Can You Cancel a Country?

Settler Colonialism and the Effort to Erase the Jewish State

Photo by Benjamin Istanbuli on Unsplash

One of the stranger and more disturbing aspects of the world since October 7, 2023 is the ongoing and increased support for the Palestinians in the aftermath of the atrocities of that day. This is hard for some of us to understand—rape and murder and kidnapping are not the usual way to make friends and influence people. Why did so many in the West celebrate and exult in the so-called resistance? Somehow, the atrocities of October 7th invigorated the Palestinian cause rather than shamed it.

I thought I understood what was going on. It’s the standard logic that Arnold Kling identified long ago and that now seems commonplace. The left views the news of the day through the lens of the oppressor and the oppressed. Israel is the oppressor, the Palestinians the oppressed. The war in Gaza simply intensified the emotions behind the marches, chants, and encampments. There isn’t a lot of nuance in the modern world. A lot of people just pick a side. Some choose Israel. Some choose the Palestinians.

But they didn’t just choose the Palestinians. After October 7th, anti-Israel sentiment increased well before Israeli launched its counter-attacks in Gaza. But it’s a very special kind of anti-Israel protest movement.

The protests aren’t about criticizing or reforming Israel. They’re not about the settlements on the West Bank. They’re not about getting Israel to improve the daily life of Palestinians in Gaza. They’re not about pressuring Israel to accept a two-state solution. They’re not even about delegitimizing Israel. They’re about erasing Israel. They’re about denying any righteousness that might exist in the pro-Israel cause or more accurately, in Zionism. They’re about a utopian ideal of returning Palestine to the state it was in as if the last 76 years hadn’t happened. Never mind that the Palestinians didn’t have sovereignty then. At least the alleged settlers didn’t either.

The resistance is about turning back the hands of time. Put aside for the moment the reality that history only runs forward. This isn’t about history. It’s about myth and what inspires people.

What should happen to the Jews who live in what is today called Israel is also beside the point—a detail to be pushed aside as relatively unimportant. You can hear the disinterest when someone is asked to expand on the implications of the phrase “from the river to the sea.” What will happen to the Jews who live there now, a protestor, is asked. They usually don’t have an answer. It’s not because they’re hiding a genocidal wish. The most important thing is an unraveling of the last 76 years. How that can possibly be achieved is irrelevant.

At the root of this idea, especially in the minds of progressive intellectuals in the West, the Ivy League faculty members supporting the encampments and their students, is the concept of settler colonialism. If you google “settler colonialism syllabus” you will pull up course after course on this perspective. Schools teaching it include Harvard, UC-Berkeley, Cornell, Williams, McGill, University of Toronto and others. It’s a ubiquitous paradigm in college classrooms in a wide array of departments.

Settler colonialism is an extraordinary lens for looking at the world—or at least the parts of the world where settler colonialism is said to be practised—the US, Canada, Australia, and, as they like to call it, Palestine. These are the countries where white Europeans allegedly displaced and killed indigenous people taking over their land and their resources.

I’d heard of settler colonialism. But I didn’t appreciate its breadth and application to Israel until I read Adam Kirsch’s short and superb treatment of the subject in his recent book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. (EconTalk episode with Kirsch coming shortly.) Buy the book. You’ll learn a lot.

Almost every nation has violence, conquest, brutality, and oppression in its past and often in its founding. Some do a better job than others of coming to grips with their history. Some run from it and hide. Others confess and add chapters to their history books. But settler colonialism is a special kind of national historical failing.

The essential and also the most radical claim of settler colonialism is that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. What does that mean? It means that the settling of the United States by Europeans isn’t just something that happened in the past, a sin that demands atonement. The sin is ongoing. The sin is now—there’s a structure of oppression of indigenous people that oppresses them today and a group of settlers who benefit from that oppression.

The Pilgrims or others who came to the United States aren’t the only settlers. Those who came from Ireland or Poland or Italy in the 19th century to the United States—they’re settlers, too, because they benefited from the displacement and murder of the Native Americans. In fact, anyone who isn’t indigenous is a settler. In settler colonialism, you’re either a settler or you’re a colonized indigenous native. Latecomers are still settlers. The descendants of the indigenous people remain colonized. They can never escape their status.

This perspective explains some of the stranger aspects of the current state of debate around Israel, the war in Gaza, and October 7:

• In the settler colonialism view, the atrocities of October 7 are a form of resistance—not to the quality of life of those who live in Gaza or Israel’s responsibility for that quality of life—but to the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine that still colonizes the Gazans and the non-Jews who are the descendants of those who lived in Israel in 1948. So the state of Gaza before October 7 is irrelevant to what happened on October 7. Those of us who are pro-Israel point out that Gaza wasn’t an open-air prison. Much of it was actually nice and it could have been nicer if Hamas had devoted resources to economic development instead of creating tunnels and smuggling in weapons. Similarly, the Israeli blockade of Gaza which allegedly immiserized the Gazans, wasn’t very effective. The tons of cement that built those tunnels found their way into Gaza anyway. None of that matters. October 7 wasn’t about Gaza. It was about Palestine.

