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The Reality of Settler Colonialism
Writers like Adam Kirsch mock the idea to demonize critics of Israel. The phenomenon itself remains.
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.
If this seems reasonable or uncontroversial to you, well, that’s why the field of settler colonial studies wasn’t immediately a lightning rod from the moment of its founding in the 1990s. Arguments over the taxonomy of colonialism according to regime type and political economy can be dry stuff. The ideas of settler colonial studies have been slowly taken up in varying degrees by other fields, from history and anthropology to Indigenous studies, but what makes it a hot topic now is the highly visible public inclusion of another country in the category: the State of Israel.
Arguments to this effect are nothing new in themselves. Palestinian intellectuals like Fayez Sayegh made the comparison first but were scarcely heard in the West. Later, the French-Jewish historian Maxime Rodinson, whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, published an article entitled “Israël, fait colonial?” (“Israel, a colonial fact?”) in June 1967, just as the Six-Day War resulted in the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt. As Kirsch discusses, Rodinson, an anti-Zionist who believed the Palestinians had suffered unjustly, nonetheless warned against the Algeria comparison. Unlike the French pieds-noirs, the first Israelis had no mother countries to return to. They may have been colonizers, Rodinson argued, but they were not agents of empire; they may have been conquerors, but they were first refugees.
This, you might think, is just the sort of analysis that leads scholars to coin new terms and create new categories. So what’s wrong with “settler colonialism,” which exists precisely for this purpose? Kirsch begins to answer this question with his initial sleight of hand, on the very first page of the book. As Michael Caine’s character in The Prestige describes the pledge: “The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see that it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course, it probably isn’t.”
Kirsch presents us with several seemingly alarming statistics from a Harvard/Harris poll of registered voters taken two months after the brutal attacks of October 7, when 1,195 people were killed (including 815 civilians) and 251 taken hostage. Among respondents aged 18 to 24, 66 percent agreed that Hamas’s assault was “genocidal in nature.” Yet 60 percent also said the attack “can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians.” These numbers may cry out for explanation, as public opinion surveys so often do, but Kirsch’s interpretation strains credulity: he writes that “more than half of college-age Americans seem to believe that it would be justified for Palestinians to commit a genocide of Israeli Jews.”
Kirsch doesn’t inform us that the poll reached only 150 people in the age bracket he cites. He doesn’t consider that their broad agreement with the claim that the attacks were “genocidal in nature” might indicate their lack of support for genocide. Nor does he mention that the poll found overwhelming—80 percent—support among this group for the view that Israel “has a right to defend itself against terror attacks by launching air strikes on targets in heavily populated Palestinian areas with warnings to those citizens,” as well as 58 percent support for the view that Hamas “needs to be removed from running Gaza.” Most notably, Kirsch fails to mention more reliable polls conducted around the same time that yielded very different results. A Generation Lab poll of college students that reached more than 900 people found that 67 percent of those who were aware of the attack called October 7 “an act of terrorism,” compared with just 12 percent who found it a “justified act of resistance.” Meanwhile, a Pew Research survey of over 12,000 people found that 58 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds reached called Hamas’s methods “unacceptable,” compared to only 9 percent who found them “acceptable.”
Nevertheless, having supposedly established the genocidal tendencies of American college students en masse, Kirsch spends the next few pages lining up citations from academics and activists seeming to praise or at least equivocate on the October 7 attacks. These include references to Israel’s settler colonial nature. Kirsch concludes, on this basis, that it is the “ideology of settler colonialism”—a phrase he coins but never defines—which leads these critics to be so insensitive to the value of Israeli Jewish life. But Kirsch never actually argues this fundamental claim, on which the rest of his book rests. This oversight is both fascinating and dismaying. Rather, he allows the sequence of his presentation to lead the reader to the conclusion that “for many academics and activists, describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack,” and he then proceeds as if genocidal hatred and violence against settlers is the inevitable consequence of any talk of settler colonialism.
