Choosing to write about “settler colonialism” as a theoretical notion and political concept is not an obvious choice for a poet and cultural critic, but Adam Kirsch’s new book is not about theory or politics. It deals instead with ideology.
Settler colonialism, Kirsch argues, is best understood “not as a historical concept but as an ideology, whose growing popularity among educated young Americans is already having significant political effects.” Their embrace of the term may be driven by idealism and good intentions, he contends, but it leads people “into morally disastrous territory.”
The case he focuses on is the war in Gaza, the current round of which started on Oct. 7, 2023, after the Hamas attack on Israel. He claims to have encountered “excitement and enthusiasm” over Hamas’s exploits, not only among Palestinians and in the Arab world, but from Ivy League campuses, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Black Lives Matter.
What was striking about these reactions, Kirsch writes, was their “frank enthusiasm for violence against Israeli civilians,” and second, “the ubiquity of the term settler colonial.” He goes on: “For many academics and activists, describing Israel as a settler colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack.”
Kirsch’s general critique of settler colonialism as an “ideology” is merely a prelude for the real topic of the book: the Gaza war and the broader Israel/Palestine question. The book is written primarily with this issue in mind, and this is also where Kirsch’s analysis falters.
Kirsch may not be aware of it, but the reference to Zionism and Israel as settler colonial projects was introduced by the Israeli radical left movement Matzpen and the PLO research center in the mid-1960s. It was followed by a spate of publications in the 1970s and inspired comparative studies that examined Israel/Palestine, South Africa, and northern Ireland—my own work included.
But this mode of analysis had largely faded by the 1990s, following the growing acceptance of Israel internationally after its peace agreement with Egypt and the collapse of the Soviet bloc with its resolute anti-Zionist ideology. Decades later, the term was revived, in a different context, by academic and student activists.
Settler colonialism can be applied in many different settings, from Chinese policies in Tibet and Xinjiang, to Indian policies in Kashmir, Indonesian practices in Irian Jaya, the Moroccan approach to Western Sahara, and Turkish settlement in northern Cyprus. But, Kirsch argues, currently the term is mostly used to refer to the actions of Israeli Jews, who “belong to the category of illegitimate settlers, because Israel itself is a settler colonial state.”
It is also applied to the United States as “a colonial power, illegitimately occupying land that rightfully belongs to Native Americans—and always will.” Both countries are seen as “permanently illegitimate,” due to their creation against the will of Indigenous people.
These notions rely on a phrase coined by the Australian academic Patrick Wolfe: “Invasion is a structure, not an event.” According to Kirsch, this is the idea that the original injustice is being renewed every moment through various forms of oppression, and that all those not descended from the original Indigenous population are and always will be settlers.
For the field of settler-colonial studies that emerged in the early 2000s, the goal of learning about settlement in America and elsewhere is not to understand it “but to combat it,” writes Kirsch. The only way to purge it is to “decolonize,” a command that has become “almost faddish.” And indeed, it is difficult to look at academic institutions in the United States in particular without noticing the prominent display of the injunction to “decolonize everything,” from the curriculum to cafeteria food.
How to do that meaningfully in practice is not obvious though. Kirsch mentions symbolic gestures such as land acknowledgments—verbal rituals that express guilt for the act of dispossession, without doing anything concrete about it. In practical terms, he concludes, decolonizing the United States is “difficult to specify or even imagine.” This makes this call a dead-end approach, a political theology according to him, that deals with absolute moral principles rather than concrete politics.
In historical anti-colonial struggles, he notes—as in Algeria, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe—decolonization had clear goals: “national independence and the seizure of power,” and perhaps also depriving settlers of their property. But in the most often cited cases of settler colonialism—the United States, Canada, and Australia—the people described as settlers are a large majority of the population, and most of them cannot go “back home,” because they have no other country.
This is not the case, of course, for Israel/Palestine where land is being contested right now, and where people and communities today have links to fields, houses, and villages where they and their immediate ancestors lived until recently. South Africa, about which Kirsch says very little, is another case where land restoration is being debated not just in a symbolic sense but as an active political issue.
In the second half of the book, Kirsch replaces his American cultural critic hat for that of an Israel apologist. His goal is to exonerate Israel from the charge of being a colonial creation, though without defending all its policies or even avoiding sharp criticism at times. His argument is that Israel is different from other societies labeled as settler-colonial (the United States, Australia, and Canada), and that it is, in fact, not colonial at all.
The core of his claim is that “the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace them … The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where conflict between European settlers and native peoples ended with the destruction of the latter.”
This fact does indeed set Israel apart from those cases, but not from historical instances of colonial rule in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Algeria, and New Zealand, all of which saw large numbers of settlers establishing themselves alongside and above the Indigenous population. Colonialism, including its settler variant, is not synonymous with genocide.
Strangely, Kirsch does not seem all that interested in engaging the academic literature on the topic. His real target is the more popular usages of settler colonialism as a term that allows people to stake a moral-political position rather than conduct proper analysis.
