Image: Darwin tree – On the Origin of Species – Wikipedia 

On the 10th April 2024, three children under the age of 10 were killed as they travelled with their families to visit relatives for Eid ul-Fitr. Another young child later died as a result of the injuries she sustained in this same attack. Their murder provoked almost no outcry in the Western media. It was justified by many commentators on grounds of their lineage: the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) had killed them, the story went, because they were the grandchildren of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas (an organisation proscribed by the UK government, among others). For many commentators in the so-called West, these extra-judicial killings (which also included several other members of Haniyeh’s family) constituted a small-scale victory over the discursively established category of violence referred to under the moniker ‘terrorism’. Outside of Westernese frameworks, however, many asked a simple – if controversial – question: could the murder of a four-year-old girl really constitute the annihilation of a terror threat?

The idea seems altogether absurd, conjuring up images of tiny suicide vests and teddy bears filled with explosives. But the idea that Palestinian children are in some way predestined for the kind of violence that is often called ‘terrorism’ is not restricted in its application only to direct descendants of the leaders of proscribed organisations. Their grandfather’s political office may have amplified the news of these children’s murders, but the Westernese logic that many defaulted to as an explanation for their killings was not especially novel. On the 23rd October 2023, the United Nations Special Rapporteur decried “Israel’s framing of Palestinian children as human shields or terrorists to justify the violence against them”, referring to a narrative pattern employed by Tel Aviv that relies on the capaciousness of the term ‘terrorist’ as a signifier to justify the killing of unconscionable numbers of Palestinian children. To be a Palestinian child, in this narrative, is to be always already predisposed to terrorism.

A Search for Meaning

The idea of an ‘empty signifier’ has long puzzled semioticians. Much changed in the history of semiotics in the thirty years that separated Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but the question of how a signifier could be without a signified remained a live issue throughout. Wittgenstein, for his part, would have struggled less to theorise how the term ‘terrorist’ made its meaning than his Genevese counterpart. His understanding of meaning as something that was not inherent to groups of letters themselves, but arose as a result of the rules of the game in which the words were being played, brings us much closer to understanding how the term ‘terrorist’ becomes socially – and in the case of the Haniyeh children, murderously – meaningful.

The term ‘terrorist’ famously has no fixed or agreed upon definition, either in the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court or more broadly within the jurisdiction of the United Nations. In other words, the relationship between the signifier ‘terrorist’ and that which it signifies is not stable. The relationship between – say – the kind of violence often called ‘terrorism’ and the four-year-old granddaughter of Ismail Haniyeh is socially produced. After all, although its sematic field is capacious, the term ‘terrorist’ cannot be said to have no rules that its meanings obey. This much is obvious to anyone who has ever attended a pro-Palestine demonstration. The protest chant “1, 2, 3, 4 Occupation No More, 5, 6, 7, 8 Israel is a Terrorist State” is effective precisely because it acknowledges that the term ‘terrorist’ is usually used to characterise violence against states, and almost never used to characterise the violence that is necessary to establish and maintain settler colonial nation state projects.

And it is not difficult to find out what the language game is that renders the term ‘terrorist’ meaningful. Four days after the murder of the Haniyeh children, an act of ‘terrorism’ was reported at a shopping centre in Bondi Junction, Sydney. Two assumptions were widely made about the assailant before his identity was known: 1. that he was Muslim, and 2. that he was likely motivated to his violence by pro-Palestinianism. “If you want to know what ‘Globalise the Intifada’ looks like, see the Sydney Mall”, Rachel Riley tweeted in response to news. “Another day. Another terror attack by another Islamist terrorist.” wrote Julia Hartley-Brewer. And although both were proved incorrect in their assumptions (Joel Cauchi is neither expressly Muslim nor an activist in the struggle for Palestinian liberation), this fact has not altered the rules of the game of West-opoly in which the meaning of the word ‘terrorist’ is established. Terrorism is, by the rules of this game, violence perpetuated by Muslims and for the liberation of Palestine.

The Science of Predestiny…

So far, so predictably poststructuralist. In the absence of inherent meaning, a discursive connection is socially established between the Muslim, the Palestinian and the terrorist that endures even as the rules of West-opoly threaten not to hold for material reality (“the principles of […] noncontradiction clearly do not bind the orientalist” as Edward Said famously pointed out, 1978, 236). But the point I want to make here is that this discursive connection is not just semiotic, but narrative and historiographical. The point, after all, of extending the label ‘terrorist’ to include a murdered four-year-old girl is not to argue that this small child is herself currently committing a certain category of violence. It is to argue that she is predestined to do so, to position her as a terrorist-in-waiting.