Let us not mince words. Some people, including some who refer to Israel as a settler colonial state, have indeed made statements to the effect that “there are no civilians in Israel.” But by the same token, self-declared Zionists, Christian as well as Jewish, American as well as Israeli, have for decades made statements to the effect that Israel is “fighting human animals” and that “there are no civilians in Gaza.” If the former in itself counts as evidence of a dangerous “ideology of settler colonialism,” surely the latter must count as evidence of a dangerous “ideology of Zionism”? Needless to say, Kirsch identifies no such thing. For all his outrage at justifications of genocidal violence, he fails to quote, much less condemn, a single example of such speech—including the statements made by Israel’s political and military leaders that South Africa cites in its case charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Perhaps that is because Kirsch understands that if “rhetorical ferocity” (as he calls it) is the standard of argument, he has no leg to stand on.
The game is given away in claims like “the killing of Israeli civilians was welcomed by many Palestinian sympathizers.” Swapping the words “Israeli” and “Palestinian” in this sentence yields a claim that is equally true, but Kirsch never once uses the phrase “Palestinian civilians” in the book, much less makes reference to any of Israel’s violations of international law. The function of this rhetoric is quite plainly not to analyze but to scandalize us into demonizing “Palestinian sympathizers,” especially those on college campuses. Yet serious analysis must look beyond speech acts to objective conditions, including the basic facts that Israel is the dominant and only nuclear power in a deeply asymmetric conflict and has exercised almost complete control over Gaza’s borders, airspace, and territorial waters since 2005; that many thousands more Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israel than the other way around; and that millions of Palestinians remain stateless most proximately because Israel’s strongest ally—the United States—is a global hegemon that holds veto power in the UN Security Council, which it used to deny Palestinian statehood as recently as last April. If Kirsch had read Frantz Fanon more carefully than his review of Adam Shatz’s recent biography indicates, he might have recognized that the “vengeful” attitudes expressed on both sides of the conflict are exactly what theories of settler colonialism predict will arise in such circumstances.
Another sign of Kirsch’s evasiveness lies in the phrase “the Hamas attack” itself, which is used throughout the book but never distinguishes between attacks on soldiers and military installations and attacks on civilians. It is true that many more civilians than soldiers were harmed and killed on October 7. But it is also obvious enough why Kirsch fails to draw this distinction: doing so might cloud the dehumanizing picture he intends to paint of Palestinians who support violent resistance—the very thing he accuses the “ideologues of settler colonialism” of doing to all Israelis. By conflating “attack” with “attack on civilians,” Kirsch not only overinterprets the evidence he cites of support for the October 7 attacks; he means to suggest, without having to make an argument, that there can be no moral or legal basis for Palestinian armed conflict with Israel whatsoever. Yet so many pre-state Zionists, from David Ben-Gurion to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, would have agreed in principle with the UN General Assembly’s 1982 resolution affirming “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” Clear-eyed, serious reflection on this issue would have contributed a great deal to public discussion, but Kirsch offers nothing of the sort. Instead, he expects you to follow him, through sleight of hand, into the Manichaean world where Israeli violence is always virtuous and necessary, while Palestinian violence is always by definition sheer evil.
Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi, for one, clearly distinguishes between soldiers and civilians. In an interview in The Drift that took place two weeks after October 7, he argued explicitly against the claim of some student activists “that all Israelis are settlers, and therefore there are no civilians.” Kirsch takes no notice of this interview but does briefly mention Khalidi at a handful of places in the book, mostly in order to mock his application of the settler colonial framework to Israel. He notably overlooks Khalidi’s discussion, in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), of the Pakistani radical intellectual Eqbal Ahmad. A principled supporter of armed struggle in Algeria, Ahmad nonetheless criticized the PLO’s use of violence on tactical grounds, arguing that armed struggle might not be the wisest course of action against Israel. Khalidi calls Ahmad’s assessment “profound and devastating,” and at the same time he credits Ahmad with having “shrewdly perceived the unique nature of the Israeli colonial project.”
Eventually, however, Kirsch concedes that Khalidi “makes the crucial point that only a solution based on ‘mutual acceptance’ between Jews and Arabs can be morally acceptable,” which Kirsch calls “the crucial dividing line between solutions, and advocates for those solutions, that can be called liberal and humane, and those that are dangerous and cruel.” We are not supposed to notice that this concession invalidates the whole argument of the book. So much for Kirsch’s central thesis about settler colonialism: that “the term itself is highly ideological,” and therefore not just dangerous but genocidal.
