Samuel Hayim Brody
Boston Review
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| Palestinos fogem de Khan Yunis no sul da Faixa de Gaza em janeiro de 2024. Imagem: Mahmud Hams / AFP via Getty Images |
On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice
Adam Kirsch
W. W. Norton, US$ 24,99 (impresso)
I. A promessa
W. W. Norton, US$ 24,99 (impresso)
I. A promessa
O filme O Grande Truque, de Christopher Nolan, apresenta uma estrutura de três atos que, segundo dizem, se aplica a todos os grandes truques de mágica. Primeiro vem a promessa (pledge): o mágico apresenta algo comum, embora o público suspeite que não seja tão simples assim. Em seguida, ocorre a reviravolta (turn): o mágico faz esse objeto comum realizar algo extraordinário, como desaparecer. Por fim, há o grande desfecho (prestige): o momento verdadeiramente surpreendente, quando o objeto reaparece de uma maneira inesperada.
Eventualmente, no entanto, Kirsch admite que Khalidi “faz o ponto crucial de que apenas uma solução baseada na ‘aceitação mútua’ entre judeus e árabes pode ser moralmente aceitável”, o que Kirsch chama de “a linha divisória crucial entre soluções, e defende aquelas soluções que podem ser chamadas de liberais e humanas, e aquelas que são perigosas e cruéis”. Não devemos perceber que essa concessão invalida todo o argumento do livro. Tanto para a tese central de Kirsch sobre o colonialismo de assentamento: que “o termo em si é altamente ideológico” e, portanto, não apenas perigoso, mas genocida.
O poeta e crítico literário Adam Kirsch, autor do livro recente On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, não se apresenta como um mágico. Mas não há como negar que ele é um mestre da retórica, colocando seus talentos para trabalhar em repetidos truques de prestidigitação. O propósito do livro é aliviar seus leitores da sensação de que há algo respeitável sobre o tópico central da discussão. A julgar por uma infeliz resenha de Michael Walzer que apareceu na Jewish Review of Books, que mais ou menos agradece a Kirsch por fazer a leitura para que ele não precise fazer, On Settler Colonialism já está fazendo sua mágica, e temo que continuará a prestar esse desserviço público nos próximos anos. Seu objetivo final: fazer a ideia do colonialismo de povoamento desaparecer.
O colonialismo de povoamento se enquadra na categoria de conceitos que podem provocar culpa em um certo tipo de liberal e fúria em um certo tipo de conservador. Para nacionalistas liberais, incluindo sionistas liberais como Kirsch, a resposta típica é algo entre os dois: uma fragilidade defensiva. Como a “performatividade de gênero” e a “teoria crítica da raça”, o “colonialismo de povoamento” era até bem recentemente a província de um campo acadêmico relativamente pequeno, embora agora tenha quebrado a contenção e entrado no mundo do discurso público (perdendo algo na tradução, como tais avanços sempre fazem). A ideia básica do colonialismo de povoamento é que, além do colonialismo clássico, no qual um país rico e poderoso estabelece controle militar e econômico sobre um mais fraco para extrair seus recursos, há também outro tipo, no qual os colonos chegam com o objetivo de tomar a terra completamente, despejando, deslocando ou eliminando os povos nativos. Exemplos paradigmáticos do primeiro são a França na Indochina e a Grã-Bretanha na Índia; exemplos paradigmáticos do último são os Estados Unidos, Austrália, Canadá e Nova Zelândia.
Se isso parece razoável ou incontroverso para você, bem, é por isso que o campo dos estudos coloniais de assentamento não foi imediatamente um para-raios desde o momento de sua fundação na década de 1990. Argumentos sobre a taxonomia do colonialismo de acordo com o tipo de regime e economia política podem ser coisas áridas. As ideias dos estudos coloniais de assentamento foram lentamente adotadas em vários graus por outros campos, da história e antropologia aos estudos indígenas, mas o que o torna um tópico quente agora é a inclusão pública altamente visível de outro país na categoria: o Estado de Israel.
Argumentos nesse sentido não são novidade em si mesmos. Intelectuais palestinos como Fayez Sayegh fizeram a comparação primeiro, mas foram pouco ouvidos no Ocidente. Mais tarde, o historiador judeu-francês Maxime Rodinson, cujos pais foram assassinados em Auschwitz, publicou um artigo intitulado “Israël, fait colonial?” (“Israel, um fato colonial?”) em junho de 1967, assim que a Guerra dos Seis Dias resultou na conquista da Cisjordânia e da Faixa de Gaza da Jordânia e do Egito. Como Kirsch discute, Rodinson, um antisionista que acreditava que os palestinos haviam sofrido injustamente, mesmo assim alertou contra a comparação com a Argélia. Ao contrário dos pieds-noirs franceses, os primeiros israelenses não tinham pátrias-mãe para as quais retornar. Eles podem ter sido colonizadores, argumentou Rodinson, mas não eram agentes do império; eles podem ter sido conquistadores, mas foram os primeiros refugiados.
Você pode pensar que esse é exatamente o tipo de análise que leva os acadêmicos a cunhar novos termos e criar novas categorias. Então, o que há de errado com o "colonialismo de colonos", que existe precisamente para esse propósito? Kirsch começa a responder a essa pergunta com seu truque inicial, logo na primeira página do livro. Como o personagem de Michael Caine em The Prestige descreve a promessa: "O mágico mostra a você algo comum: um baralho de cartas, um pássaro ou um homem. Ele mostra a você esse objeto. Talvez ele peça para você inspecioná-lo para ver se é realmente real, inalterado, normal. Mas é claro que provavelmente não é."
Kirsch nos apresenta várias estatísticas aparentemente alarmantes de uma pesquisa Harvard/Harris com eleitores registrados realizada dois meses após os ataques brutais de 7 de outubro, quando 1.195 pessoas foram mortas (incluindo 815 civis) e 251 feitas reféns. Entre os entrevistados com idades entre 18 e 24 anos, 66% concordaram que o ataque do Hamas foi "genocida por natureza". No entanto, 60% também disseram que o ataque "pode ser justificado pelas queixas dos palestinos". Esses números podem clamar por explicação, como as pesquisas de opinião pública costumam fazer, mas a interpretação de Kirsch força a credulidade: ele escreve que "mais da metade dos americanos em idade universitária parecem acreditar que seria justificado que os palestinos cometessem um genocídio de judeus israelenses".
