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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HISTORY LESSON  
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Laleh Khalili
June 24, 2025
Jewish Currents [[link removed]]

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_ Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism is an anti-woke screed
disguised as serious scholarship. _

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_On Settler Colonialism
Ideology, Violence, and Justice_
Adam Kirsch
W.W. Norton
ISBN: 978-1-324-10534-3

IN AUGUST 2024, _The Atlantic _published
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a slapdash essay by the literary critic Adam Kirsch titled “The
False Narrative of Settler Colonialism.” Kirsch claimed that the
concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s “as a way
of linking social evils in [Australia, Canada, and the United States]
today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic
inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement,” and that it
could not possibly be applied to brave little Israel. After all,
unlike the US or Australia, Israel’s settlement of a former
“province of the Ottoman Empire” did not have continental reach,
what with Israel being “about the size of New Jersey,” pluckily
bobbing in a hostile sea of Arab states. And whereas settler
colonialism is marked by “the destruction of Indigenous peoples and
cultures,” Israel, Kirsch insisted, “did not erase or replace the
people already living in Palestine.”

The article’s countless errors and elisions quickly attracted
widespread derision
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Some readers cited examples of scholarship on settler colonialism
produced long before the ’90s, while others picked apart Kirsch’s
historical inaccuracies about Palestine—for instance, rebutting his
minimization of the Nakba by referring to books by Palestinian and
Israeli scholars that provide extensive evidence of the mass ethnic
cleansing that accompanied the state’s founding. (Kirsch admits in
passing that Israel “did displace many” Palestinians, but declines
to note the scale of the dispossession—about 750,000 people expelled
from about 78% of historic Palestine, their razed towns and villages
supplanted by settlements—or clarify how this is distinct from
“erasing” or “replacing” them.)

Despite the thorough evisceration, Kirsch has since displayed his
methodological negligence at a much larger scale: _The Atlantic _noted
that the essay was adapted from a forthcoming book, _On Settler
Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice_. Much like the
capsule-length version, the book, which was published in August,
attempts to argue not only that the concept of settler colonialism is
so much nonsense in the context of the US or Australia, but that, when
applied to Israel, it becomes something far more sinister: antisemitic
“ideology,” a word Kirsch seems to apply to any idea with the
potential to shape political reality—especially in ways he finds
unsettling.

Though its authoritative-seeming title presents the text as the work
of an expert, _On Settler Colonialism _is, to put it mildly, not a
scholarly book. If it were, it would have had to acknowledge the broad
range of theoretical and empirical research in the fields of history,
sociology, and settler colonial studies, instead of fulminating about
cherry-picked lines from left-wing scholars—many of them Black or
Indigenous—and eliding the contributions of Palestinians.
Throughout, Kirsch quotes exclusively in order to excoriate. The
summaries of the books and articles he condemns are so bland, vague,
and under-specified that they could have been written by ChatGPT. It
seems clear that Kirsch harvested some of his citations from his
social media critics; for example, the book, unlike the article,
quotes the radical French historian Maxime Rodinson, whose work was
mentioned in a response
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_Atlantic _piece by Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. Kirsch also
appears to have relied on his detractors to correct some of his more
obvious mistakes: He moves the origin of the concept of settler
colonialism back several decades, to 1976, when Australian scholar
Kenneth Good used the term to describe Rhodesia. But Kirsch’s
engagement with these lifted sources only underscores his general
sloppiness. He misrepresents Rodinson by focusing solely on his plea
for the humane treatment of settlers and fails to notice that Good was
preceded by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and dozens of Palestinians.

