Book review of Adam Kirsch's On Settler Colonialism

 

Book review

On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. By Adam Kirsch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. 142 pages.

Reviewed by Hendrik van der Breggen

 

Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism should be required reading in colleges and universities across Canada and the U.S. For Kirsch, an American Jew who is a poet, literary critic, and editor at Wall Street Journal (Weekend Review section), the impetus for writing his book was the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. The Hamas attack was disturbingly evil, to say the least. But Kirsch was also disturbed—rightly so—by the “enthusiasm for violence against Israeli civilians” displayed by many Western academics (students and professors) and by the fact that “more than half of college-age Americans seem to believe that it would be justified for Palestinians to commit a genocide of Israeli Jews.” (Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism, pages 4 & 1; hereafter references to Kirsch’s book will simply be the letter K.) Clearly, this deep hatred for Israel and Jews shows something has gone wrong in Western higher education. Kirsch’s book is an attempt to set things right.

Critical theories in general

Before I go on with Kirsch’s book, a few words about so-called critical theories may be appropriate, for the sake of getting our intellectual bearings (roughly). Critical theories are popular in the present academic scene. These theories attempt to provide an overall background understanding or diagnosis of what is the main problem with the world. Typically on such theories, a more powerful group is seen as an oppressor and a less powerful group is seen as oppressed. Often there is some very real injustice that the theories pick up on, but then they run amok in diagnosing every evil in terms of the theory and in providing solutions. Some critical theories see economic classes as the root of all evil. Think of Marx’s idea of economic class division and conflict. On this view social problems arise because the powerful rich (capitalists) oppress the poor (the workers). The solution is to create a classless society with communal ownership of factories and farms, and to achieve this goal may require a violent revolution. History shows such solutions tend to fail dismally and disastrously (think of the former Soviet Union). Another critical theory—critical race theory—sees racism as the root of all evil. On this view most problems arise because whites (usually heterosexual males of European descent) oppress non-whites (everyone else). The solution is to create a society in which diversity, equity, and inclusion reign. Recent history has shown—and is showing—that such a solution tends to create a mess.[1]

Settler colonialism

Enter the ideology of settler colonialism—and Kirsch’s book.

According to Kirsch, settler colonialism is a species of critical theory which sees the major root of all evil as stemming from a country’s origin, more specifically, an origin having to do with conquest and settlement. Examples of such countries, on this view, are the U.S., Australia, and Canada. Europeans are the oppressing colonizers, and indigenous peoples are the oppressed victims. A more recent example, according to settler colonialism, is Israel and its oppression of native Palestinians. (Reminder: Israel became a state in 1948, i.e., much later than America, Australia, and Canada.) On settler colonialism, the country’s origin is a sin because it is founded in genocide, understood broadly to include not only the killing of a native people but also their physical transfer and/or their cultural assimilation. Moreover, this sin is ongoing, that is, it’s not merely a one-off event but a “structure.” The conquerors continue their conquering by promoting “settler ways of being.” (K 7, 58) Thus, on settler colonialism, even if a citizen is a mere descendent of a settler or has immigrated to the settlement-born country, whether the citizen is white, black, or whatever, that citizen is a settler and therefore complicit in guilt. Even though the original settlers may be long gone, settler ways of being continue to impinge unjustly on the native inhabitants. The original invasion of long ago continues. The solution: “deconstruct the social order founded by settler colonialism.” (K 58) More specifically, in the words of two settler colonial theorists, reported by Kirsch: “[this] requires the abolition of land as property and uphold[ing] the sovereignty of Native land and people” and “repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations.” (K 30)  The goal is to return the land to “the pristine nature that existed before Europeans arrived.” (K 54) And, because of the violent founding of the country, violent resistance may be appropriate—even virtuous.

Kirsch argues that the people who hold to settler colonialism as an ideology tend to understand and criticize present problems a priori primarily on the basis of that ideology. Such problems range “from selfishness to strip mining to the scientific method.” (K 58)  The ideology is a totalizing interpretive lens, and all history and the goings-on in history are seen through this lens. On this view, bad things today are a legacy of settler colonialism. Bad things today are bad because of a society’s origin via conquest and settlement. Settler colonialism is the original sin.

