That this is a book deserving of a wide readership among our youngest citizens is demonstrated by some introductory figures. In his first chapter, writing about the Oct. 7 attacks on Israelis, Kirsch notes that “while Americans as a whole supported Israel over Hamas by 81 percent to 19 percent, those aged 18-24 were split fifty-fifty.” He goes on to explain that “Within that age group, 66 percent of respondents agreed that Hamas’s attack was ‘genocidal in nature,’ yet 60 percent also said it ‘can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians’.” As Kirsch starkly states the matter: “more than half of college-age Americans seem to believe that it would be justified for Palestinians to commit a genocide of Israeli Jews.”
For Kirsch, students’ readiness to condone genocide reflects a confusion at the heart of the settler colonial ideology that he traces to a redefinition, if not a wholesale evisceration of our political language. Much of his book attempts to trace this violence towards definitions. In a particularly revealing chapter, he outlines the historical development of the recasting of colonialism from an event into a structural state of being that cannot be superseded or resolved.
A more historically accurate understanding of colonialism would include a taxonomy of various forms. As Kirsch explains, there were those European colonies that were limited to administrative roles, such as India or Vietnam. These colonies were not settled in any meaningful way and when decolonization occurred throughout the 20th century, the European administrators simply left. Other colonies, such as Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa present a somewhat different picture. In these, European settlers did colonize the territories but were always a minority among the indigenous populations who eventually were able to overtake and displace the minority Europeans.
And then we come to the true target of settler colonialism’s ire: the nations of the Anglosphere, especially Australia, Canada, and the United States. Unlike the European colonies of the 19th century, these were each founded and fully settled in the first wave of European migration beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese in the late 15th and 16th centuries, and carrying on with the Dutch, French, and English in the 17th and 18th centuries. The key difference here is that, unlike the recent settlers in Rhodesia or Algeria, most Canadians, Americans, and Australians no longer have a country of origin to which they might return.
A central tenet of the ideology’s mindset is that settler colonialism is an ongoing state, and while it originated with the physical displacement of the indigenous population, colonialism continues through structures, language, and attitudes that perpetuate and prolong the colonial violence. As its proponents argue, colonialism cannot be superseded or ended: It is an endless struggle to be engaged with no final resolution.
Kirsch provides some useful insights into this interminable state of affairs. First, he identifies a similarity between the Puritan understanding of original sin and the settler colonialist’s obsession with an original and ongoing crime. Of course, Puritans could look forward to the workings of eternal grace, while the settler colonialist has no such transformative hope. As Kirsch makes clear, “The goal is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist.” Hewing to its postmodernist roots, settler colonialism seeks only to destabilize social bonds through a recasting of narratives rather than implement concrete policies that might produce tangible benefits for indigenous populations. There is only an unending presence, an imperious now that prevents any future reconciliation.
Second, we see the contradiction between settler colonialism’s broad aspirations and its narrow results. One of the great attractions in the settler colonial dogma is that it can incorporate numerous sins in its catalogue of laments against the West. While movements around anti-racism or gender diversity focus primarily on one form of oppression, settler colonialism can incorporate a truly intersectional array of offences.
Blending anti-capitalism with racial, gender, sexual, and anti-rationalist critiques, settler colonial ideology should have a general appeal. However, its extremism undermines its amplitude. To ensure the purity of its doctrine it enforces its strict definition of indigeneity. In the American context, this means that everyone without a “time immemorial” origin is a settler. From the descendant of African-American slaves to the lately arrived Hispanic farm labourer, all are beneficiaries of and contributors to colonialist violence.
And third, settler colonialism is based not in any truly indigenous knowledge or experience but is a rift, an unsettling within the identity of white activists who need to expatiate their guilty through a narrative of self-flagellation. On this matter, Kirsch provides a telling example. It has become common to refer to North America as Turtle Island. As Kirsch points out, this appellation was not universally used by North American tribes or bands but is specific to the Haudenosaunee. That no North American prior to the arrival of Europeans had a conception of the land mass that is North America demonstrates that the generalization of Turtle Island as a concept is part of the narrative effort to counter an essentialized European identity based in capitalism, scientism, and technological rationalism. For Kirsch, this owes as much to European romanticism in the vein of Herder and Fichte as it does indigenous ways of knowing.
Apart from its paucity of usefulness in a public policy sense, settler colonialism runs into a brick wall when it comes to practical implementation. This is where Israel enters the picture. Given the vast difference in numbers between the would-be settler populations of nations such as Canada, Australia, and the United States, and their indigenous citizens, there is no realistic possibility that the settlers in these countries will simply disappear. But in Israel’s case, the unmet hopes of settler colonial ideology might just achieve the actual expulsion of the settler population.
This entails two contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the Jewish population in the Israeli/Palestinian lands is approximately equal to the number of Arab Palestinians living throughout Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. It is conceivable that, as would-be pro-Palestinian protesters chant, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” In other words, that the Jewish Israelis will leave, either through migration or eradication.
It is this possibility that fuels the settler colonialist ideology in its adamant and aggressive demands to wipe Israel from the map. While there is no hope for the dissolution of the United States, Australia, or Canada, it is possible—even if the possibility is remote—that Israelis might be eliminated, that Israel will cease to exist, and Palestinians might retake the land once held by their ancestors.
On the other hand, this also reveals the contradiction that Israel presents. Unlike the nations of the colonial Anglosphere, Israel has not diminished the Palestinian population, nor has it sidelined its own Arab citizens, relegating them to reservations. Instead, the Palestinian population has grown rapidly and taken on a sense of a national identity in response to the existence of Israel as a nation. Israel does not fit the settler colonial mold.
Yet, as Kirsch notes, this is the very reason why another imposing concept must be redefined to fit the settler colonialist’s ideology. Here we are speaking of that most terrible of crimes: genocide. Originally, this term referred to the physical elimination of an entire cultural or racial group. It necessarily entails a violent, bloody, and systematic extermination of a whole people. This is not remotely applicable to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Settler colonial ideology has responded by arguing that genocide can occur even though not a single person is killed. All that is needed is a rather amorphous and unmanifested yet implied intention to spiritually displace a people. It is hard to imagine a less exact and more mendacious use of the term. The great benefit of Kirsch’s short work is to unmask this new “discursive imperialism” in all its vanity.