The word “woke” doesn’t appear in Kirsch’s book, but the text
is, in essence, a vitriolic, anti-woke screed. Despite its lack of
substance, it is noteworthy as a prime example of the frenzy of
negation being undertaken by stalwarts of Israel in legacy media, who
have spent the time since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza
discrediting any scholarship, concept, or idea that could challenge
the legitimacy of the state. _The Atlantic _has put itself forward as
the leading platform for such efforts, publishing, in addition to
Kirsch’s essay, a jeremiad
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“against guilty history” by former George W. Bush speechwriter
David Frum, in which he argues that “_settler colonial_ should be a
description, not an insult,” and whines that contemporary citizens
of settler states “owe honor to those who built and secured” their
societies; and a piece
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by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a pop historian of Russia, decrying the
“dangerous and false” conception of Israel as an
“imperialist-colonialist” entity and disparaging student
protesters as the political heirs of “the leftist intellectuals who
supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace
activists who excused Hitler.” Such anti-intellectual pablum has
also liberally graced the pages of other storied outlets. In _The New
York Times_, France correspondent Roger Cohen similarly deplored
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the fact that “‘colonial’ is enjoying a field day . . . as an
insult, or line of attack,” arguing that in the case of Israel,
“the ‘colonizer’ label fails in more ways than it succeeds.”
Kirsch himself, writing
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in _The Wall Street Journal_, sought to nullify even more terminology,
pleading for “retiring” the term “genocide” because it has
become “a political flashpoint.”

 

Establishment media’s comprehensive disavowal of reams of serious
scholarly work is in part a rearguard action to defend Israel and its
“right” to use unconstrained violence. But there is also something
else at play: Kirsch’s book can be understood as an aggrieved
reaction against an undeniable, ongoing shift concerning what ideas
get taken seriously, both in the halls of academe and in the public
square. Even his methodological carelessness conveys a sense of
entitlement to continue setting the terms of debate. By demonizing any
scholarly concept that might have normative implications—and thus
function as a call to action—as illegitimate “ideology,” Kirsch
effectively advocates for a sterile form of knowledge production, in
which thinking and writing are hermetically sealed off from affecting
the real world.

O_N SETTLER COLONIALISM_’S fundamental unseriousness is evident from
its earliest pages. The first four chapters, a flimsy overview of
settler colonialism in Africa and the Americas, are rife with
misrepresentations, decontextualized arguments, and willful omissions.
Kirsch cannot hide his obvious frustration with the demands that this
field of historical scholarship exerts on the present. He accuses the
late scholar Patrick Wolfe and other “Euro-American do-gooders” in
settler colonial studies of coming up with a concept that functions as
a “black armband,” requiring the public “to be forever in
mourning for the crimes of the past.” And while he acknowledges that
casting off the yoke of settler colonialism in wars of liberation led
to the establishment of independent national states in places like
Rhodesia and Algeria, he dismisses the idea that such struggles could
remain relevant now; even if we were to accept that the US and
Australia are settler states, he cautions, since Indigenous
communities today make up only a small percentage of the population in
these countries, a demand for decolonization “indicts the many in
pursuit of justice for the few.” In this context, the anti-colonial
call for “land back,” for example, “cannot be satisfied even in
principle.”

Unsurprisingly, Kirsch caricatures Indigenous mobil­ization in the
Americas and elsewhere, ignoring the breadth and specificity of such
communities’ political activism around issues ranging from
environmental degradation
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and climate change
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to food security
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to reparations
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for historic abuses—including, yes, the return of expropriated lands
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to First Nations. In the process, he takes potshots at scholars of
Native American history, especially the celebrated Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz. He claims that by critiquing “the American way of
life” and its basis in settler institutions, Dunbar-Ortiz is in fact
taking “the progressive route to the same conclusion as some
nativists,” in effect accusing her of xenophobia. Kirsch is
similarly hostile to scholars of the Black American experience. He
dismisses historian Robin D. G. Kelley’s exhortations to “dream of
liberation” as so many “evasive pieties” and scoffs that
historian Gerald Horne, by describing the US as a “hydra-headed
monster,” reductively attributes “all types of social injustice”
to “a single source.” Aside from the fact that, contra Kirsch’s
framing, neither Kelley nor Horne is a scholar of settler colonial
studies, his stripped-of-context sneering at deeply researched works
of history amounts to boorish anti-intellectualism styled as
profundity.

