REVIEW: On Settler Colonialism
Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (W.W. Norton), 160 pages
“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
Thus read a viral tweet on X (formerly Twitter) while Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis and took hostage some 250 on October 7, 2023. The barbarism witnessed in videos and reported in newspapers was, the tweet implied, an act of “decolonization.” I imagine few people had even a mild understanding of what that term meant before October 7, but it’s now become the latest addition to the Western lexicon of progressive buzz words.
Popularized in the years after World War II, decolonization most basically refers to restoring independence to colonized peoples and countries by reversing the impact wrought upon them by colonialism and granting them autonomy and self-governance. That restitution was a central mission of the United Nations since its founding. Decolonization today, however, has emerged most recognizably among Israel’s most radical opponents in their fight to “decolonize Palestine.” That necessitates that Jews and Israel’s supporters learn how to confront it.
Against this background, cultural critic Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice arrives at an opportune moment. Kirsch tracks the intellectual evolution of decolonization from a practical process of removing foreign powers from colonized regions (such as in the Middle East) to a fundamentalist ideology that understands all the world’s ills as a byproduct of “settler colonialism,” a systemic project designed to eradicate native people and “native ways of being.”
To its proponents, Kirsch explains, the mission of decolonization has utopian and almost messianic proportions in trying to return the world to an idyllic past. Its extremism is what makes it so threatening — and that threat carries weight when levied against Israel. For this reason alone, On Settler Colonialism belongs on the bookshelf of every Zionist concerned with and fighting for Israel’s future.
Kirsch begins by situating the book in a post-October 7th world and draws attention to the distinct and faulty rhetoric that defines how some speak about Israel and Palestine. First, in justifying violence against Israeli civilians, and second in describing Israel as a settler-colonial regime. Both are more recent developments.
“During earlier conflicts, public statements in support of Palestine typically focused on the horror of violence and the need to protect civilian lives,” Kirsch writes six months after October 7. “In 2023, by contrast, the killing of Israeli civilians was welcomed by many Palestinian sympathizers…. These were pointedly not the usual calls—liberal, humane, and ineffectual—for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict” (4). Israelis lost their humanity.
Kirsch also contends that seeing Israel as a settler-colonial state served “as a sufficient justification for Hamas attack, because for them the term encapsulates a whole series of ideological convictions” (5). Once Israel is linked to settler colonialism, the terrorism by Hamas is vindicated.
Both are expressed well in an Instagram graphic I saw: “The same way there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there is no ethical habitation under settler colonialism.” Anyone who lives in a settler-colonial state is de facto complicit in the “genocidal” project. Civilians are seen as perpetrators, and thus not innocent. The whole of On Settler Colonialism can be seen as explaining why the decolonization view sees that as so.
Kirsch devotes three chapters—“Redefining Colonialism,” “A New American Countermyth,” and “Settler Ways of Being”—to deconstructing the intellectual history and development of decolonization with excellent sourcing from the field’s leading academics.
He charts a timeline of decolonization’s transformation as a post-World War II project to grant indigenous people’s autonomy and self-governance into its more contemporary and ideological form beginning in the 1980s and ‘90s, when Australian theorists began applying it to their own country “even though it did not meet the traditional definition of a colony.” The missing requirements to think of Australia in a decolonial context were twofold: A foreign power (i.e., Great Britain) no longer governed Australia, and no “settler class ruled over a native population.” Instead, “a white, European-descended population had largely replaced indigenous peoples” (20-21).
Unlike classic cases of colonialism, Kirsch adds, the case of Australia did not exploit indigenous labor but replaced the national identity of a native population with a new society. This should exclude it from discussions of colonialism. But it doesn’t.
“Settler colonies were not established to extract surplus value from indigenous labor,” Kirsch quotes anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. “Rather, they are premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land.”
Whereas historical colonialism sought exploitation, settler colonialism is a genocidal enterprise, whereby “genocide,” too, is a term stretched to new meanings. In some ways, settler colonialism can be seen as more heinous than classic colonialism.
“The colonizers came to stay,” Wolfe famously says, “invasion is a structure not an event.”
In a world where countries like America and Australia are seen to be structured by colonization — that is, structured around the extermination of native peoples to make room for a new, white society — the only remedy is dismantling the countries themselves. But these are not ordinary cases of colonization. If colonizers once comprised a foreign government with illegitimate rule, the remedy was plausible and practical: remove the colonizers and re-entrust agency with the colonized. But what happens when colonization is built into the country and its majority population, who are seen as de facto colonizers by living there? Reversing this reality becomes an impossible fantasy.
“The ideology of settler colonialism thrives on a simple paradox,” Kirsch writes. “By insisting that settler colonial societies are guilty of an irredeemable crime, it validates the most extreme criticism and denunciation of those societies.… The goal is not to change this or that policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist” (34).
This is Kirsch’s primary — and I believe most compelling — critique of decolonization: Its aims are practically impossible, if ever clearly defined.
