Australia, Israel and “settler colonialism”

How a bad theory went viral

Photo by Maick Maciel on Unsplash

This is an expanded version of a piece first published in Australia-Israel Review.

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The eruption of anti-Israel bile in the days and weeks after October 7 attacks felt surreal on so many levels — and it still does, even now. The sentiment spread through the professional classes like a virus. The idea of Israel as an irredeemable entity, which must be boycotted and ostracised, emerged from seemingly everywhere; from the ABC to Legal Aid to the Department of Defence, for crying out loud. Queers for Palestine – surely this was a joke? The annual “Invasion Day” protest on January 26 turned into a sea of keffiyehs and Palestinian flags.

Within days of the massacre in Israel, petitioners at Melbourne’s literary Overland journal were decrying the Jewish state’s “ongoing genocide” and “annihilation” of the Palestinian people.

It wasn’t the display of Israel animus on the political left that shocked me – I’d documented that pathology in countless newspaper columns over the years.

No, it was the many disparate causes effectively merging with the Palestinian cause to the point of self-abnegation, the febrile language being deployed — how does a leading international law academic come to pen a quasi poetic tribute to Yahya Sinwar? — and the absence of shame in echoing antisemitic tropes about Jewish depravity and deceit.

Something had clearly been seeded while we were sleeping only to burst forth once conditions were right. But what, exactly?

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A compelling answer is found in Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. In a mere 132 pages, Kirsch distills the essence of a relatively new ideology that has all but hijacked the Israel-Palestine debate in anglophone countries. He traces how this ideology took shape within academia, and why we should all be worried about it.

While the belief system thrust into mainstream view after October 7, it is not exclusively concerned with Israel and the Middle East. Its centre of gravity is the US, Canada and especially Australia, countries with shameful episodes in their origin stories, a stain the scholars of settler colonialism regard as permanent and all-encompassing.

Arguably, the discipline of settler colonialism conceals its radical nature with a linguistic sleight of hand. The term “settler colonialism” can be used in a neutral sense to describe historical events. But in academia the term is an explanation – a denunciation – of Australia and other Western countries today.

And because the term blends historical fact with contemporary mythology, it is hard to critique – given the misery and intergenerational trauma that European colonialists visited on indigenous peoples what reprobate individual would argue in favour of settler colonialism?

In this sense one of the most intriguing aspects of the book is its title; “On settler colonialism,” suggests the author is exploring an injustice, the existence of which is self-evident. In reality, the book is a forensic, if even-tempered, takedown of a school of thought. I was amused to hear that on its release the book was displayed in the window of a bookshop in one of Melbourne’s trendy inner suburbs. Whether or not Kirsch intended to entrap unsuspecting woke readers with his own linguistic sleight of hand, I’m thrilled he’s done so.

Black Lives Matter protest London, 2020. Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

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While Kirsch writes principally for an American audience, we soon learn that settler colonialism is something of an Australian export. This was for me the first in a series of startling revelations.

The term was first coined by an Australian scholar abroad; Kenneth Good, a political scientist who taught briefly at the University of Rhodesia in the 1970s. Good described as “settler colonial” places such as Rhodesia and Algeria where a sizeable number of Europeans had settled and enjoyed dominance over the local population. His thinking sprang from the postwar decolonisation struggles of the 1950s and 60s that brought with them an intellectual revolution; an understanding that European imperialism had been sustained by a belief in the superiority of the West.

This early decolonisation movement was basically Marxist in character, executed in a spirit of optimism and with the clear objective of evicting colonial oppressors so they could no longer exploit the labour and resources of subjugated peoples. Evicting the oppressors by any means necessary, of course, and maybe even by some means that weren’t. Frantz Fanon, the most influential theoretician of decolonisation, and part of the leadership of Algeria’s brutal FLN, preached what his movement practised. In his signature text, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote that for colonised people killing was not just a tactic but a path to regaining the power and humanity that had been taken from them.

“Decolonisation,” Fanon wrote, “reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.”

To academics in the peaceful West, Kirsch explains, Fanon’s praise for violent revolution sounded thrilling. It was bloodlust, sure, but all in the name of a good cause far away.

Kirsch is an editor at The Wall Street Journal. He’s also a published poet — and it comes in handy here. Again and again he uses his poetic sensibility to concretise a belief system that deals not with facts but with abstractions.

For in his telling, this story really starts in the 1990s when the idea of “settler colonialism” underwent a crucial shift – again, in Australia. At the time, the nation was in the grip of “the history wars”, a debate about how to evaluate Australia’s colonial past.

It was then that theorists began referring to Australia as a “settler colonial” entity, even though the continent’s colonisation had taken place centuries earlier with white settlement, and in Australia, unlike in Algeria, there was no foreign power or European settler class to dislodge. In a seminal 1999 text, anthropologist Patrick Wolfe wrote what would become the most frequently quoted sentence in the history of this new academic movement: “The colonisers came to stay – invasion is a structure, not an event.”

And thus, “settler colonialism” was born not as a descriptor of historical events but as an ideology that proposes what Kirsch calls a “new syllogism”. That is: if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure and not a completed event, “then everything and everyone that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.”

Driving this ongoing genocide is an evil force defined as European “insatiability”: a lust for resources, for power and even for knowledge.

This European rapaciousness is referred to in the lingo as “settler ways of being”, and it stands in contrast to the idealised “indigenous ways of knowing.” European rapaciousness — “settler ways of being” — supposedly underlies all our norms and institutions, including national borders, Western science, the heterosexual nuclear family, and although Kirsch doesn’t mention this, I’d add the “gender binary.” (Perhaps you’re starting to glimpse the ideological scaffolding behind “Queers for Palestine”?)