Throughout, Kirsch insinuates that the concept of settler colonialism
should be dismissed based on its recency—while ignoring its actual,
extensive history. Academic scholarship on settler colonialism has
indeed proliferated in the past three decades, but it draws on a much
deeper archive: The terms “settler” and “colonist” were
already in use well before the dawn of the 20th century, and the
specific anglophone phrasing of “settler colonialism” and its
proximate term “settler regime” can be traced to the 1960s, when
anti-colonial movements’ diagnosis of what ailed them was translated
into English. Kirsch himself gestures toward Albert Memmi’s and
Frantz Fanon’s writings on colonialism, which addressed settler
regimes as far back as 1957 and 1961. He quotes Memmi’s remark that
“the leftist finds in the struggle of the colonized, which he
supports a priori, neither the traditional means nor the final aims of
that left wing to which he belongs,” interpreting this to affirm his
own belief that the Western left can only champion decolonization by
swallowing a degree of “cognitive dissonance.” Absurdly, he
compares Memmi’s experience as a Jew in Tunisia’s Muslim-led
liberation movement to the supposed predicament of queer Americans who
support a Palestinian liberation movement led by Hamas. Kirsch
conveniently leaves out not only Memmi’s searing criticism of
settler regimes, but two crucial elements of the passage in question:
He glosses over the fact that Memmi is specifically talking about the
left-wing colonizer (think regular _Haaretz_ readers in Israel), a
figure Memmi excoriates elsewhere, and ignores Memmi’s pronouncement
that “the leftist does not always clearly understand the immediate
social content of the struggle of nationalistic colonized peoples,”
a line that positions anti-colonial contention as a necessary, even
inevitable, form of global class struggle. Kirsch’s treatment of
Fanon’s extraordinary polemic about Algerian decolonization, _The
Wretched of the Earth_, is even more risible. He finds it wanting when
set alongside philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface, writing that
“there is a great difference between Fanon’s bloody knives and
Sartre’s bloody scalpel”—presumably because the former was a
Black anti-colonial revolutionary, and the latter a European Zionist.

The colonized peoples applying the framework of settler colonialism to
their own struggles in the mid-20th century included Palestinians,
though you would not know it from reading Kirsch’s book, which does
not include any Palestinian writing published before 2018. As
historian of left-wing Zionism Areej Sabbagh-Khoury writes in
_Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the
Palestinian Nakba_, “The interpretative framework of settler
colonialism for analyzing the conflict between Zionists and
Palestinians consolidated among Palestinian intellectuals in the 1960s
and 1970s, years before this term took hold in international academic
discussions.” She cites book after book written in Arabic and
English by Palestinians from 1965 onwards. Kirsch does not include
even a single reference to Edward Said—a telling absence, given that
Said introduced the Palestinian critique of settler colonialism to the
anglophone intellectual milieu in the ’70s.

 

The polemical throat-clearing of the first half of the book sets the
stage for Kirsch’s attack, in the final three chapters, on the
application of the settler colonial framework to Israel. By this
point, Kirsch has already defined the concept as relevant only where a
country is “governed by a mother country” (as in Algeria) or has a
“settler class ruling over a native population” (as in South
Africa), and has argued that Israel does not fit the mold, since it
has, according to him, neither a mother country nor a ruling class of
settlers. On the first point, _On Settler Colonialism _does not—and
cannot—adequately address the paradox that Israel has relied
throughout its history on a succession of imperial sponsors, including
first the United Kingdom, then France, and then, since 1967, the US,
which has seen the state as a reliable gendarme in the region. On the
second point, Kirsch argues that Israeli Jews were all refugees,
escaping tsarist pogroms in Eastern Europe, the Shoah enacted by the
Nazis, persecution in nationalist Arab states after 1948, and finally,
discrimination in the former Soviet Union. Yet the contention that
refugees cannot constitute a ruling class ignores the many contexts,
across hundreds of years of history, in which it was precisely the
people oppressed or marginalized in their home countries—religious
radicals, convicts, revolutionaries, hungry working classes—who
became settlers in the colonies.

