Mick Hartley

I've just finished Adam Kirsch's On Settler Colonialism. It's not much over 100 pages, so an easy day's read.

As he notes, it started out with academics in the US, Australia, and Canada, searching for new ways to celebrate the wickedness of their countries – founded as they were by stealing the land from the indigenous inhabitants. The problem is that there's nowhere to go with it apart from the breast-beating. A few of the keener theorists might talk of all the wonders that would open up should history be reversed and the land be returned to its rightful owners – an end to racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression of any kind, a veritable new paradise – but of course it's never going to happen. Americans, Australians, Canadians, aren't all about to pack up and clear off. Where would they go? These countries are their home. So all that's left is the guilt. Anyone whose descendants arrived with the wicked colonialists – well, anyone who's white – must live forever with this burden of guilt, and must wake up each morning to the shame and horror of the curse they bear.

If this all sounds religious, well yes, it is. This is Original Sin all dressed up in fancy new progressive clothes.

And anyway, this is what happens. Peoples, nations, races, fight each other, conquer each other, displace each other. History is a succession of wars and dispossessions and violence. If history were to be reversed we'd all end up in some rift valley in East Africa, where it all started.

But, as we know, the US, Australia, and Canada take a back seat now. Settler colonialism is all about Israel – absurd as that might seem for a people who see the land as their ancestral home, and half of whose population never left the Middle East and North Africa and in no way could be considered white. So…why might that be?

Kirsch:

But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it – from "emptiness" and "not-enoughness" to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide – could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic policy rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be the perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously – especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.