Hamas ’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 produced two shocks. The first was the gruesome success of the attack. Hamas militants faced almost no resistance as they entered Israel to rape, torture, murder, and disfigure Israelis living in kibbutzim near the border of the Gaza Strip . Over 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 were abducted in the attack, most of them civilians.
The second was the approval the attack garnered, not from Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East but from students and faculty at universities in the United States. Shortly after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Yale professor Zareena Grewal posted on X that “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.” Russell Rickford, a professor of history at Cornell, called the attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Many others followed suit .
At the end of May, Harvard’s Ash Center published a report that found that there have been pro-Palestinian protests at over 500 schools across the country since Oct. 7, with encampments at 130 of them. A poll conducted by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies two months after the attack found that only 50% of respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 supported Israel in the conflict and that 60% believed the Oct. 7 attacks were justified because of the “grievances of Palestinians .”
The attacks made clear that within a generation, America could go from one of the world’s staunchest critics of terrorism to an aider and abettor of it. How did we get here?
In On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, Adam Kirsch blames a once obscure academic concept that has become a dangerously popular ideology on the Left, especially among young people: settler colonialism. The phrase was used again and again in support of Palestinians following the attacks. The New York chapter of the LGBT advocacy group ACT UP, for example, stated in January 2024 that it stood “with Palestinians against a settler-colonial state backed by the finances and brutality of the U.S.” Kirsch argues it is “impossible to understand progressive politics today without grasping the idea of settler colonialism.” So, what does the phrase mean, and where did it come from?
One of the first people to use the term was Kenneth Good, Kirsch writes, who published a 1976 study examining European colonies in Rhodesia, Algeria, and South Africa. In these countries, a small group of European settlers ruled a native majority to exploit natural resources. This exploitation, however, helped these countries develop more advanced economies that provided natives with the skills and resources to rebel against imperial rule. Thus, “like capitalism in Marx’s theory of class conflict,” settler colonialism, according to Good, Kirsch writes, played “a paradoxical double role, accelerating historical progress even as it created misery.”
While Good used the phrase “settler colonialism” to refer narrowly to colonies ruled by a minority of white Europeans, this definition changed in the 1980s and '90s when anthropologists and critical theorists began to apply the term to countries like Australia and the U.S., even though these countries were no longer colonies and only a small minority of aboriginal inhabitants remained after centuries of displacement.
In his 1999 book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, Patrick Wolfe argued that the purpose of settler colonialism was not to extract the natural resources of a colony using “indigenous labor,” as Good had argued, but to replace the indigenous population itself. Thus, settler colonialism, in Wolfe’s view, became inherently “genocidal.” “Settler colonies,” he wrote, “were [are] premised on the elimination of native societies.”
As a matter of historical fact, it is absurd to claim that English Puritans came to America to exterminate native peoples. As Kirsch shows, it isn’t the only absurdity of this new iteration of settler colonialism.
Theorists of settler colonialism act as if the displacement of peoples was new with European colonialism, even though the precolonial people of North America were themselves settlers from East Asia, as the paleontological record shows. One historian called precolonial North America “a ‘relatively disease-free paradise’ where ‘wealthy peoples’ lived ‘long and well with abundant ceremonial and recreational periods.’” In reality, war was ubiquitous. Another historian claimed native people abandoned a large city in the 14th century because they found “urban living ... insufficiently egalitarian.” This is presented as a rejection of European inegalitarianism, even though Columbus would not set foot in North America for another 150 years, and there is no record of why the city was abandoned.
According to this new theory of settler colonialism, Kirsch writes, genocide is redefined as any action that suppresses a native’s original relationship with the land. This includes things like assimilation, as well as any activity that contributes to the status quo of so-called settler colonial societies, such as buying a house or getting a job. Other things that are “genocidal” in this way are: moving (“settlers create their claim on the land ... by moving in and moving on just as much as through staying”), monogamous relationships (“a monogamist, heteronormative, marriage-focused, nuclear family ideal ... is central to the colonial project”), watching Disney’s Moana, and referring to time and space. (Two professors of geography argued in a 2021 paper, Kirsch writes, that “Western scientific ‘objectivity,’ along with categories such as ‘space, time, and matter,’ are themselves artifacts of settler colonialism.”)
This rejection of reality and history is what makes settler colonialism both appealing and dangerous. Kirsch writes that “virtually anything one objects to in modern ... life” can be blamed “on the original sin of settler colonialism.” Like all “radical ideologies,” Kirsch writes, the appeal of settler colonialism is the “promise of a final solution.” In this case, it is the total repatriation of land to natives in the U.S. and Australia and to Palestinians in Israel.
It also offers a ready-made excuse for the worst kind of violence. Israel does not fit even the newly expanded definition of a settler colonial state. Jews claim to be the original inhabitants of the land of Israel. They were displaced by an imperial power nearly 2,000 years ago. They were the victims of an actual genocide less than 100 years ago.
But settler colonial theorists have simply ignored these facts. “To a degree that outsiders may well find surprising,” Kirsch writes, “for the ideology of settler colonialism, Palestine is the reference point for every type of social wrong.” How did this happen? Old-fashioned antisemitism: Settler colonialism is not about making the world a better place through political actions. It is about a battle between darkness and light in which Jews have once again become the face of a “soulless materialism” that is the root of all the world’s evils.
This is why so many theorists and students of settler colonialism were thrilled by Oct. 7. It was the first step in this final solution that would not only rid the world of the Jewish state but of all the world’s evils, returning us to an idealized past. “Young people today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses,” Kirsch writes, “are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews — because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.”
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Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
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