‘On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice’
By Adam Kirsch
W.W. Norton & Company, 160 pages

The writer Adam Kirsch’s “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice” is a slim indictment of one of the world’s worst ideas. It is all the more convincing for being understated — an antidote to the rhetoric that rises against America, Israel, and the West. Mr. Kirsch sets his ken on a paradigm that celebrates the massacres of October 7, views the Constitution as a document born of original sin, and disdains the ideals worth celebrating.

One would not immediately take Mr. Kirsch, who served as literary editor of the Sun during its print run, to be a polemicist. An admired poet and critic now at the Journal, he has written elegant volumes on, among other subjects, the Talmud, modern Jewish literature, Lionel Trilling, and Benjamin Disraeli. If he comes to the subject from a Jewish sensibility, it only sharpens his vision of the canary in the coal mine. Mr. Kirsch’s quiet rigor is convincing.   

Mr. Kirsch’s subject is settler colonialism, a theory that has incubated in faculty lounges for two decades but “whose growing popularity among educated young Americans is already having significant political effects” and is “leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory.” This territory includes the conviction that America and Israel are “permanently illegitimate” and should be “decolonized.” 

The Legal Information Institute names settler colonialism as “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.” Mr. Kirsch asserts that it is a “political theory of original sin” that offers no promise of atonement because the “violence involved in a nation’s founding continues to define every aspect of its life.”

It is a bleak world view, one committed to a view of the past as a sequence of brutalities, the present as a pile up of injustices, and the future as populated by fantasies of violence, which when directed at “settlers”  — Israelis, most of all — is elevated to virtue. Mr. Kirsch shows how the hallucinations of harm and revenge summoned by settler-colonialism are already warping worldviews. One paper asserts that “space, time, and matter” are colonial constructs.

Settler colonialism’s political potency is unbothered by the shoddy history on which it relies. The stories it tells of the settlement of America is rife with simplifications and distortions that efface more than raise up victims. Its account of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is a funhouse mirror. As Mr. Kirsch puts it, there is “no continuing reality of Palestinian expulsion” and the return to Zion is a triumph of the indigenous imagination. 

Mr. Kirsch tells the Sun that settler colonialism’s focus on Israel flows from the perception of its adherents that unlike America, Australia, or Canada, the Jewish state is one whose annihilation can be envisioned. That’s what gives the cheers for Hamas and the jeers for Jews their edge. So fervent is the anticipation of Israel’s demise that for this ideology, “Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong.” 

With Palestine as a Polaris, adherents of this ideology navigate with a cracked compass. They “celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers” and are not ashamed “for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews — because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.” The linkage of anti-Zionism with the medieval and modern anti-semitism gives a fresh face to the oldest hatred. 

Mr. Kirsch reckons that the “hope that Israel will prove to be a short-lived aberration, a historical curiosity like the Crusader kingdoms of the Middle Ages, condemns the Palestinians to political limbo.” The adoption of the settler colonial tent that “invasion is a structure not an event” means that “it is very difficult to imagine how it might be overcome, or even what it would mean to overcome it.” 

Settler-colonialism’s sour utopianism and ambition to be a grand theory can tip into bathos. Calls are sounded to “decolonize mental health” and eschew Woody Gurthrie’s “This Land as Your Land” as settler agitprop. Land acknowledgements become a kind of empty catechism, and organizations ostensibly devoted to gay rights line up to support Hamas, which views same-sex attraction as an abomination punishable by death. 

Mr. Kirsch explains that this paradigm is “a simple explanation for everything that is wrong in the world.” Therein lies its danger. The slaughter of October 7 was not an act of liberation. It was, in the words of the German Jewish philosopher that Mr. Kirsch cites, a “document of barbarism.” To laugh, though, at such declarations as “National Parks are a form of genocide” is to miss the imperative to defend the precious things.