Portside

In August 2024, The Atlantic published a slapdash essay by the literary critic Adam Kirsch titled “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism.” Kirsch claimed that the concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s “as a way of linking social evils in [Australia, Canada, and the United States] today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement,” and that it could not possibly be applied to brave little Israel. After all, unlike the US or Australia, Israel’s settlement of a former “province of the Ottoman Empire” did not have continental reach, what with Israel being “about the size of New Jersey,” pluckily bobbing in a hostile sea of Arab states. And whereas settler colonialism is marked by “the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures,” Israel, Kirsch insisted, “did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine.”

The article’s countless errors and elisions quickly attracted widespread derision on social media: Some readers cited examples of scholarship on settler colonialism produced long before the ’90s, while others picked apart Kirsch’s historical inaccuracies about Palestine—for instance, rebutting his minimization of the Nakba by referring to books by Palestinian and Israeli scholars that provide extensive evidence of the mass ethnic cleansing that accompanied the state’s founding. (Kirsch admits in passing that Israel “did displace many” Palestinians, but declines to note the scale of the dispossession—about 750,000 people expelled from about 78% of historic Palestine, their razed towns and villages supplanted by settlements—or clarify how this is distinct from “erasing” or “replacing” them.)

Despite the thorough evisceration, Kirsch has since displayed his methodological negligence at a much larger scale: The Atlantic noted that the essay was adapted from a forthcoming book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. Much like the capsule-length version, the book, which was published in August, attempts to argue not only that the concept of settler colonialism is so much nonsense in the context of the US or Australia, but that, when applied to Israel, it becomes something far more sinister: antisemitic “ideology,” a word Kirsch seems to apply to any idea with the potential to shape political reality—especially in ways he finds unsettling.

Though its authoritative-seeming title presents the text as the work of an expert, On Settler Colonialism is, to put it mildly, not a scholarly book. If it were, it would have had to acknowledge the broad range of theoretical and empirical research in the fields of history, sociology, and settler colonial studies, instead of fulminating about cherry-picked lines from left-wing scholars—many of them Black or Indigenous—and eliding the contributions of Palestinians. Throughout, Kirsch quotes exclusively in order to excoriate. The summaries of the books and articles he condemns are so bland, vague, and under-specified that they could have been written by ChatGPT. It seems clear that Kirsch harvested some of his citations from his social media critics; for example, the book, unlike the article, quotes the radical French historian Maxime Rodinson, whose work was mentioned in a response to the Atlantic piece by Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. Kirsch also appears to have relied on his detractors to correct some of his more obvious mistakes: He moves the origin of the concept of settler colonialism back several decades, to 1976, when Australian scholar Kenneth Good used the term to describe Rhodesia. But Kirsch’s engagement with these lifted sources only underscores his general sloppiness. He misrepresents Rodinson by focusing solely on his plea for the humane treatment of settlers and fails to notice that Good was preceded by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and dozens of Palestinians.

The word “woke” doesn’t appear in Kirsch’s book, but the text is, in essence, a vitriolic, anti-woke screed. Despite its lack of substance, it is noteworthy as a prime example of the frenzy of negation being undertaken by stalwarts of Israel in legacy media, who have spent the time since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza discrediting any scholarship, concept, or idea that could challenge the legitimacy of the state. The Atlantic has put itself forward as the leading platform for such efforts, publishing, in addition to Kirsch’s essay, a jeremiad “against guilty history” by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, in which he argues that “settler colonial should be a description, not an insult,” and whines that contemporary citizens of settler states “owe honor to those who built and secured” their societies; and a piece by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a pop historian of Russia, decrying the “dangerous and false” conception of Israel as an “imperialist-colonialist” entity and disparaging student protesters as the political heirs of “the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler.” Such anti-intellectual pablum has also liberally graced the pages of other storied outlets. In The New York Times, France correspondent Roger Cohen similarly deplored the fact that “‘colonial’ is enjoying a field day . . . as an insult, or line of attack,” arguing that in the case of Israel, “the ‘colonizer’ label fails in more ways than it succeeds.” Kirsch himself, writing in The Wall Street Journal, sought to nullify even more terminology, pleading for “retiring” the term “genocide” because it has become “a political flashpoint.”

