← EconTalk
EconTalk
Understanding the Settler Colonialism Movement (with Adam Kirsch)
00:59:07
Under settler colonialism, you're either a settler or indigenous and the sin of the founding of America, Australia, and Israel, for example, is not just a past injustice but a perpetuating mistake that explains the present. Listen as poet, author, and literary critic Adam Kirsch explains how an academic theory helps us understand the protests against Israel on America's college campuses, the phenomenon of land acknowledgments, and more.
Loading summary
Transcript38 lines
- [00:03]
A
Welcome to Econ Conversations for the curious part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mailcontalk.org we'd love to hear from you.
- [00:37]
B
Today is December 16, 2024. My guest is poet, author and literary critic Adam Kirsch. He is an editor at the Wall Street Journal. His latest book published this year and our topic for today on settler colonialism, ideology, violence and justice. Adam welcome to Econ Talk.
- [00:56]
C
Thanks very much.
- [00:57]
B
I want to let listeners know you can vote for your favorite episodes of 2024. Please go to econtalk.org, you link to vote in our annual survey. And now we're going to talk about settler colonialism, a phrase that I had heard of but never fully appreciated or understood until I read your very short, extremely provocative and interesting summary.
- [01:23]
C
Thank you.
- [01:23]
B
Let's start with the definition. What is settler colonialism?
- [01:28]
C
Well, settler colonialism is an idea that is talked about a lot in the academy. I think if you've studied history or a lot of humanities subjects, social sciences in the last 15 years, you probably encountered the idea of settler colonialism. And it's a term that's undergone some changes in meaning over time. Really. It refers to sort of the best one sentence definition I could give would be to say that it's the idea that countries founded by European colonialism, primarily countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, and then often by extension Israel, are sort of permanently shaped by the original sin of colonization. So that the the countries, even hundreds of years after the original settlement, remain shaped by this settler colonial experience. And that a lot of the injustices and problems, as critics see it, with those countries can be explained by reference to that European settlement. The the idea of a settler colony is older than the last 15 years, really, when people started to talk about different kinds of colonialism after World War II, during the decolonization era, there were different models of colonialism, different parts of the world. And a settler colony would be a colony like Algeria or Rhodesia, where Europeans had come to settle but had not displaced or replaced the native population. So in those places in Algeria, you've had maybe 10% European population, 90% Arab and Berber population. In Rhodesia, slightly less European population. But in those situations, you had a very clear and distinct settler class. And the idea of decolonization in those settings was to take power and property from the settlers and maybe in the end to expel them, which is what happened in Algeria. After France sort of declared defeat and Algeria became an independent country. Most of the European settlers left very quickly. And that was different from other models of cloning colonialism, like in India, where there was very little settlement and power was exercised in different ways. But in the 1990s, settler colonialism came to be applied to countries with a very different history and situation, first in Australia and then in North America. And thinking about those countries as settler colonial societies means something very different. Because in, in those countries, to say, the United States, where, where I am, 98% of the population is not indigenous, only, only two indigenous. So in that situation, you can't decolonize the United States in the same way that you could decolonize Algeria by getting rid of the settlers. Right. So if you refer to a country like the United States as a settler colonial country, it has different implications. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to drive out all the settlers, but instead it means that you want to acknowledge that the country was sort of founded on the crime of colonialism of settlement and change things about it that are directly related to that. And it lines up with a lot of progressive critique of the United States and other societies. So people talk about the environment, about capitalism and inequality, about gender relations, but framing them as the results of settler colonialism.
- [04:56]
B
We'll come back to some of those claims about the extension of the idea to other areas of the place. I'm just going to say it would be very hard to decolonialize the United States. Some of the people originally came from Holland or England, but since the founding of America, there are many people came from Poland and Ireland and Italy and so on. In theory, they could go back to where they came from and the United States could return to its so called pristine state before European invasion. Does anybody talk about that? And why not?
- [05:42]
C
There are some academic theorists who do talk about what decolonization would mean in a more concrete way. Usually they don't have a program and can't spell it out. One of the things I say in the book is that it's sort of significant that when activists and theorists talk about what it would mean to decolonize the United States, they usually say we have to imagine it, or it belongs in the realm of dream, or the future will make it clear, because you can't really imagine what it. What it would look like in real terms to get rid of hundreds of millions of people. But it raises an important point, which is that for this theory, or what I call the ideology of settler colonialism, there are only really two categories. You can either be a settler or you can be indigenous. So what that means is that to be a settler, you don't have to be someone who is actually settling the land, like in the 17th century, and you don't even have to be a descendant of that person. You don't have to be someone whose ancestors can came over on the Mayflower. The idea is that since America was founded by settlers, everyone in America who is not indigenous sort of occupies the position of a settler. So there are some curious consequences that come from this. One is that people don't like to use the term immigrant, don't like to talk about immigration, because immigration implies that you're coming to an already established country. So rather than immigrant, people will say that you are a settler. Even if your ancestors might have come here 10 years ago from East Asia or even in from. For many people, if your ancestors came as slaves from Africa, there are settler colonial theorists will say, if your ancestors were slaves, that doesn't mean that you're any different from other settlers. You're still a settler because you're in a place that doesn't belong to. You're not indigenous, and you've sort of taken a share in this settler society.
