With the permission of the Jewish Review of Books, TTN is posting in two parts, “Unsettling Ideology,” Michael Walzer’s review of Adam Kirsch’s book, “On Settler Colonialism,” published in its Fall 2024 issue. Some bolding is added for emphasis. (Click here for Part I)
Kirsch repeatedly, and rightly, compares settler colonialism to other radical ideologies that attribute “many different varieties of injustice to the same abstraction and promises that slaying this dragon will end them all.” But what, concretely, are the Native Americans to do with the settlers (or the messianists with the nonbelievers, or the revolutionary vanguard with the bourgeoisie)? “Lack of imagination also indicates lack of commitment to figure it out,” according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a longtime activist and ethnic studies professor emeritus at California State University.
Israel and Palestine
All the world is not America, and there is one country where “figuring it out” is easy. Kirsch doesn’t get to Israel and Palestine until halfway through, though the brief introductory chapter makes it clear that this is where his argument is going—an argument made necessary by the response of American progressives to October 7 (“What did you think decolonization meant?” many tweeted and posted in the days after). For many leftists, not only in the US, Israel is the exemplary settler colonial state and the Palestinians are the prime example of a colonized people. This is a view of the conflict that misses most of its history—or, better, it is an ideological construction of the conflict that takes little interest in history.
But it is important to acknowledge (as Kirsch never quite does) that Israeli settlement on the West Bank from 1967 until the present moment fits the ideological construction all too neatly. The settlers aim to expand Israeli territory; they aim at the subjugation and, many of them, at the expulsion, of the Palestinian inhabitants; and they are protected by the Israeli state, from whose territory they come. Their militants are driven by a theological version of manifest destiny. And it is entirely possible to imagine, though at this moment it isn’t likely, a return of the settlers to the homeland on the other side of the Green Line—like the return of the pieds noirs to France.
This account of West Bank settlement actually proves, by contrast, the falseness of the settler colonial account of Israel itself. The Zionist settlers in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, and in the new state after 1948, were desperate refugees, fleeing persecution, hoping initially to live side by side with the Arab inhabitants; they did not have the sponsorship or protection of any of the states from which they came—most of which had a long history of antisemitism. There was no country in the world ready to take them back or take them in. Nor was Jewish settlement in Palestine a European invasion; half or more of the settlers fled from Arab countries.
The flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs in 1947–1948 came during and after a war that the Jewish settlers didn’t start, and the 150,000 Arabs who remained in Israel in 1948 have now grown to around two million, which is not the usual effect of genocide. Of course, according to the ideology of settler colonialism, Arab citizenship in democratic Israel is itself effectively genocidal—a loss of rightful sovereignty, a cancellation of alterity. Today, the number of Arabs and Jews living “between the river and the sea” is roughly even: some seven million each. This is nothing like America; there actually is room and people enough for two sovereignties. What the militants want, however, is for Israeli Jews to “relinquish their futurity.”
“Israel is much younger and smaller than the United States,” Kirsch writes, “and it is easier to imagine its disappearance.” Similarly, the number of Jews, all of them defined as “settlers,” is small enough to allow the antisettler militants to plan their subjugation, exile, or elimination. The leading ideologues argue only for the end of Jewish sovereignty; what comes after that is, as usual, more vaguely described. But Kirsch, who has read more extensively in the literature of settler colonialism than anyone I know would willingly do, concludes that its effect is “to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance.” Israel is accused of genocide—and threatened with genocide.
So the radical theory of settler colonialism became “the theory of a massacre,” the ideology that justified Hamas’s atrocities of October 7 and inspired the response of too many American professors, students, and activists. The Israeli settlers were taken to be rapacious and domineering; the native Palestinians were innocent and oppressed, and October 7 was an exhilarating example of a struggle for liberation, as a Cornell historian infamously told rallying students.
To be sure, the Hamas terrorists were not killing and raping to oppose settler colonialism; they acted for religious reasons—they were zealots whose goal was the elimination of any Jewish presence in what they regard as Muslim territory. The ideology of the antisettler militants is entirely secular, but it serves to justify theologically driven rape and murder. I wonder how many of the student protesters who thought they were opposing settler colonists understood what they were defending. Kirsch writes, I believe, first of all for these young men and women, to convince them that an ideology that “makes violence virtuous” needs to be reconsidered.
Justice and Despair
The tone of Kirsch’s last chapter, “Justice and Despair,” is different than the rest of the book. It is a meditation on what Walter Benjamin called “the tradition of the oppressed.” For Benjamin, oppression is ever present, and our duty is to recognize it, to “call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers” by seeing them through the eyes of the oppressed. Beyond that, beyond reading history against the progressivist grain, Benjamin had no plausible politics. His moment was a moment of hopelessness. “The only way he could envision redemption,” Kirsch writes, “was as the cancellation of history.”
Settler colonial ideology shares a similar bleakness—America, and Israel, should never have happened. But it also pretends to have a political response. Kirsch acknowledges that “there is not a single country whose history does not provoke horror, if seen through the eyes of the victims rather than the victors,” but he rejects the millennialism of the militants. History cannot be undone. Israel’s disappearance is indeed easier to imagine than America’s, “but again, not without massive death and destruction.” There has to be another way to think about, and to deal with, the horrors of history.
Kirsch invokes a talmudic principle developed in response to certain kinds of property dispute. Imagine a stolen garment that is sold to a merchant and then bought by a customer. Does the original owner have a claim, given that the customer acted in good faith? The law assumes that the original owner has “despaired” of the garment; he or she is entitled to compensation and damages, but the garment now belongs to the person who bought it. “Is despair justice?” Kirsch asks, “No. It is what the law offers instead of justice, knowing that perfect justice often cannot be achieved.”
Think about land in a similar way: perfect justice, Kirsch argues, would mean restoring the Land of Israel to the Jews who were driven out of it by the Romans and also to the Palestinian Arabs who have been denied sovereignty by the Jews. “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.” Despair over past losses would make it possible to hope for a better future for both peoples: “The creation of the State of Israel should not be negated, but Palestinians should have the security and dignity of their own homeland.”
I doubt that either Hamas’s Islamists or Jewish messianists would find this kind of despair acceptable. But Kirsch’s argument, at once sharp and conciliatory, points the way toward more serious scholarship about settler colonialism, toward an intelligent reflection on the pain it has caused, and toward a politics of imperfect justice and peace.