The Turn
On Settler Colonialism is as unreliable and evasive as this throughout. The readings of scholarship are untrustworthy; when Kirsch says “in other words” after presenting an argument from a proponent of settler colonial studies, it is sometimes a struggle to see how his words resemble the ones he has quoted. For example, he cites political theorist Adam Dahl, whom he calls a “historian,” arguing that the “settler colonial foundations of American democracy . . . continue to structure the basic features of modern democratic thought and politics,” and then claims that “in other words,” the United States is “illegitimately occupying land that rightfully belongs to Native Americans—and always will.” Try as I might, I cannot find a property claim in this citation from Dahl. But even if Dahl does hold the view here attributed to him, what is most symptomatic in this example is Kirsch’s refusal to engage the explicit claim of the text he cites. Do the main categories of American democratic thought continue to be socially and logically structured by the dispossession of Native Americans, or don’t they? It doesn’t seem to matter.
Kirsch does the same thing with the oft-cited dictum of the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe that “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Rather than dispute the contention, Kirsch prefers to diagnose it: settler colonialism “offers a political theory of original sin.” Just as reactionaries before him claimed about communism, Kirsch wants to persuade us that here we have a case of secular radicals clamoring for the missing religion in their lives, unconsciously acting out Protestant, even specifically Calvinist, cultural scripts. All well and good—who among us hasn’t known a leftist Puritan—but is Wolfe wrong, or is he right? Kirsch won’t tell you. He writes as if you already assume Wolfe is wrong, so he doesn’t have to argue it and can instead get by with explaining how anyone could come to think such a ludicrous thing. All this in what Walzer, whose scholarship is far more scrupulous than this, calls a “calm and careful” critique.
Further evidence of Kirsch simply dodging the claims of scholarship arises in his treatment of work by the Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen. In Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (2022), Hämäläinen claims that many Native peoples of North America had “opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world.” Kirsch calls the social and political arrangements of the eastern half of the continent a “slender evidentiary basis” for this claim, dismissing it as a “fable about the virtue and selflessness of Native Americans.”
This is odd, first of all, because Hämäläinen is perhaps best known as the author of The Comanche Empire (2008), a book about vertical, exclusive, and hierarchical practices of Native nations in the southwest. He has never claimed that all Native Americans lived in stateless, non-hierarchical societies, only that many did. It is also odd because Hämäläinen is far from the only scholar to have reached similar conclusions. The historian Kathleen DuVal, for example, in her recent work Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (2024), assesses a long-standing debate on the question of whether great North American cities on the southern Aztec model, such as Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, were eventually abandoned and rejected for political reasons. She writes that they were: “The height of the great cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam can be seen as a golden age, but their descendants came to see it as a misguided era.” In other words, just as Hämäläinen says, many eastern native North Americans experimented with hierarchical models of polity and found them unsatisfactory. They developed narratives about this experiment intended to prevent it from being reattempted. When Europeans, hailing from absolutist monarchical nation-states, encountered these natives, they simply assumed that they were incapable of achieving what seemed to them like the obviously best type of civilization. It was literally inconceivable to them—as, apparently, it remains for Kirsch—that a polity such as their own could have been attained and then later rejected.
A final method Kirsch employs to avoid directly engaging the central claims of settler colonial studies is to argue that accepting them would have negative consequences: “Indignation against past injustice is not a sufficient basis for remedying it. . . . it can easily become the source of new injustices.” That may be true—and if it is, and you’re paying more attention than Kirsch, you might notice that it could just as plausibly be leveled against countless actions of the State of Israel, including its response to October 7. Unfortunately, it resolves nothing about whether the basic claims of settler colonial studies are true. What matters, for Kirsch, is the turn—from the fact that it is “difficult to specify or even imagine” how one might decolonize the United States or Israel, to the claim that “on October 7, Hamas did more than imagine it.”