• Anti-Israel voices accuse Israel of apartheid, echoing the settler colonialism of South Africa. Pro-Israel voices explain that no, Arab-Israelis have full rights as Israeli citizens. They can vote, get government subsidized health care and education, and so on. These facts are irrelevant in the eyes of the adherent of settler colonialism. It doesn’t matter that the Arab citizens of Israel have high standards of living and live better than Arabs in neighboring Syria, Jordan, or Egypt. Irrelevant. Israelis as settler colonialists are still colonizing those Arabs. And those doing the colonizing or the settling aren’t just in the West Bank. They’re in Haifa and Tel Aviv and everywhere that we call Israel. I arrived here in Israel three years ago. By the settler colonialist logic, I, too, am a settler.

• Why does no one protest when Syria kills Kurds or tens of thousands of civilians in the Syrian civil war? Why no encampments for various atrocities occurring around the world? Assad’s not a European. He was just a run-of-the-mill tyrant. No settler colonialism? Irrelevant. Just part of the ongoing tragedy of human existence. Move along.

• Why hasn’t anyone offered the Gazans refuge from a horrific war zone? There are currently hundreds of thousands or maybe even 2 million Gazans who have lost their homes. When the Syrians fled from their civil war, millions found refuge in Europe. Why aren’t the Gazans being taken in by their Arab neighbors or by Europeans? There’s more than one answer but part of the answer is that to give the Gazans refuge is to take them from their indigenous land and to endorse the Israeli occupation by Jewish settlers—not just of Gaza or the West Bank, but of Palestine.

• Alumni of the University of Pennsylvania recently showed a film of the Nova Music Festival where peace-loving music-loving dance-loving people were gunned down and hunted like animals by Palestinians from Gaza. People protested the showing of the film. What did they chant? “Liar liar colonizer!” I don’t know if they meant by “liar liar” that the film was fake but I think they meant that the film was irrelevant. Only colonized indigenous people suffer injustice. What happened at Nova is irrelevant—it happened to colonizers. It is some comfort that there were only a few handfuls of chanters. But who protests showing a film like this? People who believe that all Israeli Jews are colonizers.

• Why aren’t the marchers and encampers demanding a two-state solution—a home for the Palestinians alongside the Jews? You hear those demands but they come from the current residents of the White House not the students and faculty of the Ivy League or the people marching in the streets of London. Why not? A two-state solution would validate the existence of Israel. It would set in stone the events of 1948. “By any means necessary” and “in our lifetime” aren’t demands for a Palestinian state. They are demands for the end of the Jewish one.

• Why are the Palestinians the only refugees with a dedicated branch of the UN, UNWRA, making sure they never move on? Because that would validate the existence of Israel. It would set in stone the events of 1948.

• The settler colonialism paradigm explains the absurd attempts to paint Jesus as a Palestinian rather than a Jew. It explains the attempts to ignore the Jewish heritage of the Temple Mount and the Temple in Jerusalem pretending that the Dome of the Rock was the first religious building there. It explains the attempt to paint wine-making as an ancient Palestinian activity. All of this is to strengthen the indigeneity of the Palestinians and to erase the indigeneity of the Jews.

• And of course the settler colonialism paradigm explains the rise in anti-Israel sentiment after October 7. The end of resisting settler colonialism justifies the means: raping and murdering and kidnapping. The blow struck against Israel created an optimism among the adherents of settler colonialism that it could be the first of many such successes.

The fans of settler colonialism love hating Israel because Israel is so young. You can’t return America to 1619, say. In America, there are over 325 million settlers and only 7 million Native Americans. Decolonizing the United States is unimaginable. So is decolonizing Israel, really. But it’s more imaginable than the United States.

The defenders of Israel see Israel as the tip of the sword fighting against terrorism and Jihadism. For the those who use the settler colonialism lens, Hamas is the tip of the sword against settler colonialism. If somehow the Palestinians could get control of what was once called Palestine, then anything is possible, isn’t it? Free Palestine? What do you think that means? It means let’s go back to 1947. From the river to the sea? Back to a Palestine of 1947. Never mind that Palestine in 1947 was under the control of actual colonizers, the British. By any means possible? Rape and kidnapping are resistance to settler colonialism. In our lifetime? Believe or at least pretend to believe that soon the land of Palestine can be liberated from the so-called settlers and its indigenous people restored to their homeland.

