One of the oddest features of the university pro-Palestine protests since the October 7 massacre a year ago has been the habit of attaching to the Palestinian cause any number of seemingly unrelated causes. Adam Kirsch, the literary critic and poet, has brought out a book just now discussing the political ideas that have animated the protests, and he cites a curious example of this phenomenon from November 2023. Sixty-five student groups at Northwestern University—including, he tells us, the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico, and All Paws In, which promotes animal shelters—put together a letter, and published it in the student newspaper defending the protest slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”
The slogan looks forward to the day when Israel will no longer exist, since if Palestine were free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, not one inch would remain for the Israeli state. But the sixty-five student groups rejected any supposition that such an eventuality would require “murder and genocide.” They explained: “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.” Kirsch observes that, considered as a political program, this is, in his word, “nonsensical.” For why would Israel’s disappearance bring about or accompany in some way the elimination of Islamophobia in, say, the places where Islamophobia is massively a problem right now, as in India? And why would Israel’s disappearance bring about an end to anti-Black racism? Or the end of militarism in, say, Russia?
Even so, people do make claims of this kind, and even broader claims about patriarchy and the climate crisis and the tyranny of science. It is a utopian outburst. The students must find it exhilarating. The liberation of the entire world is their goal, and, in the case of the students at Northwestern, the nobility of their intentions is illustrated by the fact that among their stated aspirations is the disappearance of antisemitism itself, presumably on the principle that, if only the Jewish state could be discreetly escorted off the map, and the seven million Jews of Israel could no longer defend themselves, there would no longer be a need for Jews to defend themselves.
A scholarly doctrine that began as a valid social criticism or observation about historical reality thickened into something that has the look of a political program, except in dreamy versions that exist only in the zones of fantasy, since there was never the slightest prospect of a real-life decolonization being carried out.
But is there more to this sort of thing than student inanity? Kirsch’s book is On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, and his purpose is to explain that, in fact, the student impulses do rest on something more. This is an academic doctrine, which has congealed into what he calls an ideology, suitable for a political movement. The ideology is relatively new, and it has flourished lately among the professors in some departments of the universities, though not in other departments.
Kirsch is not the first person to look into the emergence of the new set of ideas. Cary Nelson—the president, in times gone by, of the American Association of University Professors—has devoted the last several years to conducting pointed inquiries into this kind of thinking, along with the academic zest for boycotting the Israeli universities. Indiana University runs an entire program that looks into these developments. But Kirsch has a talent for zeroing in on grisly details (e.g., the barbarous glee expressed by sundry American professors in the first hours after the October 7 massacre), and for zooming out to capture panoramic views (e.g., the whole sweep of Western civilization), which allows him to sharpen his observations and broaden them at the same time. And he possesses a journalist’s knack for being up to date.
The particular presentation of the ideology that catches his attention was launched a quarter century ago, as he explains, by a number of anthropologists or anthropologically-minded investigators in Australia (notably, the late Patrick Wolfe, the author of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology), and then in Canada and the United States. The original impulse among those investigators had nothing to do with Israel, Zionism, Jews, or Arabs. Their instinct was to run a horrified glance across the histories and landscapes of their own oppressive countries, the big English-speaking places.
These scholars saw in the founding moments of Australia, Canada, and the United States a colonial project from Europe that turned out to be a genocidal project, directed against the original inhabitants, which was achieved sometimes by physical exterminations, but also by deliberate acts of destruction of the indigenous cultures, amounting to a different sort of genocide. And the genocide of the indigenous people, described in that fashion (a loosening of certain definitions is a characteristic of this school of thought), has continued through the centuries, either because the indigenous populations have declined to disappear, or else because something about a settler colonialist genocide is contrary to nature and requires perpetual reinforcement. The English-speaking countries have therefore maintained their settler-colonial identities, endlessly devoted to perpetuating the genocidal program, anthropologically conceived, in every corner of life: politically, economically, patriarchally (because settler colonialism is responsible for patriarchy), and scientifically (because science is implicated in the genocidal project).
