“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things—that’s all.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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Not for the first time in the last 18 months, recent events in the Middle East and the United States have had me marvelling at the shiftiness of words.

On Saturday, March 15, three days before Donald Trump’s promised all hell once again broke loose in Gaza, I read in the Guardian that:

The current fragile pause in hostilities in Gaza has come under further threat with Hamas hardening its negotiating positions amid new Israeli airstrikes in the devastated territory.

The first phase of the ceasefire agreement ended two weeks ago but Israel is refusing to implement the scheduled second phase, which is supposed to end with its withdrawal from Gaza, the freedom of all remaining hostages held by Hamas, and a definitive end to the conflict.

Currently, both sides have refrained from returning to war, though Israel has conducted an intensifying series of airstrikes in Gaza that have killed dozens of Palestinians. (My emphasis)

If conducting “an intensifying series of airstrikes that have killed dozens of Palestinians” is not a “return to war,” I exploded, then what was it?

When is a ceasefire not a ceasefire?

The “ceasefire agreement” was announced on January 15—just in time for Donald Trump’s inauguration—and came into operation four days later. It was a funny sort of ceasefire. Hamas kept its side of the bargain and didn’t fire a single rocket into Israel during the truce. But between January 22 and March 11 at least 700 Palestinians were killed by the IDF or their bodies retrieved from areas medics could not access before.

Just one Israeli was killed in Gaza during that same period, a contractor Israeli forces “misidentified as [a] threat as he arrived at IDF post in civilian clothing” and shot.

Israel also failed to withdraw its troops from the so-called Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, as promised in the agreement. Instead of moving on to Phase 2 of the ceasefire, it demanded that Hamas accept a new proposal from Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to prolong Phase 1 through Ramadan and Passover in exchange for immediate release of half of Hamas’s remaining hostages, but with no guarantee that Israel would implement the already agreed terms of Phase 2 thereafter.

Hamas’s reluctance to accept this unilateral shifting of the goalposts was what the Guardian meant when it spoke of Hamas “hardening its negotiating positions.”

Although the agreement mandated the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza, Israel obstructed the delivery of tents, prefabricated homes, and heavy machinery into the strip, where over 90 percent of the population have been (to use the media’s favoured euphemism) “displaced” and are attempting to survive the winter in the bombed-out hellscape in which their homes have been reduced to piles of rubble. While for a time Israel did allow the flow of food aid to increase, it continued to block everything else it considered “dual use,” from scalpels and scissors to scaffolding and generators.

On March 2 the Israeli government went further and decided “to prevent any entry of goods and supplies into Gaza”—whether from aid agencies or commercial sources—in order to pressurize Hamas to accept the Witkoff proposal. Since that date, no trucks have been allowed through the Gaza crossings, all of which Israel controls.

Tightening the screw, a week later Israel cut off all remaining electricity supplies (most had already been stopped after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023), crippling the desalination plant that supplies Gaza’s already depleted supply of clean drinking water.

This reimposition of seige conditions on Gaza’s desperate civilian population was widely condemned internationally—though not, needless to say, by the United States. The foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the UK issued a joint statement warning that “Humanitarian aid should never be contingent on a ceasefire or used as a political tool.”

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy, normally a staunch defender of Israel, went so far as to tell the House of Commons on March 17 “This is a breach of international law.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer soon slapped him down. A Downing Street spokesperson later clarified that in Britain’s view “Israel’s actions in Gaza are at clear risk of breaching international humanitarian law,” without accusing Israel of actually having done so. They added: “The government is not an international court, and … it is up to courts to make judgments.”

They neglected to mention that the world’s two highest courts, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have both (severally) ruled that Israel is in flagrant breach of international humanitarian law.

Four months ago the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.” The indictment states:

both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity … [as well as] impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law …

These are the very things Israel resumed doing while the ceasefire was still in operation.

