Counterinsurgency (COIN) is also known as irregular, asymmetric, or “low-intensity” warfare in dominant discourse today. We should begin by reviewing our reference point. The way we talk about counterinsurgency, how we participate in this discourse, is therefore a way of engaging or ignoring particular histories of settler colonialism here and elsewhere, of transmitting it, or keeping different versions of history alive or dead. Here, I suggest that if “terrorism” and “counterinsurgency” have become a cover for settler colonial economic expansion, they have done so in part through the definitions and discourse of counterinsurgency that this history has shaped. Further, this suppression has been achieved by displacing the recognition of how people were forcefully removed from their ancestral homes with a narrative about the creation of a liberal democratic beacon of a state and alongside this narrative, any expression by the displaced indigenous community in resistance to the destruction of their communities has been warped into “threats” within a dominant discourse of security. As in Israel now, in America, the nation’s origins in colonization by settlement has been suppressed. Below, I describe how early US history and the nation’s construction of its own political legitimacy compel this stance.
We should not be surprised that the United States will not condemn Israel’s violence, or that it describes such activities as merely a defensive response to indigenous “terrorism” and insurgent forces. Who Are the Insurgents and Counterinsurgents?
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