Kirsch não nos informa que a pesquisa atingiu apenas 150 pessoas na faixa etária que ele cita. Ele não considera que sua ampla concordância com a alegação de que os ataques foram "de natureza genocida" pode indicar sua falta de apoio ao genocídio. Ele também não menciona que a pesquisa encontrou apoio esmagador — 80% — entre esse grupo para a visão de que Israel "tem o direito de se defender contra ataques terroristas lançando ataques aéreos contra alvos em áreas palestinas densamente povoadas com avisos a esses cidadãos", bem como 58% de apoio à visão de que o Hamas "precisa ser removido do governo de Gaza". Mais notavelmente, Kirsch não menciona pesquisas mais confiáveis conduzidas na mesma época que produziram resultados muito diferentes. Uma pesquisa do Generation Lab com estudantes universitários que alcançou mais de 900 pessoas descobriu que 67% dos que estavam cientes do ataque chamaram o dia 7 de outubro de "um ato de terrorismo", em comparação com apenas 12% que o consideraram um "ato justificado de resistência". Enquanto isso, uma pesquisa da Pew Research com mais de 12.000 pessoas descobriu que 58% dos jovens de 18 a 29 anos alcançados chamaram os métodos do Hamas de "inaceitáveis", em comparação com apenas 9% que os consideraram "aceitáveis".
No entanto, tendo supostamente estabelecido as tendências genocidas dos estudantes universitários americanos em massa, Kirsch passa as próximas páginas alinhando citações de acadêmicos e ativistas que parecem elogiar ou pelo menos equivocar-se sobre os ataques de 7 de outubro. Isso inclui referências à natureza colonial de colonos de Israel. Kirsch conclui, com base nisso, que é a "ideologia do colonialismo de colonos" — uma frase que ele cunha, mas nunca define — que leva esses críticos a serem tão insensíveis ao valor da vida judaica israelense. Mas Kirsch nunca realmente argumenta essa afirmação fundamental, na qual o resto de seu livro se baseia. Essa omissão é fascinante e desanimadora. Em vez disso, ele permite que a sequência de sua apresentação leve o leitor à conclusão de que "para muitos acadêmicos e ativistas, descrever Israel como um estado colonial de colonos foi uma justificativa suficiente para o ataque do Hamas", e então ele prossegue como se o ódio genocida e a violência contra os colonos fossem a consequência inevitável de qualquer conversa sobre colonialismo de colonos.
Não vamos medir palavras. Algumas pessoas, incluindo algumas que se referem a Israel como um estado colonial de colonos, de fato fizeram declarações no sentido de que “não há civis em Israel”. Mas, da mesma forma, sionistas autodeclarados, cristãos e judeus, americanos e israelenses, têm feito declarações no sentido de que Israel está “lutando contra animais humanos” e que “não há civis em Gaza”. Se o primeiro em si conta como evidência de uma perigosa “ideologia de colonialismo de colonos”, certamente o último deve contar como evidência de uma perigosa “ideologia de sionismo”? Desnecessário dizer que Kirsch não identifica tal coisa. Apesar de toda a sua indignação com as justificativas da violência genocida, ele deixa de citar, muito menos condenar, um único exemplo de tal discurso — incluindo as declarações feitas pelos líderes políticos e militares de Israel que a África do Sul cita em seu caso acusando Israel de genocídio na Corte Internacional de Justiça. Talvez seja porque Kirsch entende que se “ferocidade retórica” (como ele a chama) é o padrão de argumento, ele não tem base para se sustentar.
O jogo é revelado em alegações como "a matança de civis israelenses foi bem recebida por muitos simpatizantes palestinos". Trocar as palavras "israelense" e "palestino" nesta frase produz uma alegação que é igualmente verdadeira, mas Kirsch nunca usa a frase "civis palestinos" no livro, muito menos faz referência a qualquer violação de Israel ao direito internacional. A função desta retórica é claramente não analisar, mas nos escandalizar para demonizar "simpatizantes palestinos", especialmente aqueles em campi universitários. No entanto, uma análise séria deve olhar além dos atos de fala para condições objetivas, incluindo os fatos básicos de que Israel é a potência nuclear dominante e única em um conflito profundamente assimétrico e exerceu controle quase completo sobre as fronteiras, o espaço aéreo e as águas territoriais de Gaza desde 2005; que muitos milhares de civis palestinos foram mortos por Israel do que o contrário; e que milhões de palestinos permanecem apátridas mais proximamente porque o aliado mais forte de Israel — os Estados Unidos — é um hegemon global que detém poder de veto no Conselho de Segurança da ONU, que ele usou para negar a condição de estado palestino tão recentemente quanto abril passado. Se Kirsch tivesse lido Frantz Fanon com mais cuidado do que sua revisão da biografia recente de Adam Shatz indica, ele poderia ter reconhecido que as atitudes "vingativas" expressas em ambos os lados do conflito são exatamente o que as teorias do colonialismo de assentamento preveem que surgirão em tais circunstâncias.
Outro sinal da evasividade de Kirsch está na própria frase “o ataque do Hamas”, que é usada ao longo do livro, mas nunca distingue entre ataques a soldados e instalações militares e ataques a civis. É verdade que muito mais civis do que soldados foram feridos e mortos em 7 de outubro. Mas também é óbvio o suficiente por que Kirsch não consegue fazer essa distinção: fazê-lo pode obscurecer o quadro desumanizador que ele pretende pintar dos palestinos que apoiam a resistência violenta — a mesma coisa que ele acusa os “ideólogos do colonialismo de assentamento” de fazer a todos os israelenses. Ao confundir “ataque” com “ataque a civis”, Kirsch não apenas interpreta exageradamente as evidências que cita de apoio aos ataques de 7 de outubro; ele quer sugerir, sem ter que argumentar, que não pode haver base moral ou legal para o conflito armado palestino com Israel. No entanto, muitos sionistas pré-estatais, de David Ben-Gurion a Ze'ev Jabotinsky, teriam concordado em princípio com a resolução de 1982 da Assembleia Geral da ONU afirmando "a legitimidade da luta dos povos pela independência, integridade territorial, unidade nacional e libertação da dominação colonial, apartheid e ocupação estrangeira por todos os meios disponíveis, incluindo a luta armada". Uma reflexão séria e lúcida sobre essa questão teria contribuído muito para a discussão pública, mas Kirsch não oferece nada disso. Em vez disso, ele espera que você o siga, por meio de prestidigitação, para o mundo maniqueísta, onde a violência israelense é sempre virtuosa e necessária, enquanto a violência palestina é sempre, por definição, pura maldade.
