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Why did pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University chant “N.Y.P.D., K.K.K.” and the Movement for Black Lives demand “an immediate end to Israel’s lethal settler-colonial project”? And how did the tables turn so quickly on Israel — even before its military retaliation — after Hamas attacked it on Oct. 7?
If the answers to these questions elude you, it’s worth reading two short new books.
You’ve probably heard about one of them, “The Message” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which came out this month and is already a best seller. Coates, the prizewinning author of “Between the World and Me,” is a writer who, fittingly for someone who has written numerous Black Panther comics, has achieved superhero status on the left.
The other book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice,” by the poet and critic Adam Kirsch, has received far less fanfare. While Coates’s book captures the moral conviction behind the pro-Palestinian movement, Kirsch’s explains how its underlying ideology took root in elite circles over two decades only to explode into the public sphere on Oct. 7.
“For many academics and activists, describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack,” Kirsch writes, “because for them the term encapsulates a whole series of ideological convictions — about Israel and Palestine, but also about history and many social and political issues, from the environment to gender to capitalism. Indeed, it’s impossible to understand progressive politics today without grasping the idea of settler colonialism and the worldview that derives from it.”
Insofar as college students read at all these days, “The Message” is likely to reach many. But if schools were to assign one book this academic year, I’d recommend Kirsch’s — even if only for context.
Context is precisely what critics of “The Message” have found lacking. The book consists of four essays, including ones about trips to Senegal and to a school district in South Carolina where “Between the World and Me” has been banned. But its longest section, on Israel and Palestine, has attracted the most negative attention, in particular because it leaves out any mention of the suicide bombings of the second intifada, Hamas or Oct. 7.
These omissions, as well as the absence of a contemporary pro-Israeli perspective, are a conscious choice on Coates’s part. He has no desire, he writes, to “hear both sides” — “no matter how politely articulated, no matter how elegantly crafted.” As he puts it, “My frame excluded any defense of the patently immoral.”
“On Settler Colonialism” makes the reasons behind this refusal clear. As Kirsch defines it, settler colonialist theory holds that any state that is created against the will of the people previously living there is permanently illegitimate; no argument can counter that basic fact. The throughline Coates draws in “The Message” from Senegal to American slavery to Trump’s America to Israel belongs to the same school of thought that ties America’s conquest of its Native American population to imperial efforts to subjugate Indigenous populations worldwide. According to settler colonialist theory, “colonial America” refers not only to the 18th century, but also to Americans living on Indigenous land today.
From here, it’s just a small skip to the Middle East, where Israel is cast in the role of colonial settler and Palestinians are the oppressed. In this reading of history, “occupation” doesn’t refer merely to right-wing settlers in the West Bank, but to Israel’s very existence.
Such an interpretation lends itself to a stark moral divide. In Coates’s rendition, for Israelis, Palestinians are “savage Nazis, third-world barbarians embodying the depraved native in the colonial mind. The Aztec. The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab.” Between a Black American like himself and the Palestinians, Coates sees “the warmth of solidarity, of ‘conquered peoples,’ as one of my comrades put it, finding each other across the chasm of oceans and experience.”
On this side of the ocean, settler colonialist theory easily found purchase amid a curriculum in which dates and events have been de-emphasized in favor of more theoretical approaches to understanding the past. History majors can now specialize in thematic frameworks like Comparative Colonialism or Race and Ethnicity, for example, rather than Early European History or Modern Chinese History. As with the social sciences, this more ideological approach cherry-picks historical facts in the pursuit of an argument.
That doesn’t mean this approach lacks legitimate points. In “The Message,” for example, Coates describes the very real tension between the ideals of democracy, which rests on equality among diverse members of society, and the Jewish state of Israel, which privileges adherents of one religion over another.
But while he condemns the status quo, Coates never proposes an alternative. For an ostensibly progressive movement, the pro-Palestinian cause doesn’t specify what might constitute progress. As Kirsch notes, “For the ideology of settler colonialism, the impossibility of concretely imagining a decolonial future ought to serve as a warning sign.”
Herein lies the most dispiriting aspect of settler colonialist theory in practice. Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states? The ideology of settler colonialism offers little beyond a hopeless impasse, that “history is evil and deserves to be repealed,” Kirsch says, or what he calls a “longing for redemptive destruction.”
In their mutual resistance to an end game, an ironic parallel emerges between the “free Palestine” movement and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has declined to offer a viable plan for how the current conflict ends. It may be that neither side can find a realistic solution that can claim pure justice. What remains, in its absence, are vengeance and despair.
Source photographs by jeff1farmer and TPopova/Getty Images
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