On October 7th, 2023, when the horrible news of Hamas’s attack reached Harvard University, about three dozen of its student organizations reacted with warp speed. They unilaterally condemned Israel and expressed no regret for the slaughter that the terrorist organization was inflicting. How can this inhumane and unnuanced response be explained? In a brisk and engrossing book, Adam Kirsch provides a compelling answer. For well over a generation, he writes, a group of social scientists have drawn on the political success of the Arab Algerians in evicting the French in 1962, and of the Vietnamese in expelling the American military in 1975, to make a broader case for the superior moral claims of indigenous peoples seeking national liberation.
That case, Kirsch argues, constitutes an ideology — a set of beliefs into which historical facts can be slotted to define which sides in a bloody conflict deserve progressive support. Whichever group was the first to occupy the land in question deserves sovereignty, such as Aborigines in Australia, First Nations in Canada, and Native Americans. Subsequent inhabitants, the argument goes, have stolen the land and kept it from its rightful owners. This ideology has empowered the Ivy League defenders of Hamas to make Zionism the victimizer of Palestinian Arabs in the postage stamp – sized land that Israel occupies.
Kirsch devotes two chapters to anti-Zionism that effectively dismantle the analogy to the liberation movements of Algeria and Vietnam. Unlike the Pieds-Noirs and the American military, Jews in Israel have no place in which to seek refuge if they suffer defeat in war. Unlike the British emigrants who landed in Australia and Canada and what became the United States, the Zionist pioneers who arrived in Palestine were returning to the land from which the Roman Empire had expelled their ancestors almost two millennia earlier — and before military conquests brought Arabs themselves in large numbers to the Middle East and North Africa.
The author’s observations about settler colonialism can be used to explain why the civil war in Syria, where the death toll has reached six hundred thousand since 2011, elicits indifference among campus activists haunted by the destruction in Gaza. By the same token, settler colonialism did not form the People’s Republic of China, which is why its political and cultural crimes against Tibetans and Uyghurs do not spur encampments or bring students to the streets. On Settler Colonialism injects sophistication into a debate that Israel’s champions sometimes ascribe solely to antisemitism.
Stephen Whitfield is Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Brandeis University. He is the author of Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University (2020).