O acadêmico palestino Rashid Khalidi, por exemplo, distingue claramente entre soldados e civis. Em uma entrevista no The Drift que ocorreu duas semanas após 7 de outubro, ele argumentou explicitamente contra a alegação de alguns ativistas estudantis "de que todos os israelenses são colonos e, portanto, não há civis". Kirsch não toma conhecimento desta entrevista, mas menciona brevemente Khalidi em um punhado de lugares no livro, principalmente para zombar de sua aplicação da estrutura colonial de colonos a Israel. Ele notavelmente ignora a discussão de Khalidi, em The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), do intelectual radical paquistanês Eqbal Ahmad. Um defensor íntegro da luta armada na Argélia, Ahmad, no entanto, criticou o uso da violência pela OLP em bases táticas, argumentando que a luta armada pode não ser o curso de ação mais sensato contra Israel. Khalidi chama a avaliação de Ahmad de "profunda e devastadora" e, ao mesmo tempo, credita Ahmad por ter "percebido astutamente a natureza única do projeto colonial israelense".
Eventualmente, no entanto, Kirsch admite que Khalidi “faz o ponto crucial de que apenas uma solução baseada na ‘aceitação mútua’ entre judeus e árabes pode ser moralmente aceitável”, o que Kirsch chama de “a linha divisória crucial entre soluções, e defende aquelas soluções que podem ser chamadas de liberais e humanas, e aquelas que são perigosas e cruéis”. Não devemos perceber que essa concessão invalida todo o argumento do livro. Tanto para a tese central de Kirsch sobre o colonialismo de assentamento: que “o termo em si é altamente ideológico” e, portanto, não apenas perigoso, mas genocida.
II. A reviravolta
Sobre o colonialismo de colonos é tão pouco confiável e evasivo quanto isso. As leituras acadêmicas não são confiáveis; quando Kirsch diz "em outras palavras" após apresentar um argumento de um proponente dos estudos coloniais de colonos, às vezes é difícil ver como suas palavras se assemelham às que ele citou. Por exemplo, ele cita o teórico político Adam Dahl, a quem ele chama de "historiador", argumentando que os "fundamentos coloniais de colonos da democracia americana... continuam a estruturar as características básicas do pensamento e da política democrática moderna", e então afirma que "em outras palavras", os Estados Unidos estão "ilegitimamente ocupando terras que pertencem legitimamente aos nativos americanos — e sempre pertencerão". Por mais que eu tente, não consigo encontrar uma reivindicação de propriedade nesta citação de Dahl. Mas mesmo que Dahl tenha a visão aqui atribuída a ele, o que é mais sintomático neste exemplo é a recusa de Kirsch em se envolver na reivindicação explícita do texto que ele cita. As principais categorias do pensamento democrático americano continuam a ser social e logicamente estruturadas pela desapropriação dos nativos americanos, ou não? Não parece importar.
Kirsch does the same thing with the oft-cited dictum of the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe that “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Rather than dispute the contention, Kirsch prefers to diagnose it: settler colonialism “offers a political theory of original sin.” Just as reactionaries before him claimed about communism, Kirsch wants to persuade us that here we have a case of secular radicals clamoring for the missing religion in their lives, unconsciously acting out Protestant, even specifically Calvinist, cultural scripts. All well and good—who among us hasn’t known a leftist Puritan—but is Wolfe wrong, or is he right? Kirsch won’t tell you. He writes as if you already assume Wolfe is wrong, so he doesn’t have to argue it and can instead get by with explaining how anyone could come to think such a ludicrous thing. All this in what Walzer, whose scholarship is far more scrupulous than this, calls a “calm and careful” critique.
Further evidence of Kirsch simply dodging the claims of scholarship arises in his treatment of work by the Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen. In Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (2022), Hämäläinen claims that many Native peoples of North America had “opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world.” Kirsch calls the social and political arrangements of the eastern half of the continent a “slender evidentiary basis” for this claim, dismissing it as a “fable about the virtue and selflessness of Native Americans.”
This is odd, first of all, because Hämäläinen is perhaps best known as the author of The Comanche Empire (2008), a book about vertical, exclusive, and hierarchical practices of Native nations in the southwest. He has never claimed that all Native Americans lived in stateless, non-hierarchical societies, only that many did. It is also odd because Hämäläinen is far from the only scholar to have reached similar conclusions. The historian Kathleen DuVal, for example, in her recent work Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (2024), assesses a long-standing debate on the question of whether great North American cities on the southern Aztec model, such as Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, were eventually abandoned and rejected for political reasons. She writes that they were: “The height of the great cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam can be seen as a golden age, but their descendants came to see it as a misguided era.” In other words, just as Hämäläinen says, many eastern native North Americans experimented with hierarchical models of polity and found them unsatisfactory. They developed narratives about this experiment intended to prevent it from being reattempted. When Europeans, hailing from absolutist monarchical nation-states, encountered these natives, they simply assumed that they were incapable of achieving what seemed to them like the obviously best type of civilization. It was literally inconceivable to them—as, apparently, it remains for Kirsch—that a polity such as their own could have been attained and then later rejected.
A final method Kirsch employs to avoid directly engaging the central claims of settler colonial studies is to argue that accepting them would have negative consequences: “Indignation against past injustice is not a sufficient basis for remedying it. . . . it can easily become the source of new injustices.” That may be true—and if it is, and you’re paying more attention than Kirsch, you might notice that it could just as plausibly be leveled against countless actions of the State of Israel, including its response to October 7. Unfortunately, it resolves nothing about whether the basic claims of settler colonial studies are true. What matters, for Kirsch, is the turn—from the fact that it is “difficult to specify or even imagine” how one might decolonize the United States or Israel, to the claim that “on October 7, Hamas did more than imagine it.”
A more generous response to an admitted failure of imagination would be to study and discuss what has been proposed so far. For example, many people and organizations are, right now, returning land to tribal governments. But the term “Land Back,” the name for this movement, never appears in Kirsch’s book. Perhaps that’s because any consideration of real, practical steps to rectify or mitigate the colonial legacy would get in the way of his project: establishing a direct link between any claim about past and ongoing injustices and the specter of murdered and kidnapped civilians. When Kirsch briefly raises the idea of settler colonial societies ceding back parts of their territory and sovereignty to indigenous peoples, he treats the idea as an obviously utopian fantasy of radical scholars rather than as something that has in fact already taken place. Kirsch has the chutzpah to invoke the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz saying that “lack of imagination also indicates lack of commitment for figuring it out” and then proceeds to demonstrate just how correct she is through his own poverty of imagination. (Walzer cites this same passage in his review, seeming to think it applies to the wooly-headed utopians of settler colonial studies rather than to Kirsch and himself.)
