In the face of anti-Israel protests last spring, many colleges have established task forces on antisemitism, revised protest policies, and reaffirmed the values of civil discourse and mutual respect. But what if the problem isn’t inadequate policies or insufficiently tolerant campuses? What if colleges are facing — and facilitating — an intellectual crisis?
That’s one reading of Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism. Kirsch, a poet and critic who has taught at Columbia University and is now an editor at The Wall Street Journal, traces the idea of settler colonialism back to its roots on the academic left. He argues that it’s impossible to understand the protest movement without grasping the idea of settler colonialism and the ideological convictions that flow from it.
The concept, which dates back decades, originally described patterns of settlement in which émigrés from an imperial center set up colonies abroad, as the English did in North America and Australia. Scholars of settler colonialism focus on both historical injustices and on the contemporary inequities those injustices are thought to produce. The application of the concept to Israel, particularly after the Hamas attacks of October 7, has proved especially influential — and controversial.
Settler colonialism is a critical theory. It’s not so much about understanding the past as it is about shaping attitudes in the present.
Born out of a virtuous impulse to rectify injustice, Kirsch argues, the settler-colonial lens is prone to many of the same errors that plague other radical ideologies. Idealists think their way into morally callous stances. Thus the Yale associate professor Zareena Grewal’s response to October 7: “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.” Or Students for Justice in Palestine: “This is what it means to Free Palestine. Not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.”
As colleges gear up for the fall semester, I spoke to Kirsch about land acknowledgements, why Israel is so central in discourse about settler colonialism, and higher education’s crisis of confidence. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is settler colonialism best understood more as an ideology than a historical concept?
After October 7, I started noticing that a lot of the more sympathetic reactions to Hamas used the term “settler colonial” to describe Israel. It was a sign that this academic idea was percolating into mainstream public discourse. I read the major texts to see how the ideas are articulated and the different forms they take. What I found is that settler colonialism is a critical theory. It’s not so much about understanding the past as it is about shaping attitudes in the present. It’s an ideology in the sense that it’s a story people tell about the world and its problems, and how we should change in the future.
What surprised you about the scholarship on settler colonialism?
How ramified it is and how many different areas of study are touched by it. Obviously it touches on American history, but it’s also in public health, feminism, gender studies, environmentalism and ecology, Middle Eastern politics — so many different things. That’s because it’s a worldview, and when you adopt this worldview it puts you in a position to criticize basically everything, because everything about a settler-colonial society bears the imprint of its original sin. It’s a kind of political theology.
The most common manifestation of this worldview is the land acknowledgement: when an institution, whether a college or a museum, identifies the Native American peoples who once inhabited the same land. The tone of these can be quite confessional, even self-flagellating.
Land acknowledgements are really interesting because they’ve gone from zero to 100 in the space of a few years. Now basically every university and arts institution has some kind of land acknowledgement on their mission statement or displayed on their wall, or they cite it at public events. In a sense, land acknowledgements aren’t telling us something we don’t already know. We learned in elementary school that America was conquered from Native Americans. So what is the purpose? It reaffirms this idea that society and the institutions we’ve built sit on a false foundation, that they’re rooted in an evil crime, and are therefore illegitimate in some way.
People at academic conferences will sometimes introduce themselves by saying, ‘I’m from University X, which stands on the ancestral homelands of …'
If that’s the case, why is there no serious plan to make reparations? There’s never a sense that the university should dissolve itself or give back the land, or that the museum should sell off its paintings. The purpose is moral prestige. If you are willing to acknowledge that you’re a settler, an inheritor of an original sin, paradoxically that makes you better than people who don’t acknowledge it. The worse you are, the better you are, in a strange way.
So land acknowledgements are an empty gesture?
It’s definitely a gesture, but the people who make it don’t think it’s empty. They think they’re doing something morally important. People at academic conferences will sometimes introduce themselves by saying: I’m from University X, which stands on the ancestral homelands of … . For them the land acknowledgement has become a part of the identity of their institution and of themselves as a member of that institution. No one thought that was necessary five or 10 years ago. Something has really changed about how people in the academy think about themselves and their roles and their institutions.
Explain the significance of Israel in the discourse on settler colonialism.
Settler colonialism is a theory that was developed in the context of Anglophone countries colonized by the British in the 17th and 18th centuries — North America and Australia. There is a debate to be had about whether settler colonialism is the best template to understand those events. But whatever the case, that is not what happened in Israel. It’s actually very strange to take this template that was developed for one type of scenario and to apply it to a context where it obviously doesn’t fit.