Kirsch supports this in the words of decolonization’s proponents who insist that, only once this is achieved, can a different future be discussed. “The great appeal of radical ideologies,” he says, “has always been this promise of a final solution” to every problem plaguing the world (63). Decolonization promises a messiah it cannot deliver.
The impossibility becomes clear by imagining how this new form of decolonization might take form in a country like America. If colonization forms a country with “settler ways of being” — that characterize how a society thinks, lives, and interacts, and all of its non-native citizens (no matter how far back their ancestry) — everything but indigenous life must be destroyed. What would happen to America’s hundreds of millions of non-natives?
On Settler Colonialism is less concerned with moral evaluation than a pragmatic one: Countries with majority non-native populations cannot be unraveled as decolonization proponents might like. That should automatically disqualify it.
In the case of Israel and Palestine, however, Kirsch believes activists and academics see the prospects of real potential — so the theory becomes a real-world threat.
His chapter on “The Palestine Paradigm” unpacks the anti-colonial development of Palestinians and “Why Israel Can’t Be Decolonized” addresses the implicated dangers and impossibilities that decolonization poses to Israel.
Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine offers a comprehensive account of how Palestinians understand the Zionist project as a settler colonial endeavor. Khalidi’s take hinges on Israel historically functioning as an outpost for Western powers to colonize the region by first disregarding the Palestinian people’s existence in the land (believing it is terra nullis, “nobody’s land,” in decolonial parlance) and then “forc[ing] them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.”
Khalidi’s historical narrative receives insufficient attention in Kirsch’s book and is oversimplified. This is a disservice in simplifying a complex discussion and offering a weak rebuttal in defense of Jewish rights to the land.
One example is Kirsch’s attempt to discredit Khalidi’s argument by citing the Arab population growth since 1948. “Most important,” he adds, “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.”
The semantics of characterization (“displace” vs. “erase or replace”) miss the essential point of millennia-old Jewish connections to the land. Additionally, in an Israeli socio-political atmosphere where some extremist Knesset members currently call to remove Palestinians from Gaza and resettle the land themselves, claims like Kirsch’s undermine the position they seek to bolster. (For a compelling, thorough, and authoritative criticism of views like Khalidi’s, Israeli historian Benny Morris’ analysis in The Jewish Review of Books is exceptional.)
Gone are the days when talking points of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “an Arab justice sat on its Supreme Court” were sufficient to make the case for Israel. It is no secret why the accusations today — namely, that Israel is a settler colonial empire that has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians since before its founding — confound young Jews (almost entirely non-Orthodox and unaffiliated), and gain such traction on college campuses. These new charges require refreshed attention.
This critique of oversimplification against Kirsch — which I had in other areas of his slim book, such as his chapter on the “countermyth” of Columbus’ journey to America — is somewhat ironically his greatest achievement.
Kirsch is less interested in relitigating the historical record or issuing moral evaluations and instead urges readers to consider the here-and-now implications of decolonization.
“But the actual effect of the ideology of settler colonialism is not to encourage any of these solutions” to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he says. “It is to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance…. The hope that Israel will prove to be a short-lived aberration … 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” (117-118).
The distinction of Kirsch’s pragmatic rather than moral consideration is an important one. The theoretical, academic discussions about decolonization work fine in the abstract, but the moment they need to translate into the world, they necessitate graver injustices than they seek to rectify. “The impossibility of true decolonization impels the discourse about it to become more extreme, conspiratorial, and violent,” he writes (128). What, as is classically asked, ought to happen to the millions of Israelis if Palestinians were to decolonize the land? The answer is obvious — and inconceivable.
Thus, Kirsch’s final chapter on “Justice and Despair” rebrands pragmatic compromise as the most perfect form of justice we can hope to achieve in this world. Building on the Talmudic concept of “yeush” — a person’s despair of reclaiming their possession relinquishes their ownership of it — as an alternative model for justice.
“Is despair justice?” he asks. “No. It is what the law offers instead of justice, knowing that perfect justice cannot be achieved.”
Kirsch explains practically: “To render perfect justice, the land of Israel would be restored to the Jews, who were exiled from it by the Romans, and also restored to the Palestinian Arabs who lived there before 1948. Not only is this impossible, but any attempt to secure the country for just one of these peoples would inflict suffering on millions whose only sin was being born in a contested land” (130).
Yeush thus provides a path forward. Accepting that the injustices of the past cannot be perfectly righted, he says, “is what makes it possible to hope for a better future, instead of perpetuating grievances and blood feuds.” That is why he calls for a Two-State Solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
On Settler Colonialism does not just dismantle the false messianism of decolonization but charts an alternative path forward that is anchored in reality. In a word, Kirsch believes that the greatest obstacle decolonization faces, and why it will never materialize as a just and successful approach to conflict resolution, is reality itself. Its impracticability makes it a complete impossibility.
Sruli Fruchter, director of operations at 18Forty, where he hosts the 18 Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers Podcast, is a rabbinical student at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and a contributing columnist at the Forward.