Title: On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice
By: Adam Kirsch
Publisher: W.W. Norton and Company
Anyone who has heard Australia, Canada, or the United States condemned as a “settler colonialist state” – or who has seen that same accusation made against Israel by many of its murderous enemies – has encountered that ideology in only a mild form. Adam Kirsch, an accomplished literary analyst, poet, and an editor at the Wall Street Journal has written a short, elegant, and factual examination of the ideology of settler colonialism and how and why it is currently deployed. In Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice Kirsch traces the idea of settler colonialism that express dissatisfaction with modernity, Western Civilization and, particularly, Israel. Kirsch shows the ideology, which shares some of the characteristics of a religion, to be substantially flawed in its understanding of history, people, and causation.
In reaction to the rape, kidnapping, and murder of Israelis on October 7, 2023, many people, including academics, applauded the Hamas violence against unarmed civilians and repeatedly said that Israel was a “settler state” or a “colonizer” or a “settler colonialist” state as if those labels were sufficient justification for the crimes committed against Israeli civilians. Since these words had previously been used in a more neutral way, and even “settler” had traditionally been used only to describe post-1967 Jewish inhabitants of Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”) Kirsch was curious to see what was afoot.
He found that for the ideologues of settler colonialism, the fact that a Western people moved to a place, then took control and settled it, thereby displacing a supposedly indigenous people, was at the heart of the ideology. A place was a settler colonialist state if it had been settled by people of European ancestry who then dominated the previous people. But that is only the beginning. The ideology also holds that moving to a place and wresting control of it from the group previously in control forever pollutes and contaminates the society that does that – or as the true believers in this ideology say, “Invasion is a structure, not an event.”
Not only are those who come to a place and take over from the previous control group “colonialists” and “settlers,” but so are those who join them and their descendants until eternity. “Settler” is therefore not a description of an individual or his actions but an inheritable identity so that not only the descendants of the Pilgrims in the United States but also the descendants of unwilling African slaves, the descendants of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrant refugees from Europe in the 19th century, and the Afghan refugee who got off the plane last week are all settlers. The previous group in control are “indigenes” forever, somehow natives even if they assimilate and are successful in the new society.
This ideology, as it turns out, has spread through many Western universities in the last two decades, with dozens of courses available on the subject as well as hundreds of articles and books written supporting and expanding the ideology. Articles in academic journals with titles such as “Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing,” “The Settler Colonialist Determinants of Health,” and “Native Feminisms and Settler Colonialism” give a sense of how the ideology is elaborated. But importantly, the object of settler colonial studies is not to understand what happened in the past. Rather, the object is to combat settler colonialist societies by dismantling them – to “decolonize.” The savants of settler colonialism often speak of the importance of interrupting, dismantling, and refusing “settler futurity” by decolonizing a place and a mindset, destroying a way of thinking and thereby destroying settler colonialist societies. It is, of course, modernity and Western civilization that they detest and seek to destroy.
This ideology accuses countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel of an ongoing genocide. The adherents had to perform some intellectual contortions and prevarications to make that accusation. First, they had to redefine “colonial” so that people who move to another place, even if that place is not a colony in the sense of exploiting local natural resources or local labor for the benefit of a metropole or “mother country,” are settlers and colonists, even if they are returning to their homeland. Those people are still “colonists” even when their descendants far outnumber the descendants of the people who were there earlier. So every modern American not descended from Native Americans is a settler. Secondly, the settler colonial theorists hypothesize that the new group is invariably committing an ongoing genocide against the earlier inhabitants. They justify this accusation by redefining “genocide” so that it no longer means killing or attempting to kill an ethnic group. “Genocide” could mean something as benign as having the earlier group join the majority group by intermarrying with them.
One of the leading lights of this ideology, an otherwise undistinguished Australian academic, has identified no fewer than 26 forms of “genocide,” only one of which involves mass murder. According to him and his true believers, everything the new dominant culture does is “genocidal.” This leads to the syllogism that colonization is a genocidal process, that colonization is also an ongoing process and not an event, and therefore settler colonial societies are committing an ongoing genocide even today. Besides that, settler colonialism is also responsible for “interlocking forms of oppression including racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism.”
