The “Settler Colonial” Trap for Israel
A review of Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (Norton, 2024)
This extended review of Adam Kirsch’s book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (Norton, 2024), appeared in Athenaeum Review, Issue 11 (Spring 2025): 66-71. Among the journal’s minor changes to my article was the omission of parenthetical page references to Kirsch’s book. I have retained these page references from my original draft in the copy reprinted here. The footnotes are the same in both versions.
Adam Kirsch’s new book, a powerful critique of the concept of settler colonialism as applied to the history of Israel, could not have arrived at a more timely moment. Kirsch outlines a number of essential points that collectively show the shallowness of viewing the establishment of the state of Israel through the lens of this concept, one that has become ubiquitous on college campuses. Moreover, he demonstrates how the concept has been adopted by pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli activists not for its value as a term of scholarly analysis but rather as a component of a political ideology aimed at undermining Israel’s legitimacy. At a length of a mere 140 small-sized pages, the book’s brevity and lucidity make it readily assignable for undergraduate and graduate courses (and even for high school social studies classes), thus addressing exactly the audience of idealistic, yet naïve and hot-headed students (and teachers) who today are most in need of reading it. Along with these achievements, however, Kirsch’s book exhibits two shortcomings that point in the direction of further work needed to complete the task the author has so forcefully begun.
The term “settler colonialism” emerged in the 1960s and ’70s among academics interested in studying the phenomenon of African and Asian decolonization, a process that unfolded with great rapidity following the end of World War II. Scholars used the term to distinguish between colonies like India and Vietnam, where the European mother country sent few of its own people to settle there, and those like Rhodesia or Algeria, where European settlers came to comprise significant minorities of the population. However, by the 1980s and ’90s the concept had become a pejorative label – really, little more than a slogan – with which to stigmatize the nation of Israel, itself formed during the same era.
As Kirsch points out, almost none of the characteristics common to settler colonies fits the history of modern Israel’s creation. There was no “mother country” which “sent” its Jewish inhabitants to the Ottoman Empire’s Syrian and Sidonian (later, Beirut) provinces or its Jerusalem district (together including the area referred to intermittently as Palestine)1 when the Zionist movement began in the 1870s and ’80s. Jews fled the Russian Empire and other countries of Eastern and later Western Europe as refugees from the persecution of pogroms and then the Holocaust. They came on their own steam, in any way they could muster, though helped by the philanthropy of well-to-do Jews in Europe and the United States. They bought land from Turkish and Arab landowners. These newcomers to the place that had given birth to both Judaism and Christianity, moreover, could make their own justifiable claim to being its indigenous people, a term frequently employed by today’s settler-colonial ideologues in an attempt to draw a sharp distinction between those said to be the original inhabitants of an area and its later colonial invaders. Not only had the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah and then the kingdom of Judea persisted from early in the first millennium BCE until the Romans killed or enslaved and carried off the great majority of the region’s Jews (perhaps about one million in number) in the first and second centuries CE, but Jewish people trickled back and continued to live in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and other Palestinian towns and villages, sometimes in substantial numbers, during the many centuries following the conquest of the area by Arabs and Islam in the seventh century.2
Even when the British endorsed the Zionist project by proclaiming their support for a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, this important decision did not mean that the British would now call all the shots there. The growing Jewish population in Palestine faced off with the British on numerous occasions during the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) over the issue of how many Jewish immigrants would be allowed in. Indeed, the British ultimately turned their back on the Jews in 1939. Were it not for the moral pull, particularly on President Truman and the Americans, exerted by the Holocaust and especially by the plight of more than 100,000 displaced European Jews who had survived the Second World War, the modern nation of Israel might never have come into existence.3
Since Kirsch’s book centers on how the notion of settler colonialism serves a broader ideology, some of the book’s strongest parts go toward identifying that ideology, which turns out to be a species of revolutionary leftism that adopts a particularly uncompromising, almost nihilistic stance. The clue to understanding this outlook resides in the fact that once a country has been labeled a settler colonial society, there are no remedies to ameliorate this oppressive situation short of complete decolonization. Yet, significantly, the ideology began by taking aim at nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, countries in which the earlier inhabitants had been reduced in number – typically, these theorists assert, through genocide – to tiny minorities next to the huge populations of settlers and their descendants, who, of course, no longer think of themselves as settlers or colonists. Since there is no possibility of removing the invaders from these countries, the only outcome for those among the settlers’ descendants who become aware of their nations’ terrible histories is to feel the guilt that comes with having committed an original sin. The current practice, for example, of “land acknowledgments” to Native American groups that once occupied the territory on which a museum or university now sits, offers but a poor substitute for any genuine atonement. “The goal,” Kirsch writes, “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” (34).
