What is a settler colonialist anyway?
Speaking for YIVO, writer Adam Kirsch explains the term and how it’s used again Israel
Of course, the first earthquake is the worst. That’s when the tectonic plates that hold our world together somehow slip and the world shakes.
The aftershocks generally are milder, but still they can be damaging, and they’re frightening. They’re a sign that the earth has not yet settled into a relationship with itself, and that the ground beneath our feet, which we’ve always assumed is firm, really isn’t.
If the unthinkable brutality and inhumanity of October 7 — the murders and rapes and tortures and kidnappings — was the first earthquake, the big one, then the sudden refusal to see Hamas’s victims as victims and Hamas as anything but heroic was a significant aftershock.
Adam Kirsch, a 47-year-old polymath who is an essayist, journalist, poet, literary critic, writer at the Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal’s features editor, wrote his newish book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice,” in shocked response to the reaction, particularly in parts of the academic world in which he is at home — he graduated from Harvard and has taught at Columbia — to October 7.
He will talk about the book, which was published in August, and its ideas, on Zoom, for YIVO Institute of Jewish Research on Wednesday, January 15. (See below.)
The response to Hamas — the idea, expressed in memes and on signs at marches, that the terrorist group actually is a band of the oppressed, finally hitting back at its oppressors — was both profoundly shocking to Mr. Kirsch, and then, when he thought about it, unsurprising. “Settler colonialism is an academic idea that has been used in academia for 15, 20 years, and had become pretty important as a way to understand the world,” he said. “My goal in this book is to see how it has crossed into the real world.”
Settler colonialism is the idea that the countries in which the academics who work with the phrase are most interested — the United States, Canada, and Australia chief among them, and to a lesser extent African countries, including most prominently South Africa and South American states — were settled by Europeans, who displaced, killed, or otherwise replaced the indigenous peoples who lived there.
It is an original sin, as inherent and undeniable a characteristic as hands and feet, lungs and heart. Just as the Puritans believed that Adam’s fall meant that everyone born since Adam was inherently sinful, so too, according to settler colonial theorists, is any non-indigenous American, Canadian, or Australian. It doesn’t matter if you are descended from Africans transported into slavery, or Chinese immigrants here to build the railroads, or Jews escaping the pogroms or the Holocaust. It’s still your fault, according to settler colonialist theorists.
You can atone for that original sin, Mr. Kirsch said, through “introspection, examining your conscience, trying to be a better person. You try to shrink yourself.”
You also can try to atone, at least in a small way, by using land acknowledgements. Montclair State University has one:
“We respectfully acknowledge that Montclair State University occupies land in Lenapehoking, the traditional and expropriated territory of the Lenape. As a state institution, we recognize and support the sovereignty of New Jersey’s three state-recognized tribes: the Ramapough Lenape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, and Powhatan Renape nations.
“We recognize the sovereign nations of the Lenape diaspora elsewhere in North America, as well as other Indigenous individuals and communities now residing in New Jersey.
“By offering this land acknowledgement, we commit to addressing the historical legacies of Indigenous dispossession and dismantling practices of erasure that persist today.
“We recognize the resilience and persistence of contemporary Indigenous communities and their role in educating all of us about justice, equity, and the stewardship of the land throughout the generations.”
Rutgers and Princeton have similar acknowledgments; New Jersey sits mainly on what once was Lenape land.
(One of the flaws of settler colonialism is a lack of clarity about when it begins. The Lenape were not the first people in the state. And the history of, say, Europe is the history of tribes coming from elsewhere, battling, killing, or enslaving the people who lived in the places they invaded, and then taking it over, gradually becoming native to those places. But the narrative has to start somewhere.)
A problem with settler colonialism, however, is that there is no way to fix it. It is not possible to expel all Americans save the descendants of Native Americans. Where would we all go?
Mr. Kirsch explains settler colonialism; he quotes academic writing extensively and explains it clearly. His writing — lucid, straightforward, and smart — contrasts with the word salad he explicates.
But then there’s Israel.
Israel, according to settler colonialist theorists, is a perfect example of
outsiders coming into a land, displacing its indigenous population, and taking over. All Jews are Europeans, all are foreign to the land, and all should go back to where they came from, according to a vastly oversimplified version of the theory.
What once was an academic theory — that Israel was colonized by people who do not belong there, that they should leave, and Palestine should be free, from the river to the sea, has gone from a borderline belief to a nearly mainstream cause, at least in some places.
That’s partly possible, Mr. Kirsch said, because Israel is so small. It’s not likely that it can be overthrown and its people dispersed, but it’s not impossible, as it would be in, say, the United States.
He doesn’t concentrate on antisemitism as much as on the opportunity Israel poses to its detractors, although he does say that “Jews have been scapegoats, in different ways at different times,” and now, in particular, the goal is to disperse them to die in the wilderness, sharing the destiny of the biblical model. “I think that people who call for the decolonization of Israel usually say that they don’t want to kill them, but I think it’s safe to say that that’s what they’re pointing toward,” Mr. Kirsch said.
He does not downplay the terrible situation the Palestinians are in, and the paradox posed by two mutually exclusive self-understandings.
“From the point of Zionism, Jews are not European settlers who came to colonize land that never belonged to them,” he said. “They’re the original inhabitants of the land of Israel, coming back to reclaim their ancestral homeland. They’re the indigenous people, so to call them settler colonists is to make a big mistake.
“On the other hand, from the point of view of Arabs living in Palestine in the 20th century, it was those outsiders who gradually created the state in which Arabs in the West Bank, at least, are disenfranchised and oppressed. And both of those things are true.
“I think it was true that Israel is a blessing and needed to be created. And I definitely describe myself as a Zionist. But it’s also true that Palestinian Arabs have suffered from the creation of Israel.
“The question is, how can you find a way to hear both of those stories? That’s really the hardest thing — it’s very difficult, maybe virtually impossible.”
But both peoples exist, and on the same small piece of land.
Mr. Kirsch sees the future as grim but not hopeless.
We cannot go back and undo the wrongs that were done to us — to the Jews, to the Arabs, to the Native Americans, to the Australian Aboriginals, to the Canadian First Peoples; for that matter, to the Angles and Saxons of early Britain. History, like life, moves in only one direction. Forward.
In his book, he talks about a discussion in the Talmud about lost and stolen objects. When something is stolen, sold to a merchant, and then sold to a customer, who knows nothing of its provenance, and years pass, to whom should it belong? The original owner should be paid for it, but does the customer who bought it good faith have to give it back? No, we’re told. If the original owner has despaired of getting it back, that despair marks a change of status.
Maybe that’s true of land as well.
Despair “is what the law offers instead of justice, knowing that perfect justice often cannot be achieved,” Mr. Kirsch writes. “And what is true of individuals and their possessions is infinitely more so of nations and their histories.” Israel cannot be restored to the Jews, who lived there in their own state until the Romans expelled them, and also to the Palestinian Arabs who lived there from well before 1948, when Israel was declared. Both histories are true, but they clash.
Understanding that, there might be some way — there must be some way — to acknowledge the hurt and restore the dignity of both sides, because there is no other way to live. And life, like history, moves in one direction. Forward.
Who: Adam Kirsch
What: Talks about his book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice”
When: On Wednesday, January 15, at 1 p.m.
Where: On Zoom
For whom: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
How much: It’s free but
To register: It’s necessary to register; go to yivo.org, click on “Events,” and then “On Settler Colonialism.”
For more information: yivo.org or (212) 246-6080
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