The guiding premise of settler colonial ideology is that European settlement should never have happened. It follows that the only way to atone for European settlement would be to rewind time and revert to indigenous sovereignty – but that is impossible. So what to do? Well, we must devote ourselves to the “work” of decolonisation while appreciating that true decolonisation can never really be achieved, because the original sin of colonisation cannot be undone.

Kirsch exquisitely documents how Lorenzo Veracini, a leading theorist from Melbourne’s Swinburne University, pondered what doing “the work” of decolonisation might mean in an Australian context.

Veracini noted that in the 1960s, Fanon had defined the work as bringing about the (literal) “death of the colonist.” Now, decades later at Swinburne in Melbourne, Veracini, in Kirsch’s description, “takes pleasure in the violent sound of ‘kill the settler.’”

The scholar concludes: “I recommend a Fanonian (and metaphorical) cull of the settler.” These two adjectives — Fanonian and “metaphorical” — are in contradiction to one another, pulling in opposite directions, a fact of which Veracini was, according to Kirsch, “conscious.”

And so, aware that their calls for murder can only be metaphorical, the scholars of settler colonialism indulge in conspiratorial thinking and rhetorical violence about “culling the settler.”

Ah, but what, Kirsch asks in a masterful pivot, what if there was a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than just florid words? A country, as it happens, whose people Western civilisation has traditionally hated and considered it virtuous to do so?

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Photo by Merch HÜSEY on Unsplash

And so we have a concept first developed to explain the history of Australia most often invoked in connection with Israel. In Palestine, the fable goes, just as in Australia, the European colonisers – which is how the early Zionists are referred to – saw not a land inhabited by indigenous people since time immemorial but “terra nullius”, empty territory.

As Kirsch explains, the Israel-Palestine conflict has come to function as “the reference point for every type of social wrong,” whether the building of a pipeline under a Sioux reservation, evicting a homeless encampment from a park in Toronto or the Mexican experience with the US in the 19th century, which activists duly refer to as a “Nakba”. Now I understand the perverse logic behind the activist chant that until Palestine is “free” no-one is free.

With Israel as its centre, settler colonialism throws up what Kirsch identifies as yet another syllogism: “If Israel is a settler colonial state and settler colonialism entails genocide then it is ideologically necessary (my emphasis) for Israel to be committing genocide.”

The key point here is that Israel was defined as genocidal long before the Gaza war, creating a frame through which all of its subsequent actions were viewed. Hence, the denunciations, of which the Overland petition was but one, of Israel’s “ongoing genocide” against Palestinians in October 2023 when the IDF’s assault on Gaza was barely underway.

As it turns out, when in December 2023 Masha Gessen drew comparisons in The New Yorker between Gaza and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, to the apparent satisfaction of the magazine’s famously rigorous fact checkers, her observation didn’t even have the merit of originality. Wolfe, the Australian anthropologist, had made the same comparison as early as 2006.

Here too, Kirsch explains, the community of scholars confronted an intellectual problem to which it had to find a novel solution: namely, the specific meaning of genocide and its precedent in history. The discipline, he writes, finds itself “having to define genocide down so that it no longer means what it is ordinarily taken to mean.” Once again, Australian scholars come to the rescue: Wolfe devises a category of “structural genocide”, in which even indigenous citizenship in a settler colonial state can be part of the “logic of elimination”.

Making Israel fit the template of a genocidal settler-colonial regime is an exercise that requires disavowing a universe of inconvenient facts, starting with the Jews’ own claim on Israel as their ancestral homeland and ending with their postwar statelessness as refugees from Nazi genocide. It also requires disavowing some very dark themes.

In a series of powerful passages Kirsch delves into what we might call settler colonialism’s own repressed unconscious. For instance, we can hear deeply Christian echoes in settler colonialism’s emphasis on sin and redemption. And we can hear age-old antisemitic echoes in its defining Zionists and Israelis as emblematic of settler rapaciousness and greed. One theorist even described Israel as “the linchpin of the neoliberal order.” (Never mind that at last count the country’s rate of union membership was almost double that of Australia.)

And the idealisation in the literature of Palestinian “ways of knowing” the land owes much to German Romantic nationalism, which eventually degenerated into the blood-and-soil nationalism of Nazism.

With history falsified to dehumanise Israelis, it’s no surprise that so many in the academic world found justifications for the slaughter of October 7 – that is, when they weren’t outright celebrating the slaughter. After all, the butchered “settlers” had no right to be there in the first place.

As to what “decolonisation” in Israel-Palestine might look like, given that, unlike Algeria in the 1960s, Israeli Jews have no equivalent of France to return to – not that that stopped a protestor outside Columbia University taunting Jews to “Go back to Poland!” – is never really elucidated.

The settler-colonial scholars do not explicitly call for Israeli Jews to be thrown into the sea but in cultivating hatred for one side of the conflict they abet the region’s Islamists who harbour genocidal fantasies.

Kirsch flags early on his belief in a two-state solution, but he leaves a key concession to the end: to Palestinians, Israel does indeed resemble a colonial power because the state was established without the consent of the people already living there. The creation of the Jewish state brought Palestinians displacement and suffering. Yet as Kirsch straightforwardly reminds us, conquest and displacement are constants throughout history, which, no matter what Wolfe says, is nothing if not a series of events. Colonisation and the Mabo judgement; the Nakba and the Camp David negotiations: all are events.

What is progressivism without the hope that tomorrow can be better than yesterday?A progressive movement worthy of its name must acknowledge the bloodshed and injustice of the past while ensuring these do not lay the foundation for even greater bloodshed and injustice in the future.

I have no idea how we climb out of this new Dark Age and return to intellectual sanity, but Kirsch shows us a place from which the journey can start.

On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, Adam Kirsch, W.W. Norton & Company, August 2024, A$41.35