Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Razgovory]

The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism
The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel
By Adam Kirsch


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/how-settler-colonialism-colonized-universities/679514/

On October 7, Hamas killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as had been killed in the previous 15 years of conflict. In the months since, protesters have rallied against Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. But a new tone of excitement and enthusiasm could be heard among pro-Palestinian activists from the moment that news of the attacks arrived, well before the Israeli response began. Celebrations of Hamas's exploits are familiar sights in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo and Damascus; this time, they spread to elite college campuses, where Gaza-solidarity encampments became ubiquitous this past spring. Why?

The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement. In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.

One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism's evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a "white European settler colony." For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of "European Jewish Settler-Colonialism," and the "liberation" referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is "liberation from Settler-Colonialism."


Western activists and academics have leaned heavily on the idea. Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it "makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-�colonial regimes." When the city of Toronto evicted a homeless encampment from a park, it was like Palestine because both are examples of "ethnic cleansing" and "colonial 'domicide,' making Indigenous people homeless on their homelands." Health problems among Native Americans can be understood in terms of Palestine, because the "hyper-�visible Palestine case ...  provides a unique temporal lens for understanding settler colonial health determinants more broadly." Pollution, too, can be understood through a Palestinian lens, according to the British organization Friends of the Earth, because Palestine demonstrates that "the world is an unequal place" where "marginalised and vulnerable people bear the brunt of injustice."

Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state "between the river and the sea." In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.

The concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.

For the academic field of settler-colonial studies, the settlement process is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider "terra nullius," the legal property of no one; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures. This model, drawn from the history of Anglophone colonies such as the U.S. and Australia, is regularly applied to the history of Israel even though it does not include any of these hallmarks.

When modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman empire, and after World War I, it was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Far from being "no one's land," Jews could settle there only with the permission of an imperial government, and when that permission was withdrawn—�as it fatefully was in 1939, when the British sharply limited Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust—they had no recourse. Far from expanding to fill a continent, as in North America and Australia, the state of Israel today is about the size of New Jersey. The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant: 76 years after Israel was founded, it is still the only Jewish country in the region, among 22 Arab countries, from Morocco to Iraq.


Most important, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace many of them. Here the comparison between European settlement in North America and Jewish settlement in Israel is especially inapt. In the decades after Europeans arrived in Massachusetts, the Native American population of New England declined from about 140,000 to 10,000, by one estimate. In the decades after 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine more than quintupled, from about 1.4 million to about 7.4 million. The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—�as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where European settlers decimated Native peoples.

In the 21st century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights office reported that the Chinese government had compelled nearly 1 million Tibetan children to attend residential schools "aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically." Forcing the next generation of Tibetans to speak Mandarin is part of a long-�term effort to Sinicize the region, which also includes encouraging Han Chinese to settle there and prohibiting public displays of traditional Buddhist faith.

China has mounted a similar campaign against the Uyghur people in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Since 2017, more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in what the Chinese government calls vocational training centers, which other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. The government is also seeking to bring down Uyghur birth rates through mass sterilization and involuntary birth control.


These campaigns include every element of settler colonialism as defined by academic theorists. They aim to replace an existing people and culture with a new one imported from the imperial metropole, using techniques frequently described as genocidal in the context of North American history. Tibet's residential schools are a tool of forced assimilation, like the ones established for Native American children in Canada and the United States in the 19th century. And some scholars of settler colonialism have drawn these parallels, acknowledging, in the words of the anthropologist Carole McGranahan, "that an imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-�first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries."

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—�like India's rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—�occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-�Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-�speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

But the focus on Israel-�Palestine isn't only a product of the discipline's limitations. It is doctrinal. Academics and activists find adding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other causes powerfully energizing, a way to give a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler-colonial model must be made to fit.


Israel also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren't simply those who happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—�white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.

Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, "We are not Red Indians." But today's activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that "Palestinian claims to life" are based in having "a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land." Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that "Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land."

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-�and-�soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: "The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it ... Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it."


For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the "rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite." The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about "Zionists," who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: "In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity ... Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics."

In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti�-Semitic and anti�-Jewish thinking. It is true, of course, that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-�Semitic. Virtually anything that an Israeli government does is likely to be harshly criticized by many Israeli Jews themselves. But it is also true that anti-�Semitism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice against Jews, existing on an entirely different plane from politics. The term anti�-Semitism was coined in Germany in the late 19th century because the old term, Jew hatred, sounded too instinctive and brutal to describe what was, in fact, a political ideology—�an account of the way the world works and how it should be changed.

Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who popularized the word, complained in his 1879 book, The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism, that "the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world." That spirit, for Marr, was materialism and selfishness, "profiteering and usury." Anti-�Semitic political parties in Europe attacked "Semitism" in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism. The saying "Anti-�Semitism is the socialism of fools," used by the German left at this time, recognized the structural similarity between these rival worldviews.


The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to 19th-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things (�the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law) and Christianity with spiritual things—�the circumcision of the heart, a new law "written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts."



Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late 19th century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism. As the historian David Nirenberg has written, "We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of 'Israel,'" except that today, Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state.

When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University's student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—�including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—�defending the use of the slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails "murder and genocide." Rather, they wrote, "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."


As a political program, this is nonsensical. How could dismantling Israel bring about the end of militarism in China, Russia, or Iran? How could it lead to the end of anti-Black racism in America, or anti-Muslim prejudice in India? But for the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target. Young Americans today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses 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.

[Josquius]

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—�like India's rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—�occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-�Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-�speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

The world needs to pay more attention to other injustices in the world. Israel gets attention way out of proportion. This is definitely true.
We should remember however that this is the case in politics as well as media and academics. Most in the US are pretty onboard with the idea that the PRC is not very nice. The US isn't sending vast quantities of unnecessary aid to China to help its oppressions.

Raz and Squeeze: could you both please drop your insistence on defining the "anti-Zionist movement"  as this or that?  It's obvious to me you're talking about two separate things, Squeeze's bobo friends protesting in the streets and campuses on the one hand and Hamas and their friends on the other.

Yes (though a lot of those I know are not bobo by any stretch).
I'm not trying to pin labels and score points here. Really its a bizarre and pointless topic. Lets forget about the actual issues and instead try to smear anyone with a critical viewpoint because some people he saw have views that go beyond critical and into hateful insanity.

The use of the term "settler-colonialism" is antisemitic, fwiw. It is an entirely constructed language that was developed exclusively to attack Jews, it has no actual history beyond that.

Don't be daft.
Checking google books I see it is a oddly modern term just going back to the 60s but it seems equally used for Africa.


Incidentally I was thinking about this the other day. The whole "Anything bad about Israel is anti-semitic" thing. There's a real "Boy who cried wolf" factor in this. And this is key to incidents like the mess in Labour some years ago with the leadership being soft on anti-semitism.

When you have Israel's drum baggers screeching that any bad thing about Israel is anti-semitism it builds up a resistance to such labels. It puts a lot of people in a natural state of disbelief for these accusations, thus increases the amount of proof required before they'll take them seriously.
Basically those who insist anything bad about Israel is anti-semitic are really doing their part to help grow actual anti-semitism, shifting the line for the worse and allowing ever less borderline comments to pass in Israel critical communities without being called out.

[Solmyr]

Zionists being a bunch of cunts is the driving force of the anti zionist movement. No conspiracies required (which makes those who do go in for them extra loopy) . Reality does enough.

Fake news, misinformation, and all that sort of thing is an issue in the world of today no doubt. Though it's not the core issue. And in the west it's usually Muslims that are the target.

And people who think Zionists are cunts often think so because they believe in a conspiracy theories.  If what the zionists do is actually enough to engender such hatred, why come up with conspiracy theories?  If the leaders and organizations that make up the antizionist movement are so untethered from reality as to believe these theories how can achieve reality-based solutions?

Who do you think makes up the core of the antizionist movement?

I think many Zionists are cunts because Netanyahu and anyone who supports him are cunts. FWIW, I am Jewish and actually support a Jewish state, but Israel being a quasi-religious entity sliding into authoritarianism and doing what it's doing is doing more harm than good for Jews worldwide. A Jewish state should be secular and multicultural (like, you know, Jews are).

[grumbler]

Adam Kirsch is a self-described poet.  He is hardly an authority on the academic concept of settler-colonialism, and his article in the Atlantic is full of outright falsehoods and selective quotation.  The article reeks of OvB-style "it's all about me!"

[Razgovory]

Adam Kirsch is a self-described poet.  He is hardly an authority on the academic concept of settler-colonialism, and his article in the Atlantic is full of outright falsehoods and selective quotation.  The article reeks of OvB-style "it's all about me!"

Could you give examples as to the outright falsehoods and selective quotations?

