.
• 47:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we do see, I think, people's minds being changed, regardless.
• 47:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that, you know, maybe that's part of this story that we should know too.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, you know, I think it's as Palestinians themselves told me the consciousness is irreversible.
• 47:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that we can definitely take hope from that and understand that, you know,
• 47:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: any post can be deleted, any account can be banned, but that new found understanding and the realization of the necessity to act because of this new knowledge.
• 48:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that that's something that really can't and won't be taken away.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think we just need to keep that in mind and move forward with that and continue trying to make change, however we can, from wherever we are.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's
• 48:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So on that note, Omar Zazah, again, the book is terms of servitude, Zionism, Silicon Valley, and digital settler colonialism in the Palestinian liberation struggle will have a link to buy it in the show description.
• 48:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Please go check it out.
• 48:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much Omar for coming on the program.
• 48:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
• 49:00
  [UNKNOWN]: You