Some of much of the animus toward Israel is simply Jew-hatred. But settler colonialism gives more than sheep’s clothing to that wolf. It motivates many casual observers against Israel. If I am right, we have been fighting the wrong battles when we explain that many Gazans lived fairly well on October 6 or that Hamas inflates the death toll in Gaza by including the deaths of Hamas fighters. The real intellectual battle is over the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

A stranger recently emailed me about Israel’s right to exist. His son lives in a major European city and while the son is a supporter of Israel, he avoids conversations about Israel because in his circle of highly educated friends, there is a virulent dislike of the Jewish state. My correspondent asks me: what do you say when confronted with the argument that Israel is a settler/colonial nation which stole Palestinian land and never should have been allowed to become a state?

One answer is that for some reason, the sin of settler colonialism is the only sin that negates the legitimate existence of a country. After the murder of 6 million Jews, no one suggests that Germany forfeited its right to exist or that the establishment of Germany in 1870 was a mistake that needs to be made right.

Depending on how you count, there are about 195 countries in the world. Over half of those countries are younger than Israel— 109 of them were created after Israel’s independence in May of 1948. Jordan and Syria were created in 1946. Nobody marches or protests the Syrian state. The people who live within Syria’s borders haven’t exactly had the opportunity to flourish since 1946. Or the people of Jordan or dozens of other countries where people are oppressed. But Israel is different. Settler colonialism is the sin that makes Israel unique.

The other answer is to learn some history: Israel is a remarkably dishonest example of settler colonialism:

• Jews have lived here in Israel for millennia. We’re the indigenous people so we can’t be settlers.

• We’re not white Europeans. Well some of us are. But most of those who are white are descendants of Holocaust survivors who were almost murdered for not being white enough. Not exactly the British running India and of course, we Jews were instrumental in throwing real colonizers—the British—out of Palestine. But we’re also black and brown refugees from Ethiopia and Yemen and Iran and Iraq and Morocco. Over half of Israel’s population is Mizrachi—Jews who came from Arab countries fleeing Jew-hatred.

• One of the weirder parts of trying to squeeze Israel into the settler colonial narrative is that the place that is now called Israel, when it was established in 1948, hadn’t been a country for a few millennia. There was no sovereignty for the Palestinian people in 1948 that the Jews took away. The region that is Israel today, that was called Palestine in 1947 (though not ruled by the people who today are called Palestinians) had always been ruled by others—the British, the Ottoman Empire, and then the Mamluk Sultanate, the Ayyubid Dynasty, the Crusaders, the Fatimid Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Ummayad Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire. Before that, the only time it was a sovereign country under the rule of its inhabitants was when it was run by the Jews. Israel was never a colony of anyone’s like Algeria was for the French or India was for the British. The Jews in 1948 had as good a claim as anyone could make to be the indigenous people of this land.

• We didn’t steal land from the indigenous Palestinians. We lived here alongside them. We bought land from our Ottoman rulers as well as from our Palestinian neighbors. We did not invade Palestine like Cortez, say, invaded Peru. We lived here and accepted the UN compromise that our Arab neighbors rejected. When we declared a state, our Arab neighbors invaded us. We did not ethnically cleanse the land like the Americans did, say, with Native Americans. As part of the war in 1948, we did fight against Arabs who were already living here. Shamefully, we committed some atrocities. Both sides did. It was a war.

We did drive out Arab residents through fear and military threat. But many Arab residents simply fled at the encouragement of the invading Arab armies, expecting to return to an Arab country after a military victory. Those two groups of people—those who were pushed out and those who left coluntarily—became the refugees of the war, settling in the West Bank and Gaza, territories ruled by Jordan and Egypt between 1948 and 1967. No one demanded sovereignty for those refugees until Israel took Gaza and the West Bank in the Six Day War of 1967. Jordan and Egypt could not plausibly be described as White European colonialists. So the world said nothing.

• A few hundred thousand of our Palestinian neighbors—about 25% of the Arab population of Palestine neither fled, nor were driven out. They stayed in their homes. We let them. That population grew into the 2 million Arab-Israeli citizens who are my neighbors today in Israel. They did not lose their homeland when the British left Palestine. They did fail to get one because they did not embrace the UN compromise.

It is tempting to find solace in the reality that the existence of Israel does not rise and fall on an academic debate. We’re here. We’re not going anywhere. We have the best army in the Middle East and we finally have the opportunity to pursue justice for those who rape and murder and kidnap our people. More than ever, we understand that a Jewish state is a necessary sanctuary for our people. All of that is some consolation. But the academic debate matters. The elevation of the settler colonialism paradigm is not a small thing. It has mobilized many people, especially those from what were once the most prestigious universities in the West, to despise the Jewish state. This is not good for the Jews or the West. We ignore the doctrine of settler colonialism at our peril.