Establishment media’s comprehensive disavowal of reams of serious scholarly work is in part a rearguard action to defend Israel and its “right” to use unconstrained violence. But there is also something else at play: Kirsch’s book can be understood as an aggrieved reaction against an undeniable, ongoing shift concerning what ideas get taken seriously, both in the halls of academe and in the public square. Even his methodological carelessness conveys a sense of entitlement to continue setting the terms of debate. By demonizing any scholarly concept that might have normative implications—and thus function as a call to action—as illegitimate “ideology,” Kirsch effectively advocates for a sterile form of knowledge production, in which thinking and writing are hermetically sealed off from affecting the real world.

On Settler Colonialism’s fundamental unseriousness is evident from its earliest pages. The first four chapters, a flimsy overview of settler colonialism in Africa and the Americas, are rife with misrepresentations, decontextualized arguments, and willful omissions. Kirsch cannot hide his obvious frustration with the demands that this field of historical scholarship exerts on the present. He accuses the late scholar Patrick Wolfe and other “Euro-American do-gooders” in settler colonial studies of coming up with a concept that functions as a “black armband,” requiring the public “to be forever in mourning for the crimes of the past.” And while he acknowledges that casting off the yoke of settler colonialism in wars of liberation led to the establishment of independent national states in places like Rhodesia and Algeria, he dismisses the idea that such struggles could remain relevant now; even if we were to accept that the US and Australia are settler states, he cautions, since Indigenous communities today make up only a small percentage of the population in these countries, a demand for decolonization “indicts the many in pursuit of justice for the few.” In this context, the anti-colonial call for “land back,” for example, “cannot be satisfied even in principle.”

Unsurprisingly, Kirsch caricatures Indigenous mobil­ization in the Americas and elsewhere, ignoring the breadth and specificity of such communities’ political activism around issues ranging from environmental degradation and climate change to food security to reparations for historic abuses—including, yes, the return of expropriated lands to First Nations. In the process, he takes potshots at scholars of Native American history, especially the celebrated Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. He claims that by critiquing “the American way of life” and its basis in settler institutions, Dunbar-Ortiz is in fact taking “the progressive route to the same conclusion as some nativists,” in effect accusing her of xenophobia. Kirsch is similarly hostile to scholars of the Black American experience. He dismisses historian Robin D. G. Kelley’s exhortations to “dream of liberation” as so many “evasive pieties” and scoffs that historian Gerald Horne, by describing the US as a “hydra-headed monster,” reductively attributes “all types of social injustice” to “a single source.” Aside from the fact that, contra Kirsch’s framing, neither Kelley nor Horne is a scholar of settler colonial studies, his stripped-of-context sneering at deeply researched works of history amounts to boorish anti-intellectualism styled as profundity.

Throughout, Kirsch insinuates that the concept of settler colonialism should be dismissed based on its recency—while ignoring its actual, extensive history. Academic scholarship on settler colonialism has indeed proliferated in the past three decades, but it draws on a much deeper archive: The terms “settler” and “colonist” were already in use well before the dawn of the 20th century, and the specific anglophone phrasing of “settler colonialism” and its proximate term “settler regime” can be traced to the 1960s, when anti-colonial movements’ diagnosis of what ailed them was translated into English. Kirsch himself gestures toward Albert Memmi’s and Frantz Fanon’s writings on colonialism, which addressed settler regimes as far back as 1957 and 1961. He quotes Memmi’s remark that “the leftist finds in the struggle of the colonized, which he supports a priori, neither the traditional means nor the final aims of that left wing to which he belongs,” interpreting this to affirm his own belief that the Western left can only champion decolonization by swallowing a degree of “cognitive dissonance.” Absurdly, he compares Memmi’s experience as a Jew in Tunisia’s Muslim-led liberation movement to the supposed predicament of queer Americans who support a Palestinian liberation movement led by Hamas. Kirsch conveniently leaves out not only Memmi’s searing criticism of settler regimes, but two crucial elements of the passage in question: He glosses over the fact that Memmi is specifically talking about the left-wing colonizer (think regular Haaretz readers in Israel), a figure Memmi excoriates elsewhere, and ignores Memmi’s pronouncement that “the leftist does not always clearly understand the immediate social content of the struggle of nationalistic colonized peoples,” a line that positions anti-colonial contention as a necessary, even inevitable, form of global class struggle. Kirsch’s treatment of Fanon’s extraordinary polemic about Algerian decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, is even more risible. He finds it wanting when set alongside philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface, writing that “there is a great difference between Fanon’s bloody knives and Sartre’s bloody scalpel”—presumably because the former was a Black anti-colonial revolutionary, and the latter a European Zionist.

