Summary of On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

This is my hand-written (zero AI) summary of the book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) by Adam Kirsch. I've tried to extract the main ideas as well as possible, but would still encourage readers to buy the book for more details and a better written text.

On Settler Colonialism

After the October 7th attack, many people were first introduced to the concept of settler colonialism. However, it has been an well-known concept among academics for two decades. Settler colonialism argues that societies like the United States or Israel are illegitimate because they were created against the will of the native population. Since the concept is nowadays used for various political causes, it should be seen as an ideology instead of a historical concept.

The Theory of a Massacre

A poll conducted two months after the 7th of October attack found that the attack by Hamas "can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians." Since Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has multiple times fired rockets at Israel which led to conflicts and some Israeli and many Palestinian casualties. This pattern changed on the 7th of October where Hamas fighters killed 1,200 civilians and took 250 hostages. From bodycam footage taken by Hamas fighters, Hamas fighters conducted torture, mutilation, and rape on soldiers and civilians.

Strangely, immediately after the massacre, pro-Palestinian protests did not mute, but instead because larger and louder. Much support even came not from Cairo or Damascus, but from Ivy League universities. For example, Yale professor Zareena Grewal posted on X, "Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine"

What is striking is the enthusiasm for violence against Israeli civilians and the use of the term settler colonial. It seems it is impossible to understand progressive politics today without understanding settler colonialism.

In the context of Israel and Palestine, the word settler usually refers to Jews living on the West Bank settlements, territory occupied by Israel in 1967. Even in 2016, Israeli Jews on the political left "overwhelmingly say settlements hurt Israel's security."

The Israelis killed on October 7th were not living on the West Bank, but inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel. So that means that instead of West Bank, the Palestina activists mean that Israel itself is a settler colonial state.

The word colonial can change too. In the United States, the Declaration of Independence wrote "these United Colonies, and the Right ought to be Free and Independent States." This means that people who came to the US after independence are not colonists but immigrants.

However, according to Adam Dahl, the US is, and always will be, a settler colonial society because it illegitimately occurs land that belongs to the Native Americans. As Patrick Wolfe wrote, "Invasion is a structure, not an event." What settler colonialism thus implies is that the original injustice is continuously being renewed through structural oppression. This means that settler is not referring to actions of the individual but a heritable identity.

Sai Englert of Leiden University connects settler colonialism to capitalism and sexism, and likes to think through "how these structures of domination can be dismantled". Leigh Patel of the University of Pittsburg School of Education agrees, "Protests, marches and sit-ins are forms of pedagogy."

These settler colonial studies have become an ever expanding academic field. It is so fertile because it is considered that the violence of the founding of a nation is still present even after centuries. Essentially, the academics conducting these studies affirm virtue by confirming guilt.

The settler colonial studies often talk about refusing "settler futures" meaning futures in which settler colonial societies continue to exist. For example, Eve Tuck of SUNY New Paltz and K. Wayne Yang of UC San Diego like to imagine "the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone." On October 7, Hamas did more than imagine it, which one Cornell professor described as "exhilarating" and "energizing".

We can call the settler colonialism an ideology because it aims to shape our reality with a particular interpretation of politics and history. Like other radial ideologies, it's hard to oppose because the core idea of fighting against injustice is praiseworthy. However, history shows that fighting against past injustices may easily lead to causing new injustices and generally disastrous results.

Redefining Colonialism

The history of colonialism starts with Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941 aiming to "respect the right of all peoples to choose a form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." Yet, many Western countries continued to control colonial territories after the war including the Netherlands over Indonesia. The efforts did fail for various reasons and almost all these colonial efforts were dismantled.

Decolonization was less violent than colonization but still not a peaceful process. Imperial powers that resisted decolonization made the process only bloodier. In the 1950s and 60s, intellectuals outside the West set out to demolish the idea of the superiority of the West.

Many Europeans lived in some of these colonial territories and decided to stay. The Boers in South Africa for example were joined by many Brits. This made the process of decolonization much more complicated.

In 1976, Kenneth Good wrote Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation, in which he argues that settler colonialism accelerated historical progress while also creating misery. He also only used the term only to describe a handful of African countries where white settlers dominated the larger native population.

In the 1980s and '90s, however, Australian theorists began to apply the term to Australia. In Patrick Wolfe's book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999), he argued that colonialism was about getting rid of the people already living there. Wolfe also introduced the idea that "The colonizers came to stay-invasion is a structure not an event", which means that settlers can never become legitimately owners of the territory.

In practice, settler colonial studies is usually concerned with the countries where it is the most successful as an academic discipline, namely Australia, Canada, and the United States. Another major focus is Israel even though the historic differences are enormous.