From an academic perspective, the concept of settler colonialism, in the sense of an overarching imperative to grab land and discard local people, cannot explain historical developments. Rather, the bulk of the explanation remains to be done, guided by specific questions: Why, for instance did the United States adopt slavery while Canada did not? Why were Native Americans subjected to genocide in the 19th century, but their survivors politically incorporated in different ways in the 20th century? Why did Australia allow white immigration only but changed its policy toward the end of the 20th century? Why did Israel ethnically cleanse Palestinians in 1948, keep them under occupation after 1967, and incorporate some of those who remained after its creation as citizens?
These disparate cases cannot be accounted for by a single unchanged logic. To say that genocide and assimilation, exclusion and incorporation, are two sides of the same “eliminationist” coin, as Wolfe and his disciples do, is untenable—killing people and granting them rights can be equated only as part of an obscure intellectual game, not in a world populated by flesh-and-blood people.
It is equally untenable to maintain that the Indigenous-settler binary divide remains forever the most crucial feature of society, despite massive shifts in population composition, policies, and land use, due to immigration from the mid-19th century to the present, urbanization, and internal migration.
In his rejection of the colonial characterization of Israel, Kirsch deploys a familiar set of arguments: Jewish immigrants had no imperial mother country; they were not motivated by the search for economic opportunities but by ideology, religion, and above all the need to survive in a hostile world; they did not exploit the native population and employed their own labor; they were Indigenous themselves (in a historical sense), and so on.
He concludes: “Seeing Israel as a colonial state requires ignoring all these differences from true colonialism.” He recognizes, though, that for Palestinians, these are “not good enough reasons to justify their loss and suffering.”
Yet in light of this acknowledgment, the intentions of settlers—and the distinction between different types of colonial rule—should become irrelevant. What is relevant is the destructive impact of the modern Jewish settlement of Palestine: on people, their communities, and the country as a whole.
In this context, colonialism means plainly taking control of the country from its Indigenous inhabitants (who formed 95 percent of the population when the Zionist movement began its operations in the late 19th century), by a group of immigrants who arrived and settled in the country only a few years earlier.
The ancestors of those immigrants may have prayed for “next year in Jerusalem” for millennia, but the Zionist immigrants themselves were new to the country, unfamiliar with its language and culture, arrived there against the wishes of its residents, and proceeded to wrest control over power and resources in a zero-sum game. This is a textbook instance of a colonial takeover, whether we regard the term in its generic meaning or as a specific settler-dominated variation.
This is why so many scholars portray Israel as the outcome of a violent colonial enterprise: It was designed as an exclusive and exclusionary ethnonationalist political project that clashed with the interests, needs, and desires of the local population.
Its definition of the new “nation” left no space within its boundaries for the existing residents, except perhaps as a minority that may be tolerated as individuals if they abandoned any quest for their own collective national expression. And even beyond its boundaries, the Israeli leadership has never accepted that Palestinians could form their own independent state, free of Israeli control.
This has been the case for at least a century, and it has nothing to do with the emergence of settler colonialism as an academic term, or with the rise of the ideology that Kirsch believes fuels current solidarity activism. Palestinians usually frame their claim in plain language: They were already there when the settlers started arriving towards the end of the 19th century. This definition does not require any special spiritual connection between the people and the land. Modern notions of democratic rule and national self-determination, justice and redress, suffice to establish the position of the Palestinian struggle as an anti-colonial movement.
This view of the problem does not provide an obvious solution, and Kirsch offers a standard formulation that falls short. He sees the conflict in terms of two national groups that must share the country between them in some sort of an arrangement, without specifying the boundaries and the need for land restitution, and without acknowledging that Israel has been steadily eating the territorial pie while ostensibly negotiating about it.
In his view, the legacy of the 1948 Nakba that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and replaced them with new Jewish immigrants who settled in their villages, towns, and homes, will remain unaddressed and must be subject to “magical forgetfulness” (meaning, a recognition that the past cannot be undone). But he also quotes approvingly notions put forth by historians Maxime Rodinson and Rashid Khalidi—both of whom advance a colonial analysis of the history of Israel/Palestine—that a solution must be based on equality of rights, including national rights, and on principles of “mutual acceptance.”
The key question then is how to reconcile an analytical focus on colonialism and its legacies (which is essential for understanding the conflict in all its historical dimensions) and a political focus on the concrete national and civil rights of all residents of the country, and on equality and justice for all—whether they can be exercised within the boundaries of one state or two, or a combination of federal and confederal arrangements. We need both.
The weakness of Kirsch’s approach is his exclusive focus on the national definition of the conflict to the exclusion of the colonial dimension. Palestinian solidarity activists tend to have the opposite focus: The chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” does not acknowledge the existence of an Israeli-Jewish national community with its own right to self-determination, which need not be seen as contradicting the equivalent Palestinian right.
An integrated approach must keep both sets of rights constantly at play in an attempt at a political balance: Without addressing colonial dispossession, there is no way to begin the process of reconciliation. Without recognizing the formation of two coexisting national communities, which came into being through different historical processes but today are equally valid forms of collective self-expression, there is no way to convince Israelis and Palestinians that they could have a shared future.
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