The colonized peoples applying the framework of settler colonialism to their own struggles in the mid-20th century included Palestinians, though you would not know it from reading Kirsch’s book, which does not include any Palestinian writing published before 2018. As historian of left-wing Zionism Areej Sabbagh-Khoury writes in Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, “The interpretative framework of settler colonialism for analyzing the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians consolidated among Palestinian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, years before this term took hold in international academic discussions.” She cites book after book written in Arabic and English by Palestinians from 1965 onwards. Kirsch does not include even a single reference to Edward Said—a telling absence, given that Said introduced the Palestinian critique of settler colonialism to the anglophone intellectual milieu in the ’70s.

The polemical throat-clearing of the first half of the book sets the stage for Kirsch’s attack, in the final three chapters, on the application of the settler colonial framework to Israel. By this point, Kirsch has already defined the concept as relevant only where a country is “governed by a mother country” (as in Algeria) or has a “settler class ruling over a native population” (as in South Africa), and has argued that Israel does not fit the mold, since it has, according to him, neither a mother country nor a ruling class of settlers. On the first point, On Settler Colonialism does not—and cannot—adequately address the paradox that Israel has relied throughout its history on a succession of imperial sponsors, including first the United Kingdom, then France, and then, since 1967, the US, which has seen the state as a reliable gendarme in the region. On the second point, Kirsch argues that Israeli Jews were all refugees, escaping tsarist pogroms in Eastern Europe, the Shoah enacted by the Nazis, persecution in nationalist Arab states after 1948, and finally, discrimination in the former Soviet Union. Yet the contention that refugees cannot constitute a ruling class ignores the many contexts, across hundreds of years of history, in which it was precisely the people oppressed or marginalized in their home countries—religious radicals, convicts, revolutionaries, hungry working classes—who became settlers in the colonies.

Kirsch attempts to cover this analytical muddiness with a barrage of all the familiar clichés. Israel cannot be an example of settler colonialism because Jewish settlers never replaced Palestinians: The Palestinian population—horror of horrors—quintupled in the first 75 years after the establishment of Israel. Israel cannot be “decolonized” because it was never a colonizer, but rather, as a country of refugees, the paradigmatic eternal victim. There is no Palestinian state because Palestinians are rejectionists. Plus, no one in the world is really Indigenous, and if they claim to be, they’re being “irrational,” because we have all moved from one place to another. And oh, look, you’re ignoring the brutality of Mao Zedong and the Aztec and Inca Empires! Yes, seriously.

This palimpsest of misinformation serves Kirsch’s effort to convince readers that there is no possible just resolution to Israel’s colonization of Palestine. A two-state solution—the path Kirsch has called “the only morally worthy solution that I could imagine”—ultimately will not work, he is sorry to say, nor will a “de-Zionization” of Israel to establish one equal state for all its citizens, because what the conniving Arabs really want in the last analysis is simply to kill the Jews. This, for Kirsch, is what is meant by calls to decolonize Palestine “between the river and the sea.” Indeed, he claims that the “October 7 massacre was a foretaste of exactly what being ‘driven into the sea’ would mean for Israel’s Jews”—implying that it is Palestinians committing genocide against Israel, not the other way around.

Here and elsewhere, to read Kirsch’s book is to go through a mirror darkly, into a world in which the aggressors are the people who have been expelled from their homes, dispossessed, imprisoned, and murdered by the hundreds of thousands—subjected to torture, weapons experimentation, and starkly asymmetrical warfare. Kirsch’s commitment to Zionism, his sense of perpetual victimhood, is so complete that it draws a veil over reality. At the outset, Kirsch promises to conclude the book with “an alternative way of thinking about historical injustice that is both more truthful and more conducive to a better future.” Reading and rereading the final chapter, I was astonished to find that the view he puts forward is, essentially, Revisionist Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” proposition—which famously argued that the security of the Zionist project depended upon a Palestinian defeat so complete that the Indigenous people would crawl on their knees to the negotiation table and willingly vacate their rights. This thesis was “regarded by mainstream Zionists at the time as brutally pessimistic,” Kirsch tells us. Yet in his own opinion, “the intractability of the conflict has vindicated Jabotinsky’s view.”

