On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

by Adam Kirsch

the actual effect of the ideology of settler colonialism is not to encourage any of these solutions. It is to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance. In this way, it abets Arab rejection of the State of Israel, which has helped to freeze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the same basic form since before 1948. The hope that Israel will prove to be a short-lived aberration, a historical curiosity like the Crusader kingdoms of the Middle Ages, condemns the Palestinians to political limbo, the Jews to aggressive hypervigilance, and both to dreams of a final solution in which the enemy simply disappears. Insofar as the ideology of settler colonialism nourishes such dreams, it helps to ensure a worse future for everyone living “between the river and the sea.”