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yeah guys people in academia have been hating Israel since the 1960s and earlier. Showing the term "settler-colonialist" was in use in the 60s helps to demonstrate my point. You and your ilk have been assiduously working to delegitimize Israel for generations.

[Josquius]

Yeah guys people in academia have been hating Israel since the 1960s and earlier. Showing the term "settler-colonialist" was in use in the 60s helps to demonstrate my point. You and your ilk have been assiduously working to delegitimize Israel for generations.

And the fact that a lot of these references from the 60s are talking about Africa?

Thats not particularly true about Israel either. Back in the 60s views still tended to be fairly positive. Israel was the underdog clinging onto survival, the kibbutz system was very popular amongst the left, and due to relatively recent events the right had to keep quiet about their views of Jews.

[grumbler]

Adam Kirsch is a self-described poet.  He is hardly an authority on the academic concept of settler-colonialism, and his article in the Atlantic is full of outright falsehoods and selective quotation.  The article reeks of OvB-style "it's all about me!"

Could you give examples as to the outright falsehoods and selective quotations?

Trivially easy. 

Outright falsehood: "The concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement."  The facts are that the terminology of settler colonialism was developed in Australia as a handy way of distinguishing between settlement colonialism and exploitation colonialism.  It was just a new, easier-to-use term for an existing concept.

Selective quotation: "Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it "makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-colonial regimes.""  Who is this quote from?  How authoritative is it?  The author completely ignores such questions, and may in fact have made up his "evidence."

Those examples are both from a single paragraph, which actually has even more examples of this kind of intellectual dishonesty.

[Razgovory]

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—�like India's rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—�occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-�Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-�speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

The world needs to pay more attention to other injustices in the world. Israel gets attention way out of proportion. This is definitely true.
We should remember however that this is the case in politics as well as media and academics. Most in the US are pretty onboard with the idea that the PRC is not very nice. The US isn't sending vast quantities of unnecessary aid to China to help its oppressions.

The US (and the rest of the world do immense amounts of trade with China.  Trade that has built China to what it is today.  Where is the Boycott, Divest and Sanction people on China?

I think asking "what does the antizionist movement want, what do they believe?"  Is a valid question.  It is certainly valid when we ask that of MAGA or the Tea Party.  And using examples of what members and organizations in those movements to indicate if they are racist or paranoid wasn't a problem with us leftists in the past.  The same should be true of the antizionist movement.

The core of the antizionist movement is the Palestinians themselves and the groups that organize them.  For the most part they are paranoid, corrupt, eliminationist, antisemitic and warlike.  Even the more secular Fatah has a "martyrs" brigade and exhorts its people to simply go out and murder Jews.  The first ring around the core is the Muslim nations of the world, particularly the Arab ones.  These are basically the same as the core, they are still obsessed with eliminating the Jews out (and have done an admirable job doing so in their own polities), but less of the public is fulling on board.  Still, they have levels of antisemitism greater than that of Nazi Germany.  The ring beyond that is in the West, mostly the far-left and far-right.  The far-left loudly proclaims it is not antisemitic, just as the Soviet did in the Cold War.  And true, some are opposing Israel as simply a way to oppose the US and the West in general.  Still, they often eliminationist and happy to dive into conspiracy theories.  The far-right ones are just fascists and Nazis, the worst attack on Jews in the US was a far-right ideologue who attacked a synagogue about 10 years ago.  Antizionist organization in the US are often proudly "Palestinian led", and have seeped up a great deal of the sectarian and ethnic hatred coming from the Middle East.  In the furthest periphery of the antizionist movement are marchers in the mass protesters.  Generally they are ill-informed and think they are marching against racism or something.  They are the ones that say "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."

[crazy canuck]

Earlier in the thread, there was a robust discussion about the role of conspiracy theories.  The theory that the concept of settler colonialism was developed to criticize Israel is a good example of one.

It was developed to help explain the elimination of indigenous culture, and in some cases, indigenous peoples, in lands settled by Europeans.

[Razgovory]

Adam Kirsch is a self-described poet.  He is hardly an authority on the academic concept of settler-colonialism, and his article in the Atlantic is full of outright falsehoods and selective quotation.  The article reeks of OvB-style "it's all about me!"

Could you give examples as to the outright falsehoods and selective quotations?

Trivially easy. 

Outright falsehood: "The concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement."  The facts are that the terminology of settler colonialism was developed in Australia as a handy way of distinguishing between settlement colonialism and exploitation colonialism.  It was just a new, easier-to-use term for an existing concept.