The best corrective to Kirsch’s attempt to dismiss the concept of settler colonialism as a shallow fad is a substantive discussion of the actual historical process—especially the colonization of Palestine, as understood from the vantage of its victims. While some colonial systems depended on the exploitation of local labor (sometimes via local intermediaries), the term “settler colonialism” refers specifically to those colonies where, as historian George Fredrickson wrote in The Arrogance of Race, settlers “exterminated or pushed aside the indigenous peoples” and “developed an economy based on white labor.” (In practice, this meant developing settler workers’ skills and lifting their standard of living while de-developing and de-skilling the remaining Indigenous workers, whose labor the colony continued to mine.) For European powers, settler colonialism solved two problems at once, feeding the insatiable need for labor to exploit the colonies’ natural resources and ridding the metropole of undesired or troublesome populations. As Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, reportedly told journalist W.T. Stead,

In order to keep your forty millions here from eating each other for lack of other victuals, we beyond the seas must keep open as much of the surface of this planet as we can for the overflow of your population to inhabit, and to create markets where you can dispose of the produce of your factories and your mines . . . If you have not to be cannibals, you have got to be imperialists.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, a number of Spanish moriscos and conversos moved to the nation’s colonies in the Caribbean and South and Central America; in the 17th and 18th centuries, religious nonconformists and radicals were induced to leave Britain and the Netherlands for the Caribbean, North America, and South Africa; and in the 18th and 19th centuries, convicts were transported to Australia, while the increasingly assertive European working classes were directed toward Algeria, Rhodesia, and elsewhere in the antipodes.

Against the backdrop of this long history, the peculiarity of Israeli settler colonialism is its anachronism; the declaration of the founding of the state came at the very moment when European colonies in Asia and Africa were clamoring for independence. But Israel has followed the same blueprint as its predecessors. Indeed, Jewish settlement in Palestine, which began in the latter half of the 19th century, was initially modeled on European settlers’ search for El Dorado in Southern Africa, Hawaii, and the North American Pacific Coast. Edmond de Rothschild, a major supporter of white settlement in Southern Africa, also funded that first wave of Zionist colonization and sponsored French Algerian viticulture experts to advise Zionists settlers on developing vineyards in Palestine. Though those early Zionist settlements floundered—the new arrivals lacked experience farming in semi-arid ecosystems, and their efforts bore little fruit, as sociologist Gershon Shafir has shown in his classic account, Land, Labor and the Origins of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914—the Zionist movement soon improved its position by throwing in its lot with a far more experienced colonizer: the British empire, which, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promised Zionists a state in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine.

For the British, this alliance served to establish a friendly settler population in a strategic locale, “a bulwark to the British position in Egypt and an overland link with the East,”as George Antonius, a Cambridge-educated Arab civil servant in Jerusalem, argued in his magisterial 1938 account of Arab nationalism, The Arab Awakening. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, had promoted his cause in much the same way in 1896, arguing that for Europe, a Zionist state “should form a new outpost against Asiatic barbarism and a guard of honor to hold intact the sacred shrines of the Christians.” Herzl’s imagined state would thus fulfill a dual function shared by settler colonies everywhere: The British saw Kenya and Rhodesia not only as founts of coveted natural resources, but as strategic beachheads in East and Southern Africa, while the French viewed their colony in Algeria as an important base on the Mediterranean, where the Muslim throngs were held at bay beyond Fortress Europe.

