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This article is a lightly edited excerpt from Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestine Liberation Struggle by Omar Zahzah, published by The Censored Press/Seven Stories Press, copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

An outgrowth of the counter-revolutionary Oslo Accords, the Palestinian internet digitally encapsulates the contradictions of anti-colonial resistance in the neoliberal era. As such, the internet today is both an instrument for collective interconnection to Palestinian revolutionary history and struggle as well as a site of suppression and surveillance. As Miriyam Aouragh writes in Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet, and the Construction of Identity, the introduction of the internet “excited many Palestinians,” and the “motivation most often heard for many of the internet projects was resentment at the pro-Israeli/anti-Palestinian coverage in the mainstream media.” Sociopolitical factors such as the violent crackdowns and restrictions on movement imposed on Palestinians by Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-2005) greatly influenced the frequency and nature of Palestinian internet usage during this period, as many Palestinians turned to mobile telephones and email to keep abreast of developments around the Intifada, and communicate the reality of their conditions to an outside world whose experience with Palestine was more often filtered through unsympathetic media outlets.

Yet these newfound possibilities were paradoxically paired with restrictions from the outset. First, “the fusion of technology and politics” that emerged in the context of 9/11 “challenged the necessity and potential of ICT [Information and Communication Technology].” Following the Oslo Accords, many Palestinians living in the West chose to return to Palestine to go into development; many of them were ICT specialists, and as such, they played a crucial role in building out what would become the contemporary Internet industry in Palestine. Some of these returnees set up the Palestinian IT Special Interest Group (ITSIG), believing ICT to be a “central component of the Palestinian economy.” While this was “not strange,” Aouragh notes, given that “at the time hype about the internet partly overlapped with utopian ideas about virtual reality,” digital autonomy was precluded from the outset. For all of the newfound possibilities in interconnection and communication the internet made (and would continue to make) possible,

Despite the ‘free’ and ‘magic’ IT, Palestinians could not set up an internet backbone that was actually autonomous … The infrastructure of the Palestinian IT sector could only be partly realised because the underlying colonialist logic in Palestine dictates that ISPs must provide bandwidth and connectivity through Israeli companies. Hence, when deconstructing the materiality of the internet in Palestine critical analyses become crucial.

Despite the ‘free’ and ‘magic’ IT, Palestinians could not set up an internet backbone that was actually autonomous … The infrastructure of the Palestinian IT sector could only be partly realised because the underlying colonialist logic in Palestine dictates that ISPs must provide bandwidth and connectivity through Israeli companies. Hence, when deconstructing the materiality of the internet in Palestine critical analyses become crucial.

After Oslo, ICT was the fastest growing portion of the economy, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) privatized the telecom sector. In January 1996, the sector was transferred to PalTel (short for Palestinian Telecommunications Company), a private company, and the penetration of the internet in Palestine increased, while evolutions in computer technology resulted in computers becoming more affordable, which ensured increasing social diffusion of the internet in addition to geographical spread. Prior to PalTel’s coordination of the network infrastructure, private investors had already set up ISPs offering internet services. The ostensible distinction was that preceding linkages had to go through Israeli territory, while PalTel provided a “data-communications network blanket.” Yet it soon became clear that

all providers, including the official and so-called independent, PalTel, were roaming through Israeli companies. In reality there was no fully Palestinian-controlled and independent technological infrastructure. Despite PalTel, and later Hadara, presenting themselves as autonomous communication services, they depend on the benevolence of Israel. The truth is that to go online the occupied had to tap from their occupier. A further look into this awkward situation revealed that its fate had already been sealed by the Oslo agreements. Related Story News Analysis |........

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