It turns out that today many Western academics and students view the West in general through the ideological-interpretive lens of settler colonialism (witness the prevalence of “land acknowledgements”) and thus negatively—very negatively.

Kirsch goes on: The settler colonialist ideology gets a grip on people because they are indignant about injustices. And, as Kirsch rightly points out, there are in fact injustices to be indignant about. So far, so good.

But, Kirsch points out, things run amok quickly. It turns out that the ideology of settler colonialism serves as a Procrustean bed in its causal analysis of the injustices and in its attempts to resolve them.[2] There are injustices involved in the history of conquest and settlement, to be sure, and in fact the whole history of the world is rife with conquest and settlement. But the goings-on in the world are much more complex—and so too the possible solutions—than the ideology allows. In effect, settler colonialism serves as an ideological rolling pin (my change of metaphor) that flattens the historical and moral landscape to reflect the ideology rather than letting the actual landscape present its own complex peculiarities (not all of which is bad, as Kirsch rightly also points out).

According to Kirsch, “the actual effect of the ideology of settler colonialism…is to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance.” (K 117–118) Indeed, viewing one’s society now as illegitimate, as the ideology of settler colonialism requires, and thus trying to undo the injustices of the settler colonial past which led up to the present with its inherited and ongoing settler sins, runs, according to Kirsch, into the problem of creating more injustices.

Enter: Israel

Israel is of particular interest to settler colonialist ideologues because, compared to other Western countries, Israel’s inception is much more recent and the Israel-Palestine conflict is ongoing, so serious societal change is, for settler colonial ideologues, a live option. The abstract ideological rubber can more easily meet the reality of the road, so to speak (my words). If one takes Israel’s comparatively-recent inception as unjust, which settler colonial ideologues typically do, and if one also sees such injustice as justification for killing Israelis—as believed by apparently not a few settler colonial ideologues at university campus protests, and as approved by Hamas on anti-Jewish Islamist Jihadist grounds—then the October 7th slaughter in Israel becomes legitimate. Today’s Israeli people are not innocent, according to the ideology. They are bad, and deserve their punishment. And so killing them is a legitimate part of Palestinian “resistance” to the original and ongoing sin of settler colonialism.

Moral problems

On settler colonialism, the end, that is, the undoing of the original genocide of indigenous people perpetrated by settler colonialists, justifies the means to achieve this end, that is, more violence—this time against the settler colonialists. And so such a means is seen as virtuous. But, as Kirsch correctly points out, this is a deep moral problem for settler colonialism. If one hasn’t bought into the ideology of settler colonialism, that is, if one hasn’t ideologically numbed one’s pre-theoretic moral intuitions (my phrase, not Kirsch’s), then October 7—the targeted slaughter (and torture and rape) of civilians, including children, women, and the elderly—is a new injustice.[3] So the alleged virtue of settler colonialism’s ideology results in more conflict, more hatred, more killing of innocents—more moral abominations.

Historical problems

Another problem for settler colonialism when applied to Israel, Kirsch also argues (also rightly), is that the actual history of Israel’s inception—unlike that of the U.S., Australia, and Canada—does not fit the settler-colonial model and thus Israel’s history is forced or flattened by ideologues to fit the ideology. The few pages Kirsch devotes to this historical point are worth the price of the book, it seems to me. The following points from Kirsch deserve to be emphasized here. Unlike the cases of colonial settlers and their settling of the U.S., Australia, and Canada,

• many Jews were indigenous to the land (too);
• for the Jews the land plays a “constitutive and defining” role;
• Jews who immigrated to the land were refugees (often persecuted);
• the Jews were not attracted to the land because of its natural resources;
• there was no mother country for whom the Jews were colonialists;
• Jews did not commit genocide toward the land’s non-Jewish inhabitants.