I don’t want to suggest that Kirsch scores no points at all. He is right that the habit among some activists of referring to the North American continent as “Turtle Island” can be ahistorical, homogenizing a creation story shared by specifically northeastern nations like the Lenape and Haudenosaunee into a generically “traditional,” pan–Native American name for an anachronistically conceived geographical entity. He is also right that the now common ritual of placing “land acknowledgments” at the beginning of events and gatherings is often empty and hypocritical. But these points are not only irrelevant to his main argument; they are made by some of the very writers he spends pages criticizing. For example, Kirsch repeatedly criticizes Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s 2012 article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” for its academic language about “settler moves to innocence” and “settler futurity,” with no mention of the fact that its central argument is precisely directed against shallow and hypocritical invocations of decolonial solidarity, including land acknowledgments. No one is more practiced in pointing out the foibles and follies of leftist subcultures than the left itself, but one rarely sees this acknowledged in polemics against the left. On Settler Colonialism is no exception.
Uma questão mais profunda que Kirsch aborda é a questão do romantismo implícito de algum discurso de indigeneidade. Quando empregada de forma superficial ou irrefletida, a retórica da indigeneidade — como a retórica do sionismo, nesse caso — pode soar como Blut und Boden: há parcelas discretas de terra que são eternamente concedidas pela providência a nações igualmente discretas e eternamente existentes, e cada nação pertence à sua terra em um relacionamento quase místico e inefável. Por esse motivo, não há lugar para nômades, migrantes ou diásporas, e nunca se pode realmente pertencer a um lugar em que seus ancestrais não estejam enterrados. Este é um conjunto sério de questões, e é difícil, senão impossível, conciliar tal visão com a política de esquerda como normalmente entendida. Mas Kirsch não dá a esse assunto a atenção que ele merece, tanto porque ele falha em demonstrar que qualquer um dos pensadores que ele trata realmente sustentam seriamente visões que se assemelham a essas, quanto porque ele falha em reconhecer até que ponto o sionismo, cuja defesa ideológica é a razão de ser deste livro, também opera nesse conjunto de suposições. Em um ponto, ele alude a esse fato como uma espécie de pegadinha — se os estudiosos do colonialismo setter amam tanto a indigeneidade, por que não são sionistas? — mas ele não pode ter as duas coisas. Ou esse pensamento é um problema, ou não é, e Kirsch não é honesto o suficiente para lidar com isso.
Kirsch does the same thing with the oft-cited dictum of the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe that “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Rather than dispute the contention, Kirsch prefers to diagnose it: settler colonialism “offers a political theory of original sin.” Just as reactionaries before him claimed about communism, Kirsch wants to persuade us that here we have a case of secular radicals clamoring for the missing religion in their lives, unconsciously acting out Protestant, even specifically Calvinist, cultural scripts. All well and good—who among us hasn’t known a leftist Puritan—but is Wolfe wrong, or is he right? Kirsch won’t tell you. He writes as if you already assume Wolfe is wrong, so he doesn’t have to argue it and can instead get by with explaining how anyone could come to think such a ludicrous thing. All this in what Walzer, whose scholarship is far more scrupulous than this, calls a “calm and careful” critique.
Further evidence of Kirsch simply dodging the claims of scholarship arises in his treatment of work by the Finnish historian Pekka Hämäläinen. In Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America (2022), Hämäläinen claims that many Native peoples of North America had “opted for more horizontal, participatory, and egalitarian ways of being in the world.” Kirsch calls the social and political arrangements of the eastern half of the continent a “slender evidentiary basis” for this claim, dismissing it as a “fable about the virtue and selflessness of Native Americans.”
This is odd, first of all, because Hämäläinen is perhaps best known as the author of The Comanche Empire (2008), a book about vertical, exclusive, and hierarchical practices of Native nations in the southwest. He has never claimed that all Native Americans lived in stateless, non-hierarchical societies, only that many did. It is also odd because Hämäläinen is far from the only scholar to have reached similar conclusions. The historian Kathleen DuVal, for example, in her recent work Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (2024), assesses a long-standing debate on the question of whether great North American cities on the southern Aztec model, such as Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, were eventually abandoned and rejected for political reasons. She writes that they were: “The height of the great cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam can be seen as a golden age, but their descendants came to see it as a misguided era.” In other words, just as Hämäläinen says, many eastern native North Americans experimented with hierarchical models of polity and found them unsatisfactory. They developed narratives about this experiment intended to prevent it from being reattempted. When Europeans, hailing from absolutist monarchical nation-states, encountered these natives, they simply assumed that they were incapable of achieving what seemed to them like the obviously best type of civilization. It was literally inconceivable to them—as, apparently, it remains for Kirsch—that a polity such as their own could have been attained and then later rejected.
A final method Kirsch employs to avoid directly engaging the central claims of settler colonial studies is to argue that accepting them would have negative consequences: “Indignation against past injustice is not a sufficient basis for remedying it. . . . it can easily become the source of new injustices.” That may be true—and if it is, and you’re paying more attention than Kirsch, you might notice that it could just as plausibly be leveled against countless actions of the State of Israel, including its response to October 7. Unfortunately, it resolves nothing about whether the basic claims of settler colonial studies are true. What matters, for Kirsch, is the turn—from the fact that it is “difficult to specify or even imagine” how one might decolonize the United States or Israel, to the claim that “on October 7, Hamas did more than imagine it.”
A more generous response to an admitted failure of imagination would be to study and discuss what has been proposed so far. For example, many people and organizations are, right now, returning land to tribal governments. But the term “Land Back,” the name for this movement, never appears in Kirsch’s book. Perhaps that’s because any consideration of real, practical steps to rectify or mitigate the colonial legacy would get in the way of his project: establishing a direct link between any claim about past and ongoing injustices and the specter of murdered and kidnapped civilians. When Kirsch briefly raises the idea of settler colonial societies ceding back parts of their territory and sovereignty to indigenous peoples, he treats the idea as an obviously utopian fantasy of radical scholars rather than as something that has in fact already taken place. Kirsch has the chutzpah to invoke the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz saying that “lack of imagination also indicates lack of commitment for figuring it out” and then proceeds to demonstrate just how correct she is through his own poverty of imagination. (Walzer cites this same passage in his review, seeming to think it applies to the wooly-headed utopians of settler colonial studies rather than to Kirsch and himself.)
I don’t want to suggest that Kirsch scores no points at all. He is right that the habit among some activists of referring to the North American continent as “Turtle Island” can be ahistorical, homogenizing a creation story shared by specifically northeastern nations like the Lenape and Haudenosaunee into a generically “traditional,” pan–Native American name for an anachronistically conceived geographical entity. He is also right that the now common ritual of placing “land acknowledgments” at the beginning of events and gatherings is often empty and hypocritical. But these points are not only irrelevant to his main argument; they are made by some of the very writers he spends pages criticizing. For example, Kirsch repeatedly criticizes Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s 2012 article “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” for its academic language about “settler moves to innocence” and “settler futurity,” with no mention of the fact that its central argument is precisely directed against shallow and hypocritical invocations of decolonial solidarity, including land acknowledgments. No one is more practiced in pointing out the foibles and follies of leftist subcultures than the left itself, but one rarely sees this acknowledged in polemics against the left. On Settler Colonialism is no exception.
