One of the most bizarre and ill-informed symbols employed by the activist and progressivist left is “settler colonialism.” Fortunately, Adam Kirsch, a poet and an editor of the Weekend Review section of the Wall Street Journal, has recently published a brief but incisive analysis of what the phrase means and of the political reality referred to by those who use the term. His On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice (New York, Norton, 2024) is, in addition, beautifully written.
Kirsch began by taking note of a surprising fact: more than half (60%) of Americans aged 18 to 24 thought the Hamas-led Palestinians were justified in seeking to exterminate Israeli Jews. The chief reason they offered for their views involved the term “settler colonialism.” Its meaning was not clear, but emotionally speaking it was highly negative.
In order to discuss this topic rationally, Kirsch shows we must have a high tolerance for inconsistencies and ironies. Usually, for example, “settler” in the Israeli context refers to Jews living in territory occupied after the 1967 “Six-day war.” About 450,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank today out of a total of nearly seven million citizens. The individuals attacked on October 7, 2023, lived within the internationally acknowledged borders of Israel, usually called the “Green Line.” What nevertheless made these people settler colonists was the expansion of the term to refer to all Israelis because the entire state had been declared a settler colonial entity. This new definition accords well with the Israeli religious nationalists who also declare there is no meaningful distinction between the post-1967 occupied territories and the “Green Line” territories. All Palestine, they say, between the river and the sea, belongs to Israel. To this irony is added its consistency with the Zionist principle that declared that Jews were a people indigenous to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. For the advocates of “settler-colonialist” language to ignore this obvious historical reality is, to say the least, inconsistent.
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