On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

by Adam Kirsch

having a monogamous relationship

and watching the Disney film Moana

Here again, the analogy with Puritanism is striking. According to the logic of predestination, the first step toward being saved is accepting that one is damned, which leads to a certain paradoxical pride in acknowledging guilt. Just as born-again Christians declare that they are sinners, so practitioners of settler colonial studies often formally identify themselves as settlers.

The collective equivalent of introducing oneself as a settler is the land acknowledgment.

If the struggle against American settler colonialism were a real political struggle, like the ones waged against the French in Vietnam and Algeria, land acknowledgments would be contemptibly hypocritical, since the institutions that make them clearly have no intention of actually vacating the land they blame themselves for occupying. They are better understood as part of a rhetorical competition among “settlers” themselves, in which the confession of sin earns moral prestige.

A religious language of sin and redemption can often be detected in settler colonial studies,

Under the banner of decolonization, fantasies of murder and hymns to national glory are rehabilitated for use by progressives.

True decolonization movements, from the American Patriots of the 1770s to the FLN in the 1950s, used actual violence to drive out their oppressors. Intellectuals who use the language of settler colonialism to critique their own society, by contrast, have no mass movement at their back. That has been the predicament of the ideology of settler colonialism from the beginning: everyone knows that calls to “eradicate,” “kill,” or “cull” settlers can be only metaphorical, so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity. But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it—from “emptiness” and “not-enoughness” to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide—could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic possibility rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be the perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously—especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.

since both the United States and Israel came into being against the will of the prior inhabitants of their land, everything they do is unjust. The question of whether the Dakota Access Pipeline would harm the Sioux, or how Israel ought to respond to deadly attacks from Gaza, are in a sense irrelevant, because they are merely practical. The more fundamental issue is that the United States and Israel do not have a right to govern at all.

The insistence that Israel is the result of the same kind of settlement that created the United States, Canada, and Australia is puzzling on its face. As we have seen, settler colonialism is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider terra nullius; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of indigenous peoples and cultures. But the history of Israel does not include any of these hallmarks.

Jews could settle there only by permission of an imperial government,

The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant in the region:

Most important, 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.

In the twenty-first century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China.

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—like India’s rule in Kashmir, or the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-Palestine on the mental map of settler colonial studies.

for the ideology of settler colonialism, Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong.

The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler colonial model must be made to fit. This Procrustean process is never more conspicuous than when Western progressives insist that the struggle for LGBTQ rights and the struggle to liberate Palestine are one and the same.

To make Israel fit its ideologically allotted role, theorists of settler colonialism must similarly redefine two central concepts: indigeneity and genocide.

In the discourse of settler colonialism, however, indigeneity has a meaning beyond chronology. It is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These indigenous values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive.

And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.

In accordance with this idea, some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity.

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. Here is another instance where the ideology of settler colonialism takes a progressive route to a reactionary conclusion. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early nineteenth century in the work of philosophers like Fichte and Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues like Richard Walther Darré,

The greatest irony, however, is that in insisting that Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine, the ideology of settler colonialism finds itself unable to reckon with the Zionist principle that Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

In fact, if settler colonial studies weren’t determined on ideological grounds to reject any Jewish connection to the land of Israel, it might find in Zionism an archetype of the kind of decolonization it hopes for in America.

In rejecting the idea that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, the ideology of settler colonialism aims to erase one of the central arguments for Zionism. The same goal lies behind its redefinition of genocide in such a way that the Jews, the exemplary modern victims of that crime, are transformed into its perpetrators instead.

Israel is a settler colonial state, and settler colonialism entails genocide, then it is ideologically necessary for Israel to be committing genocide. This syllogism is largely responsible for settler colonial studies’ ongoing effort to define genocide down, so that it no longer means what it is ordinarily taken to mean.

When Wolfe wrote that settler colonialism is based on “the elimination of the native,” the stark-sounding phrase turns out to have an equivocal meaning: it can refer to the physical elimination of a native people by killing, but also to any action inimical to “the native” as a distinctive way of life. In this sense, even policies that aim at equality between settler and native can be responsible for what Wolfe calls “structural genocide.”

mass murder, cultural assimilation, and dressing up in native costume on the same spectrum, as expressions of “the transferist imagination.”

In this way, genocide, a crime actually committed against Jews in Europe, becomes merely a subcategory of transfer, a crime allegedly being planned by Jews in Israel.

progressive discourse on Israel, shaped by the ideology of settler colonialism, defined the country as essentially genocidal long before 2023, creating a frame through which all of its actions are viewed.

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.

For the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target

In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish thinking.

Anti-Semitic political parties in Europe attacked “Semitism” in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism.

The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to nineteenth-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The Apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things—the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law—and Christianity with spiritual things

Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late nineteenth century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism.

when the ideology of settler colonialism thinks about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity.

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.

If holding on to the colony became costly enough, France could cut it loose, and if the pieds noirs feared living under the Algerians they had oppressed, they could always flee back to the mother country.

Israel, however, has no mother country obligated to defend it, or to accept millions of refugees if it falls.

The absence of a mother country is just one way that the history of Israel fails to fit the usual models of colonialism and anti-colonialism.

where those empires divided up a continent into huge colonies in order to exploit their people and resources, Jews went to Palestine in small volunteer groups, aiming to create self-sufficient agricultural communities.

They were not drawn to Palestine by its natural resources,

Nor did they aim to exploit the native population,

the Labor Zionists who came to Palestine before World War I were determined not to employ Arab workers.

Nor, finally, did Jews come to Palestine in search of a higher standard of living,

the main driver of large-scale Jewish emigration to Israel has not been economic ambition but political persecution.

Today the Jewish and Arab populations living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River number about 7 million each. This parity makes clear that the settler colonial model, based on one people eliminating and replacing another, does not describe the Israeli-Palestinian experience.

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.”