Selective quotation: "Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it "makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-colonial regimes.""  Who is this quote from?  How authoritative is it?  The author completely ignores such questions, and may in fact have made up his "evidence."

Those examples are both from a single paragraph, which actually has even more examples of this kind of intellectual dishonesty.

Grumbler the theorist of Settler-Colonialists were fairly clear that they were also talking about Israel, and that current injustices in settler-colonialist states are from the structural deficiencies of their creation.
The second one I'm sure what your getting at.  The quote is from an academic paper https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/160342/  I'm not sure what you mean by authoritative, he's talking about what other have written.  He's an academic so him using examples of from academic paper to discus an academic theory doesn't seem out of place.  He also wrote in an Atlantic article, you don't normally have foot notes in those.
He did write a book on the subject  https://www.amazon.com/Settler-Colonialism-Ideology-Violence-Justice/dp/1324105348

So you can check his sources there.

[Razgovory]

Earlier in the thread, there was a robust discussion about the role of conspiracy theories.  The theory that the concept of settler colonialism was developed to criticize Israel is a good example of one.

It was developed to help explain the elimination of indigenous culture, and in some cases, indigenous peoples, in lands settled by Europeans.

Otto is incorrect in saying that it was developed to attack Israel is fault, but settler-colonialist theoriests do focus on Israel quite a bit.  It was developed to describe existing structural oppression within the Settler-Colonialist states.

[grumbler]

Grumbler the theorist of Settler-Colonialists were fairly clear that they were also talking about Israel, and that current injustices in settler-colonialist states are from the structural deficiencies of their creation.

That some "theorist of Settler-Colonialists" seems to think that his/her/their work in the field is about Israel, the simple fact is that the origins of the concept have nothing to do with Israel and the vast majority of material written on the subject doesn't mention Israel.

The second one I'm sure what your getting at.  The quote is from an academic paper https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/160342/  I'm not sure what you mean by authoritative, he's talking about what other have written.  He's an academic so him using examples of from academic paper to discus an academic theory doesn't seem out of place.

He's an academic poet, not an academic historian or sociologist, so he, himself, has not authoritative view on the subject.  He doesn't cite (as in my example) the sources of many of his quotes.  You claim that the quote I cited is from a paper not available to the public, which is irrelevant since my point is that Kirsch doesn't provide sources.

He also wrote in an Atlantic article, you don't normally have foot notes in those.
He did write a book on the subject  https://www.amazon.com/Settler-Colonialism-Ideology-Violence-Justice/dp/1324105348

So you can check his sources there.

If you look at Atlantic articles from their established writers, they use quotes but tell us the author of the quote (you don't need footnotes to do that).  Kirsch has written a short book (as a "public intellectual" according to the blurb) trying to shoehorn all of settler-colonialism into the modern controversy over Israel, but that ignores the actual history of the subject.  That the concept of settler-colonialism is being (mis)used by some to attempt to delegitimize Israel is obvious, but that has nothing to do with the concept and everything to do with those who are trying to misuse it.

The whole debate reminds me of the "woke" panic, in which opposition to "woke" is widespread and vigorous even though none of the anti-woke people can say what woke is, except that it is everything they dislike.

Settler-colonialist studies are not a vast conspiracy against Israel.

[crazy canuck]

Earlier in the thread, there was a robust discussion about the role of conspiracy theories.  The theory that the concept of settler colonialism was developed to criticize Israel is a good example of one.

It was developed to help explain the elimination of indigenous culture, and in some cases, indigenous peoples, in lands settled by Europeans.

Otto is incorrect in saying that it was developed to attack Israel is fault, but settler-colonialist theoriests do focus on Israel quite a bit.  It was developed to describe existing structural oppression within the Settler-Colonialist states.

It should not be surprising that some academics have applied the analysis to what is happening to the Palestinians.

[Valmy]

I guess my issue with calling Israel a Settler-Colonialist state that is out to exterminate indigenous people is the absurdity of insisting Jews are not indigenous to Palestine and the fact that a huge proportion of the population come from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and North Africa etc. and the extensive similarities between Israeli and Arab culture.

That is just radically different than something like United State or Australia.

Hence why I tend to view it as an old world ethnic conflict. Sure you do have large numbers of Jews from Europe moving into a non-European area so it has that in common, but that ignores so many other issues. And Israel seem pretty integrated into the area with their corrupt politicians, religious fanaticism, and cynicism.