Every once in a while, an academic theory catapults out of the depths of obscurity into the socio-political mainstream. Such concepts eventually start being deployed loosely, on TV, radio — and street protests — even when not fully understood.
Critical race theory was one such example, having once been confined to scholarly circles as it was developed in the 1980s before dominating news headlines and becoming a hot-button political issue dividing American high schools and universities from 2020 onwards as the country was rocked by protests against racism.
Critical race theorists held that racism was pervasive and a built-in feature of American law and its legal institutions as a means by which to sustain political, social and economic disparities and inequalities between white people and African Americans.
With the war between Israel and Hamas now entering its eleventh month, another once-unknown academic concept has emerged as part of everyday vernacular: settler colonialism. And it’s the subject of a critical new book, On Settler Colonialism, written by an editor at the Wall Street Journal, Adam Kirsch.
Settler colonialism first emerged as a concept examining how certain countries, namely the United States, Canada and Australia, were supposedly created by settlers who displaced and killed off the native population living there, thereby being unambiguously and permanently illegitimate and deserving of censure.
The concept served as a counterweight for some scholars to the romanticised origin story of the United States – that European settlers discovered a parcel of land that they considered to be nobody’s legal property, or terra nullius, but had in fact plundered a land that had been inhabited by indigenous peoples and cultures in order to bring about today’s America.
“This is one of those cases where an academic idea moves into the real world,” Kirsch told the JC, adding that “the notion of settler colonialism has affected how people talk about actual political events.”
When Hamas terrorists stormed through southern Israel in a murderous, indiscriminate rampage last October, some condemned the attack, but scores of seemingly educated academics, activists, artists – and particularly college students — lauded the massacre as legitimate resistance to settler colonialism. Inflicting the deadliest concert attack in music history and murdering babies and women in kibbutzim was, to them, a form of justice being served in the virtuous fight for decolonisation.
That’s why Kirsch writes in his book that polling shows “more than half of college-age Americans seem to believe that it would be justified for Palestinians to commit a genocide of Israeli Jews.”
Even though the Hamas terror attacks of October 7 killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as in the previous 15 years of conflict put together, the massacre, Kirsch writes, “inspired a larger and louder pro-Palestinian response than any previous conflict” as it was seen through the lens of settler colonialism.
Ivy League faculty and students, the Democratic Socialists of America and the Black Lives Matter movement came out in droves to endorse the attacks. Yale professor Zareena Grewal went so far as to post shortly after the attacks on X: “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.”
Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, who is Palestinian, followed suit by writing: “Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.”
Interpreting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through this prism is intellectually flawed, argues Kirsch. While the modern state of Israel’s founding in 1948 did lead to conflict and the displacement of Palestinians, it never resulted in their eradication. In fact, the population these days between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea (including the West Bank and Gaza) is evenly split with seven million Jews and seven million Arabs.
More importantly, unlike European colonisers who plundered their way through the Americas and Australia, the Jewish people are no strangers to the land of Israel. They have a millenia-old connection to the land they inhabit.
“To many Jews, they are themselves indigenous to the land of Israel,” Kirsch told the JC. “What you have here is not a foreign population conquering and settling in a land, but really a native population returning to a long-lost homeland and trying to create a country there against the will of the other people living there.”
That’s why, rather than denying Jewish Israelis any right to live in the Holy Land and qualifying any act of genocide inflicted on its people as ‘fair game,’ the only viable solution to this seemingly intractable conflict is a negotiated agreement between Jews and Palestinians and good faith leadership in pursuit of those goals.
Jonathan Harounoff is the author of the forthcoming book “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomenLifeFreedom Revolt”
