In her meticulous and thoughtful review, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson raises important questions about Queer Terror that challenge both its understanding of terrorism and its accounting of indigenous existence and/as resistance.
With regard to my book’s understanding of terrorism, Erlenbusch-Anderson references a pre-Nakba Zionist paramilitary organization, Lehi, to show that, rather than always or only demonizing “terrorism,” settler colonial projects have in fact justified themselves precisely because or insofar as they are terrorist. How, Erlenbusch-Anderson asks, did terrorism go from being a valorized strategy by which perverse threats to survival are eliminated from the settler colony to the very enemy of that settler colony itself, as in today’s War on Terror and Israel’s racist demonization of all Palestinians as terrorists?
A comprehensive answer to this question lies beyond the scope of this response; however, it is worth noting that the War on Terror’s distinctively moralizing “terrorism” discourse developed, in part, out of an elaborate ideological effort to cast anticolonial movements and struggles as abject, nihilist, and evil, an effort that was led, on the global stage, by Israel. The roots of the War on Terror’s deployment of “terrorism,” in other words, lie in the era of decolonization and a moment when Israel was busy managing its own struggle with a militant PLO. That organization’s importance as a symbol and ally of anticolonial struggles around the world—including indigenous resistance and Black Power politics in the United States—was one important material source that fueled the ideological fire that was to become “terrorism.”
I would add that Erlenbusch-Anderson’s observation about Lehi only fortifies the claim made in Queer Terror that the War on Terror is, indeed, a distinct chapter of U.S. imperialism and, as such, it mobilizes “terrorism” in historically specific ways. In other words, not all usages of “terrorism” are settler colonial, nor do all settler colonies rely on or mobilize “terrorism” as a form of social defense. What remains the case, however, is that the twenty-first-century version of American empire reenacts its own (obscured memory of) settler conquest via contemporary anti-“terrorism” measures that have been seized on and fortified by Israel in its own eliminatory, settler colonial project against the Palestinians.
Erlenbusch-Anderson raises an even more powerful question in her observation that “alternative arrangements beyond refusal exist already in the political actions of those who are marked for death and in the lives they live in open refutation of the logic of settler sovereignty.” I take this as an elaboration of the Palestinian liberation slogan that insists that indigenous existence is resistance. Although that existence only registers in the eyes of the settler state as an absurd and existential threat to the very survival, coherence, and intelligibility of the world itself, perhaps what this antagonizing illegibility means for liberation is not simply a political solidarity with that threat (which I characterize, in Queer Terror, as “standing with” the “terrorists”) but also a turning away from the terms and tools of settler colonialism, which may pervade our very political theorizing to such an extent that it only renders indigenous modes of living unintelligible, meaningless, and “savage.” Perhaps, in other words, it is time to dismantle “canonical” political theory by turning toward the necessarily disconcerting, disaggregating, and discombobulating lives of indigenous peoples, lives that have been obscured but not eliminated, and whose resistant existence may therefore be the necessary beginning points for a decolonization not simply of “life” but of political theory itself.
