In the dying days of the second Bush administration, officials noted to their embarrassment that, in US eyes, Nelson Mandela was still a ‘terrorist’. His name – and that of other members of South Africa’s governing party the African National Congress – had been placed on a terror watchlist in 1986, at a time when President Reagan was busy currying favour with the staunchly anti-Communist but apartheid regime of P W Botha. This ‘terrorist’ had already enjoyed a state visit and addressed both Houses of Congress in 1994, but it was only in 2008 that US law-makers acted in a bipartisan manner to end this ‘embarrassing impediment to improving U.S.-South Africa relations’ as the sponsors of the change put it.

Will Abu Mohammed al-Jolani have to wait this long? The organisation to which he belongs, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is on most of the contemporary equivalents of the terror watchlists of the 1980s, required to be hunted down by the ‘global community’ as a bunch of rabid Islamists, intent upon wreaking civilisational havoc. But we are already been prepared for change: his real name is Ahmed al-Sharaa; his dress is less Jihadist than Goldman Sachs; he was never really keen on Al-Qaeda and Islamic State after all though both gave him his start in militant life. Indeed it may not be long before we discover that he enjoys Dickens, or perhaps even Henry James.

Of course al-Sharaa is a clever player in this rebranding, but it would have no traction without his successful violence in Syria. There was an easy $10million waiting for anyone who informs the US as to his whereabouts – but it is unlikely that the authorities will pay up, unless of course that he is reevaluated as dangerous by western power, in which case the terrorist label will be quickly reattached. No end of rebranding will save him then.

Syria’s ousted leaders could tell him a thing or two about terrorist labelling. Syria has been on the US list of terrorist states since 1979 when Assad’s father Hafez al-Assad was its leader. Before then Hafez was less of a pariah, meeting with Henry Kissinger in 1973 (one of Kissinger’s 28 visits to the country) and even hosting US president Richard Nixon in 1974. Jimmy Carter invited Assad senior to the White House when they met in Geneva in 1977, an offer that Assad declined. His designation as a terrorist mastermind did not greatly affect America’s desire to meet with him as even after 1979 successive administrations deemed him vital to the securing of a deal in the Middle-East that would promote US interests. The brutality of Syria’s regime, its attacks on its own people, its authoritarian viciousness, mattered little until eventually after the Arab Spring provoked even more repression in Syria it suddenly did.

The nonsense of describing states and organisations opposed to western interests as terrorist while ignoring the moral obloquy of those opposing them (the good old ‘counter-terrorists’) has been an ever-present in international diplomacy since the 1970s. As so often in the region, it has been Israel that has led the way, successfully characterising its various Palestinian opponents as terrorist and then using this condemnatory label as cover for a series of vicious, expansionist wars, entailing the commission of multiple war crimes across Palestine and Lebanon and now even likely genocide in Gaza. Israel will never allow any of its Palestinian opponents a chance to escape the ‘terrorist’ imprimatur: the last leader to try, Yitzhak Rabin was dispatched by a Zionist fanatic whose subsequent life sentence has been punctuated by frequent campaigns for his release.

In 1994, Stella Rimington, the then head of Britain’s internal security service MI5, gave the annual Dimbleby lecture on BBC 1, choosing the topic of security and democracy. In the course of this lecture, she noted proudly that ‘Over the past eighteen months or so, more than twenty Irish Republican terrorists have been arrested in Great Britain and charged. … All told, some 700 terrorists, both Republican and Loyalist, have been convicted and are currently serving prison sentences; many others are awaiting trial.’ For Rimington a suspected terrorist is a terrorist, their trial an irritant rather than a key safeguard against the miscarriage of justice. It is not so long a step from there to, first, the assassination of alleged terrorists, and then, second, to the assassination of members of a group you have decided is ‘terrorist’, and from there to blowing up the pagers of members of such a group without caring who gets caught up in the violence. Israel has long ago reached that point, and the US is not far behind. HTS wisely want to escape the label, but whether they do depends more on the geopolitical decisions of the US/Israel than it does on their own conduct.