Two days after the ceasefire went into effect in Gaza, the IDF launched a major offensive in the occupied West Bank, attacking Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur al-Shams refugee camps and “displacing” 40,000 residents. Israeli defence minister Israel Katz told the troops to prepare for an “extended stay” of at least a year and “prevent the return of residents.”

Per UNRWA, this is “by far the single longest Israeli Forces’ operation in the West Bank since the second intifada in the early 2000s … causing the largest population displacement since the 1967 war.” As of March 4, 90 Palestinians, including at least 17 children, had been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of this year.

Through the looking glass

While for the Guardian all this still did not amount to “returning to war,” the word “war” was taking on a whole new range of meanings in Washington.

In pursuit of his objective of ridding America of the “illegal immigration … poisoning the blood of our nation,” Trumpty Dumpty has now invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants not to Venezuela but to a third country, El Salvador. They have been imprisoned in the notoriously brutal Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, condemned to hard labor for a year—a term that is indefinitely renewable.

The similarities to Israel’s “administrative detention,” in which 3,327 prisoners/hostages were held as of December 31, 2024 without charge and (as documented in multiple reports) beaten, starved, raped, tortured, and brutalized, have been duly noted.

These deportees have not been given access to due process in either the US or El Salvador. The only proof of their alleged involvement in the criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which was designated a “terrorist organization” by the State Department in February, is the US administration’s assertion of their membership. Evidence of that involvement has not been presented in the courts of either country, and the accused have been given no opportunity to access lawyers or to defend their case. In several instances, distraught family members have convincingly attested their innocence.

Compounding the illegality, the flights violated US judge James E. Boasberg’s court order temporarily forbidding the deportations (and his verbal injunction that the planes must turn back if they were already in the air). Trump’s “border Tsar” Tom Homan was unapologetic, telling Fox News “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care.”

Passed in 1798 in anticipation of hostilities with France, the Alien Enemies Act has only been used three times in its entire history, all of them during actual wars.

Its most notorious invocation was by Franklin D. Roosevelt after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to facilitate the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals in the US (the internment of Japanese American citizens had a different legal basis). Internment was later acknowledged to be a grave injustice. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 gave survivors reparations and a formal apology by President Reagan.

The Alien Enemies Act states:

Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.

Pretty clearly—to anybody who understands plain English, which is now, thanks to Trump, the sole official language of the United States—the US is not involved in a “declared war” with the Venezuelan nation or government, TdA is not a part of the Venezuelan military, and nobody has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” an “invasion or predatory incursion” into US territory in any usual sense of the words.

The US president, incidentally, does not have the authority to declare war. That power exclusively belongs to Congress.

But the Master makes words mean exactly what he chooses them to mean—neither more nor less. According to Trump’s presidential proclamation,

Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States … Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens.

So, we must conclude, while in Gaza an intensifying series of air strikes killing dozens—or more accurately, hundreds—of Palestinians does not constitute an act of war, the US is the victim of a “invasion” launched by Venezuela involving neither ground troops nor air power, but whose “devastating effects” nevertheless justify the suspension of normal due process rights under the US constitution. Truly we are living in the upside-down.

The never-ending, ever-expanding “war on terror”

Just how upside-down our reality has become is well illustrated in an affidavit filed on March 17 in Justice Boasberg’s court. Attempting to justify the summary deportation of the Venezuelans, Robert L. Cerna, acting field office director for ICE’s enforcement and removal operations in part of Texas, argued that:

While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile. (My emphasis)

Read it again. Perverse as it sounds, Cerna is saying that the absence of evidence of criminal activity on the part of the alleged TdA gang members should itself be taken as proof of their being “terrorists”! This is the dystopian world imagined in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the party slogan is “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” This is a relatively restrictive definition, which limits the use of the term to illegal uses of violence or threats thereof, principally against civilians, in support of political objectives.