Naturally enough, beneath such a deep sense of cultivated alienation often lurks the potential for violence, or at least for the glorification of violence, since few people can sustain a sense of severe personal guilt without experiencing a corresponding desire to do something cathartic to remove that stain from themselves. Enter the case of Israel. Here, to these ideologues, one confronts a fairly recent example of a new nation seemingly formed through the displacement of most of its original inhabitants, and one in which the roughly equal number of Jews and Arab Palestinians (about 7 million each) in the lands of the former British Mandate (Israel, Gaza, and the occupied West Bank) make imaginable the theoretical, if thoroughly unrealistic, possibility of “decolonization.” For leftists of many stripes, from anti-capitalist and antiracist fighters to environmentalists, feminists, and gay rights activists, the Israel-Palestine conflict provides, as Kirsch puts it, “a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract” (85). It was but a short step from accepting this premise to the corollary of numerous groups and individuals on the left cheering on the murderous actions of Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Kirsch is hard-hitting against this ideology. He condemns its all-or-nothing, purist stance toward perceived social injustice, arguing instead for such moderate, reform-minded strategies of amelioration as those adopted in the past by the organizations of the civil rights movement of the 1960s or the National Congress of American Indians from the 1940s up through today. Such groups recognized that everything good and everything bad do not line up neatly on two separate sides in any conflict. Extremist ideologies like that of settler colonialism fail to see that migrations of people and displacement (or partial displacement) of one group by another, whether by force or by assimilation (or, as in the case of the Americas, Kirsch omits to add, principally by the inadvertent spread of disease), have been a common occurrence throughout human history. Naturally, such upheavals in the past were not carried out in ways that would meet today’s standards of human rights and dignity; indeed, brutality and cruelty were more often the rule than the exception. But when revolutionary ideologies have occasionally taken power (as they did in eighteenth-century France and twentieth-century Russia and China), their attempts to radically restart history in the name of utopian ideals only succeeded in producing new atrocities atop the ones they believed they were avenging. Such disastrous ends would surely be the result if the settler-colonial ideologues’ goal of “decolonizing Palestine” were to be put in motion. Hamas on October 7 offered a preview of just such a result.
Given that Kirsch has so plainly – and correctly, it seems to me – identified the settler-colonial misreading of the history of Israel and Palestine with the historic left, it is peculiar that he chooses to end his book with a mostly laudatory treatment of an essay, “On the Concept of History,” written by the German Jewish Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin in 1940 while Benjamin was living in Paris, on the run from the Nazis. What Kirsch likes about this essay is Benjamin’s reliance on the concept of despair to describe what history has meant for the majority of the world’s people. Such a bleak vision of the past could certainly make sense for someone writing in the face of fascism’s successful early conquests in Europe at that moment. But, in truth, the essay itself reveals Benjamin’s outlook to derive less from his immediate circumstances and more from his commitment to what he calls historical materialism, the Marxist diagnosis of history as a record of “barbarism,” a “tradition of oppression,” against which only a decisive, revolutionary break with the past will deliver relief. All attempts to produce slow but steady “progress,” Benjamin writes, are illusory and doomed to failure.4 This is exactly the same extremist stance as that adopted by today’s settler-colonial activists toward the social ills of the United States and Israel, with far less apparent justification than Benjamin’s precarious position in 1940 might have provided.
Kirsch does in the end depart from Benjamin’s maximalist outlook, so why privilege him with such extended treatment in the book’s final chapter? I think Kirsch’s decision to do so stems from a desire to add a religious dimension to his discussion. Benjamin was an unusual thinker of his era in astutely recognizing a religious longing beneath Marxist doctrine, even going so far in his “Concept of History” essay as to call historical materialism a puppet – he meant this as a positive characterization – whose strings were being pulled by theology. He was similarly at home in referring to his hoped-for revolution as the coming of the Messiah, an event he imagined as modeled after past moments of apocalyptic renewal that would wipe away all the despairs of history.5 Kirsch clearly finds Benjamin’s religio-political vision, based on the weighty notion of despair, compelling, but Kirsch rejects it in favor of what he calls a different kind of despair, one linked to a future that can find hope in repairing past wrongs through partial means of improvement. Kirsch believes he can find this second understanding of despair in portions of the Talmud, which, he relates, speak of the despair owners of lost or stolen articles like a garment, a donkey, or some coins, feel of ever recovering their possessions, especially once they have been passed along or resold to new and innocent parties. The Talmud’s ancient rabbis urge the original owners to accept compensation of some other sort for these goods so as not to create new injustices.
