The ‘post-9/11’ world has been marked by securitising tendencies that have been explicitly racial as has been studied by a number of scholars. However, these aspects of the 21 st century also demand to be examined historically, particularly a recent historical dominance of the racialised ‘terrorism’ label as shaped by Benjamin Netanyahu since the late 1970s. The manner in which our current structures of surveillance and policing that are developed by, for and exported by the imperial core to further entrench racialisation and repression are directly tied to the historical Zionist occupation of Palestine. My paper looks specifically at the use of the ‘terrorist’ label to not only de-historicise and de-politicise Palestinian resistance to occupation but to also dehumanise Palestinians both individually and collectively. While in the 1970s, terrorism was addressed with logics of law, risk and crisis management, by the 1980s, Netanyahu redefined it outside the laws of war and crime (Stampnitzky 2013). While the law is in itself an instrument of capital accumulation and repression, Netanyahu’s insistence to the US and European states to react to the fabricated category of ‘terrorism’ outside of their own standards marked a particular adoption of such a fascistic tendency into the liberal world order. This has resulted as seen most recently in the ongoing historical genocide of the Palestinian people that was claimed to be in reaction to the act of resistance to occupation on 7 th October 2023. The liberal accommodation of fascistic practices has and continues to produce excuses therefore in expanding and entrenching imperial structures and practices in the most brutal forms. Thus, the ‘unexceptionalising’ of a security state of exception was in the making for decades prior to 9/11, and continues to be shaped today with its acceptance in fascistic liberal politics.
Madhumita is a PhD candidate in History at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, where she is examining the racial administration of poverty by the British welfare state between 1948 and 1962, and how discriminatory ‘repatriation’ policies shaped British nationalism and the first racially targeted immigration and deportation Act in the post-WWII period.