There are words being used today that I’ve had trouble making any sense of, like the use of “genocide” when describing what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, or “settler-colonialism” as a description of Zionism itself. I’ve had a hard time telling whether they are outright lies, distortions of language, or something else entirely. Adam Kirsch’s insightful, impressive, and disturbing book, On Settler-Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice, helps answer these questions.
Much of this book is powerfully reviewed by the renowned political theorist Michael Walzer in The Jewish Review of Books, which I strongly encourage you to read. What I write here will only address a few items he doesn’t cover.
As background, Kirsch’s book begins with an excavation of the term “settler colonialism” – where it comes from in academia, the context in which it arose, as well its different permutations and logical consequences worked out over a period of decades. It begins with a core concept – “Invasion is a structure, not an event.” This means that we who live in the U.S. or Canada today are as much settler colonialists as those who came here 200-300 years ago, even though it was they, not us (or an immigrant from Nigeria that came last week), that took land from the Native tribes. We are all equally illegitimate. He goes on to trace how these ideas became applied not only to the U.S., Canada and Australia, but, as we know, to Israel.
Kirsch does this work in an incredibly dispassionate way, as only a great academic could. I found myself getting upset just reading what he wrote – I can’t imagine how he spent the time reading the volume of primary sources he did and not feeling emotionally and psychologically stained as a result.
There were a couple of ideas that Walzer gives less attention to in his review that stuck with me. One, that Kirsch’s book makes clear that this way of thinking is part of a long tradition of the “tyranny of the intellectuals.” It is a tyranny that, like with Marx or Heidigger before him, leads to violence, and profound moral inversions in a way that only those in the ivory tower seem able to justify. It is what one sees in the university today. Related to moral inversion is the lack of a clear outcome of what happens when we get the “settler colonialists” (i.e. Americans, Israelis, etc.) off the land they are “occupying.” While the intellectuals point to a utopian future, it’s only for the victims. What happens to the settlers; all 330 million Americans, let alone the seven million Israelis, is not discussed – though one can grasp the consequences based on their present-day rhetoric.
What I also found interesting was that these theories predominate in English speaking countries, who have access to this English-dominated academic corpus. It’s fascinating to see how ideas spread, and equally, how they don’t spread.
Given what’s happening in our world today, Kirsch’s book is a must-read. It’s short, clear, powerful, and necessary.
Just Because I Liked It:
- I mentioned this previously, but having finished it, I enjoyed Season 11 of Revisionist History, about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. At a high level, it’s about how people make accommodations for evil when it’s in their interests. But mostly, it’s interesting storytelling with compelling personalities.
- This is the second interview I heard with Nate Silver (of 538 fame, and now the Silver Bulletin) about his new book, and enjoyed it more than the first, perhaps because it was much more wide ranging.