The discipline of religious studies has names to apply to these two different visions of despair and redemption: premillennialism and postmillennialism. In the first, there can be no justice (no thousand years of happiness) until after the Messiah has come. In other words, the Messiah must appear before the millennium can begin; all is dark before that apocalyptic moment arrives, delivering its Day of Judgment. In the second, justice (the thousand years of happiness) comes gradually through small steps of improvement, culminating in the Messiah’s return almost as an afterthought or reward. As Kirsch’s entire critique of the settler-colonial ideology makes clear, the author sides with the second of these redemptive visions, entailing a need for human beings to grasp the particulars of perceived social injustice with care and to proceed deliberately toward gradual changes that will produce more good than harm. But it is not evident to me how framing this choice in religious terms, as Kirsch does, helps bring about his admirable goal. If anything, the history of conflict in the Middle East suggests how frequently competing religious authorities have made compromise and small improvements difficult to achieve.
Kirsch’s turn toward religion at the end of his book, not to mention his elevation of Walter Benjamin’s thought, also obscures his earlier identification of the settler-colonial ideology as part of a longstanding leftist political tradition. This tradition owes more to the romantic distortions of psychological alienation from modern, capitalist society, to which intellectuals have so often been susceptible, than to any genuinely religious impulse. The discomfort left-wing intellectuals, often well-to-do themselves, feel from their participation in modern Western societies best explains the ideology’s underlying guilt and the way in which Israel has come to function as a convenient and vulnerable stand-in for these activists’ more powerful home nations.
Instead of leaving readers with a choice between two different religious approaches, I suggest that Kirsch’s work points to the need for a renewed focus on the political and social history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Throughout his study, Kirsch alludes to a number of counter arguments taken from The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020), by Rashid Khalidi, probably the most prominent American historian writing about the conflict from a pro-Palestinian perspective. Yet Kirsch fails sufficiently to rebut these arguments (a lack of precise footnotes doesn’t help his attempts). Two favorable reviewers of Khalidi’s book, both established scholars in the field of Middle Eastern Studies, have called it the best “single book” that they would now recommend both to students and general readers in order to understand the Israel-Palestine dispute.6 His book has also made it onto The New York Times’s weekly best-seller list consistently since October 7, 2023.7 Khalidi’s observations deserve careful evaluation and explicit rebuttal, if only because his book has brought the settler-colonial ideology to countless readers and will continue to do so. There have been several critical reviews of the book, including a strong one by Benny Morris in Jewish Review of Books, but a much greater volume of critical commentary is needed in terms of both scope and influence in order to avoid losing this vital contest of ideas over Israel’s legitimacy as a nation.8
Kirsch states at the outset of his study that he will not be addressing either the conduct of the current war in Gaza – an important subject of its own – or how to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict itself (x). However, toward the end of the book he does rather ambiguously endorse the idea of a future two-state settlement, presumably based roughly on the divisions of 1967 (116). Indeed, this vision offers the only foreseeable way to resolve peacefully a dispute between two equally legitimate moral claims to the same piece of land, given the existing record of previous armed conflict. Khalidi, by contrast, endorses either the idea of a single Palestinian state in which Jews and Arabs somehow live together as equals or two separate states based roughly on the boundaries, drastically different from those within the region today, of the 1947 United Nations partition plan9 – both thoroughly unrealistic prospects. Bridging this gap in goals and expectations will require intense negotiations, now pushed well into the future owing to Hamas’s horrifying attack and the violence of the subsequent war in Gaza. Whenever these negotiations do begin, however, they will require the support of sober historical understanding, not the partisan distortions of ideology.
1 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 218n37, 28, 34, 221n69.
2 Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2nd edit., revised and updated (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 18-20.
3 Sachar, pp. 287-295.
4 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (Boston: Mariner Books, 1968), pp. 196-209, esp. pp. 200 and 202.
5 Benjamin, pp. 196, 205-206, 209.
6 Reviews in Journal of Palestine Studies 51.4 (2022):109-112, by Laila Parsons, Professor of Modern Middle East History, McGill University; and in Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 8.2 (2023), by Michael Vicente Perez, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Memphis, TN.
7 Khalidi’s book had been on The New York Times’s best-sellers list for 33 weeks, as of June 2, 2024. See www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2024/06/02/paperback-nonfiction/
8 Benny Morris, “The War on History,” Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2020. See also the valuable review by Michael Rubner in Middle East Policy 27.2 (Summer 2020): 173-177.
9 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020), p. 251 outlines four possible options, but the weight of the book’s overall argument falls on the third and fourth of these options, the two noted in my text.