Sule Ozkan
11 September 2025•Update: 11 September 2025
ANKARA
The Israeli campaign in the Gaza Strip should be seen as an extension of the US-led war on terror, an associate law professor at Arizona State University told Anadolu.
Khaled Beydoun said the legal and political framework built in the US after the Sept. 11, terror attacks criminalized Muslim identity and provided a model that was later adopted by American allies, including Israel.
“I think that in many respects, I don’t think Israel would have been able to be this disproportionate and this intense in its unleashing of violence if not for the American war on terror,” he said.
“In many respects, it’s given Israel license to inflict this kind of pain because much of the global audience doesn’t view Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians as fully fledged human beings as a consequence of the war on terror and war on terror discourse.”
Beydoun, who is also the author of American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, said that “an entire legal architecture” was put in place after 9/11, citing the Patriot Act, federal surveillance programs, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and counter-radicalization initiatives that encouraged Muslims to spy on one another.
Together, he said, the measures “anchored a new architecture of racialization” in the US that linked expressions of Muslim identity with terrorism.
“The more that Muslims freely exercised their Muslim identity, the more they were perceived through the specter of terrorism by the state,” he said.
Beydoun said the same discourse is evident in Israel’s rhetoric after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
He said Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have borrowed wholesale from American war on terror language, casting Palestinians as “radicalized”, “human animals,” or terrorists.
“That shows the American project of globalizing the war on terror was successful,” he said. “Israel, being a critical American ally and outpost, demonstrates just how resonant it was with the Netanyahu administration.”
Beydoun added that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented “modern colonial experiments,” driven by US interests in oil and regional dominance.
He said that the framework of neocolonialism also informs Israel’s disproportionate military response in Gaza today.