To maintain themselves as outposts of “civilized” Europe, settler colonies constructed strict systems of racial control, anchored in the punishing labor hierarchies that rendered the colonies immensely profitable. South Africa’s system of apartheid supplied its all-important mining industry with a steady stream of surveilled, monitored, and coerced African labor, while the advantages enjoyed by the pied-noir European settlers in Algeria underwrote their fealty to the colonial order. Similar structures of hierarchy extended to Palestine, where the British Mandatory powers cultivated Zionist settlement through preferential treatment of Jewish capital and labor. While the British advocated for an empire of free trade elsewhere, in Palestine they encouraged tariffs to grow Jewish businesses. Zionist institutions were given monopolies over public works, including the crucial electricity sector, whose hydroelectric components also facilitated expropriation of fertile lands adjacent to river basins, as Fredrik Meiton meticulously documents in Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation. The Yishuv, the Jewish settler community in Palestine, spoke of its aims not only in terms of the “conquest of land,” but also the “conquest of labor,” which, Shafir writes, “aimed at the displacement of Arab workers by Jewish workers in all branches and skill levels.” Zionist political institutions such as the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor in the Land of Israel, guaranteed jobs for new Jewish migrants and created a racialized wage regime whereby unionized Jewish workers could earn as much as four times more than Arab workers—in other words, a system of apartheid.

Thus, when Palestinians revolted against the expropriation of their lands from 1936 to 1939, they were also rebelling against the “dismissal of Palestinian Arab workers from firms and projects controlled by Jewish capital,” as Palestinian thinker and militant Ghassan Kanafani wrote shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in 1972. Contemporaneous sources bear this out; when the British set up a commission of inquiry into the grievances of the Indigenous population, George Mansour, who had been the Secretary of the Arab Workers Society and active in the general strike of 1936, provided an acute analysis of the conquest of labor’s practical impact on Palestinian workers: “As the [British Mandatory] Government, which controls the national funds of the Arabs, does not provide them with labour saving devices, they remain working in primitive conditions, while the Jewish immigrants who have supplanted them receive equipment and training which enables them to improve their financial and technical position.” (Mansour’s testimony, published in 1937 as a booklet titled The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate, remains an important source for historians and was excerpted in a 2012 compendium on Zionist settler colonialism by Palestinian scholars Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour.)

In Palestine in the ’30s, as in colonies everywhere, the settler regime relied on coercive force to keep the Indigenous population in line. In the Mandatory period, the Jewish settlers in Palestine were integrated into the coercive systems of rule deployed by the British: The Yishuv members of the British Palestine Police received training amid the British subjugation of the ’30s revolt, and many future officers of the Israeli military, some of whom went on to become prime ministers of Israel, served in the British army during World War II. To this day, some of Israel’s most repressive counterinsurgency practices—the use of separation walls, human shields, torture in interrogation, punitive displacement and expulsions, racialized pass systems, home demolitions, collective punishment, and administrative detention, among others—are a direct inheritance from the British, who had perfected these methods in other colonial settings.

Ultimately, coercive force facilitated not only the conquest of labor but, even more significantly, that of land. On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, the Yishuv held only 7% of the Palestinian land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But through the systematic mass expulsion of the Nakba, this 7% became 77%, and Israel achieved a modicum of demographic superiority within its new borders. Plans for the “transfer” of the Indigenous population had long been a significant part of Zionist ideology, as Nur Masalha explores in Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948. In practice, this entailed death marches from cities like Lydd (Lod), rapes and massacres in towns like Deir Yassin (where this brutality was intended in part to terrorize others into leaving), and Palestinians being literally pushed into the sea at the harbor in Haifa, along with countless other atrocities. Much of this violence was captured in oral histories collected in Nafez Nazzal’s The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1948 (1978) and Rosemary Sayigh’s The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979)—both published long before Israeli “New Historians” were given access to the state archives that confirmed these accounts.

The very history of Israeli settler colonialism, in other words, fatally undercuts Kirsch’s protestations that the concept amounts to newfangled jargon, incorrectly applied. So, too, does the fact that in the first decades of the Israeli state’s existence, Palestinian thinkers were already dissecting its colonial character. Among the earliest and most astute analyses was Fayez Sayegh’s 1965 pamphlet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. In a chapter titled “The Character of the Zionist Settler-State,” Sayegh enumerates three features of the Israeli settler colonial regime: “(1) its racial complexion and racist conduct pattern; (2) its addiction to violence; and (3) its expansionist stance.” By then, the state had erected new racialized systems of law and labor, instituting martial law over the Palestinians who remained within the 1949 armistice borders in order to control their movements and access to work. Within a few years, the precise contours of Israeli settler rule had shifted, with the 1967 War leading to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and the Golan Heights. If, before then, Palestinian citizens of Israel had made up less than a quarter of the state’s population of 2.7 million, now an additional 1 million Palestinians came under its control. The measures Israel had deployed against Palestinians inside its borders were extended and intensified to deal with this new population. This period saw analyses that put Israel in comparative context alongside its settler colonial peers, such as George Jabbour’s 1970 book, Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East, which illuminates parallels in the legal codes at work in Israel, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia.