For the Haniyeh grandchildren, the Westernese narrative that indites them as terrorists is one of genetic inheritance. Discursively establishing them as terrorists also establishes their fathers and grandfather in this same category. Violence becomes something that children inherit, like albinism, or freckles, or their great-grandmother’s curly hair. I have argued at length elsewhere (in my chapter in this book) that this thought-structure of inheritance logic lends its pseudo-scientific weight to racisms and ethnonationalisms of various gross kinds. Inheritance logics (which might also be called family trees, genealogies, Darwinism, DNA) are dangerous because they smuggle the presumption of objectivity from the natural sciences into our understanding of cultural relation. They present as biological realities those things that are in fact socio-political contestations (Katherine McKittrick calls this process “narrative biologizing” in her 2021 book Dear Science, writing from within Black Studies, a field that has long been alert to the way that social constructions, such as race, are narrated as if they were biological realities). They pretend that a propensity for violence is something that a child can inherit. Children are killed because something that is not at all biological – terrorism – is narrated as if it were.

“It matters what relations relate relations,” writes Donna Haraway (2016, 34), tailoring Marilyn Strathern’s famous (1992, 10) “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” to suit her analysis of relationality. In the case of the term ‘terrorist’ the mattering is semiotic as well as political and world-historical. Inheritance is a narrative which gives meaning to the word ‘terrorist’. “It’s the story that makes the difference”, as Ursula K. Le Guin famously had it (1986, 168). Although she thought of herself as a novelist rather than a theorist of semiotics or relation, Ursula K. Le Guin offered in ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ a sort of literary alternative to Wittgenstein’s language game. “I would go as far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag,” she wrote. “A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings.” (169). Words are given their meanings by stories – ‘terrorist’ by the story of gene science, inheritance and pseudo-biological predestiny.

… And The Writing of History

For the other, more than 13,000 children (according to UNICEF), that the IOF have killed in Gaza since October 7^th 2023, however, this hasbara argument that condemns children as terrorists by their genetics is much more difficult to sustain. Starvation, like air strikes, is an indiscriminate weapon and does not pick and choose which children to murder on the basis of whether their parents are fighters or civilians. For these children, their discursively established pre-disposition to terrorism is not pseudo-genetic but historiographical. It is the way that Palestinian children are located in history that discursively condemns them as terrorists-in-waiting.

I use the term ‘historiography’ rather than ‘history’ here because I want to highlight the fact that history is a narrative written (graphein is the ancient Greek verb ‘to write’, still visible in the word historiography) from a particular hegemonic vantage point. The empty signifier is, for Ernesto Laclau, the condition of hegemony (1996, 43). To hegemonize is then to fill up the emptiness of a signifier, or in Le Guin’s terms, to pack ideas like ‘Palestinian’ or ‘Muslim’ into the carrier bag marked ‘terrorist’. Historiography then, to press the carrier bag metaphor further, is the retail worker at the checkout whose job it is to do this packing. According to the rules of Westopoly, terrorism is that violence that is not normalised and justified by Westernese narratives of history (I have gestured towards this historiographical definition elsewhere).

The academic discipline in which I am trained – known as Classics, or classical studies – has a special role to play within this hegemonizing. One way to understand classicism is to think of it as a totalising narrative of world history that seeks to curate an ancient past in service of the current colonial world order (a sort of occidentalist counterpart to Said’s orientalism, as my current book project is doing its best to argue). Much could be said about the way that classicism lends its weight to Zionism, islamophobia, and other legitimating narratives of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians (and some of those things are discussed here – though much remains to be said about the way that Zionist narratives often lean on misleading and partisan framings of Greek and Roman antiquity). But what is key to my argument here is that classicism is itself essentially a narrative of inheritance. The Greeks and the Romans function in this world narrative as the glorious ancestors of Europe and the West – such that Islam appears not simply as a late-comer in this history but as violent opponent to the apparently natural-biological progression from classical antiquity to Western-supremacist modernity.

If we understand classicism to be a practice of historiography that curates and hyper-valorises pre-Islamic antiquity so as to position Muslimness as a violent affront to Western supremacy, then it is obvious how Palestinian children come to be established as terrorists both discursively and historiographically. Their apparent predisposition to violence is made to seem simply continuous with their discursive place within this world history. And it begins to become apparent how we might break the rules of Westopoly that function as these children’s predestiny. Later in ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Le Guin tells us in one of her many asides that Virginia Woolf had a secret plan to rewrite the semiotics of language. “When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas,” she tells us, “Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, ‘Glossary’: she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story” (166).

Woolf was not wrong to note that narrative is relational with semiotic meaning – this fact was quite literally deadly for the Haniyeh grandchildren, who were killed as a result of a narrative of genetic predestiny shaping the signification of the term ‘terrorist’. But I have been arguing here that it is a different history as well as a different story that this new language would need to tell – a history beyond classicism and its pseudo-biological narrative of Western supremacy. And although the role of these historiographical narratives in the construction of categories (like ‘terrorist’) that justify the murder of children by genocidal Zionism is sometimes hard to swallow – not least for someone trained in the very discipline most responsible for engineering classicism as a world narrative – acknowledging this relationship is also deeply hopeful. Because as Le Guin puts it “still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.”