As a historic discipline, settler colonial studies makes no sense due to the narrow limit. However, as a variety of critical theory where injustice is analyzed in Marxist terms it does. Today, settler colonialism is closely related to genocide, according to Wolfe in Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native (2006).

The word genocide means "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" according to Raphael Lemkin in 1944. Today, the word is morphed in meaning and now Damien Short of the University of London argues that "it isn't actually necessary for anyone to be killed in order for genocide to take place." Cultural genocide including "national park schemes", according to Short, is also considered a form of genocide. Veracini, who teaches at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology, has expanded the term further such that it now includes 26 varieties of "transferist imagination". For instance, integrating an ethnic group into society is a "transfer by assimilation."

Because settler colonialism is such a extensive crime over so many decades and with so many aspects, it is hard to see how it can be overcome. Even if a nation offers an apology, the ideology also has no answer to what should happen next. Especially with the US it is clear where the settlers (Americans) should go.

One way would be to give land away to the natives. But then the question also becomes which natives from which time? Should the progressive movement turn back the clock to the 17th century and then consider it done?

The struggle against settler colonialism does not target the rich in name of the poor, but instead seems to target the rich by the rich. Or in this case, the many Americans target themselves in name of the Native Americans. The only way in which settler colonialism can be solved is by the US not existing in the first place. This might explain the limited appeal of the theory to Native Americans. In response Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University wrote that this must be because Native Americans are "formed by their embrace of it." In contrast, Native American Ijeoma Nnodim Opara describes the rush of Euro-American do-gooders to apply for grants an attempt to "colonize the decolonization movement."

Ironically, settler colonialism has clear parallels with the Calvinist theology that inspired the Puritans. Puritans main sin was being born and therefore embracing guilt was highly necessary.

A New American Countermyth

When George Bancroft wrote his monumental History of the United States (1834) he said that "Successions of increasing culture and heroes in the world of thought had conquered for mankind the idea of the freedom of the individual" Here he ignored the part about slavery and the native population as was necessary for the story to hold.

In recent years George W. Bush and Obama have both referred to Martin Luther King and his vision that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice". Yet, while the language of civil rights aims to perfect America, the language of decolonization aims to reject it.

Through the lens of colonialism, it makes little difference whether you are an European that came to the US voluntarily or an African sold into slavery. Both groups are living where they don't belong. Further complicating things are groups like the Chicanas/os, as they are both oppressed and oppressors at the same time. They are, so to speak, oppressed by the US but at the same time Mexico was created by the Spanish Empire.

Complexities like this show why multiculturalism will also not solve the grievances since all immigrants are still considered to live on a place they should not. Dunbar-Ortiz even goes as far as calling immigration merely an alibi created by "U.S. ruling classes".

Contrary to the common narrative in settler colonial studies, Ned Blackhawk, a Yale professor of history and member of a Shoshone Indian tribe, wrote a book called The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023). In the book he argued that the field "often foregrounds Indigenous 'elimination' as the defining aspect of Native American history and minimizes the extent of Indigenous power and agency."

Another aspect that is often overlooked by the settler colonial studies is that not only the Puritans have been guilty of violence. On the one side, Dunbar-Ortiz wrote that fighting in pre-Columbian North America was "highly ritualized, with quests for individual glory, resulting in few deaths." Whereas on the other side, Chacon and Mendoza wrote in North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence that "Warfare was ubiquitous; every major culture area of Native America... has produced archaeological, ethnohistorical, osteological, or ethnographic evidence of armed conflict and ritual violence." The point of pointing out these facts is not the excuse the violence towards Native Americans, but that the account of American history in settler colonial studies is "tailored to cultivate hostility to settlers."

Another term that was introduced is that of "Turtle Island", which according to Jaskiran Dhillon of the New School, refers to "the settler colony we know as the United States of America". The term was invented by Gary Snyder who in the book Turtle Island wrote that there was a pristine nature before the arrival of the polluted European industrial civilization. This term encapsulates the ideology of settler colonialism well by being less interested in true history than in the construction of an alternative future.

Settler Ways of Being

What exactly is the final goal of the movement is unclear. Asking this is considered as a sign of insufficient faith: "Lack of imagination also indicates a lack of commitment for figuring it out," according to Dunbar-Ortiz.

Because invasion is considered a structure not an event, critics point out that "settler ways of being" is a nonspecific term that can be used to blame anything. Clear are also the links to a familiar progressive agenda. Historian Gerald Horne writes that America was born in the 17th century as a "hydra-headed monster" of "white supremacy and capitalism".

Whereas Bancroft considered Christopher Columbus as showing the virtues of America itself, modern theorists focus on things Columbus did upon arrival such as seizing gold and forcing people into slavery. The ideology of settler colonialism now considers America's history as one of American insatiability instead of American enterprise. Like other radical ideologies the main idea is a final solution to all evil.

