Polemics over “settler colonialism” and Israeli policies

There has been a lot of handwringing in polemics around the current Isarel-Gaza war, including about the concept of “settler colonialism.” That is an academic concept as well as one that has made its way into a broader political vocabulary. It’s part of the general historical outlook of postcolonialism.

Any academic theory can have a lot of exotic subsets, some more useful and sensible than others. But broadly speaking, the postcolonial outlook is a part of global history that pays particular attention to the European expansion of the modern (post-1942) era as colonies were established around the world. Imperialism and colonialism were not restricted to what we still nostalgically call “the West,” as the experiences of Russia and China with Japanese imperialism in the 20th century dramatically illustrate.

The postcolonial perspective provides a way to contextualize today global history, both by understanding how colonization and decolonization affected both the West and the Global South - the latter also known not so long ago as the Third World and the developing world.

There were different types of colonialism. Some, like that of the Dutch in Indonesia or the British in India were governed by Dutch or British administrations with the native population subjugated to the colonial power but not massively displaced by them. Others were treated as “settler colonies,” a concept which has become a hot-button phrase the last two year with the current military conflicts in which Israel is involved.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe provided the following summary of the concept in the 2022 edition of his A History of Modern Palestine (Third Edition):

The early Zionists arrived [in the area of Palestine] at roughly the same time as the missionaries. Zionism was a settler colonial movement, very much like the movement of other Europeans who moved to the Americas, parts of Africa as well as Australia and New Zealand. These were Europeans persecuted for religious, economic and political reasons who made their way out of Europe, seeking to create a new Europe elsewhere. They wanted to create this new Europe instead of the one that did not want them. They needed at first an empire to help them in the initial stages of the colonization but then rebelled against those empires in their wish not only to build a home in a foreign country but also a homeland. Hence, when the American, Israeli and Boers at the time were celebrating independence days, it meant liberating it from the colonial powers with total disregard to the indigenous population.

Their main obstacle was the presence of other people on the lands they defined as ‘the elimination of the native’. The late Patrick Wolfe explained that when these European settlers encountered the indigenous population, they were motivated by a logic he defined as ‘the elimination n of the native.’ In some cases, it means actual genocide, as in North America and Australia, sometimes, other means were employed to remove the native population such as apartheid in South Africa and … ethnic cleansing in Palestine. (pp. 32-33)

This is actually pretty straightforward. How the story of the Americas from the 1700s through the 1800s especially could be accurately understood without recognizing that is, well, impossible to fathom. How we understand exactly what happened, what longer-terms effects it had, and how it affects the present are all challenging. But not irrelevant or some kind of daydream.

Adam Kirsch in his 2024 book On Settler Colonialism addresses the concept of settler colonialism with particular emphasis on its usage in connection with Israel and the Palestinians, including the controversies after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023.

This is an hour-long interview with Kirsch conducted by Michael Shermer: (1)



In the book, Kirsch uses a lot of arguments that seem designed to confuse 18-year-olds who are encountering the concepts involved for the first time. Most of them are along the lines of the following (these are my non-entirely-sympathetic summaries, not exact quotes):

Well, all of history is run on conquest, so what’s the big deal?

Native peoples in America and elsewhere didn’t have modern property laws so how can we say it was their land?

Revolutions in the liberal era like the American one were based on doing away with the past. So how can ditsy lefties say past civilizations are still relevant?

And who’s a settler anyway? After a group establishes physical control over some piece of land, then they are the new natives, now aren’t they?

And, look here, even a Marxist icon like Walter Benjamin said that all cultural documents are a record of barbarism, so that means settler barbarism was necessary to produce culture. Why are all you bleeding-heart libs against culture, huh, huh?

Talking about settler colonialism in connection with anything Israel has ever done is antisemitic.

Talking about settler colonialism can only lead to violence and destruction. So if advocates of that viewpoint aren’t already fans of violent terrorism, they will soon be.

Kirsch doesn’t put his arguments in quite such a stoner form. But his versions aren’t too far removed from that, either. And much of the text drips with condescension.

The 2025 German edition includes a Postscript by Passau University political scientist Tim Stosberg. His argument, briefly put, is that the whole “settler colonialism” idea is just warmed-over Commie nonsense. Although he does make a vague allusion to a partial post-World War II conciliation between Soviet anti-Zionism and Israeli Zionism. Although he doesn’t specify it, that presumably refers to the fact that the Soviet Union supported the Israeli War of Independence and made sure that Czechoslovakia, then under Soviet domination, became the main weapons supplier to the Zionist forces. (Since the weapons and equipment that Czechoslovakia provided had originally been produced for the German Wehrmacht, some of it was painted or stamped with symbolism that was a bit awkward for a Jewish liberation movement.)

As Stosberg accurately notes, this was consistent with the USSR’s goal at the time of weakening British influence in the Middle East. Which in 1948 was a shared goal of the Soviets and the Truman Administration in the US.

Stosberg echoes many of Kirsch’s arguments, though in a much more substantive way than Kirsch. He also addresses some of the German context of the discussion over how German colonial practices in Africa influenced Hitler’s Final Solution of genocide against the Jews.

(1) Why Is Everyone Talking About Decolonization?/The Michael Shermer Show. Skeptic YouTube channel 09/28/2024. <https://youtu.be/HL9tghUwY-M?si=uCEkORam8lHHzc1E> (Acessed: 2025-06-08).