If you are Hezbollah or Hamas and use rockets and bombs, it is terrorism.
But if you are the Israeli military and use United States-manufactured joint strike fighters, with Australian-made parts, on Palestinian schools, universities, hospitals, refugee camps and apartment blocks, it is not terrorism.
Israel might kill far more civilians with its far more powerful weapons but apparently, it is not, and can never be called, terrorism or state terrorism.
If you wave an Israeli flag in the middle of a genocide by Israel, that is fine, regardless of the Islamophobic and racist hate speech by Israeli cabinet ministers in charge of sending out daily bombing raids deliberately targeting civilians.
But if you wave a Hezbollah flag, you are a terrorist supporter and should be arrested for hate speech.
Israeli ministers are allowed to viscerally hate on Muslims and Arabs and want to exterminate them, but Muslims and Arabs are not allowed to harbour reciprocal feelings towards the state of Israel.
Waving the flag of an entity committing a genocide is not considered hate speech.
But waving the flag of an entity that has launched rockets into the country whose government is committing the genocide is, apparently, hate speech.
Zionists are allowed to conflate Jewishness with Zionism, but spokespeople for Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran are most certainly not allowed to conflate Jewishness with Zionism.
Conflating Jewishness with Zionism is only permitted when you are ideologically defending mass murder by the Israeli military.
It is strictly forbidden, and inexcusable, to speak out or fight back against the Israeli military, regardless of how many of your friends, family and country folk may have been killed by the Israeli military.
Indeed, if you are Jewish and speak out against the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism, this is also an outrage.
The Israeli military can turn an entire city, home to 2.3 million people, to rubble and that is considered a proportionate and reasonable response to last October 7’s attacks.
But, if you are Hezbollah, Hamas or Iran, launching rockets into Israel in response to Israel committing genocide in Gaza, it is an outrageous, terrorist act.
While Israel’s destruction of entire cities is proportionate and justified, any act of military resistance to the flattening of Gaza by any group — Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni or Iranian — is completely unacceptable.
It will attract a similarly “proportionate and justified” response as has been delivered to Gaza.
The level of technology and the price tag of the weapon used is what tells you whether it was terrorism or not.
Fancy, expensive weapons being used to kill civilians? Not terrorism.
Relatively less advanced technology? Terrorism.
The exception to this would be if Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran managed to acquire a joint strike fighter, and used it to launch US-made laser-guided 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs into Israeli apartment blocks. In this case that rule would no longer apply.
If you are running Australia, Britain, Germany or the US government, the righteous thing to do is to send troops and weapons to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, to help the resistance in Ukraine to fight Russia and to assist Taiwan when China invades.
But if you are Hezbollah or Iran, defending Palestine from an actual genocide, in a far more limited manner than the West’s current military commitments, that is terrorism.
The only way to justify a genocidal settler colonial project, built on the violent dispossession of Arabs over many decades, is to engage in racist and supremacist double standards and hypocrisy.
I don’t agree with the politics of Hamas and Hezbollah. But, I’m not so naive as to be surprised that such groups, which combine religious and nationalist ideas, have emerged in response to decades of Israeli aggression and expansionism.
Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for 30 seconds.
[Zane Alcorn is a Socialist Alliance member and is active in the pro-Palestine and union movements.]