Many anti-Israel activists have adapted this language and model and applied it to Israel to focus their anti-Western anger on Israel. But Israel does not fit the model of a settler colonial state well. The Jews had been in Israel long ago and some remained there. When the Zionists began to return in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire, not a land thought to be empty, and the Zionists had no intent of destroying the native people. The early Zionists had to ask for permission to enter from the Ottoman authorities. Likewise, under the British mandate from 1918-48, Jews were at the mercy of the British administrators and hardly a conquering people spreading out over the continent like Americans, Canadians, and Australians. The United Nations granted part of Israel to the Jews in 1948. It was not acquired by conquest. The land that Israel has added in wars begun by its Arab neighbors is minuscule. Even after independence, between 1948 and the 1970s, when Israel took in over 850,000 Jewish refugees that Arab countries had expelled by force, violence, and oppression, those refugees did not come to Israel to conquer but merely to survive by returning to the one place in the world where they were likely to be taken in.
Kirsch suggests some better examples of settler colonial domination than Israel. If one were to adhere honestly to the settler colonialist doctrine, the People’s Republic of China would qualify because it removed, abused, and forced assimilation of Tibetans and Uyghers. India’s rule of Kashmir or Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor would also be likely candidates for being called settler colonial enterprises. But the academics who practice this craft are usually in English-speaking countries and are often monolingual or have only European languages which limits their ability to criticize non-Western countries. They also tend to romanticize non-Western peoples. So they refrain from castigating China for forcibly removing Tibetans from their homeland in the 20th and 21st centuries and requiring the Tibetans to abandon their own language and learn Chinese. Likewise, the Uyghers, who are often put in concentration camps and slave labor camps far from their homes to destroy their culture, escape the settler colonial theorists’ wrath.
The settler colonial herd argues that the answer to settler colonialism is “decolonization.” In the instances of the United States, Canada, and Australia, they are unwilling to say what that would mean. They do not say directly, for instance, that the United States ought to be dismantled and turned into a wildlife refuge so that Native Americans can return to their supposedly idyllic pre-colonial life of hunting and local agriculture. Nor do they suggest what should happen to the millions of Americans, Canadians, and Australians.
The goal of decolonization takes on a more ominous meaning, however, regarding the Jews of Israel. There is no place else for most Israelis to go. Just as most Americans were born in the United States, most Israelis were born in Israel. Freeing Israel of the Jews “from the river to the sea,” as a popular slogan has it, means another Holocaust, another genocide. Not the kind of redefined and imaginary “genocide” that the settler colonial theorists claim is currently happening in America and Canada today, but the real thing. Killing the Jews. In this way, the theorists of settler colonialism are perfectly in sync with the rapists, kidnapers, and murderers of Hamas who are sworn to kill the Jews – not only in Israel, but wherever Hamas finds them.
Kirsch’s thoughtful conclusion is that settler colonial ideology “is founded on a…sense that history is evil and ought to be repealed.” America, Canada, and Australia ought not to have been filled up with people of European descent and others. The Jews ought not to have returned to their ancient homeland. Settler colonial ideology “feels this indignation against the past in its bones and dreams of a future in which the past is rectified.” The ideology yearns for a mythical and supposedly idyllic past that never existed. It also fails to challenge the worst offenders, and targets those closest at hand and most familiar. Mao Zedong, for instance, killed tens of millions, but his crimes are never called out. Russia is the largest country in the world by land mass due to conquest, but it is not challenged. Islam spread from Indonesia to Mauritania, with 200 million Muslims in India alone, largely as a result of conquest – but the settler colonial theorists rarely if ever bring them into focus. All of this is the result of people moving, spreading out, conquering, warring, and more. Life has always been complicated.
Kirsch holds that there are no empty places and there is no true indigeneity. The Native Americans, for instance, were often on the move and at war with each other. How the land changed hands in the ten-thousand years before Europeans arrived in America is unknowable. The Jews were in Israel long before Islam was even invented. Israel is the focus of so much hatred because it is the most Western of the Middle Eastern countries, the smallest and most vulnerable and because – let us be honest – it is Jewish. It is not as if the theoreticians of settler colonialism are too good and too pure to hold a special hatred against Jews and Israel. For them, Israel is the symbol of all evil.
Their proposed “decolonization” of Israel is a thinly veiled suggestion of another Holocaust, another very real murderous genocide of the Jews. Kirsch ends by saying, “It is a sign of ignorance to turn any country into a symbol of evil, but in the case of these countries in particular (the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel), it is also a sign of ideological malice. And ideologues who ‘preach vengeance and murder from an ivory tower’…should be rebuked for their inhumanity, not praised for their idealism.”
