A literary critic on why the ‘settler colonial’ framing is bad for Israel and Palestine - opinion

Like many Jews after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, Adam Kirsch was stunned by the number of activists and intellectuals who celebrated the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.

“People looked at this attack where terrorists killed, kidnapped and raped over 1,200 civilians and were cheering for it, saying ‘this is a great thing’ or ‘this is an act of resistance against a settler colonial occupier, and we want more of it,’” Kirsch said Thursday. “That’s the kind of reaction that it would be hard to imagine after almost any other act of aggression in the world.”

He was also struck by how the term “settler colonialism” — an academic concept, popularized over the past two decades, that understands powerful countries through their mistreatment and displacement of their indigenous populations — had become a catchphrase at pro-Palestinian street protests and was deployed to justify calls for the elimination of Israel. Kirsch felt the term was not only misleading when it came to Israel, but that it did real harm by leading those who purported to speak for the Palestinians into “morally disastrous territory.”

A cultural critic who has written books on the Talmud, Jewish-American literature and contemporary poetry, Kirsch explores these ideas in a concise new book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.” He describes how a concept rooted in a praiseworthy moral instinct — “indignation against injustice” — has cultivated hatred for Jews and Israel and condemned Palestinians to “political limbo.”

I reached Kirsch, 48, at the offices of the Wall Street Journal, where he is an editor of the Weekend Review section. Kirsch has also written for Tablet, Jewish Review of Books, the New York Sun and The Atlantic.

We spoke about the ways Israel resembles a settler colonial project, the ways it doesn’t, and why he thinks his critique of a progressive academic and activist trend is not a question of right vs. left, but right vs. wrong.

Our interview was edited for length and clarity.

The Interview

I think of you as a literary and cultural critic. Why did you take on a subject we might call political science or social science?

I have written about the history of ideas, and particularly at the intersection of history, literature and politics. Settler colonialism is an academic historical theory that made its way into the real world of politics. When it started to become more newsworthy last October, and so many people after the Hamas attack were using the term “settler colonialism” to justify it, I thought this would be a way to consider what this idea is, what’s behind it and why it leads people to these conclusions.

Give me a brief, neutral definition of “settler colonialism.”

It’s a way of thinking about the societies that were founded by European colonization — particularly the US, Canada and Australia — which sees the circumstances of their founding not as something that happened in the distant past, but as the central fact about those societies to this day, and in particular is seen as responsible for a lot of bad things about them. So that in trying to criticize or improve these societies, you have to start with the fact that they’re settler colonial societies, and this paradigm is often applied to Israel, even though I argue in the book that its history doesn’t really fit the same model.

What makes a society a settler colonial state? 

The idea is that European colonizers come to a land inhabited by indigenous people and evict them from it, either by killing them or dispossessing them in order to create a new society on top of the land that they’ve conquered. It’s about dispossession and genocide and conquest, but it’s also the idea that settler culture, the way settlers think and act, is insatiable and rapacious, and is also reflected to this day in things like capitalism or exploitation of the environment — and also in sort of spiritual terms, that settler colonialism is responsible for feelings of emptiness or anomie or disconnection.

You show how the settler colonial model is applied to the United States, to the French in Algeria, and other countries, but I want to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is where your book begins and ends. How did the Israeli-Palestinian conflict become the main contemporary address for settler colonial analysis? Of all the conflicts in the world, what accounts for the left’s focus on Israel?

It’s been that way since this ideology became more popular in the late 1990s, early 2000s. The reason, I think, is simple: It’s impossible to imagine decolonizing America or Australia or Canada in any concrete sense. In those countries, when you talk about settler colonialism, what you’re really doing is engaging in some kind of cultural political critique. It’s a way of explaining the bad things about these countries and cultures, because undoing the past is not realistic.

Because these countries are too big, the indigenous peoples too few, and there’s no going back.

Exactly. When people first started talking about settler colonialism in the ’60s, they were talking about countries like Algeria, where there were about a million European settlers and about nine or 10 million Arab and Berber natives who wanted to reclaim their country from foreign rule. And so in that situation, decolonization meant the Europeans leaving, which they did.

That can’t happen, obviously, in the United States, because it’s too many people coming from too many places, for too long a period of time. The indigenous people in Algeria were 90% of the population. In the US and Canada and Australia, it’s more like 2% of the population. So decolonization doesn’t work as a goal in that sense.