Unfortunately in recent years—and in particular, since George W. Bush declared a “Global War on Terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—the semantic boundaries of the term “terror” have been expanded, while its meanings have become less and less precise.

Because of, rather than in spite of, this imprecision, “terror” has become the perfect floating signifier, in which the horror that is evoked by memories of 9-11, or the 2015 Charlie Hebdo killings, or the 2017 massacre at Ariana Grande’s Manchester Arena concert, is transferred onto whoever and whatever governments choose to demonize and provides the justification for taking extraordinary measures against them.

Meaning is assigned, in other words, acording to the dictates of power. As with Humpty Dumpty, the question is which is to be master—that’s all.

The “war on terror” provided the cover for the American-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003—a conflict based on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, which led to from 150,000 to one million civilian deaths.

It also gave us the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, and Guantánamo Bay internment camp, which despite many promises remained in use throughout the Obama and Biden presidencies (and is now being refashioned by the Trump administration to warehouse deported migrants).

These latter operate in a shadowy state of exception beyond the reach of law, but the law itself has also been mobilized in the war on terror in ways that are no less detrimental to civil liberties. In many western jurisdictions legislation that is ostensibly designed to prevent support for organizations designated by governments as “terrorist” has the effect of criminalizing speech or actions, like protest demonstrations, that otherwise would be perfectly legal, and empowering the state to surveil and intimidate a wide range of dissident opinion which goes well beyond “terrorism” as usually understood.

In the UK, for example, last August a police swat team conducted a dawn raid on the London home of Asa Winstanley, associate editor at The Electronic Intifada news site, and seized his electronic devices. Earlier in the month another pro-Palestinian journalist, Richard Medhurst, was detained and questioned for 24 hours at Heathrow Airport.

Both times the police were acting under the “Encouragement of Terrorism” and “Dissemination of Terrorist Publications” sections of the UK’s 2006 Terrorism Act, which carry a maximum sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment. This “disturbing pattern of weaponizing counter-terrorism laws against reporters,” argued the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, is having “a chilling effect on journalism and public service reporting in the United Kingdom.”

Donald Trump and his minions have also discovered they can make “terrorism” mean many different things, depending on the political needs of the moment.

Trump has designated international drug cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” despite the fact that their aims are criminal rather than political. He is reportedly also considering designating “illicit fentanyl” as a “weapon of mass destruction.” While the former order provided the basis for invoking the Enemy Aliens Act in the case of the Venezuelan deportees, the latter could be used to justify military action against Mexico or Canada, both of which he has accused of supporting the trafficking of fentanyl across the US border, while repeatedly threatening to annex Canada as the “51st state.”

More recently, when asked whether the wave of vandalism against Tesla dealerships should be treated as “domestic terrorism,” Donald Trump replied:

I’ll do it. I’m going to stop them … because they’re harming a great American company. When you hurt an American company, especially a company like this that supplies so many jobs that others are unable to do.

Attorney General Pam Bondi followed up with a statement that described “the swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property” as “nothing short of domestic terrorism” and promised “We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

I am not for a moment suggesting that such violent attacks should go unpunished. The point is that the administration doesn’t need to invoke “domestic terrorism”—which hitherto, in the US, has mostly been the province of the extreme right—to prosecute vandalism or arson. The existing legal framework suffices. But this is not about the law.

Trumping constitutional rights

The Trump administration has made its intention to use the canard of “terrorism” to go after political dissidents crystal clear. While the main target at this time is academic and other critics of Israel, there is no reason to believe the persecution will stop there.

Commenting on March 10 on what is rightly being seen as one of the most critical legal cases of modern times, Trump posted the following on his Truth Social network:

Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you! (My emphasis)

Khalil was a leading figure in last year’s student protests against Columbia University’s links with Israel. He is not, however, by any stretch a “terrorist sympathizer,” and can only be misrepresented as such if all criticism of Israel is equated with support for Hamas.

