A clip from the game’s Steam page shows its hero kneeling to pray outside of the al-Aqsa mosque in front of a pile of dead IDF soldiers. Courtesy of Steam
By Mira Fox
December 12, 2024
A violent video game on distribution platform Steam is drawing ire from the likes of Rep. Ritchie Torres and right-wing internet personality Libs of TikTok, thanks to its setting in Israel — where Palestinian characters blow the heads off of IDF soldiers.
The game, Fursan al-Aqsa, puts players in the shoes of Palestinian guerilla fighters, their faces covered by keffiyehs, shooting Israeli soldiers at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem as well as in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. This past November, the game released an update called “Operation al-Aqsa Flood,” in which the fighters paraglide into an IDF military base.
The game is graphic — the Palestinian fighters can be heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they stab uniformed IDF soldiers, and big plumes of blood spurt out. In one scene, a guerilla fighter kneels to pray in front of a pile of dead bodies.
According to the game’s description on Steam, users play as “Ahmad al-Falastini, a young Palestinian Student who was unjustly tortured and jailed by Israeli Soldiers for 5 years, had all his family killed by an Israeli Airstrike and now, after getting out from the prison, seeks revenge against those who wronged him.” (Though Hamas is visually referenced in the game, the characters are officially part of a fictional resistance group called the Knights of al-Aqsa.”)
If the name “Ahmad al-Falastini” feels extremely on the nose — well, that’s the point. In the game’s description, its creator, a Brazilian man named Nidal Nijm, wrote an all-caps message: “This game does not promote ‘terrorism,’ antisemitism, hate against Jews or any other group. This is a message of protest against the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian lands. Fursan al-Aqsa is a video game about war like many other games here on Steam.”
Nijm has a point about the violence normalized in the video game industry; many of the most famous, lauded and widely-played video games feature graphic violence, often directed against Arab enemies. Call of Duty has several installments featuring Arab militant enemies, and it’s the entire plot of games like Six Days in Fallujah.
But this violence feels different to many. “Steam is selling a video game that represents nothing less than an open invitation of violence against Israelis and Jews,” said Torres in a press release. In a viral post on X, Libs of TikTok accused the game of enabling players to “kill Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem,” though the game does not feature any civilian deaths.
Despite the uproar around Fursan al-Aqsa, however, it was relatively unknown before Torres and Libs of TikTok found it and began to advocate for its removal. Even in the wake of its newfound fame, it has never had more than 25 players at the same time, according to video game publication Polygon. And most of those players seem to have discovered the game through its negative coverage, including bans in the UK and EU for “dissemination of terrorist content online”; the game’s few spikes into double-digit player numbers occurred in the wake of the bans.
“I first found out about and bought this game because I saw that the UK counter terrorism unit had blocked the game’s sale on Steam, which is just another example of censorship actually providing major advertising for the thing that it is trying to censor,” wrote one player in the game’s reviews.
The game has hundreds of glowingly positive reviews, however, mostly supporting its political message even if critiquing the game’s apparently shoddy mechanics and animation.
“Most based game I have ever played,” wrote one representative reviewer. “It is just nice to play as the good guys for once.”
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