But Israel is the one place where you could imagine decolonization in our time actually happening by force. In other words, the destruction of the Jewish state and the Jews either being forced to leave and go back to where they came from — which, in the eyes of most of these critics, is Europe — or a binational state that is no longer Jewish or Zionist, are seen as real possibilities. The Israel-Palestine conflict is very energizing for people who think about settler colonialism, because it’s the one place where you can move from theory to practice, and it’s a place where you can see all the things that you deplore historically in other countries actually taking place right now.

You write about the many ways that the founding of Israel does not bear the hallmarks of European settler colonialism, but first I want to ask about the ways it does — especially from the perspective of Palestinians, who rightly see their history as one of displacement by Jews who came mostly from abroad. 

The core fact that makes it similar to other European colonies is that Israel was the creation of a new state in a territory against the will of its original occupants, or those who were living there at the time. When the Zionists began immigrating to Israel in the 1880s and then accelerating after World War I, the Palestinian Arabs were very opposed to it. The first Zionists told themselves that the Arabs would be very glad that they showed up, because it would mean a higher standard of living, and everyone would get rich and be friends. Theodor Herzl tried to suggest that, but that was never actually the case. And if you look at, for example, Rashid Khalidi’s history of Palestine, it’s clear that even starting in the 1890s Palestinian Arabs did not want mass Jewish immigration, and eventually that turned into armed resistance starting in 1929, and through 1949 there was an on-and-off civil war between Jews and Arabs in this territory. And in the end, the Jews won in the war of 1948 and were able to establish a Jewish state.

So in the basic sense that this was a state created by people from Europe against the will of the people who were there before they got there, it is a colonial situation. And you add the fact that in 1967 Israel conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and for a long time administered them under military occupation, which means constant repression and conflict. That’s not really a new observation.

What is new is the framing by proponents of settler colonialism that Israel is essentially the same as what happened in America or Australia, which was a kind of genocidal dispossession of a native people by a European people. And of course, that’s not how Jews and Zionists understand the foundation of the State of Israel at all. And in many ways it is factually untrue.

So if Israel does not fit the model of settler colonialism, what are the main differences?

There are three big ones. One is that Israel was not founded as a colony by a European empire. If you look at the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, when European countries competed to take over huge swaths of Africa in order to exploit resources, those were cases where an empire sent out troops, conquered land by force and exploited it. The Zionist movement in the 1880s started not as an attempted imperial expansion by an empire, but as a voluntary movement of small numbers of Eastern and Central European Jews who were fleeing religious and political persecution. The first settlements were very, very small and gradually increased in number, but it was always a private volunteer movement. The most official sort of sponsorship it ever had was from the British, starting with the Balfour Declaration [of 1917], lasting for about 10 years in the 1920s, until the British turned against Jewish immigration because they saw that it was creating a lot of opposition among the vast number of Arabs and Muslims in their empire.

The second big difference has to do with the idea of indigeneity. In settler colonial theory indigenous people are seen as superior to colonizers, not just in terms of their rights to land, but morally and spiritually and aesthetically. When people in the world of settler colonial studies talk about this conflict, they insist that the Palestinians are the indigenous people, and Jews are European occupiers and colonists, which is not historically true.

It’s not the way Jews in Israel understand themselves, and it’s not true about the actual ethnic composition of Israeli Jews, where the population is about 50-50 Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. Jews see themselves as the indigenous people of the land of Israel going back to Biblical times. The Zionist movement never saw itself as white Europeans colonizing someone else’s land. It was a return to the Jewish homeland by Jews who had been in exile for hundreds of years, thousands of years.

And then the third way has to do with the idea of genocide. Genocide is a term that’s been deployed against Israel since the Gaza war started. And among progressive activists, the idea of genocide is inherent in the idea of settler colonialism. And this is a difficult distinction to make, because obviously tens of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza, and to say that that’s not a genocide is not to say that it’s not taking place, or that it’s not terrible, or that it shouldn’t be stopped. It’s simply to say that genocide traditionally means an attempt to exterminate a people. That’s the way it was first used, to describe the Holocaust of Jews in Europe, and how it’s been used in other situations of mass killing on ethnic or class lines, where millions of people were killed, like in Cambodia or Rwanda. And that is clearly not the case in Israel and Palestine.

In the 75 years after the Puritans arrived in New England, the native population there is estimated to have fallen by about 90%. Since the State of Israel was created in 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine has increased by 500%. So it’s not the case that Israel has conducted or attempted to carry out a genocide of Palestinian Arabs.