Kirsch attempts to cover this analytical muddiness with a barrage of
_all _the familiar clichés. Israel cannot be an example of settler
colonialism because Jewish settlers never replaced Palestinians: The
Palestinian population—horror of horrors—quintupled in the first
75 years after the establishment of Israel. Israel cannot be
“decolonized” because it was never a colonizer, but rather, as a
country of refugees, the paradigmatic eternal victim. There is no
Palestinian state because Palestinians are rejectionists. Plus, no one
in the world is really Indigenous, and if they claim to be, they’re
being “irrational,” because we have all moved from one place to
another. And oh, look, you’re ignoring the brutality of Mao Zedong
and the Aztec and Inca Empires! Yes, seriously.

This palimpsest of misinformation serves Kirsch’s effort to convince
readers that there is no possible just resolution to Israel’s
colonization of Palestine. A two-state solution—the path Kirsch has
called
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“the only morally worthy solution that I could
imagine”—ultimately will not work, he is sorry to say, nor will a
“de-Zionization” of Israel to establish one equal state for all
its citizens, because what the conniving Arabs really want in the last
analysis is simply to kill the Jews. This, for Kirsch, is what is
meant by calls to decolonize Palestine “between the river and the
sea.” Indeed, he claims that the “October 7 massacre was a
foretaste of exactly what being ‘driven into the sea’ would mean
for Israel’s Jews”—implying that it is Palestinians committing
genocide against Israel, not the other way around.

Here and elsewhere, to read Kirsch’s book is to go through a mirror
darkly, into a world in which the aggressors are the people who have
been expelled from their homes, dispossessed, imprisoned, and murdered
by the hundreds of thousands—subjected to torture, weapons
experimentation, and starkly asymmetrical warfare. Kirsch’s
commitment to Zionism, his sense of perpetual victimhood, is so
complete that it draws a veil over reality. At the outset, Kirsch
promises to conclude the book with “an alternative way of thinking
about historical injustice that is both more truthful and more
conducive to a better future.” Reading and rereading the final
chapter, I was astonished to find that the view he puts forward is,
essentially, Revisionist Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s
“iron wall” proposition—which famously argued that the security
of the Zionist project depended upon a Palestinian defeat so complete
that the Indigenous people would crawl on their knees to the
negotiation table and willingly vacate their rights. This thesis was
“regarded by mainstream Zionists at the time as brutally
pessimistic,” Kirsch tells us. Yet in his own opinion, “the
intractability of the conflict has vindicated Jabotinsky’s view.”

 

THE BEST CORRECTIVE to Kirsch’s attempt to dismiss the concept of
settler colonialism as a shallow fad is a substantive discussion of
the actual historical process—especially the colonization of
Palestine, as understood from the vantage of its victims. While some
colonial systems depended on the exploitation of local labor
(sometimes via local intermediaries), the term “settler
colonialism” refers specifically to those colonies where, as
historian George Fredrickson wrote in _The Arrogance of Race_,
settlers “exterminated or pushed aside the indigenous peoples” and
“developed an economy based on white labor.” (In practice, this
meant developing settler workers’ skills and lifting their standard
of living while de-developing and de-skilling the remaining Indigenous
workers, whose labor the colony continued to mine.) For European
powers, settler colonialism solved two problems at once, feeding the
insatiable need for labor to exploit the colonies’ natural resources
and ridding the metropole of undesired or troublesome populations. As
Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, reportedly told journalist W.T.
Stead,

In order to keep your forty millions here from eating each other for
lack of other victuals, we beyond the seas must keep open as much of
the surface of this planet as we can for the overflow of your
population to inhabit, and to create markets where you can dispose of
the produce of your factories and your mines . . . If you have not
to be cannibals, you have got to be imperialists.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, a number of Spanish moriscos and
conversos moved to the nation’s colonies in the Caribbean and South
and Central America; in the 17th and 18th centuries, religious
nonconformists and radicals were induced to leave Britain and the
Netherlands for the Caribbean, North America, and South Africa; and in
the 18th and 19th centuries, convicts were transported to Australia,
while the increasingly assertive European working classes were
directed toward Algeria, Rhodesia, and elsewhere in the antipodes.