Uma questão mais profunda que Kirsch aborda é a questão do romantismo implícito de algum discurso de indigeneidade. Quando empregada de forma superficial ou irrefletida, a retórica da indigeneidade — como a retórica do sionismo, nesse caso — pode soar como Blut und Boden: há parcelas discretas de terra que são eternamente concedidas pela providência a nações igualmente discretas e eternamente existentes, e cada nação pertence à sua terra em um relacionamento quase místico e inefável. Por esse motivo, não há lugar para nômades, migrantes ou diásporas, e nunca se pode realmente pertencer a um lugar em que seus ancestrais não estejam enterrados. Este é um conjunto sério de questões, e é difícil, senão impossível, conciliar tal visão com a política de esquerda como normalmente entendida. Mas Kirsch não dá a esse assunto a atenção que ele merece, tanto porque ele falha em demonstrar que qualquer um dos pensadores que ele trata realmente sustentam seriamente visões que se assemelham a essas, quanto porque ele falha em reconhecer até que ponto o sionismo, cuja defesa ideológica é a razão de ser deste livro, também opera nesse conjunto de suposições. Em um ponto, ele alude a esse fato como uma espécie de pegadinha — se os estudiosos do colonialismo setter amam tanto a indigeneidade, por que não são sionistas? — mas ele não pode ter as duas coisas. Ou esse pensamento é um problema, ou não é, e Kirsch não é honesto o suficiente para lidar com isso.
III. O desfecho
No início do livro, Kirsch faz a estranha afirmação de que, por não ter aplicações práticas, a estrutura do colonialismo de assentamento “tem apenas um apelo limitado às pessoas que alega reivindicar — os nativos americanos”. A única evidência que ele oferece para essa afirmação é que “grupos de defesa tradicionais como o Congresso Nacional dos Índios Americanos (NCAI) e o Native American Rights Fund não usam a linguagem do colonialismo de assentamento ou nomeiam a descolonização como um de seus objetivos”.
Isso é como afirmar que se um grupo de defesa dos negros em particular, digamos a NAACP, não usa uma linguagem específica ou defende uma proposta específica — digamos, realocar orçamentos policiais para serviços sociais — devemos ignorar o amplo apelo dessa proposta a ativistas vocais dos direitos civis em outros lugares da comunidade negra. Em outras palavras, Kirsch simplesmente assume que os grupos “mainstream” falam pela maioria — a presunção lisonjeira de todos aqueles que se autodenominam representantes do mainstream, sem dúvida. E, como acontece, o NCAI respondeu ao repúdio do Vaticano em 2023 à “Doutrina da Descoberta”, que autorizou a conquista das Américas em nome da Igreja Católica, dizendo que esperava
que o anúncio de hoje é mais do que meras palavras, mas sim o início de um reconhecimento total da história da opressão e de um relato completo dos legados do colonialismo — não apenas pela Igreja Católica Romana, mas por todos os governos do mundo que usaram o racismo, o preconceito e a autoridade religiosa não apenas para justificar as desigualdades do passado, mas para permitir, alimentar e perpetuar a institucionalização dessas desigualdades que continuam até hoje.
Since Kirsch’s evidence of Native American disinterest in settler colonialism is so weak, perhaps we can take a page from his book and ask why he makes this claim at all. Its purpose is quite obviously to persuade us that the preoccupations of settler colonial studies are those of guilty, privileged whites seeking absolution. Kirsch is honest enough to admit that “settler colonial studies does include Native activists and scholars,” but he discounts them because “it is mainly an academic enterprise, and in 2021 Native Americans made up less than one half of one percent of university professors.” (Read that again. What an interesting fact; perhaps there is a field of study that can account for this astonishing underrepresentation.) He approvingly cites a few Native scholars who do not use settler colonial frameworks and approaches, or who offer criticisms of the way some white scholars have deployed them. By contrast, he castigates a rainbow of scholars for their betrayal of the liberal narrative that America is always improving, and for believing that it would have been better if the colonization of the Americas had not taken place.
Kirsch positions himself carefully on the matter of U.S. history. At several points in the book, he invokes the triumphalist narrative according to which “the creation of the United States was a great and providential event.” He acknowledges that this conservative history of heroes and explorers and martyrs for freedom could be credible “only so long as the country was defined solely by the experience of its white citizens.” (Unsurprisingly, he makes no such acknowledgment in his potted history of Zionism, which is unreconstructed and pre-revisionist.) This bad old conservative history was then replaced, Kirsch tells us, with a liberal one according to which the United States only needed to make good on its founding promises, to become the country it had always claimed to be. This civil rights–era narrative, which Kirsch attributes to Martin Luther King Jr. among others, was so popular that presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have adopted it. Settler colonial studies is found guilty of abandoning it in favor of a Black Legend of a country born in the original sins of slavery and genocide, never to escape them.
Kirsch implicitly defends his repeated refusal to engage settler colonial studies at the level of its truth claims by dismissing it as having no practical political consequences. This is one of the functions of his assertion that it constitutes a “political theology” (as if political theology—and here we must surely count many a variety of Zionism—has never had practical political consequences!) and his insistence that the only possible outcome of “decolonization” is an unrealizable reversal of history or the mass disappearance of 7 million Israeli Jews and 300 million U.S. American settlers. Kirsch also uses this point to explain one of the most jarring disconnects in the book: If settler colonial studies produces an ideology that leads militant leftists to support the genocide of Jews in Palestine/Israel, why don’t we see the same militance with respect to the settlers of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand?
On the surface, the settler colonial critique does exactly what proponents of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism want from critics of Israel: it doesn’t single out Israel or hold it to a “double standard.” What it says about Israel it says about the entire liberal Anglosphere. For Kirsch, however, this is not reassuring but rather an invitation to yet another ingenious sleight of hand. It is precisely because it is so hard to imagine decolonization in the United States and the other Anglosphere countries, he argues, that the ideology of settler colonialism seizes upon Israel. Because Israel was founded more recently and has a settler-native ratio closer to 1:1 than 9:1, it is easier for foolish militants, Kirsch alleges, to fantasize about its destruction and the genocide or expulsion of its settlers: Israeli Jews. (Never mind that here again he simply conflates decolonization with genocide and expulsion, treating their equivalence as a given.) But then he suggests—pulling the rug out from under his own observations about population size and founding date—that this differing treatment is fueled by antisemitism, making it possible for Israel to be “a country one could hate virtuously” since it is “home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.” This is a truly impressive rhetorical feat, but it depends entirely upon the reader forgetting that Kirsch never actually establishes that the concept of settler colonialism must motivate genocidal hatred in the first place.