The big English-speaking societies are, as a result, an “unmitigated disaster,” as Kirsch sums up this line of thought. They are morally despicable. Then again, the proponents of this view have argued that, because the genocidal assault on the indigenous populations remains a feature of our own era, it is possible to put up a resistance, regardless of how many centuries have come and gone since the original crime. Resistance goes under the name of “decolonization,” which, like genocide, turns out to be a flexible term. And the acts of resistance might be able to reverse, in some unspecified fashion, the genocidal conquest.
The American Indians of yore, some of them, are thought to have called the North American continent “Turtle Island,” and, from the standpoint of the angry and radical scholars whose goal is decolonization, Turtle Island might be restored. Ancient authenticity might triumph over modern falsity, the Edenic life that existed before the arrival of the Europeans might resume, and a better world might result, though not, of course, for the guilty European populations who have spent so many hundreds of years wreaking their terrible damage.
In this fashion, a scholarly doctrine that began as a valid social criticism or observation about historical reality thickened into something that has the look of a political program, except in dreamy versions that exist only in the zones of fantasy, since there was never the slightest prospect of a real-life decolonization being carried out. And all of this has amounted to a fanciful new revival of ideas that were entertained by Rousseau and other writers in France in the eighteenth century, and by Alexander Pope in England, and by the German Romantics (Kirsch emphasizes the Germans), except in versions that have been modernized with exotic vocabularies and thoughts drawn from the French philosophers of the 1950s and ’60s.
Kirsch grants to the decolonization ideology one very definite virtue, which is to remind the Australians, the Canadians, and most acutely the Americans to keep in mind the tragic origins of their own societies, and not to get drunk on the satisfactions of success. He sees a Puritan spirit of self-accusation at work, and he accords it respect, even if he does not delude himself about the ideological extravagances. He applauds. His applause is sufficiently polite to last for a sentence or two. But mostly his impulse is to note the imp of absurdity, naiveté, and excess that is at work in the academic ideology. And he notes that, prompted by the imp, the self-accusatory ideology has taken a strange twist.
This is a turn, enraged and indignant, toward Israel. It is a belief that Zionism’s project to build a Jewish state represents the same imperial and genocidal impulse that led to the terrible assaults centuries ago by the English and other Europeans on the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia. Now, this is not an altogether preposterous belief. No one needs to be reminded that, in the course of Israel-and-Palestine’s modern history, masses of Jews did pour into Palestine from elsewhere in the world, and masses of Palestinians did get driven from their homes, and Palestinian suffering was severe from the start, and has lately become horrific in the extreme. These are realities which, seen from one angle, could indeed be likened to the arrival of European colonists in North America and Australia centuries ago and its resultant disasters. And yet, other angles do exist. One of those angles has to do with the history of the modern world, and not the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
No one needs to be reminded that, in the course of Israel-and-Palestine’s modern history, masses of Jews did pour into Palestine from elsewhere in the world, and masses of Palestinians did get driven from their homes, and Palestinian suffering was severe from the start, and has lately become horrific in the extreme.
The single biggest event of the modern world was World War II, which was a bit of a catastrophe (on this point some people do need to be reminded). And the catastrophe had the effect of sending one enormous population after another into terrorized flight all over the world, like billiard balls banging into one another and ending up in places they had never imagined being. The largest instance of this was in the Indian subcontinent. The war led to the dissolution of the British Empire, therefore to the independence of the suddenly partitioned India and Pakistan, which sent fourteen million or more Hindus and Muslims into flight, terrified of one another and seeking the protection of their co-religionists.
The second largest instance was the fate of the Germans after Germany’s defeat. Some twelve million or more ethnic Germans and German citizens fled from the Slavic lands, and their erstwhile neighbors took over their homes and property. The flight of the Jews from Europe was still another instance, smaller only because the Jewish population in Europe was smaller, and smaller yet after so many of the Jews were murdered. The flight of the Jews from the Arab countries was still a further instance. And finally there was the flight of the Palestinians, desperate to escape the Jews, who were desperate to escape the Arabs.