A more generous response to an admitted failure of imagination would be to study and discuss what has been proposed so far. For example, many people and organizations are, right now, returning land to tribal governments. But the term “Land Back,” the name for this movement, never appears in Kirsch’s book. Perhaps that’s because any consideration of real, practical steps to rectify or mitigate the colonial legacy would get in the way of his project: establishing a direct link between any claim about past and ongoing injustices and the specter of murdered and kidnapped civilians. When Kirsch briefly raises the idea of settler colonial societies ceding back parts of their territory and sovereignty to indigenous peoples, he treats the idea as an obviously utopian fantasy of radical scholars rather than as something that has in fact already taken place. Kirsch has the chutzpah to invoke the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz saying that “lack of imagination also indicates lack of commitment for figuring it out” and then proceeds to demonstrate just how correct she is through his own poverty of imagination. (Walzer cites this same passage in his review, seeming to think it applies to the wooly-headed utopians of settler colonial studies rather than to Kirsch and himself.)
I don’t want to suggest that Kirsch scores no points at all. He is right that the habit among some activists of referring to the North American continent as “Turtle Island” can be ahistorical, homogenizing a creation story shared by specifically northeastern nations like the Lenape and Haudenosaunee into a generically “traditional,” pan–Native American name for an anachronistically conceived geographical entity. He is also right that the now common ritual of placing “land acknowledgments” at the beginning of events and gatherings is often empty and hypocritical. But these points are not only irrelevant to his main argument; they are made by some of the very writers he spends pages criticizing. For example, Kirsch repeatedly criticizes Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s 2012 article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” for its academic language about “settler moves to innocence” and “settler futurity,” with no mention of the fact that its central argument is precisely directed against shallow and hypocritical invocations of decolonial solidarity, including land acknowledgments. No one is more practiced in pointing out the foibles and follies of leftist subcultures than the left itself, but one rarely sees this acknowledged in polemics against the left. On Settler Colonialism is no exception.
A deeper issue that Kirsch touches on is the question of the implicit romanticism of some indigeneity discourse. When deployed glibly or thoughtlessly, the rhetoric of indigeneity—like the rhetoric of Zionism, for that matter—can sound like Blut und Boden: there are discrete parcels of land that are eternally granted by providence to equally discrete and eternally existing nations, and each nation belongs to its land in a quasi-mystical, ineffable relationship. On such an account, there is no place for nomads, migrants, or diasporas, and one can never truly belong to a place in which one’s ancestors are not buried. This is a serious set of issues, and it is difficult if not impossible to square such a view with left-wing politics as typically understood. But Kirsch does not give this matter the attention it deserves, both because he fails to demonstrate that any of the thinkers he treats actually seriously hold views that resemble these and because he fails to acknowledge the extent to which Zionism, the ideological defense of which is this book’s raison d’être, also operates on this set of assumptions. At one point, he alludes to this fact as a sort of gotcha—if scholars of setter colonialism love indigeneity so much, why aren’t they Zionists?—but he can’t have it both ways. Either this thinking is a problem, or it isn’t, and Kirsch isn’t honest enough to grapple with that.
The Prestige
Early in the book, Kirsch makes the strange claim that because it has no practical applications, the framework of settler colonialism “has only a limited appeal to the people it claims to vindicate—Native Americans.” The only evidence he offers for this claim is that “mainstream advocacy groups like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the Native American Rights Fund do not use the language of settler colonialism or name decolonization as one of their aims.”
This is like claiming that if a particular Black advocacy group, say the NAACP, doesn’t use particular language or advocate a particular proposal—say, reallocating police budgets to social services—we should ignore that proposal’s wide appeal to vocal civil rights activists elsewhere across the Black community. In other words, Kirsch simply assumes that “mainstream” groups speak for a majority—the flattering presumption of all those who style themselves as representatives of the mainstream, no doubt. And as it happens, the NCAI responded to the Vatican’s 2023 repudiation of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which authorized the conquest of the Americas in the name of the Catholic Church, by saying that it hoped
that today’s announcement is more than mere words, but rather is the beginning of a full acknowledgement of the history of oppression and a full accounting of the legacies of colonialism—not just by the Roman Catholic Church, but by all the world governments that have used racism, prejudice and religious authority to not only justify past inequalities, but to allow, fuel, and perpetuate the institutionalization of those inequalities that continue to this very day.