In reality, the radical left’s narrative of U.S. history, like descriptions of Israel as colonial, long predated the rise of settler colonial studies in the academy. Kirsch hopes to shock us by observing that some scholars of settler colonialism, such as Mahmood Mamdani, contrast the Black liberal struggle for civil rights with the Native struggle for sovereignty. “When Black and Native aspirations are placed in opposition in this way,” Kirsch writes, “it follows that, in seeking equality with white Americans, Blacks are embracing the guilt of the settler.” Unfortunately for Kirsch’s argument, this is no excess of settler colonial studies but a basic claim of Native activists, going back decades.
The Standing Rock Sioux activist and thinker Vine Deloria Jr., who served as executive director of the NCAI in the mid-1960s, devoted an entire chapter to this idea in his manifesto Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). Thirty years before Wolfe, in a book so practical it includes minute recommendations for reforms of bureaucratic practices in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Deloria wrote of the “unthoughtful Johnny-come-lately liberal who... generally defines the goals of all groups by the way he understands what he wants for the blacks.” Deloria defends the decision of Native movements to avoid the March on Washington, explaining that the civil rights movement confused Indians, who “could not believe that blacks wanted to be the same as whites.” But Stokely Carmichael and Black Power made sense to them, he writes, because they spoke in terms of self-determination:
Kirsch positions himself carefully on the matter of U.S. history. At several points in the book, he invokes the triumphalist narrative according to which “the creation of the United States was a great and providential event.” He acknowledges that this conservative history of heroes and explorers and martyrs for freedom could be credible “only so long as the country was defined solely by the experience of its white citizens.” (Unsurprisingly, he makes no such acknowledgment in his potted history of Zionism, which is unreconstructed and pre-revisionist.) This bad old conservative history was then replaced, Kirsch tells us, with a liberal one according to which the United States only needed to make good on its founding promises, to become the country it had always claimed to be. This civil rights–era narrative, which Kirsch attributes to Martin Luther King Jr. among others, was so popular that presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama have adopted it. Settler colonial studies is found guilty of abandoning it in favor of a Black Legend of a country born in the original sins of slavery and genocide, never to escape them.
Kirsch implicitly defends his repeated refusal to engage settler colonial studies at the level of its truth claims by dismissing it as having no practical political consequences. This is one of the functions of his assertion that it constitutes a “political theology” (as if political theology—and here we must surely count many a variety of Zionism—has never had practical political consequences!) and his insistence that the only possible outcome of “decolonization” is an unrealizable reversal of history or the mass disappearance of 7 million Israeli Jews and 300 million U.S. American settlers. Kirsch also uses this point to explain one of the most jarring disconnects in the book: If settler colonial studies produces an ideology that leads militant leftists to support the genocide of Jews in Palestine/Israel, why don’t we see the same militance with respect to the settlers of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand?
On the surface, the settler colonial critique does exactly what proponents of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism want from critics of Israel: it doesn’t single out Israel or hold it to a “double standard.” What it says about Israel it says about the entire liberal Anglosphere. For Kirsch, however, this is not reassuring but rather an invitation to yet another ingenious sleight of hand. It is precisely because it is so hard to imagine decolonization in the United States and the other Anglosphere countries, he argues, that the ideology of settler colonialism seizes upon Israel. Because Israel was founded more recently and has a settler-native ratio closer to 1:1 than 9:1, it is easier for foolish militants, Kirsch alleges, to fantasize about its destruction and the genocide or expulsion of its settlers: Israeli Jews. (Never mind that here again he simply conflates decolonization with genocide and expulsion, treating their equivalence as a given.) But then he suggests—pulling the rug out from under his own observations about population size and founding date—that this differing treatment is fueled by antisemitism, making it possible for Israel to be “a country one could hate virtuously” since it is “home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.” This is a truly impressive rhetorical feat, but it depends entirely upon the reader forgetting that Kirsch never actually establishes that the concept of settler colonialism must motivate genocidal hatred in the first place.
In reality, the radical left’s narrative of U.S. history, like descriptions of Israel as colonial, long predated the rise of settler colonial studies in the academy. Kirsch hopes to shock us by observing that some scholars of settler colonialism, such as Mahmood Mamdani, contrast the Black liberal struggle for civil rights with the Native struggle for sovereignty. “When Black and Native aspirations are placed in opposition in this way,” Kirsch writes, “it follows that, in seeking equality with white Americans, Blacks are embracing the guilt of the settler.” Unfortunately for Kirsch’s argument, this is no excess of settler colonial studies but a basic claim of Native activists, going back decades.
The Standing Rock Sioux activist and thinker Vine Deloria Jr., who served as executive director of the NCAI in the mid-1960s, devoted an entire chapter to this idea in his manifesto Custer Died for Your Sins (1969). Thirty years before Wolfe, in a book so practical it includes minute recommendations for reforms of bureaucratic practices in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Deloria wrote of the “unthoughtful Johnny-come-lately liberal who... generally defines the goals of all groups by the way he understands what he wants for the blacks.” Deloria defends the decision of Native movements to avoid the March on Washington, explaining that the civil rights movement confused Indians, who “could not believe that blacks wanted to be the same as whites.” But Stokely Carmichael and Black Power made sense to them, he writes, because they spoke in terms of self-determination:
Os índios entenderam quando Carmichael falou sobre integridade racial e nacional e a necessidade de distinções sutis a serem feitas entre brancos e negros. Mas quando King começou a agrupar indiscriminadamente como uma só todas as comunidades minoritárias com base em seu status econômico, os índios ficaram extremamente desconfiados. A questão real para os índios — a existência tribal dentro da reserva da terra natal — parecia ter sido completamente ignorada.
And so it remains, with Kirsch ventriloquizing Native peoples’ supposed rejection of settler colonial studies on their behalf.
But let me not be evasive myself. Suppose Kirsch were to grant that U.S. history is, in fact, a vale of tears—a catastrophe continually piling wreckage at the feet of the angel of history, in the resonant image of Walter Benjamin that he critiques in his final chapter. Still, might Kirsch be right that it is politically unwise to dwell on this truth?
He is not the first liberal to think so. This was the thesis of pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who defended it nearly thirty years ago in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). “Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself,” Rorty wrote, “need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of.” Even in those halcyon days prior to settler colonial studies, Rorty was worried about “a widespread sense that national pride is no longer appropriate.” The culprits then were Foucault and Heidegger. Their readers—the “academic left”—wound up viewing the United States “as something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly different.” Like Kirsch, Rorty saw a quasi-religious drive at work; the anti-patriots, he said, “think of themselves as a saving remnant.”