Against the backdrop of this long history, the peculiarity of Israeli
settler colonialism is its anachronism; the declaration of the
founding of the state came at the very moment when European colonies
in Asia and Africa were clamoring for independence. But Israel has
followed the same blueprint as its predecessors. Indeed, Jewish
settlement in Palestine, which began in the latter half of the 19th
century, was initially modeled on European settlers’ search for El
Dorado in Southern Africa, Hawaii, and the North American Pacific
Coast. Edmond de Rothschild, a major supporter of white settlement in
Southern Africa, also funded that first wave of Zionist colonization
and sponsored French Algerian viticulture experts to advise Zionists
settlers on developing vineyards in Palestine. Though those early
Zionist settlements floundered—the new arrivals lacked experience
farming in semi-arid ecosystems, and their efforts bore little fruit,
as sociologist Gershon Shafir has shown in his classic account, _Land,
Labor and the Origins of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,
1882–1914_—the Zionist movement soon improved its position by
throwing in its lot with a far more experienced colonizer: the British
empire, which, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promised Zionists a
state in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine.

For the British, this alliance served to establish a friendly settler
population in a strategic locale, “a xxxxxx to the British position
in Egypt and an overland link with the East,”as George Antonius, a
Cambridge-educated Arab civil servant in Jerusalem, argued in his
magisterial 1938 account of Arab nationalism, _The Arab Awakening_.
Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, had promoted his cause
in much the same way in 1896, arguing that for Europe, a Zionist state
“should form a new outpost against Asiatic barbarism and a guard of
honor to hold intact the sacred shrines of the Christians.”
Herzl’s imagined state would thus fulfill a dual function shared by
settler colonies everywhere: The British saw Kenya and Rhodesia not
only as founts of coveted natural resources, but as strategic
beachheads in East and Southern Africa, while the French viewed their
colony in Algeria as an important base on the Mediterranean, where the
Muslim throngs were held at bay beyond Fortress Europe.

To maintain themselves as outposts of “civilized” Europe, settler
colonies constructed strict systems of racial control, anchored in the
punishing labor hierarchies that rendered the colonies immensely
profitable. South Africa’s system of apartheid supplied its
all-important mining industry with a steady stream of surveilled,
monitored, and coerced African labor, while the advantages enjoyed by
the pied-noir European settlers in Algeria underwrote their fealty to
the colonial order. Similar structures of hierarchy extended to
Palestine, where the British Mandatory powers cultivated Zionist
settlement through preferential treatment of Jewish capital and labor.
While the British advocated for an empire of free trade elsewhere, in
Palestine they encouraged tariffs to grow Jewish businesses. Zionist
institutions were given monopolies over public works, including the
crucial electricity sector, whose hydroelectric components also
facilitated expropriation of fertile lands adjacent to river basins,
as Fredrik Meiton meticulously documents in _Electrical Palestine:
Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation_. The Yishuv, the Jewish
settler community in Palestine, spoke of its aims not only in terms of
the “conquest of land,” but also the “conquest of labor,”
which, Shafir writes, “aimed at the displacement of Arab workers by
Jewish workers in all branches and skill levels.” Zionist political
institutions such as the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor in
the Land of Israel, guaranteed jobs for new Jewish migrants and
created a racialized wage regime whereby unionized Jewish workers
could earn as much as four times more than Arab workers—in other
words, a system of apartheid.

 

Thus, when Palestinians revolted against the expropriation of their
lands from 1936 to 1939, they were also rebelling against the
“dismissal of Palestinian Arab workers from firms and projects
controlled by Jewish capital,” as Palestinian thinker and militant
Ghassan Kanafani wrote shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in
1972. Contemporaneous sources bear this out; when the British set up a
commission of inquiry into the grievances of the Indigenous
population, George Mansour, who had been the Secretary of the Arab
Workers Society and active in the general strike of 1936, provided an
acute analysis of the conquest of labor’s practical impact on
Palestinian workers: “As the [British Mandatory] Government, which
controls the national funds of the Arabs, does not provide them with
labour saving devices, they remain working in primitive conditions,
while the Jewish immigrants who have supplanted them receive equipment
and training which enables them to improve their financial and
technical position.” (Mansour’s testimony, published in 1937 as a
booklet titled _The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate_, remains
an important source for historians and was excerpted in a 2012
compendium on Zionist settler colonialism by Palestinian scholars Omar
Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour.)