Since Kirsch’s evidence of Native American disinterest in settler colonialism is so weak, perhaps we can take a page from his book and ask why he makes this claim at all. Its purpose is quite obviously to persuade us that the preoccupations of settler colonial studies are those of guilty, privileged whites seeking absolution. Kirsch is honest enough to admit that “settler colonial studies does include Native activists and scholars,” but he discounts them because “it is mainly an academic enterprise, and in 2021 Native Americans made up less than one half of one percent of university professors.” (Read that again. What an interesting fact; perhaps there is a field of study that can account for this astonishing underrepresentation.) He approvingly cites a few Native scholars who do not use settler colonial frameworks and approaches, or who offer criticisms of the way some white scholars have deployed them. By contrast, he castigates a rainbow of scholars for their betrayal of the liberal narrative that America is always improving, and for believing that it would have been better if the colonization of the Americas had not taken place.
Kirsch positions himself carefully on the matter of U.S. history. At several points in the book, he invokes the triumphalist narrative according to which “the creation of the United States was a great and providential event.” He acknowledges that this conservative history of heroes and explorers and martyrs for freedom could be credible “only so long as the country was defined solely by the experience of its white citizens.” (Unsurprisingly, he makes no such acknowledgment in his potted history of Zionism, which is unreconstructed and pre-revisionist.) This bad old conservative history was then replaced, Kirsch tells us, with a liberal one according to which the United States only needed to make good on its founding promises, to become the country it had always claimed to be. This civil rights–era narrative, which Kirsch attributes to Martin Luther King Jr. among others, was so popular that presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have adopted it. Settler colonial studies is found guilty of abandoning it in favor of a Black Legend of a country born in the original sins of slavery and genocide, never to escape them.
Kirsch implicitly defends his repeated refusal to engage settler colonial studies at the level of its truth claims by dismissing it as having no practical political consequences. This is one of the functions of his assertion that it constitutes a “political theology” (as if political theology—and here we must surely count many a variety of Zionism—has never had practical political consequences!) and his insistence that the only possible outcome of “decolonization” is an unrealizable reversal of history or the mass disappearance of 7 million Israeli Jews and 300 million U.S. American settlers. Kirsch also uses this point to explain one of the most jarring disconnects in the book: If settler colonial studies produces an ideology that leads militant leftists to support the genocide of Jews in Palestine/Israel, why don’t we see the same militance with respect to the settlers of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand?
On the surface, the settler colonial critique does exactly what proponents of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism want from critics of Israel: it doesn’t single out Israel or hold it to a “double standard.” What it says about Israel it says about the entire liberal Anglosphere. For Kirsch, however, this is not reassuring but rather an invitation to yet another ingenious sleight of hand. It is precisely because it is so hard to imagine decolonization in the United States and the other Anglosphere countries, he argues, that the ideology of settler colonialism seizes upon Israel. Because Israel was founded more recently and has a settler-native ratio closer to 1:1 than 9:1, it is easier for foolish militants, Kirsch alleges, to fantasize about its destruction and the genocide or expulsion of its settlers: Israeli Jews. (Never mind that here again he simply conflates decolonization with genocide and expulsion, treating their equivalence as a given.) But then he suggests—pulling the rug out from under his own observations about population size and founding date—that this differing treatment is fueled by antisemitism, making it possible for Israel to be “a country one could hate virtuously” since it is “home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.” This is a truly impressive rhetorical feat, but it depends entirely upon the reader forgetting that Kirsch never actually establishes that the concept of settler colonialism must motivate genocidal hatred in the first place.
In reality, the radical left’s narrative of U.S. history, like descriptions of Israel as colonial, long predated the rise of settler colonial studies in the academy. Kirsch hopes to shock us by observing that some scholars of settler colonialism, such as Mahmood Mamdani, contrast the Black liberal struggle for civil rights with the Native struggle for sovereignty. “When Black and Native aspirations are placed in opposition in this way,” Kirsch writes, “it follows that, in seeking equality with white Americans, Blacks are embracing the guilt of the settler.” Unfortunately for Kirsch’s argument, this is no excess of settler colonial studies but a basic claim of Native activists, going back decades.