There’s another aspect to Israel’s centrality in the settler-colonial discourse, which is that, as you said, it’s very hard to think through how to decolonize the United States or Canada. But Israel is perhaps small enough and endangered enough that it nudges the theory toward a more concrete reality.
Definitely. Big and old and wealthy and powerful societies like the United States, where there has been almost a complete replacement of one civilization with another — it’s basically impossible to imagine that being undone. So settler colonialism can only really function as cultural or political critique. But Israel is a small country fairly recently established that has been perpetually in conflict and, crucially, whose existence has never been accepted by many of the countries around it. There actually is a campaign to destroy it, and it’s imaginable it could happen. Which explains why some of the responses to October 7, especially among those who use the language of settler colonialism, were gleeful.
In past conflicts people have deplored civilian casualties. October 7 was a terrorist raid to kill civilians, and some people on the left and in academe were excited about that. For those who see themselves as engaged in the struggle against settler colonialism in some mediated way as scholars or activists, in Israel you see a real struggle to kill people and destroy a country. That’s the logical endpoint of settler-colonial theory: Israel is an illegitimate country that should not exist. And therefore if you’re working to get rid of it, you’re supporting a virtuous cause.
I’m reminded of the Cornell historian Russell Rickford, who professed to being “exhilarated” by the Hamas attack.
Yes. I recall a protest at a college — I forget which one and I don’t want to name the wrong one — where students were saying to the university: “You taught us to read Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Why are you mad that we’re acting on what we’ve learned?” It’s theory turning into practice.
To what extent has Israel become a reference point in the settler-colonial scholarship for all kinds of social wrongs?
If the Palestinian struggle is the struggle against settler colonialism, and if everything wrong in the world is a result of settler colonialism, there’s no way to have reservations about that struggle because all good things will come of the liberation of Palestine. You hear some young people say that “From the River to the Sea” means an end to militarism, apartheid, racism, everything they see as bad in the world. The key is liberating Palestine, meaning ending the State of Israel. So the killing of Israeli civilians can be seen as a step forward in history rather than a step back into barbarism.
Why would dissolving Israel end racism in other parts of the world?
It reminds me of how Marxists would say that if we get rid of capitalism everything else will be solved. Then in places like the Soviet Union, where they did get rid of capitalism, it created new problems. I see a similar dynamic with settler colonialism, though it isn’t a mass political movement like communism was. It has a similar totalizing way of thinking: At the root of all our problems is settler colonialism; if we get rid of it all our problems will be solved.
Why is there so much ambiguity about what a decolonial future would look like?
Decolonization originally was a movement to evict European empires from Asia and Africa. So in Algeria or Rhodesia or Vietnam or India, decolonization meant throwing out the colonizers and the native people retaking their countries. Obviously it’s not the same situation in Australia and North America. You can’t imagine everyone in North America not descended from Native Americans leaving, which is basically what happened in Algeria when the French left. So decolonization in America is much more about inner work, about changing who you are as a person, how you think about yourself, the way you relate to the world. So in a paradoxical way, discourse about settler colonialism is so-called settlers critiquing themselves and trying to be better human beings. It’s a moral and spiritual struggle that has generated an entire literature of self-examination, almost a religious discourse.
In the wake of the protests, encampments, and crackdowns on campuses last spring, colleges have been tweaking protest policies and promoting a culture of agreeable disagreement. Your book suggests that what transpired last semester — and may start up again in the fall — isn’t primarily or exclusively a failure of policy but rather evidence of an intellectual crisis.
On most campuses most people are not especially interested in this issue. They’re trying to study and get an education. Most people are not participating in these protests. But I do think it’s true that the way certain things are taught, and settler colonialism is at the heart of this, is very critical of existing societies and institutions. And the people who teach it wouldn’t disagree with that. They proudly affirm their responsibility to call out and combat injustice. So if you have an institution that’s teaching students, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that America should never have been founded or that it’s fundamentally evil, or that Israel shouldn’t exist, and then students protest and say they believe what they’ve been taught, it’s tricky for colleges to make the case that these ideas were only meant for the classroom, not real life. This is true of a lot of radical politics in the academy. Ideas are taught without the expectation that those ideas will be turned against the university itself. When students do that, it puts universities in a very difficult situation. They don’t want to disavow the ideas and values they teach. But they also want to sustain themselves. In a way it’s similar to the land-acknowledgement question: If you say a college is built on an evil foundation, how do you then make the case the institution deserves to exist at all?
So if there is a crisis, it’s a crisis of legitimacy among institutions on the left. And that crisis won’t be solved with a policy that says everyone should agree to disagree. Yes, they should. But there’s more to the problem than that.
So it’s an open question whether universities have the confidence to defend themselves?
Absolutely.