The details of Khalil’s arrest, transfer from New Jersey to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, and attempted deportation (which at the time of writing has temporarily been blocked by the courts) have been well covered in the mainstream media.

What matters here that Khalil is a Green Card holder, which is to say, a legal permanent resident of the United States, who has not been accused, let alone convicted, of any crime. He is being expelled from the US, in his own words, for “exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza“—a right that is supposedly protected by the First Amendment to the US constitution.

The sole basis for Khalil’s attempted deportation is that “that the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe that his presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The secretary of state is not required to provide any evidence in support of that belief.

The administration maintains that judges who interfere in the use of executive fiat to deport are exceeding their authority. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump fumed apropos Justice Boasberg, whom he called a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge” and a “troublemaker.”

“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced after Khalil’s arrest. “He’s going to leave—and so are others. We’re going to keep doing it,” he reiterated on Face the Nation.

In another recent case, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at a medical center affiliated with Brown University, was denied re-entry to the US after visiting her parents in Lebanon because immigration officials deemed her to be a supporter of Hezbollah. The “evidence” for this was photos and videos on her phone of the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated in an Israeli air strike, which was attended by “hundreds of thousands” of mourners. It was only “common sense security,” Trump officials claimed. Once again, Dr Alawieh was denied due process.

We can expect many more summary deportations to follow. This is an administration that means business, and shows little inclination to be restrained by the niceties of law.

In Israel, back in October, the Knesset adopted two laws designating UNRWA—the principal channel for distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza—as a “terrorist organization,” banning it from operating in Israel or the occupied territories. Donald Trump has meantime publicly mused about removing Gaza’s surviving Palestinian population and repurposing the strip, under American auspices, as a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Terror is as terror does

The Guardian finally acknowledged that Israel had “returned to war” in Gaza on March 18, when it reported that the IDF had “launched attacks that killed more than 400 people in the devastated Palestinian territory, in the bloodiest single day of violence since the first months of the war in 2023.”

The next day the paper carried an editorial which laid the blame for “shattering the two-month ceasefire that had brought a fragile peace and relief to Gaza” squarely on Israel.

Among the casualties of Israel’s air strikes in the early morning hours of March 18, when most people will have been asleep in their tents or makeshift shelters, were 174 children and 89 women. I mention this not because I consider the lives of Palestinian men of any less importance but because it underlines the fact that now, as throughout the war, the principal victims—and indeed targets—of Israel’s actions in Gaza have been civilians.

I was wrong, however, when I asked earlier what this was if not a “return to war.”

What Israel has done to Gaza in the last 18 months is obscenely violent, not to say monstrously disproportionate—as of March 20, the official death toll in Gaza had climbed to 49,617, as compared with the 1,139 killed in Israel during Hamas’s October 7 attack, of whom one-third were members of the IDF, police, or kibbutz security guards and an unknown number died from IDF “friendly fire.”

But this is not a war, in the accepted meaning of the word. It is, rather, a collective punishment by an occupying power, in which Hamas’s October 7 attacks—which also according to the ICC involved war crimes and crimes against humanity, albeit on a much smaller scale—provided the Israeli state with the opportunity to further the process of ethnic cleansing, if necessary by genocide, of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine that began with the Nakba of 1948 and now appears to be reaching its Final Solution.

In a video broadcast on March 19, Yoav Gallant’s successor as Defense Minister Israel Katz didn’t even try to hide his government’s agenda. His remarks were addressed not to Hamas, but to Gaza’s civilian population:

Residents of Gaza, this is a final warning. If all the Israeli hostages are not released and Hamas is not eliminated from Gaza Israel will act with forces you have never known before. Take the advice of the US president. Return the hostages and eliminate Hamas, and other options will open up for you—including going to other places in the world for those who wish. The alternative is complete destruction and devastation.

There is a word for “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” It’s called terrorism.

Derek Sayer is professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His most recent book, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship and was a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award in European History.