The Standing Rock Sioux activist and thinker Vine Deloria Jr., who served as executive director of the NCAI in the mid-1960s, devoted an entire chapter to this idea in his manifesto Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). Thirty years before Wolfe, in a book so practical it includes minute recommendations for reforms of bureaucratic practices in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Deloria wrote of the “unthoughtful Johnny-come-lately liberal who . . . generally defines the goals of all groups by the way he understands what he wants for the blacks.” Deloria defends the decision of Native movements to avoid the March on Washington, explaining that the civil rights movement confused Indians, who “could not believe that blacks wanted to be the same as whites.” But Stokely Carmichael and Black Power made sense to them, he writes, because they spoke in terms of self-determination:
Indians had understood when Carmichael talked about racial and national integrity and the need for fine distinctions to be made between white and black. But when King began to indiscriminately lump together as one all minority communities on the basis of their economic status, Indians became extremely suspicious. The real issue for Indians—tribal existence within the homeland reservation—appeared to have been completely ignored.
And so it remains, with Kirsch ventriloquizing Native peoples’ supposed rejection of settler colonial studies on their behalf.
But let me not be evasive myself. Suppose Kirsch were to grant that U.S. history is, in fact, a vale of tears—a catastrophe continually piling wreckage at the feet of the angel of history, in the resonant image of Walter Benjamin that he critiques in his final chapter. Still, might Kirsch be right that it is politically unwise to dwell on this truth?
He is not the first liberal to think so. This was the thesis of pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who defended it nearly thirty years ago in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). “Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself,” Rorty wrote, “need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of.” Even in those halcyon days prior to settler colonial studies, Rorty was worried about “a widespread sense that national pride is no longer appropriate.” The culprits then were Foucault and Heidegger. Their readers—the “academic left”—wound up viewing the United States “as something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly different.” Like Kirsch, Rorty saw a quasi-religious drive at work; the anti-patriots, he said, “think of themselves as a saving remnant.”
In contrast to this “wrong kind of despair,” Kirsch concludes his book by offering the Talmudic concept of ye’ush, or despair over a lost object. According to Jewish law, we must be willing to give up on “perfect justice,” in the following sense: someone whose property is stolen, then purchased by a third party unaware of the crime, cannot demand it back from the buyer, though the victim remains “entitled to monetary compensation and damages.” The same is true of nations, lands, and history, Kirsch urges. Attempting to restore the past can only result in new wrongs; the best we can do is muddle forward, resigning ourselves to loss.
Yet here Kirsch might have taken more of a cue from his predecessor. He and Rorty both sound the classic liberal theme of imperfection, but where Kirsch stresses resignation, Rorty stresses achievement, quoting William James: “Democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture.” In one way or another, Kirsch spends much of his book chastising radicals for abandoning the liberal “arc of justice” narrative, but here he seems to relinquish it himself, failing to muster one iota of Rorty’s democratic optimism. Instead, through the example of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, in which characters are put under a “spell of oblivion,” Kirsch invites us to forget and move on.
A strenuously secular thinker, Rorty opposed his account of cruelty to religious notions of sin. As I have argued elsewhere, however, his view comports perfectly well with the Jewish conception of teshuva, or repentance: turning away from sin to forgiveness and redemption, which necessarily includes making restitution to the extent possible. Perhaps teshuva, then, is the Jewish concept Kirsch should have reached for. Ye’ush, as Kirsch counsels it, is a comfort to the powerful rather than the afflicted. Teshuva demands more.
But can a nation do teshuva? This is one of the oldest and deepest questions of Judaism. The traditional answer, coming down to us through the prophets and rabbis, is yes. This cuts against Kirsch’s cynical reading of settler colonial studies, which he portrays as committed to “mak[ing] hundreds of millions of ‘settlers’ disappear” or nothing. In fact, the literature of Indigenous studies and Native American studies, whether identifying as part of settler colonial studies or not, is full of inspiring and promising examples of activists using every legal, cultural, and political means at their disposal to pursue decolonization.
In Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and their Lands (2022), for example, Salish-Kootenai economist Ronald L. Trosper writes of how in 2015, the Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Hopi, and Zuni nations formed a coalition to protect 1.3 million acres of land in southeastern Utah by creating the Bears Ears National Monument in an innovative application of the 1906 Antiquities Act—a move Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer (hardly anyone’s idea of a decolonial militant) recently called “a transformative step toward healing a long history of colonial taking.” President Obama signed a proclamation to this effect, though he kept decision-making authority in the hands of the U.S. government rather than consent to the co-management structure the tribes had proposed. President Trump then attempted to reduce the size of the monument to 200,000 acres, in accordance with the wishes of the Utah congressional delegation and state legislature (as well as a private uranium-mining company). The tribes initiated legal action, which remains in limbo, but in 2021 President Biden reinstated the monument at greater than its original size.
Perhaps this all falls into the category of what Kirsch calls “defending tribal rights, enforcing treaties, and holding government accountable—concrete goals that can be achieved within the framework of American law.” But it is a mistake to conclude that groups pursuing such resolutions “fail to see that the colonial relationship endures”—another view advanced by Mamdani that Kirsch attempts to use as a reductio of settler colonial studies. (In this case, I take issue with Mamdani’s view, but that is no reason to reject his whole body of work.) For one thing, this and other instances of “Land Back” often involve highly innovative legal strategies, including pursuing legal personhood for tracts of land and bodies of water, as in the cases of Te Urewera and Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand—upending the Anglo-settler legal system in order to make it possible to recognize the relationship described in the title of Dana Lloyd’s book Land Is Kin (2023). For another, as evidenced by the Bears Ears example, these cases remain contentious. They provide clear evidence of a political divide between forces who seek to perpetuate, deepen, and consolidate the colonial pattern and those who seek to stall, frustrate, or even reverse it.
There are moments in On Settler Colonialism when it seems as though Kirsch is ready to acknowledge that the intellectual framework of settler colonialism does not inevitably lead to genocidal violence. He admits, for example, that “Western intellectuals seldom openly endorse the eliminationist ambitions of either Jews or Arabs, and the leading ideologues of settler colonialism do not call for Israelis to be pushed into the sea.” He mentions, in this regard, Mamdani’s support for a one-state solution and Lorenzo Veracini’s support for two states as a first step toward a longer-term resolution. And yet, Kirsch simply waves these explicit arguments away with the contention that the “actual effect of the ideology of settler colonialism is not to encourage any of these solutions. It is to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance.” This extreme pitting of denotation against connotation, at the conclusion of his book, cries out for nothing so much as diagnosis.
On Settler Colonialism begins with a pledge: See this trendy body of scholarship? It’s not what it appears to be! It moves on to the turn: making settler colonial studies disappear by evading its central truth claims in favor of too-clever diagnosis. Knowing this, Kirsch hopes, will be enough for credulous audiences (including, apparently, Michael Walzer) to satisfy themselves. As Caine says in his monologue about the turn: “Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.” For the prestige, Kirsch brings settler colonialism back, as “the ideology of settler colonialism,” a repository of everything that liberals, centrists, and conservatives have hated about radical academia since McCarthyism—too secular and too religious at the same time, both anti-American and anti-Jewish, both ineffectual and dangerous, both genocidal and disrespectful of genocide. The trick is done, and now you can clap.
But even if “settler colonialism” goes the way of “critical race theory,” becoming the new pet hate of liberal pundits’ anti-academic screeds and conservative politicians’ draconian legislation, the phenomenon itself will remain. Getting rid of “settler colonialism” will not stop people from seeking to address the ongoing and enduring injustices of colonization, any more than getting rid of “critical race theory” will make everyone unaware of the vast differences in life outcomes across differently racialized populations. As I write, Gaza has been destroyed and far-right Israeli politicians have developed plans to resettle it. Uncounted numbers of Palestinian men, women, and children lie dead or live starving. Instead of obsessing over how to make the apparently ineffable mystery of opposition to this cruelty and criminality disappear, the real magic would be devoting some imagination to care, repentance, and repair.
(c) 2025, Boston Review
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