- [07:31]
B
And we'll come talking. We'll come back and talk about, you know, what the implications of that might be and how it would be useful and why it would be useful to make such a claim. But I think for many people who are not politically astute, who aren't paying close attention to the latest events in the academy, the way you might have come across this idea is through this idea of land acknowledgement. Talk about that and how well you think you can. What I like about Adam's book is it's very calm. I'll just say he appears to have done a great deal of reading. He doesn't do any yelling. There's no yelling in the book, which I really appreciate. It is, on the surface at least, a calm assessment of this idea. That's not unimportant right now, I think, in certain places around the world. But land acknowledgement might be something that people have come across. What's the idea there and what do you think of it, even though you don't always give your opinion of these things in the book?
- [08:35]
C
Yeah, well, it's true, I'm trying to shed light rather than heat, but I think that I'm critical of a lot of these things and sort of let them speak for themselves or try to. Land acknowledgments is a great example because it's a good example of how things that start out seeming very esoteric and academic can end up having real world consequences. So I think that maybe five years ago, few people in the United States would have been familiar with the term land acknowledgments, or what they were. They had started in Australia and Canada and were becoming more common there, but not in the United States. And then very quickly, in just a couple of years, they became basically required for all universities and most cultural institutions. And a land acknowledgment is simply a statement which says that this institution occupies the land of a Native American people that used to live here. And it can be phrased in different ways. It can say, you know, this university sits on the historic homeland of such and such a people. Or it can go in a more aggressive direction and say, you know, we're occupying this and we're benefiting from their displacement, and this is an act of privilege, which some of them say. But I think, however it's phrased, the implication is clear that it's a sort of act of symbolic reparation to the people who were displaced in the settlement of North America. And it carries this suggestion that in a way, the Native American people who used to sort of be in control of this land are still the legitimate possessors of it or sovereigns of it, and that Americans or American institutions are sort of squatting on this land or occupying it without permission, and that that makes some sort of apology required. So they're strictly symbolic. You've never heard of a university saying, you know, we're going to give up our land and. And return it to the descendants of the people who lived here 200 years ago. But these things are very common. They're often recited at public events or, you know, with someone introducing an event will say the. Say the formula, or they're put on signage. I live in New York City. You see them on signs at theaters a lot now, and sometimes recited as well. And so for a whole sector, sort of academic, nonprofit sector, it's become really an expectation that you will have a land acknowledgement and that if you don't have one, you're sort of neglecting the moral duty. And it's a sort of concrete expression of this idea that we should be thinking about the United States and American civilization as in some basic sense illegitimate and needing to apologize for its existence, that what came here before is sort of the real legitimate inhabitants and possessors of this land. And America, which is the society that we all actually live in, is sort of a usurper.
- [11:29]
B
In a Raise the question of what before actually means, and maybe we'll talk about that. Because there's inherently something arbitrary about how you define before this particular practice of land acknowledgment, as opposed to, say, a social critique or ideological critique. I have to confess to being of somewhat mixed feelings about it. It offends me because it's virtue signaling. It doesn't seem to accomplish anything other than a beating of the breast and a mea culpa that conveys nothing other than a desire to be seen as correct among people that you think matter. At the same time, there's a truth to it, and it's hard to say that there's anything wrong with it. As you point out in the book, I think very thoughtfully, many of these historical episodes that led to the creation of the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, there are horrific things that happened. As in every single country's establishment, there's no country that has a clean slate. And in some sense, there is a moral attractiveness to acknowledging sin.