The “genocide” accusation against Israel and the Zionists has been a staple of the larger denunciation of Israel, back through the decades, and to question it right now can seem morally obtuse—right now, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas has brought about the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Still, lucidity has its claims, and it is worth recalling yet another historical reality, which is that, over the long course of Zionism’s progress, the Palestinian population has not, all in all, shriveled. On the contrary. Nor has Zionism brought about the destruction of Islam, or of the mighty Arab civilization, or the Arabic language. Nor is there even the remotest danger of anything like that occurring in the future—which might suggest that “settler colonialism” is not the ideal framework for analyzing the Jewish-and-Arab tragedies. The consequences of World War II might appear to be a better framework.
The proponents of the decolonization ideology insist on their own framework, even so, which means they insist on viewing the Jewish refugees as haughty imperialists, worthy of decolonization, and insist on viewing the Palestinians as American Indians. And they are adamant in these insistences. The decolonization argument tends to be, in Patrick Wolfe’s word, a matter of “binarism,” meaning there are Good People and Bad People, and he who speaks of mutual tragedies and mutual future possibilities is morality’s enemy. And by insisting on these contentions, the ideologues succeed in being analytically dubious and politically frightening at the same time.
For it is one thing to deliver fire-and-brimstone church sermons on topics of Original Sin in the big English-speaking countries, but those same concepts in connection to Israel tend to have an ominous implication, given that, as everyone has come to see during this last year, Israel could indeed be defeated in a military war, and the Jews could indeed be “decolonized,” which is to say, massacred. And if that were to happen, the proponents of the decolonization ideology in the American universities—not just the students, but the professors, enough of them to be noticeable—would respond, as they have already shown us, by cheering.
The ideologues of decolonialization theory succeed in being analytically dubious and politically frightening at the same time.
Their cheers would be deep and vigorous, too. That is because, in the decolonization ideology, as Kirsch explains, “Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong,” and the destruction of Israel would be the triumph for the ideology itself and for every well-intentioned person and political movement around the world. And so, the new and exotic academic ideology that inveighs against “settler colonialism” has turned out to be a recognizable thing. It is one more variation on a phenomenon well known to the twentieth century—the noble doctrine that turns into its opposite. Kirsch makes the point: “I see it leading people who think of themselves as idealists into morally disastrous territory, in ways that are all too familiar in modern history.”
What can account for the success of an ideology like this, not only in the universities, but in the art-and-literary world, as well? It is a success, too, and not just a sudden fad, as Kirsch observes—a success that has been years in the making, which has just now revealed itself in the student protests and the showy boycotts and mass-signature letters of the artists and writers. Kirsch is reluctant to propose grand-scale explanations. Modesty is his instinct. It leads him to acknowledge that, in writing about the decolonialists, he has described merely “one strand” of the intellectual climate right now—and this, I think, is a crucial point to bear in mind. Other strands do exist, and, as I interpret the mood , a couple of those additional strands, intertwining, have added considerably to the success of the new ideology.
Kirsch mentions in passing Frantz Fanon, the author of The Wretched of the Earth, which was a manifesto of Third World revolution from 1961—and Fanon’s influence seems key to one of those additional strands. Fanon was a philosopher from Martinique, and from him has descended a certain trend in modern Black nationalism, which has remained distinct from the decolonialist doctrine that Kirsch has described, but has turned out to be influential in the anti-Zionist protests (even if Fanon himself showed some sympathy for Zionism). And Kirsch mentions, likewise in passing, Gary Snyder, the poet—who, at age ninety-four, may perhaps be surprised to discover his name invoked in these debates and controversies. If Snyder has ever said anything notable about Israel, the Jews, and the Palestinians, he has not done so in a sufficiently loud voice to catch my own attention.
Israel could indeed be defeated in a military war, and the Jews could indeed be “decolonized,” which is to say, massacred.