In contrast to this “wrong kind of despair,” Kirsch concludes his book by offering the Talmudic concept of ye’ush, or despair over a lost object. According to Jewish law, we must be willing to give up on “perfect justice,” in the following sense: someone whose property is stolen, then purchased by a third party unaware of the crime, cannot demand it back from the buyer, though the victim remains “entitled to monetary compensation and damages.” The same is true of nations, lands, and history, Kirsch urges. Attempting to restore the past can only result in new wrongs; the best we can do is muddle forward, resigning ourselves to loss.
Yet here Kirsch might have taken more of a cue from his predecessor. He and Rorty both sound the classic liberal theme of imperfection, but where Kirsch stresses resignation, Rorty stresses achievement, quoting William James: “Democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture.” In one way or another, Kirsch spends much of his book chastising radicals for abandoning the liberal “arc of justice” narrative, but here he seems to relinquish it himself, failing to muster one iota of Rorty’s democratic optimism. Instead, through the example of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, in which characters are put under a “spell of oblivion,” Kirsch invites us to forget and move on.
A strenuously secular thinker, Rorty opposed his account of cruelty to religious notions of sin. As I have argued elsewhere, however, his view comports perfectly well with the Jewish conception of teshuva, or repentance: turning away from sin to forgiveness and redemption, which necessarily includes making restitution to the extent possible. Perhaps teshuva, then, is the Jewish concept Kirsch should have reached for. Ye’ush, as Kirsch counsels it, is a comfort to the powerful rather than the afflicted. Teshuva demands more.
But can a nation do teshuva? This is one of the oldest and deepest questions of Judaism. The traditional answer, coming down to us through the prophets and rabbis, is yes. This cuts against Kirsch’s cynical reading of settler colonial studies, which he portrays as committed to “mak[ing] hundreds of millions of ‘settlers’ disappear” or nothing. In fact, the literature of Indigenous studies and Native American studies, whether identifying as part of settler colonial studies or not, is full of inspiring and promising examples of activists using every legal, cultural, and political means at their disposal to pursue decolonization.
In Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and their Lands (2022), for example, Salish-Kootenai economist Ronald L. Trosper writes of how in 2015, the Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Hopi, and Zuni nations formed a coalition to protect 1.3 million acres of land in southeastern Utah by creating the Bears Ears National Monument in an innovative application of the 1906 Antiquities Act—a move Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer (hardly anyone’s idea of a decolonial militant) recently called “a transformative step toward healing a long history of colonial taking.” President Obama signed a proclamation to this effect, though he kept decision-making authority in the hands of the U.S. government rather than consent to the co-management structure the tribes had proposed. President Trump then attempted to reduce the size of the monument to 200,000 acres, in accordance with the wishes of the Utah congressional delegation and state legislature (as well as a private uranium-mining company). The tribes initiated legal action, which remains in limbo, but in 2021 President Biden reinstated the monument at greater than its original size.
Perhaps this all falls into the category of what Kirsch calls “defending tribal rights, enforcing treaties, and holding government accountable—concrete goals that can be achieved within the framework of American law.” But it is a mistake to conclude that groups pursuing such resolutions “fail to see that the colonial relationship endures”—another view advanced by Mamdani that Kirsch attempts to use as a reductio of settler colonial studies. (In this case, I take issue with Mamdani’s view, but that is no reason to reject his whole body of work.) For one thing, this and other instances of “Land Back” often involve highly innovative legal strategies, including pursuing legal personhood for tracts of land and bodies of water, as in the cases of Te Urewera and Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand—upending the Anglo-settler legal system in order to make it possible to recognize the relationship described in the title of Dana Lloyd’s book Land Is Kin (2023). For another, as evidenced by the Bears Ears example, these cases remain contentious. They provide clear evidence of a political divide between forces who seek to perpetuate, deepen, and consolidate the colonial pattern and those who seek to stall, frustrate, or even reverse it.
There are moments in On Settler Colonialism when it seems as though Kirsch is ready to acknowledge that the intellectual framework of settler colonialism does not inevitably lead to genocidal violence. He admits, for example, that “Western intellectuals seldom openly endorse the eliminationist ambitions of either Jews or Arabs, and the leading ideologues of settler colonialism do not call for Israelis to be pushed into the sea.” He mentions, in this regard, Mamdani’s support for a one-state solution and Lorenzo Veracini’s support for two states as a first step toward a longer-term resolution. And yet, Kirsch simply waves these explicit arguments away with the contention that the “actual effect of the ideology of settler colonialism is not to encourage any of these solutions. It is to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance.” This extreme pitting of denotation against connotation, at the conclusion of his book, cries out for nothing so much as diagnosis.
On Settler Colonialism begins with a pledge: See this trendy body of scholarship? It’s not what it appears to be! It moves on to the turn: making settler colonial studies disappear by evading its central truth claims in favor of too-clever diagnosis. Knowing this, Kirsch hopes, will be enough for credulous audiences (including, apparently, Michael Walzer) to satisfy themselves. As Caine says in his monologue about the turn: “Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.” For the prestige, Kirsch brings settler colonialism back, as “the ideology of settler colonialism,” a repository of everything that liberals, centrists, and conservatives have hated about radical academia since McCarthyism—too secular and too religious at the same time, both anti-American and anti-Jewish, both ineffectual and dangerous, both genocidal and disrespectful of genocide. The trick is done, and now you can clap.
But even if “settler colonialism” goes the way of “critical race theory,” becoming the new pet hate of liberal pundits’ anti-academic screeds and conservative politicians’ draconian legislation, the phenomenon itself will remain. Getting rid of “settler colonialism” will not stop people from seeking to address the ongoing and enduring injustices of colonization, any more than getting rid of “critical race theory” will make everyone unaware of the vast differences in life outcomes across differently racialized populations. As I write, Gaza has been destroyed and far-right Israeli politicians have developed plans to resettle it. Uncounted numbers of Palestinian men, women, and children lie dead or live starving. Instead of obsessing over how to make the apparently ineffable mystery of opposition to this cruelty and criminality disappear, the real magic would be devoting some imagination to care, repentance, and repair.
But let me not be evasive myself. Suppose Kirsch were to grant that U.S. history is, in fact, a vale of tears—a catastrophe continually piling wreckage at the feet of the angel of history, in the resonant image of Walter Benjamin that he critiques in his final chapter. Still, might Kirsch be right that it is politically unwise to dwell on this truth?
