Debunking Settler Colonialism

Adam Kirsch remembers his shock in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023. “I saw a number of progressive groups and academics applauded the attack.”  Kirsch became determined to find out why.

An editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review Section, Kirsch, 48, is a prolific author who’s penned books about the Talmud, Jewish literature, biographies, and poetry.

His latest book is about Settler Colonialism, the toxic ideology that glorifies Hamas and wants to see Israel wiped from the map. His short, easily-digestible guide to this arcane sounding concept maps out just how harmful today’s critics of Israel can be when they parrot this destructive ideology. “I’d been aware of the idea of Settler Colonialism as a concept that’s become trendy over the past decade,” he explains in an aish.com interview. “Now it’s emerging into real political debate, and is shaping the way people react to real political events.”

Fueling Extremism on Campus

George Washington University’s student group Students for Justice in Palestine was a typical reaction.  Three days after Hamas attack, they issued a statement lauding the murders and kidnapping as “resistance” and joyously declared “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”  Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad described Hamas’ murderous rampage as “resistance” and a “major achievement” which weakened “settler-colonies.”  “Decolonization” of “settler-colonies” is the ultimate goal of Settler Colonialism, which views Israel - as well as other countries including the United States, Canada, and Australia - as illegitimate.

Settler Colonialism cultivates hatred for people and institutions it sees as obstacles to redemption, and even justifies violence against them.

As Kirsch explains in his book, “It cultivates hatred for people and institutions it sees as obstacles to redemption, and even justifies violence against them. And it offers a distorted account of history, to make it easier to divide the world into the guilty and the innocent.” Ideas that are cultivated in arcane books and articles about Settler Colonialism are becoming more mainstream; the assumptions and theories behind this academic school of thought are spilling out of academia and poisoning discussions about Israel.

A New Way of Looking at Colonialism

Kirsch traces the origins of Settler Colonialism back to the wave of former colonies gaining independence after World War II. “According to the UN, the number of people living under colonial rule fell from 750 million in 1945 to 2 million in 2020,” he writes. Accompanying this new political reality were new ways of thinking about colonialism: whereas some powers set up purely extractive systems to remove profit and wealth from their colonies, in some cases colonialism was characterized by Europeans settling in large numbers. Kirsch identifies South Africa, which was 20% white in 1918, and Algeria which was 15% European in 1962 as examples of this; theorists began to apply the term Settler Colonialism to these situations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, theorists in Australia began to apply the term to their own nation. By moving to Australia and making it their home, Europeans were permanently changing the country, they asserted.  More and more, theorists began viewing this not as a neutral historical evolution, but as an ongoing tragedy.  Australian theorist Patrick Woolf described the Settler Colonialist view of Australia in 1999: “The colonizers came to stay - invasion is a structure not an event.” This catapulted an injustice from the past into the present: every day that non-indigenous Australians continued to live - every institution they participated in - was seen as a fresh assault and part of an ongoing, irredeemable injustice.

The very existence of non-indigenous people began to be seen as an insult. Kirsch sums up Settler Colonialism’s new insidious message: “What is distinctive about the ideology of settler colonialism is that it proposes a new syllogism: if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything - and perhaps everyone - that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.”

Redefining Genocide

Accusations of genocide are a major component of current Settler Colonialist ideology. The term genocide was coined after the Holocaust as a way to describe the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. It’s also been used to describe mass killings of particular groups of people that are similar in scale, such as the murder of 2 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s or the murder of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Kirsch points out that Settler Colonialism “defines much more broadly. In fact, Damian Short of the University of London argues that ‘it isn’t actually necessary for anyone to be killed in order for genocide to take place.’” This view helps explain the perplexing accusations that Israel is committing genocide against its Arab minority, even as the numbers of Arab Israelis - as well as the numbers of Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank - has been increasing rapidly.

According to Short’s and others’ way of thinking, a broad range of activities on the part of non-indigenous “settlers” - not just killing - constitutes genocide. Short identifies “industrial mining farming…and even national parks” as “genocide.” Taking any steps to stamp a “colonialist” identity on a nation can be termed genocide, according to Settler Colonialist studies. This has real world consequences as Israel battles claims of genocide in the International Criminal Court and the court of public opinion globally.

Idealizing Indigenous Societies

An underlying preoccupation of Settler Colonial studies is convincing adherents that indigenous societies are vastly superior - practically and morally - to anything that “settlers” could ever hope to create. Kirsch notes that Settler Colonial study “describes Native American life in idealized and ahistorical terms.” He points to the growing practice of land acknowledgements (opening that one is living on stolen Native American land) as a way these views have crept into the mainstream.  For the most radical activists, any non-native person or institution is considered illegitimate.

In America, in Australia, in Canada, 99% of people are in the category of settlers: everyone who’s not an indigenous person.

The movement marginalizes everyone, no matter what their history or role in a “Settler Colonial” society might be. “In America, in Australia, in Canada, 99% of people are in the category of settlers: everyone who’s not an indigenous person. That includes recent immigrants and people descended from slaves. You’re saying the problem is not with a few people but with everyone,” Kirsch noted to Aish.com.  For him, this is a break with progressivism of the past, which sought to reorder institutions and make a more just society. “Historically progressive movements have been about taking power from people who shouldn’t have it and giving it to the people. This (Settler Colonialism) changes the dynamic.  It’s a very elite idea.  I can’t be a popular movement.”  (A tragedy of the movement is the way it eschews real world solutions in a doomed attempt to chase an impossible ideal: the “restoration” of an ahistorical and perfect society.)