If settler colonialism is a false framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I want to ask about the consequences. You write that the ideology of settler colonialism “is leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory.” In what ways?

It’s not the only reason, but if you look at this through the lens of settler colonialism, you’re saying the State of Israel should be destroyed. The Jews in Israel don’t belong there. They’re usurpers. They’re colonizers, and they should be evicted by any means necessary, which is sort of the same strategy used against the French in Algeria, right? You kill as many people as you can, create as much violence and chaos as you can, and eventually the colonizers will leave.

The problem is that that’s not what’s going to happen in Israel, because Israel is not the colony of any country. It doesn’t have a mother country, and it doesn’t have any place for its people to go if they’re driven out. So when they’re attacked, their only alternative is to fight back. So as long as the survival of the Jewish state is at issue — and fundamentally, that has been an issue since it was created — there can’t ever be a peaceful solution for Jews or Arabs in Israel and Palestine. And to the extent that settler colonialism sees it in those terms and teaches people to see it in those terms, it’s contributing to making the conflict worse, not better.

You write, with some evident frustration, that progressives who purport to be advocating for a better future for Palestinians are instead looking to and dreaming of an unrealizable past, and applying an ideology that only imagines the elimination of Israel instead of solutions that might bring dignity and security to both peoples. You are skeptical of the one-state solution, of Jews and Arabs jointly governing the land, writing that it’s hard to see how mortal enemies under two governments would become “good neighbors under the same government.” What alternatives are available to progressives outside the settler colonial framing? 

I don’t have any great original insight into this, but it seems to me that there are three scenarios. One is the status quo. The other is one side succeeds in pushing out or removing the other side, either by destroying the Jewish state or by pushing Palestinian Arabs beyond the territories they’re in. And the third is a settlement where Jews and Arabs live side by side in peace and security of some kind.

And I feel like that third solution is the only one that can be morally right, and it’s the only one that is worth working for, and it’s also the one that seems least likely right now. It’s a very difficult situation to know what to want, even what to advocate for right now, especially when it’s a terrible conflict and threatens to become an even worse conflict with more people joining the war against Israel. It’s hard to say what we should demand, in particular we as American Jews. I’m not there. I’m not part of this conflict. I’m not endangered by it, I’m not fighting in the army. I’m not at risk of being killed by a missile. But what are the things that we should want? I think a peaceful solution, which traditionally would have been a two-state solution, is the only morally worthy solution that I could imagine.

Your book is clinical, sober, analytical. But certainly you must have brought some passion as an American Jew to this project or you wouldn’t have taken it on. What motivated you as a Jew to write about settler colonialism? 

I’ve realized for a long time that Jews are a kind of weather vane in politics. So, for example, people who opposed the Iraq War often said that it was being foisted on America by Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush administration for the sake of Israel. Right after Oct. 7, I felt like we’ve seen something similar. Anti-Israel sentiment, especially in academia and intellectual literary circles, has been growing stronger and stronger over the years as the conflict continues to get worse. But after Oct. 7, I felt like there was something new, which I didn’t remember seeing, which is lots of people cheering for Israelis to be killed. And that seemed like a real break in the way that Americans think about this conflict.

In seeing that reaction, it made me think it would be useful to look at these ideas and try to help people understand what’s behind this, and what we can do to think about it differently.

Academic trends and fads come and go. Do you have a sense that 10 years from now, settler colonialism will still be influential or will be supplanted by something else?

I think that this is an idea that’s still on the upswing. It’s becoming more popular and more influential. The truth is that these things start out abstract and esoteric, and as people who are educated in them grow up and move into society and start occupying positions of power and influence, they do have a real-world effect.

Do you worry that your book will be seen in ideological terms — that you come from the Wall Street Journal, that it will be dismissed, or embraced, as a right-wing attack on a left-wing ideology? 

I know what you mean, and I think it’s probably true that that’s how some people will see the book. But I don’t think of it as a right-wing book. I see it as a sort of liberal way of thinking about responding to genuine injustice in ways that can solve the injustice rather than perpetuate it. There’s no denying that these movements are responses to injustice — the injustice of European colonization of the Americas, or the injustices suffered by the Palestinians. But I think that radical politics often, despite its indignation and passion for justice, simplifies and totalizes in ways that actually make things worse rather than better. That’s what’s happening on the left with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that rather than actually contributing to solving the conflict, it’s making the conflict worse and spreading it.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.