He is not the first liberal to think so. This was the thesis of pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who defended it nearly thirty years ago in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). “Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself,” Rorty wrote, “need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of.” Even in those halcyon days prior to settler colonial studies, Rorty was worried about “a widespread sense that national pride is no longer appropriate.” The culprits then were Foucault and Heidegger. Their readers—the “academic left”—wound up viewing the United States “as something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly different.” Like Kirsch, Rorty saw a quasi-religious drive at work; the anti-patriots, he said, “think of themselves as a saving remnant.”
In contrast to this “wrong kind of despair,” Kirsch concludes his book by offering the Talmudic concept of ye’ush, or despair over a lost object. According to Jewish law, we must be willing to give up on “perfect justice,” in the following sense: someone whose property is stolen, then purchased by a third party unaware of the crime, cannot demand it back from the buyer, though the victim remains “entitled to monetary compensation and damages.” The same is true of nations, lands, and history, Kirsch urges. Attempting to restore the past can only result in new wrongs; the best we can do is muddle forward, resigning ourselves to loss.
Yet here Kirsch might have taken more of a cue from his predecessor. He and Rorty both sound the classic liberal theme of imperfection, but where Kirsch stresses resignation, Rorty stresses achievement, quoting William James: “Democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture.” In one way or another, Kirsch spends much of his book chastising radicals for abandoning the liberal “arc of justice” narrative, but here he seems to relinquish it himself, failing to muster one iota of Rorty’s democratic optimism. Instead, through the example of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, in which characters are put under a “spell of oblivion,” Kirsch invites us to forget and move on.
A strenuously secular thinker, Rorty opposed his account of cruelty to religious notions of sin. As I have argued elsewhere, however, his view comports perfectly well with the Jewish conception of teshuva, or repentance: turning away from sin to forgiveness and redemption, which necessarily includes making restitution to the extent possible. Perhaps teshuva, then, is the Jewish concept Kirsch should have reached for. Ye’ush, as Kirsch counsels it, is a comfort to the powerful rather than the afflicted. Teshuva demands more.
But can a nation do teshuva? This is one of the oldest and deepest questions of Judaism. The traditional answer, coming down to us through the prophets and rabbis, is yes. This cuts against Kirsch’s cynical reading of settler colonial studies, which he portrays as committed to “mak[ing] hundreds of millions of ‘settlers’ disappear” or nothing. In fact, the literature of Indigenous studies and Native American studies, whether identifying as part of settler colonial studies or not, is full of inspiring and promising examples of activists using every legal, cultural, and political means at their disposal to pursue decolonization.
In Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and their Lands (2022), for example, Salish-Kootenai economist Ronald L. Trosper writes of how in 2015, the Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Hopi, and Zuni nations formed a coalition to protect 1.3 million acres of land in southeastern Utah by creating the Bears Ears National Monument in an innovative application of the 1906 Antiquities Act—a move Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer (hardly anyone’s idea of a decolonial militant) recently called “a transformative step toward healing a long history of colonial taking.” President Obama signed a proclamation to this effect, though he kept decision-making authority in the hands of the U.S. government rather than consent to the co-management structure the tribes had proposed. President Trump then attempted to reduce the size of the monument to 200,000 acres, in accordance with the wishes of the Utah congressional delegation and state legislature (as well as a private uranium-mining company). The tribes initiated legal action, which remains in limbo, but in 2021 President Biden reinstated the monument at greater than its original size.
Perhaps this all falls into the category of what Kirsch calls “defending tribal rights, enforcing treaties, and holding government accountable—concrete goals that can be achieved within the framework of American law.” But it is a mistake to conclude that groups pursuing such resolutions “fail to see that the colonial relationship endures”—another view advanced by Mamdani that Kirsch attempts to use as a reductio of settler colonial studies. (In this case, I take issue with Mamdani’s view, but that is no reason to reject his whole body of work.) For one thing, this and other instances of “Land Back” often involve highly innovative legal strategies, including pursuing legal personhood for tracts of land and bodies of water, as in the cases of Te Urewera and Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand—upending the Anglo-settler legal system in order to make it possible to recognize the relationship described in the title of Dana Lloyd’s book Land Is Kin (2023). For another, as evidenced by the Bears Ears example, these cases remain contentious. They provide clear evidence of a political divide between forces who seek to perpetuate, deepen, and consolidate the colonial pattern and those who seek to stall, frustrate, or even reverse it.
There are moments in On Settler Colonialism when it seems as though Kirsch is ready to acknowledge that the intellectual framework of settler colonialism does not inevitably lead to genocidal violence. He admits, for example, that “Western intellectuals seldom openly endorse the eliminationist ambitions of either Jews or Arabs, and the leading ideologues of settler colonialism do not call for Israelis to be pushed into the sea.” He mentions, in this regard, Mamdani’s support for a one-state solution and Lorenzo Veracini’s support for two states as a first step toward a longer-term resolution. And yet, Kirsch simply waves these explicit arguments away with the contention that the “actual effect of the ideology of settler colonialism is not to encourage any of these solutions. It is to cultivate hatred of those designated as settlers and to inspire hope for their disappearance.” This extreme pitting of denotation against connotation, at the conclusion of his book, cries out for nothing so much as diagnosis.
On Settler Colonialism begins with a pledge: See this trendy body of scholarship? It’s not what it appears to be! It moves on to the turn: making settler colonial studies disappear by evading its central truth claims in favor of too-clever diagnosis. Knowing this, Kirsch hopes, will be enough for credulous audiences (including, apparently, Michael Walzer) to satisfy themselves. As Caine says in his monologue about the turn: “Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.” For the prestige, Kirsch brings settler colonialism back, as “the ideology of settler colonialism,” a repository of everything that liberals, centrists, and conservatives have hated about radical academia since McCarthyism—too secular and too religious at the same time, both anti-American and anti-Jewish, both ineffectual and dangerous, both genocidal and disrespectful of genocide. The trick is done, and now you can clap.
But even if “settler colonialism” goes the way of “critical race theory,” becoming the new pet hate of liberal pundits’ anti-academic screeds and conservative politicians’ draconian legislation, the phenomenon itself will remain. Getting rid of “settler colonialism” will not stop people from seeking to address the ongoing and enduring injustices of colonization, any more than getting rid of “critical race theory” will make everyone unaware of the vast differences in life outcomes across differently racialized populations. As I write, Gaza has been destroyed and far-right Israeli politicians have developed plans to resettle it. Uncounted numbers of Palestinian men, women, and children lie dead or live starving. Instead of obsessing over how to make the apparently ineffable mystery of opposition to this cruelty and criminality disappear, the real magic would be devoting some imagination to care, repentance, and repair.
Samuel Hayim Brody é professor associado de Estudos Religiosos na Universidade do Kansas e autor de Theopolitics, de Martin Buber.
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