A shortcoming of Kirsch’s book is that he does not develop the last point about Jews not committing genocide to the land’s non-Jewish inhabitants during Israel’s inception. The view that Jews did commit genocide at Israel’s inception is a highly popular view. But it is false and should be challenged. Kirsch should have set out the evidence for this falsity and put more responsibility/ blame on the Palestinian Arabs. The fact is that in 1947 the Palestinian Arabs started (and later lost) a genocidal war against the Jews, a war that was an attempt by the Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states to bring Hitler’s “final solution” (extermination of Jews) into the region of Palestine. But the Jews refused to be victims (again) and successfully resisted the Nazi-sympathizing Arab oppressors. The 1947–49 war, started by Palestinian Arabs, was the cause of the displacement of many thousands of Palestinian Arabs, often referred to by Arabs as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). Yes, many Arabs, especially those deemed hostile to Israel, were forced out by Israel in 1948. This is truly tragic. But it was war—a war started by the Arabs. And these facts remain: Many Arabs left Israel willingly to get out of harm’s way because a war (to exterminate Jews) was at hand (and these fleeing Arabs planned to return to Israel after Israel was destroyed); many Arabs left Israel because the surrounding Arab nations (wishing to wage genocidal war on the Jews) ordered them to leave to facilitate the war effort (and return later to a Jew-ridden land); many Arabs who were not hostile to Israel stayed in Israel (as citizens of Israel). In other words, the criterion for Arabs being forced out of Israel was not whether they were Arab, but whether they were hostile to Israel. Thus, embedded in the criterion of expulsion is a distinction that shows the Nakba was not genocide, not ethnic cleansing. Hostility, not ethnicity or religion, was the concern. This is a significant distinction that should not be missed (but often is) and it refutes the genocide/ethnic cleansing charge.[4]

Practical problems

Back to Kirsch’s general criticism of settler colonialism: According to Kirsch, using the ideology of settler colonialism to attempt to render justice to the indigenous peoples of the U.S., Australia, and Canada is also problematic in practice in the sense that it fails to address what parts should be returned to which tribe. Moreover, which warring tribe has priority: the most recent conquerors or the previously conquered (and what about the tribes before the previously conquered tribes)? And what should be done with the non-indigenous people now living on the land whose number is huge compared to the remaining indigenous people and whose actions are so far removed from the actions of the original settlers that their responsibility for those actions is tenuous if not near-zero? Attempts to undo the effects of the long and many previous histories of conquest and settlement, much of whose historical records is lost, would result in chaos and additional injustices. Surely.

Talmudic “despair” as a possible way forward

As important as the above insights from Kirsch are—and they are important—here I wish to share briefly what I take to be Kirsch’s perhaps more important insights on how to move forward and get beyond the faulty ideology of settler colonialism.

Kirsch argues that we should acknowledge the sad and terrible truth that the entire history of the world has in fact involved an awful lot of conquest and settlement and that, contrary to what ideologues seem to assume, there is no “pure” previous country or utopia to which to return. (Note from me for the religious: Even the Garden of Eden is guarded by an archangel with a flaming sword to keep us out!) The fact of history is that the conquered of the past were also conquerors in the past. Still, says Kirsch, we should try to deal with past injustices, “recognizing that the wounds we inherit can’t be undone, but perhaps they can be healed, even if they’re guaranteed to leave a scar.” (K 129) How? By looking, as much as we can, at the actual goings-on in history without the pre-judgments of the settler-colonial ideological lens. And by employing the Talmudic concept of “despair.” (The Talmud is a multi-volume compilation of centuries of rabbinic debate about law, philosophy, and biblical interpretation. It is a source of wisdom, whether one is Jewish or not.)

Kirsch quickly adds that the Talmudic concept of “despair” is not justice per se and does not pretend to be. But it is “knowing that perfect justice often cannot be achieved” (K 130), especially in the face of the chaos and greater injustice that would likely ensue if we attempt to seek an impossible-for-humans perfect justice concerning the past. It is to seek goodness, as far as is humanly possible, even though past injustice cannot be undone. We despair of the past, yes, but do not despair of the future.