One other aspect of modern life that is blamed on the settlers is today's environmental crises. According to Hadeel Assali of the Center for Science and Society, argue that indigenous societies treat Earth as a precious entity while "Western colonial legacies" expect they can extract natural resources as much as they want. What this ignores is that China and India are not considered settler colonialists, but still they produce a large percentage of total CO₂. It is hard to see how decolonization, however defined, would solve this.

For Immanuel Kant, the main idea of the Enlightenment was Sapere aude, "Dare to know". Yet, from the perspective of settler colonialism, science is seen as another form of settler insatiability. For example, since some tribes "know that they have always have existed in their lands", Jennifer Raff decides to ignore the DNA and paleontological evidence that the earliest Native Americans came from East Asia. She writes, "I acknowledge this conflict but will not attempt to resolve it (if it is possible-or necessary-to resolve it at all)."

Robbie Shilliam of Johns Hopkins University complains that the discipline divides "humanity into oppositional categories with fixed properties". Shilliam argues that "fixing reality in this extreme way must require-or at least, must lead to-violence." since it involves imposing boundaries instead of accepting changing entities. Abolishing settler colonialism in practice would mean avoiding also other male, Western ideas such as moving from one place to another, having a monogamous relationship, and watching the Disney film Moana (due to expropriating "Native creative labor for collaborative, corporate storytelling").

These ways of thinking have spilled out in modern society. For example, there is a paradoxical pride in acknowledging guilt such as people introducing themselves as settler. Even institutions participate by admitting that they operate on stolen land. These sentiments are not new for even the Apostle Paul described in his epistle: "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Romans 7:19).

"This book of the New Testament lay at the center of Martin Luther's theological revolution." Perhaps this is why the ideology of settler colonialism was founded in historically Protestant countries like Australia, Canada, and the US. Just like Jesas died for our sins on the cross, perhaps decolonization is another way of dying to sin. One way to append for the sin, according to Frantz Fanon, is to find dignified labor for the first time in killing: "To work means to work towards the death of the colonist." This leads to a predicament in settler colonialist studies since calls to "eradicate", "kill", or "cull" settlers can only be metaphorical. But what if there was a country that could more realistically than the US be destroyed because it was small?

The Palestine Paradigm

In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux, whose reservation is home to about 8000 people protested against an oil pipeline. The confrontation attracted international attention including from pro-Palestinan protesters. Even the Palestinian Youth Movement sent a delegation to Standing Rock to fight against "corporate greed and the settler colonial state."

Standing Rock was a peaceful protest against civilian infrastructure, while Gaza is a long-standing military conflict. The core of this idea is that both the United States and Israel came into being against the will of prior inhabitants, so therefore why the pipeline is actually harmful or how Israel should respond are in a sense irrelevant.

Settler colonialism was first created to discuss Australia, Canada, and the US. However, today Israel is considered almost as important as the US in having settler roots. Yet, Israel did not via insatiable hunger fill the entire continent. On the contrary, the State of Israel is about the size of New Jersey. And it is still the only Jewish country in the Middle East among 22 Arab countries.

Moreover, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people living in Palestine, though it did displace them. With this displacement of historic Palestine came a growth from 1.3 million to 7.5 million in about 75 years.

Where we can nowadays find settler colonialism is probably in China. Both Tibetan and Uighur people have been forced into what other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. According to the definitions of theorists like Wolfe and Verancini, these campaigns involve every element of settler colonialism. As Carole McGranahan writes, "imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries."

One reason could be that the Chinese language as well as Chinese censorship manages to hide these activities. Another could be that settler colonial theorists tend to not come for fields like history or international relations.

As we have seen, settler colonialism can be applied to anything including capitalism, sexism, and climate change. So adding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a concrete target for an otherwise abstract struggle. Even more perplexingly, LGBTQ organizations have declared solidarity with Palestinians and even supported the Hamas attacks.

What is surprising about this stance is that Tel Aviv is considered one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world while the other countries in the Middle East are definitely not. For example, a 25 year old man, Abu Murkhiyeh, was murdered in 2022 and the video of his execution was posted online. A Hamas leader called Mahmoud Al-Zahar in a 2010 interview defended told an European interviewer: "You do not live like human beings. You do not (even) live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?" Criticizing Hamas is considered presumptuous since, according to Sarah Schulman, Hamas was democratically elected.

Contrary to what many people believe, no human population is indigenous. Instead all Homo sapiens are likely from East Africa and then spread around the world from there. In settler colonialism however, indigeneity is defined as having moral and spiritual status; unlike colonialist who are destructive.

(WORK IN PROGRESS)