In Palestine in the ’30s, as in colonies everywhere, the settler
regime relied on coercive force to keep the Indigenous population in
line. In the Mandatory period, the Jewish settlers in Palestine were
integrated into the coercive systems of rule deployed by the British:
The Yishuv members of the British Palestine Police received training
amid the British subjugation of the ’30s revolt, and many future
officers of the Israeli military, some of whom went on to become prime
ministers of Israel, served in the British army during World War II.
To this day, some of Israel’s most repressive counterinsurgency
practices [[link removed]]—the use of
separation walls, human shields, torture in interrogation, punitive
displacement and expulsions, racialized pass systems, home
demolitions, collective punishment, and administrative detention,
among others—are a direct inheritance from the British, who had
perfected these methods in other colonial settings.

Ultimately, coercive force facilitated not only the conquest of labor
but, even more significantly, that of land. On the eve of the
establishment of the State of Israel, the Yishuv held only 7% of the
Palestinian land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
But through the systematic mass expulsion of the Nakba, this 7% became
77%, and Israel achieved a modicum of demographic superiority within
its new borders. Plans for the “transfer” of the Indigenous
population had long been a significant part of Zionist ideology, as
Nur Masalha explores in _Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of
“Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948_. In
practice, this entailed death marches from cities like Lydd (Lod),
rapes and massacres in towns like Deir Yassin (where this brutality
was intended in part to terrorize others into leaving), and
Palestinians being literally pushed into the sea at the harbor in
Haifa, along with countless other atrocities. Much of this violence
was captured in oral histories collected in Nafez Nazzal’s _The
Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1948 _(1978) and Rosemary Sayigh’s
_The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries _(1979)—both
published long before Israeli “New Historians” were given access
to the state archives that confirmed these accounts.

The very history of Israeli settler colonialism, in other words,
fatally undercuts Kirsch’s protestations that the concept amounts to
newfangled jargon, incorrectly applied. So, too, does the fact that in
the first decades of the Israeli state’s existence, Palestinian
thinkers were already dissecting its colonial character. Among the
earliest and most astute analyses was Fayez Sayegh’s 1965 pamphlet,
_Zionist Colonialism in Palestine_. In a chapter titled “The
Character of the Zionist Settler-State,” Sayegh enumerates three
features of the Israeli settler colonial regime: “(1) its racial
complexion and racist conduct pattern; (2) its addiction to violence;
and (3) its expansionist stance.” By then, the state had erected new
racialized systems of law and labor, instituting martial law over the
Palestinians who remained within the 1949 armistice borders in order
to control their movements and access to work. Within a few years, the
precise contours of Israeli settler rule had shifted, with the 1967
War leading to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem,
Sinai, and the Golan Heights. If, before then, Palestinian citizens of
Israel had made up less than a quarter of the state’s population of
2.7 million, now an additional 1 million Palestinians came under its
control. The measures Israel had deployed against Palestinians inside
its borders were extended and intensified to deal with this new
population. This period saw analyses that put Israel in comparative
context alongside its settler colonial peers, such as George
Jabbour’s 1970 book, _Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the
Middle East_, which illuminates parallels in the legal codes at work
in Israel, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia.

It wasn’t only Arab and Palestinian scholars who recognized these
continuities between settler states. In 1961, South African Prime
Minister Hendrik Verwoerd declared that Zionists “took Israel away
from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years.
In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid
state.” Verwoerd, like Jabotinsky, was not coy about might making
right. Kirsch’s circumlocutions essentially land in the same place:
Ultimately, Palestinian lives matter far less than Zionist claims to
national self-determination.

