Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle

Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle

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Omar Zazah
This groundbreaking book documents how digital platforms and tech companies based in the US support the Israeli settler-colonialism.

Terms of Servitude shows how social media, once instrumental in advancing the Palestinian struggle, has become a new tool of anti-Palestinian suppression. Omar Zahzah explores the paradox whereby major digital platforms like Meta, Google, and X – initially spaces for activism and advocacy for Palestinian liberation – now help fortify Zionist settler-colonialism. Through anti-Palestinian censorship and erasure, often justified by so-called “terms of service” or “community standards” violations, these Big Tech companies provide the Israeli occupation with AI technologies and metadata that streamline genocidal colonial violence.

Through original analysis and careful documentation, Zahza traces a timeline from the Sheikh Jarrah uprisings of 2021 to October 2023 and the most current developments, showing how social media has both advanced and suppressed Palestinian narratives. This urgent and revealing book considers what makes anti-colonial counter-narratives across digital platforms so necessary – and what resistance must mean in an era defined by the consolidation of Big Tech with Israeli colonialism and genocide.

"From social media censorship to the pernicious surveillance of Palestinians and their supporters, Omar Zahzah chronicles the intimate involvement of American Big Tech corporations in Israel’s unrelenting settler-colonial project. Terms of Servitude provides a guide to understanding and resisting digital settler colonialism. It is a timely and urgent read for everyone concerned with the fate of Palestine."—Michael Kwet, author of Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival
"Terms of Servitude is a blistering, timely testament to the unyielding power of Palestinian resistance in the age of digital empire. With eloquence and rigor, Omar Zahzah exposes how Silicon Valley’s so-called “neutral” technologies collude in Israel’s settler-colonial violence, demonstrating that censorship, algorithmic bias, and surveillance are not glitches but blueprints for silencing Indigenous struggles. Written in the midst of ongoing genocide yet unwavering in its vision, the book slices through corporate euphemisms to reveal how Big Tech encodes the brutality of occupation into pixels and code. It insists on situating Palestine at the center of any decolonial project seeking to reclaim the digital commons." —Laila Shereen Sakr, author of Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives
"A bold and utterly captivating exposé, Terms of Servitude delivers the most powerful indictment yet of Silicon Valley's pervasive use of surveillance, egregious censorship, and other digital tools not only to facilitate Israeli violence but to aggressively stifle Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices that dare to expose it. Omar Zahzah's brilliant, meticulously-researched, and irrefutable arguments unequivocally demonstrate that digital technology is being actively weaponized to fuel settler colonialism in Palestine. This book is absolutely critical, not merely for a profound understanding of the sinister alliance between Big Tech and the Israeli occupation, but as a chilling, prescient warning of how such technology can fundamentally deepen oppression against marginalized communities worldwide." —Ramzy Baroud, author of These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons
“Zahzah reveals—in damning clarity—the paradoxical use of technology to both suppress and amplify the Palestinian liberation struggle, offering us a meticulous yet accessible articulation of the digital resistance to Zionism and why, ultimately, Big Tech is failing to silence it. Terms of Servitude is a masterful and essential record of this pivotal moment in history.”—Nora Barrows-Friedman, associate editor of The Electronic Intifada

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