Non­fic­tion

On Set­tler Colo­nial­ism: Ide­ol­o­gy, Vio­lence, and Justice

  • Review
By – September 4, 2024

On Octo­ber 7th, 2023, when the hor­ri­ble news of Hamas’s attack reached Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, about three dozen of its stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions react­ed with warp speed. They uni­lat­er­al­ly con­demned Israel and expressed no regret for the slaugh­ter that the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion was inflict­ing. How can this inhu­mane and unnu­anced response be explained? In a brisk and engross­ing book, Adam Kirsch pro­vides a com­pelling answer. For well over a gen­er­a­tion, he writes, a group of social sci­en­tists have drawn on the polit­i­cal suc­cess of the Arab Alge­ri­ans in evict­ing the French in 1962, and of the Viet­namese in expelling the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary in 1975, to make a broad­er case for the supe­ri­or moral claims of indige­nous peo­ples seek­ing nation­al liberation.

That case, Kirsch argues, con­sti­tutes an ide­ol­o­gy — a set of beliefs into which his­tor­i­cal facts can be slot­ted to define which sides in a bloody con­flict deserve pro­gres­sive sup­port. Whichev­er group was the first to occu­py the land in ques­tion deserves sov­er­eign­ty, such as Abo­rig­ines in Aus­tralia, First Nations in Cana­da, and Native Amer­i­cans. Sub­se­quent inhab­i­tants, the argu­ment goes, have stolen the land and kept it from its right­ful own­ers. This ide­ol­o­gy has empow­ered the Ivy League defend­ers of Hamas to make Zion­ism the vic­tim­iz­er of Pales­tin­ian Arabs in the postage stamp – sized land that Israel occupies.

Kirsch devotes two chap­ters to anti-Zion­ism that effec­tive­ly dis­man­tle the anal­o­gy to the lib­er­a­tion move­ments of Alge­ria and Viet­nam. Unlike the Pieds-Noirs and the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary, Jews in Israel have no place in which to seek refuge if they suf­fer defeat in war. Unlike the British emi­grants who land­ed in Aus­tralia and Cana­da and what became the Unit­ed States, the Zion­ist pio­neers who arrived in Pales­tine were return­ing to the land from which the Roman Empire had expelled their ances­tors almost two mil­len­nia ear­li­er — and before mil­i­tary con­quests brought Arabs them­selves in large num­bers to the Mid­dle East and North Africa.

The author’s obser­va­tions about set­tler colo­nial­ism can be used to explain why the civ­il war in Syr­ia, where the death toll has reached six hun­dred thou­sand since 2011, elic­its indif­fer­ence among cam­pus activists haunt­ed by the destruc­tion in Gaza. By the same token, set­tler colo­nial­ism did not form the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na, which is why its polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al crimes against Tibetans and Uyghurs do not spur encamp­ments or bring stu­dents to the streets. On Set­tler Colo­nial­ism injects sophis­ti­ca­tion into a debate that Israel’s cham­pi­ons some­times ascribe sole­ly to antisemitism.

Stephen Whit­field is Pro­fes­sor of Amer­i­can Stud­ies (Emer­i­tus) at Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty. He is the author of Learn­ing on the Left: Polit­i­cal Pro­files of Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty (2020).

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