 

AMONG THE MANY CALUMNIES that fill Kirsch’s petty book is an attack
on Patrick Wolfe’s now-famous dictum that settler-colonial
“invasion is a structure, not an event”—an observation that
speaks to the continuation of Israel’s settler colonial violence in
Palestine and its fundamental importance to the character of the
state. Kirsch dismisses this insight as “a new syllogism: if
settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing
structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps
everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also
genocidal.” Kirsch intends for readers to scoff along with him at
the supposed hyperbole. But surveying the wreckage left by Israeli
violence across the Middle East, it is hard to disagree.

Every day, as I write this, settlers with forged deeds are expelling
Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and Hebron from the homes
their families have owned for centuries. Israel is forcing its
Palestinian Bedouin citizens from their villages in the Naqab (Negev)
desert in order to expand its military free-fire zone there. The state
is continuing to expropriate Palestinian lands in the Triangle and the
Galilee, and to privatize the lands already acquired through conquest
in 1948. Palestinian citizens of Israel, long subject to far more
restrictive and arbitrary laws and regulations than Jewish citizens,
are now enduring even more vicious repression. A system of labor
apartheid that saw Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza working
low-wage jobs inside Israel has been hobbled as a result of checkpoint
closures, and Israeli policymakers are frantically scrambling to
replace these workers with migrants from India, who suffer under
kafala-like systems of control. In the West Bank, settlements are
expanding every day; the area inhabited by Palestinians is divided
into a discontinuous, highly surveilled archipelago, riddled with
apartheid roads and permanent and “flying” checkpoints. Jenin
refugee camp, regularly subjected to batterings, now lies in ruins.
The Golan Heights, once a supposed buffer zone between Israel and
Syria, have been annexed to Israel. Israel’s virulent settlers,
encouraged by their fascist leadership’s power in the government,
are establishing “facts on the ground” on Syria’s Mount Hermon
and in the rich river basins of the Yarmouk River and the occupied
“buffer zones” of Lebanon.

And in Gaza, the settler colonial practice of expulsion has now
culminated in extermination. Israel’s genocidal violence has
transformed an area populated by some two million people—already
living under conditions of extreme control and subjected to bouts of
colossal violence—into a vast free-fire zone, covered in mass graves
and 42 million tons of rubble that is itself a mass grave of another
kind. Gaza is filled with more child amputees than have been seen in
any other war and with people dying from starvation and disease, in
numbers that surely exceed 150,000 souls
[[link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1750120586917107&usg=AOvVaw1atAmigXmRKBEBNSQocaMv].
The life expectancy of Palestinians in Gaza is now 34.9 years
[[link removed](24)02810-1/abstract],
about half of what it was before Israel’s genocidal assault.

You could not ask for a clearer demonstration of the truth of
Wolfe’s articulation. His aphorism succinctly captures the idea that
a nation founded on what he elsewhere calls settler colonialism’s
“logic of elimination” will continue to operate by that same
logic. And indeed, this is precisely what we see today, as the
state’s genocidal underpinnings find their fullest and most terrible
expression yet. Kirsch’s telling parenthetical about “everyone”
being tarred as murderous, which accords with his guiding principle
that the framework of settler colonialism was developed to unfairly
besmirch individuals and societies, reveals that his primary concern
is that those who stand with Israel will be branded genocidaires. But
while there is plenty of blame to go around—from the soldiers who
have gleefully enacted atrocities, to the Israelis who have cheered
them on, to Zionists the world over who have called for Israel to
“finish the job” and the imperial sponsor that has armed them to
do so—Kirsch’s rickety reductio ad absurdum entirely misses the
core of Wolfe’s claim, and of settler colonial studies as a whole.
The idea, in the end, is to understand and indict the entire structure
that has produced this ongoing, catastrophic violence, and to finally
undo it. For Kirsch, however, it seems the point is not to change the
world, but only to misinterpret it.

* Israel
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* settler colonialism
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* European colonialism
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* History
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