“Decolonization” has become a popular term in much of the West, inspired by Settler Colonial studies.  But while people might talk about “decolonizing” their garden by planting native plants or “decolonizing” their bookshelves by adding diverse voices, in countries where the vast majority of the population is considered a “settler,” there is no practical way to “decolonize” and entire country.  With one exception: the Settler Colonial movement has seized on Israel as a nation where an idealized indigenous movement might actually succeed in driving out people whom Settler Colonial studies sees as “illegitimate:” the Jews

Palestine’s Centrality to Settler Colonial Studies

Calling Israel a colonialist state is nonsensical: there has been a Jewish presence in the land since ancient times. Jews began moving to present-day Israel in large numbers legally while it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire; and Arabs continue to live in modern-day Israel in large numbers and retain their customs and language and freely exercise their religion.  “Most important,” Kirsch writes, “the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace them in some cases.”

Instead of advocating for realistic solutions to actual problems in Gaza and elsewhere, activists call for Israel’s erasure. The dismantling of Israel - which is seen as necessary to boost an ill-defined Palestinian cause - has emerged as a central tenet in Settler Colonial studies.  “It is doctrinal. To a degree that outsiders may well find surprising, for the ideology of settler colonialism, Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong,” Kirsch writes.

The demonization of Israel has seeped into every corner of today’s radical world views which are increasingly informed by Settler Colonialist ideology.

Every single societal problem is related to the false notion that Jews are illegitimately occupying Palestine. Activists protest oil pipelines in the United States by invoking the plight of Palestine. Canadians opposing the treatment of homeless people in Toronto compared the situation to Israel’s supposed “ethnic cleansing” in Palestine. British climate activists compare pollution to the evils that Jews are supposedly heaping on Palestinians. The demonization of Israel has seeped into every corner of today’s radical world views which are increasingly informed by Settler Colonialist ideology.

“Such rhetoric makes it only too natural for young people educated in the ideology of settler colonialism to conclude that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians embodies the conflict between good and evil in human history,” Kirsch explains in his book.

Supporting Terrorists

For Kirsch, much of the reason Settler Colonial adherents focus disproportionately on Israel is because Hamas and other terrorist entities are targeting the Jewish state. “Israel is the only place in the world where there’s an active conflict involving what’s thought of as Settler Colonialism,” Kirsch explains to Aish.com. Whereas a violent overthrow of the non-indigenous populations of the USA, Canada or Australia is virtually impossible, in Israel, “this is somewhere we can put this into practice.” For some activists, “decolonization” seems possible. The fact that this necessitates supporting Hamas, whose stated goal is killing all Jews, is immaterial.

The support for Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other terror groups is one of the most perplexing aspects of Settler Colonial ideology.

This support for Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other terror groups is one of the most perplexing aspects of Settler Colonial ideology. For Kirsch, Settler Colonialists’ embrace of terrorists and Islamists - so long as they oppose Israel - is part of a long tradition of radicals “embracing terrorist regimes in the name of left-wing politics. There’s this very obvious contradiction which I talk about in the book, of left-wing Western activists supporting a patriarchal, homophobic regime” in Hamas.  He notes that some activists are genuinely moved by the high death toll in Gaza and fail to grasp the nuances of the Arab-Israeli conflict or of Hamas’ genocidal desire to wipe out Israel.  The radical anti-Israel view that Settler Colonial ideology is promoting is “embraced by people with no real knowledge of what’s going on there.”

Demonizing Jews

By associating Israel with everything that’s evil in the world, Settler Colonialism makes it easy to fall into age-old patterns of demonizing Jews. “In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of antisemitism and anti-Jewish thinking,” Kirsch writes.  Many of the ways Settler Colonialist ideology views Israel - as “stubborn, heartless, and materialistic” - converge with traditional antisemitic stereotypes.

Kirsch quotes the historian David Nirenberg: “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel,’ except that today Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state. Whereas in the past, Jews coveted gold or other wealth, today Israel is accused of coveting land. In the past, Jews were accused of sadistically taking pleasure in killing Christian children; today, Israelis are baselessly accused of sadistically oppressing Palestinians and rejoicing in Arabs’ suffering.

Young people today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews - because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.

This hatred of the world’s only Jewish state spills out of academia into real world conflict.  Kirsch cautions that theorists of the movement are not calling for violence, but embracing armed struggle is a logical outgrowth of this radical way of looking at the world.

“Young people today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves,” Kirsch observes in his book, “for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews - because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.”

Confront Settler Colonial Assumptions

Kirsch hopes that his work will help students and others think critically about Settler Colonial ideology. “What I hope to do with this book is set out some of the basic flaws in this thinking and show there are ways to critique it.”  It can be difficult to evaluate the claims and assumptions Settler Colonialism puts forth, especially for students and others in academic settings where there’s little pushback against the ideology.

“I want to open it up to the marketplace of ideas,” he notes, and convey to readers that “these ideas can be debated and criticized.”

On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice by Adam Kirsch (Norton: 2024)