It wasn’t only Arab and Palestinian scholars who recognized these continuities between settler states. In 1961, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd declared that Zionists “took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” Verwoerd, like Jabotinsky, was not coy about might making right. Kirsch’s circumlocutions essentially land in the same place: Ultimately, Palestinian lives matter far less than Zionist claims to national self-determination.

Among the MANY CALUMNIES that fill Kirsch’s petty book is an attack on Patrick Wolfe’s now-famous dictum that settler-colonial “invasion is a structure, not an event”—an observation that speaks to the continuation of Israel’s settler colonial violence in Palestine and its fundamental importance to the character of the state. Kirsch dismisses this insight as “a new syllogism: if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then everything (and perhaps everyone) that sustains a settler colonial society today is also genocidal.” Kirsch intends for readers to scoff along with him at the supposed hyperbole. But surveying the wreckage left by Israeli violence across the Middle East, it is hard to disagree.

Every day, as I write this, settlers with forged deeds are expelling Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and Hebron from the homes their families have owned for centuries. Israel is forcing its Palestinian Bedouin citizens from their villages in the Naqab (Negev) desert in order to expand its military free-fire zone there. The state is continuing to expropriate Palestinian lands in the Triangle and the Galilee, and to privatize the lands already acquired through conquest in 1948. Palestinian citizens of Israel, long subject to far more restrictive and arbitrary laws and regulations than Jewish citizens, are now enduring even more vicious repression. A system of labor apartheid that saw Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza working low-wage jobs inside Israel has been hobbled as a result of checkpoint closures, and Israeli policymakers are frantically scrambling to replace these workers with migrants from India, who suffer under kafala-like systems of control. In the West Bank, settlements are expanding every day; the area inhabited by Palestinians is divided into a discontinuous, highly surveilled archipelago, riddled with apartheid roads and permanent and “flying” checkpoints. Jenin refugee camp, regularly subjected to batterings, now lies in ruins. The Golan Heights, once a supposed buffer zone between Israel and Syria, have been annexed to Israel. Israel’s virulent settlers, encouraged by their fascist leadership’s power in the government, are establishing “facts on the ground” on Syria’s Mount Hermon and in the rich river basins of the Yarmouk River and the occupied “buffer zones” of Lebanon.

And in Gaza, the settler colonial practice of expulsion has now culminated in extermination. Israel’s genocidal violence has transformed an area populated by some two million people—already living under conditions of extreme control and subjected to bouts of colossal violence—into a vast free-fire zone, covered in mass graves and 42 million tons of rubble that is itself a mass grave of another kind. Gaza is filled with more child amputees than have been seen in any other war and with people dying from starvation and disease, in numbers that surely exceed 150,000 souls. The life expectancy of Palestinians in Gaza is now 34.9 years, about half of what it was before Israel’s genocidal assault.

You could not ask for a clearer demonstration of the truth of Wolfe’s articulation. His aphorism succinctly captures the idea that a nation founded on what he elsewhere calls settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination” will continue to operate by that same logic. And indeed, this is precisely what we see today, as the state’s genocidal underpinnings find their fullest and most terrible expression yet. Kirsch’s telling parenthetical about “everyone” being tarred as murderous, which accords with his guiding principle that the framework of settler colonialism was developed to unfairly besmirch individuals and societies, reveals that his primary concern is that those who stand with Israel will be branded genocidaires. But while there is plenty of blame to go around—from the soldiers who have gleefully enacted atrocities, to the Israelis who have cheered them on, to Zionists the world over who have called for Israel to “finish the job” and the imperial sponsor that has armed them to do so—Kirsch’s rickety reductio ad absurdum entirely misses the core of Wolfe’s claim, and of settler colonial studies as a whole. The idea, in the end, is to understand and indict the entire structure that has produced this ongoing, catastrophic violence, and to finally undo it. For Kirsch, however, it seems the point is not to change the world, but only to misinterpret it.