And yet, as Kirsch observes, Snyder published a collection of poems in 1974 called Turtle Island,which won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and—more to the point—marked a significant moment in the history of the hippie counterculture. Snyder by 1974 was a hippie saint, beatified by Jack Kerouac back in the 1950s as the grand monkish exemplar of Beat mysticism. In Turtle Island, Snyder specified the meaning of his mysticism. This was a Zen Buddhism, focused meditatively on the natural landscape of the American West, combined with an implicit protest against the depredations of modern society, and combined, as well, with an appreciation of the American Indians who inhabited the land before the dreadful night of modernity descended on the bright day of the pre-modern past.
In Snyder’s poetry was an early presaging of what would in later decades emerge as the decolonization ideology of the academic anthropologists, in its benign first phase—in connection, that is, to the American West. And Snyder expressed, as well, the larger hippie ideal, which was anarchist in the benign and imaginative mode of Peter Kropotkin—an ideal of universal and even cosmic liberation, containing every possible spiritual breakthrough and offering marvels and wonders to every last person. This was a utopian ideal in which the Eden of the American Indians of long ago could blossom anew among people who bore no connection whatsoever to actual Indian life.
A remnant trace of that very generous countercultural ideal flowered for a moment, many years later, in 2012, in the encampments of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And a further trace burst into bloom in the university encampments of this past year (except that, whereas the hippies of long ago wore Apache headbands and beaded necklaces to express their affinity with the Indian past, the university campers of our own moment wear keffiyehs to express their affinity with Palestinians in general, and face masks to convey an air of frightening menace, even as they protect themselves from getting doxxed). And the encampments and protests have somehow tied all of these separate and discrete influences and inspirations into a single peculiar knot—the sweet bouquet of flower-child innocence and universal benignity, which the students insist on, together with the salutations of Hamas’s massacre that have indelibly marked the protests, together with the transgressive and frightening chants and the unmistakable spirit of ethnic hatred, which was notably missing from the hippie counterculture of long ago.
Or do the protests draw on still other inspirations? Kirsch allows himself to speculate on ancient Christian origins—on the Pauline idea (though he prefers to cite Peter) of Judaism as the major obstacle to the redemption of the world, which, as he observes, has undergone any number of variations over the millennia. Then again, it might be worth recalling that, less than a hundred years ago, almost the whole of continental Europe fell under the influence of a mostly post-Christian idea that Jews and Judaism needed to be exterminated because they were the source of the world’s problems.
But I think that chiefly it is worth recalling that, in our own moment, the ideological condemnation of Israel, Judaism, and the Jews that carries the most weight in the world is the one that comes from the Islamist movement—the religious-and-political movement, that is, whose goal is to resurrect the ancient Islamic utopia that can be found in the Qur’an. This movement commands the support right now of many millions of people across the denominations in Islam, and it enjoys the backing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is confident of its beliefs and its ultimate triumph someday in the future. And naturally it exerts a pressure on everyone else, and especially on the people in the university quads right now who are protesting against settler colonialism. The pressure is to come up with ideological explanations of every sort—scientific-sounding explanations in the anthropological mode, or political explanations in the national-liberation style of the 1960s, or human-rights explanations in the modern humanitarian fashion, or countercultural displays of universal spirituality—to show that Islamism’s wrath cannot be entirely misplaced, even if the Islamist rhetoric, half medieval-theological, and half pseudo-scientific in the Nazi style (“malignant cancerous tumor,” to quote Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, just now), grates disagreeably on the modern ear.
Will Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice be widely read during these next months of renewed protests in the universities and in the art-and-literary world? I hope so. It is a short book. It is pleasing to read. It has the sparkle of sharp intelligence. But I am skeptical of its prospects. I notice that, in one university after another, the debate among professors and administrators has tended to dwell on matters of campus civility and how to enforce it, and not on the actual ideas that have come to prosper in their own quarters. Those people, the academics, may perhaps glance at Kirsch’s book, but they will notice that speech codes and the regulation of unruly behavior occupy his attention not at all. His book will therefore seem to them irrelevant. And yet, I think his book goes to the heart of the problem, which is the rise of noxious new ideologies.