The Reality of Settler Colonialism

Writers like Adam Kirsch mock the idea to demonize critics of Israel. The phenomenon itself remains.

Palestinians flee Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip in January 2024. Image: Mahmud Hams / AFP via Getty Images

The Pledge

Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige presents a three-act structure said to apply to all great magic tricks. First is the pledge: the magician presents something ordinary, though the audience suspects that it isn’t. Next is the turn: the magician makes this ordinary object do something extraordinary, like disappear. Finally, there’s the prestige: the truly astounding moment, as when the object reappears in an unexpected way.

Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch, author of the recent book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, doesn’t present himself as a magician. But there is no denying that he is a master rhetorician, putting his talents to work in repeated sleights of hand. The purpose of the book is to relieve its readers of the sense that there is anything respectable about the central topic of discussion. Judging by an unfortunate review from Michael Walzer that appeared in the Jewish Review of Books, which more or less thanks Kirsch for doing the reading so he doesn’t have to, On Settler Colonialism is already working its magic, and I am afraid that it will continue to provide this public disservice for years to come. Its ultimate goal: to make the idea of settler colonialism disappear.

Settler colonialism falls into the category of concepts that may provoke guilt in a certain type of liberal and fury in a certain type of conservative. For liberal nationalists, including liberal Zionists like Kirsch, the typical response is something in between: a defensive fragility. Like “gender performativity” and “critical race theory,” “settler colonialism” was until fairly recently the province of a relatively small academic field, though it has now broken containment and entered the world of public discourse (losing something in translation, as such breakthroughs always do). The basic idea of settler colonialism is that in addition to classic colonialism, in which a wealthy and powerful country establishes military and economic control over a weaker one to extract its resources, there is also another type, in which settlers arrive with the goal of taking over the land completely, evicting, displacing, or eliminating the native peoples. Paradigmatic examples of the former are France in Indochina and Britain in India; paradigmatic examples of the latter are the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand....

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