A review of ‘On Settler Colonialism’

Do we favor never-ending hateful ethnocentrism or alternatively peace and reconciliation between the two nations of Israel and Palestine?  A review of On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, violence and justice by Adam Kirsch, W.W. Norton & Company. 2024 by Philip Mendes

Inflammatory allegations that Israel was a settler-colonial state and hence politically illegitimate have been around for a long time. Those allegations were most often voiced by supporters of the extremist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement whom I would term rejectionists. That is, they were opposed to any conflict resolution strategy or formula that could potentially advance and reconcile the national rights of both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Just as some ultra right-wing Jews pretended that the Palestinians were an invented or fake people that did not deserve any recognition, so these alibis of Palestinian ultra-nationalists (and in the case of Hamas, outright Islamo-fascists) insisted that Jews were not a real people and should simply be compelled to disappear by remote control.

The other fundamental objection to the application of settler-colonial theory was its lack of congruence with historical events in the Middle East. Firstly, the Jews who settled in Palestine from about 1900 to 1948 and then in Israel from 1948 onwards were not a population of colonial settlers who freely chose to leave their home country (i.e. such as the British who settled in India or the French in Algeria), and could seamlessly return if they chose with full citizenship rights at any time. Rather, they were overwhelmingly refugees from institutional Anti-Semitism and populist racism in Tsarist Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Nazi Germany, and then later the neighbouring Arab countries and the newly independent North African states.

Secondly, although the British mandate regime advanced the plan for a Jewish national home in Palestine and enabled and protected the refugees who immigrated from 1917-38, they largely reversed their position from 1938 onwards by blocking Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust and opposing creation of a Jewish state. In the period from 1945-48, the Jewish community of Palestine engaged in a political and military revolt against British colonial authority to establish their national independence. That revolt was overwhelmingly endorsed by progressive groups globally including the Soviet Union.

Into this contested history steps the American Jewish writer Adam Kirsch with his short topical book on settler colonialist theory. Kirsch identifies settler colonialism as a theory applied to Anglophone countries such as the USA, Canada, and Australia whereby European settlers are condemned for displacing Indigenous communities without their consent. Its extension to Israel (as noted above) seems, however, to be based more on propaganda than historical fact, and contrasts with its non-application to other more fit for purpose examples such as China’s ongoing persecution of the Tibetans and the Uighurs.

Kirsch identifies settler colonialism as a ‘radical ideology’ rather than a dispassionate analysis of historical injustice, which consequently informs some ‘morally disastrous’ policy agendas such as the alignment of many young idealistic people with the hateful ethnocentrism of Hamas (p.xi). He warns that this binary approach that divides the world into evil oppressors and good innocent victims may drive forms of hate and violence not dissimilar to those unleashed by similar malevolent myths in the past. Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, I suspect he is thinking of the myth that the German army was stabbed in the back by Jews and Socialists during World War one, a falsehood that influenced the rise of the Nazis and their perpetration of the Holocaust.

Kirsch interrogates the paradox that many young progressives responded to the Hamas death squad massacre of October 7 not by expressing sympathy for the (mainly civilian) Israeli victims, but rather by approving Hama’s gruesome violence as a legitimate means of remedying historical injustice. He attributes this anti-humanitarian response to the influence of settler-colonial theory, and particularly the belief that all Israelis (even within the internationally recognized Green Line borders) are illegal settlers, rather than the common international usage of the term to refer only to Israeli Jews who live on occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank or East Jerusalem outside those legally recognized borders. He also notes the irony that this ultra-nationalist belief in a Greater Arab state of Palestine to replace Israel closely approximates the belief of far Right Israelis in a Greater Israel state for Jews that excludes Palestinians.

Notably, many of the leading settler colonialist theorists discussed by Kirsch are white Australian academics including Patrick Wolfe, Rachel Busbridge and Lorenzo Veracini. These scholars were presumably motivated by understandable shame at the colonialist destruction of Aboriginal society in Australia by British settlers, but it is hard to justify their extension of such concepts to Israel given their at best superficial engagement with the unique cultural, national and religious factors underpinning the foundation of Israel and the long-standing Israeli-Arab conflict.

Kirsch carefully examines how settler colonialist theorists have reinterpreted the meaning of the word genocide to fit their ideological agenda. He notes this term was invented by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to describe the Holocaust, and was defined by Lemkin as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’ (p.25). Consequently, it has been applied to other examples of mass murder on ethnic or ideological grounds such as the Khmer Rouge massacre of Cambodians in the 1970s, and the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1995. But this term is now used (and arguably misused) as a catch-all phrase to refer to any alleged persecution of Indigenous peoples even where no killing at all has taken place.

That misinterpretation helps to explain why the term genocide is so often applied to events in the Middle East that don’t fit the model. As Kirsch notes, Israel did not eliminate the existing population of Palestine on a par with the destruction of native peoples in North America, although it may have displaced many of them from one part of Palestine to another part (i.e. the West Bank and Gaza Strip). The Arab population of Palestine has not declined at all, to the contrary it has increased from 1.3 million in 1948 to approximately 7.5 million today. To be sure, far too many people on both sides have died in the 77 years of the Israeli-Arab conflict, but the total number of deaths remain far below the approximately 600,000 people killed in recent decades in the Syrian civil war.

Yet, the doctrinal-style ideology of settler colonialism absurdly blames Israel for all the problems of the world such as mental ill health and pollution. This type of anti-Zionist fundamentalism arguably converges with older far Right Anti-Semitic theories attributing all the evils of the world to international Jewish plots and conspiracies. Even more bizarrely, LGBTQ groups align themselves with Hamas which forbids homosexuality, rather than Israel which is more supportive of gay rights than the rest of the Middle East combined.

Kirsch reflects on the earlier influential writings of the French Jewish Communist, Maxime Rodinson. Rodinson, who had publicly defended Stalin’s anti-Jewish Doctors Plot in 1953, conducted extensive research in the Arab world. He was an anti-Zionist and strong supporter of Palestinian nationalism who labelled Israel a colonial society not dissimilar to French rule in Algeria and white rule in Rhodesia. Yet in his famous 1973 book, Israel: A colonial-settler state? (Monad Press, New York): http://www.nonel.pu.ru/erdferkel/rodinson.pdf, Rodinson urged the Arabs to forgive the injustices experienced, and come to terms with Israel’s existence. He specifically attacked the pro-violence views of those ‘left-wing intellectuals’ sitting ‘in cafes along Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel boulevards’ who ‘preach vengeance and murder from an ivory tower’ (p.93).

Drawing on Rodinson’s analogy with Algeria, Kirsch highlights the key differences. At the end of the day, the French settlers living in Algeria always retained the option of returning to the home country, and when Algeria gained independence in 1962, 80 per cent did so. In contrast, most Israelis possess no home country to which they can return. Consequently, any viable political solution needs to reconcile the national rights of two peoples who will continue to live together in the same land. Instead, settler colonialists conflate Indigenous rights with ultra-nationalist dogma aligned with the overt Islam-fascism of Hamas. They propose only hatred for, and the exclusion of, the Israeli Jewish population as symbolized via their ethnocentric slogan ‘From the river to the sea , Palestine will be free’. Such slogans merely guarantee further death and destruction and new forms of injustice.