Kirsch explains well, so I quote him in extenso:

“[I]f what we want is hope for the future—for the possibility of ending conflicts, rather than renewing them; for reconciliation, rather than righteous hatred—then it may be necessary to despair of the past….” (K 128–129)

“A model for this kind of despair can be found in the Talmud’s discussion of the legal status of lost and stolen items. If a person loses a possession or has it stolen, does he remain its legal owner? It might seem obvious that he should: after all, he never agreed to give it up. But suppose a thief stole a cloak and sold it to a merchant, who sold it to a customer. If the garment still belongs to the original owner, then he would have the right to go to the customer and take it back. In remedying the original wrong, however, this would create a new wrong, since the new owner acted in good faith and paid for his purchase…. Now imagine a case involving not just a cloak but homes, land, and political sovereignty, over a span of centuries.…” (K 129)

“A legal system that held out hope of reversing every loss would create more chaos and injustice than it remedied.” (K 130)

“For this reason, Jewish law introduces the concept of ‘despair.’ Under certain circumstances, the law presumes that a person who loses a possession despairs of getting it back and thus relinquishes ownership. The Talmud’s examples include coins lost in a public place, a donkey taken by a customs collector, and a garment stolen by a bandit. A person who despairs is still entitled to monetary compensation and damages, but he or she can no longer demand the return of the original item, and its subsequent chain of title is valid.” (K 130)

Kirsch again: “Is despair justice? No. It is what the law offers instead of justice, knowing that perfect justice often cannot be achieved. And what is true of individuals and their possessions is infinitely more so of nations and their histories. 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.” (K 130)

Ditto for other countries born of conquest and settlement and the many more millions whose only sin was being born in a contested land. Yes, we should honour treaties and provide legitimate compensation as is possible, but we should not demand the humanly impossible and we should not create more injustice.

According to Kirsch, acknowledging this despair and not succumbing to settler colonialism as an ideology permits us to build and “hope for a better future, instead of perpetuating grievances and blood feuds.” (K 131)

I think Kirsch is correct.

 

Notes

1. For additional thought on critical theory, see Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, andIdentity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020). On the mess that has been created in recent history by critical theories, see Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).

2. From Merriam-Webster (on the origin of the term “procrustean bed”): “Procrustes was one of many villains defeated by the Greek hero Theseus. According to Greek mythology, Procrustes was a robber who killed his victims in a most cruel and unusual way. He made them lie on an iron bed and would force them to fit the bed by cutting off the parts that hung off the ends or by stretching those people who were too short. Something Procrustean, therefore, takes no account of individual differences but cruelly and mercilessly makes everything the same. And a ‘procrustean bed’ is a scheme or pattern into which someone or something is arbitrarily forced.” (I add the etymology and definition of “procrustean bed” here because, sadly, I have come to believe that many young people are not aware of the meaning and origin of the term.)

3. Reminder: Hamas targets civilians, whereas Israel does not. Also, for a defence of moral intuitions, see chapter 2 “Moral Philosophy” of my Miracle Reports, Moral Philosophy, and Contemporary Science (PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2004).

4. For my view on Israel’s inception, which complements Kirsch’s view but puts more responsibility/ blame on the Palestinian Arabs for their Nazi-collaborating Islamic Jihadist behaviour, see my Settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing: Two false assumptions about Israel’s inception, APOLOGIA, October 8, 2024.

 

Interviews with Adam Kirsch

In the Spotlight: Adam Kirsch (Jewish Broadcasting Service) (24 minutes)

Settler Colonialism and Drivers of Anti-Israel Sentiment with Eric Kaufmann and Adam Kirsch (Manhattan Institute) (44 minutes)

The Campaign Against 'Settler Colonialism' (Quillette) (30 minutes)

Why Are Jews Called 'Settlers Colonialists' w/ Adam Kirsch (Jewish News Syndicate TV) (42 minutes)

Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, is a retired philosophy professor who lives in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada. Hendrik is author of the 2024 book Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments: Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War, which is available for purchase at Amazon (paperback) or for free here (pdf).