- [12:48]
C
Sure, Absolutely. I mean, one of the interesting things about this way of thinking about just to keep it on America for now, American history, is that none of these are new claims or surprising claims. I mean, the. The fact that America was founded by European settlers who over generations, sort of conquered the entire continent and displaced and often made war on and killed Native Americans and so reduced them to, you know, small reservations. That is the history of the United States. Everyone in America knows it and has always known it. All you have to do is, you know, look at a map and see all the Indian place names, or you take a class in American history, even starting in elementary school. And I think by extension, the same is true of Australia and Canada as well. So settler colonialism as a theory doesn't make new factual claims about the history of these places. What it really does is it makes theoretical claims or moral claims about what are the obligations that we have now coming in the aftermath of those events. How should we remember them? How should we analyze them? And how should we think about ourselves as, in some sense, inheriting those events? So one person who wrote to me after the book was published made an analogy which I hadn't thought of and I thought was illuminating, which was that in the 19th century, in America, before a public event, you know, like a college graduation, for example, you would have a Christian prayer where you'd have an invocation, a minister would say a prayer. And in a sense, the land acknowledgement is a sort of secular equivalent of that prayer. They're both ways of saying, sort of acknowledging public. These are the values that we believe in. These are the things that are important to us, and we want to sort of honor them in this public way. And if the value that we believe in is in some basic sense, the United States should not exist or should never have been created, and its creation was wrong, and we're sort of symbolically atoning for that wrong, I think that has pretty serious implications for the United States future. Right? It has implications for our future as a civilization. If what we're saying about ourselves is the foundation of this country was a mistake or should never have happened, which is what a lot of settler colonial theorists explicitly say, then how can we repair it? How can we improve it? How can we make the future better for the people who actually live here now? And one of the things I talk about in the book is that there's a real distinction between the sort of settler colonial way of thinking of American history and an earlier way which was focused on race and civil rights. That in the civil rights movement in mid 20th century America, there was a sort of evolved a new way of thinking about American history which was much more honest and open about the wrongdoings of the past, which had sort of always been previously thought of as, you know, not the real American story, but a side note or something subsidiary to the real American story, which was the story of liberty and the foundation of democracy. And so after the civil rights movement, historians and then also the public began to say, you know, we can't ignore this part of our history, which is about slavery and racism. That's also key to American identity. But the civil rights movement, particularly Martin Luther King, developed this way of thinking and talking about the history, which was to say America was founded as a promise of liberty to all of its people. And that promise has not been kept. And King famously said in the March on Washington that. That they had come to collect on a promissory note. The promissory note was the Declaration of Independence, and for black Americans, that had not been kept. And so now we're coming to demand payment on that note. And that way of thinking about American history says it is founded on ideals of liberty that we need to fulfill that have not yet been fulfilled. And in doing so, it honors the sort of identity of America that has always been sort of the official identity, and it makes us all partners in continuing the founding in a certain way. It's now up to all of us, all of us who are living now to forge the more perfect union that America started out to create but hadn't succeeded in creating. But seeing America in terms of settler colonialism is a much more absolute judgment, because it says, going back to the very beginnings of European settlement, America was always an act of war and genocide, which is what people will usually say. And America is sort of based on genocid and in that sense continues the genocide. Structurally, we're continuing a genocide because as long as we are here on land that shouldn't be ours, because we're not indigenous, we're sort of continuing the suppression and the erasure of native peoples and cultures. And if that's the judgment on America, it's very hard to see what can be done to make things better for the people who are actually here, or to sort of improve America in the future. Because you're saying from the beginning this thing should not exist, this civilization should not exist.
- [17:46]
B
I mean, there's a whole range of things you could say in the face of moral disgrace, failures, sins and so on. One word that would come to mind would be irredeemable. It seems to me, in the settler colonialist ideology, the United States is irredeemable. There's a longing to unravel the situation, which is fun. It's not just that it's unrealistic, it's fundamentally immoral. Given that, for me, when I think about the claim, because so many of the people who live there now had nothing to do with the grotesque atrocities that took place in the American past. And as you say, it doesn't offer much hope for the future, it seems to me, and we'll certainly look at this when we come to Israel, there's a certain longing to turn back the hands of time to say, I wish this had not happened. I understand that on many different situations in history, I wish that hadn't happened. But to say, and therefore we should strive to unravel it is to me a very difficult moral claim. Because of the lack of guilt, in my view, of the people who came in later, it does put moral responsibility on later arrivals, perhaps to do things on behalf of those who were mistreated or their descendants, certainly. And that could include all kinds of things. We could talk about reparations, land grants of certain kinds and so on. But there's an enormous gap between this is a shameful fact of American past that we might regret, but it's a reality. And the other extreme, which is let's try to create a world where it didn't happen in the first place. That latter view, which rings as part of the settler colonialist ideology, seems not correct.
- [19:49]
C
Well, it is, definitely. It's a backward looking view. It's a way of looking at society that, as you say, is about wanting to redeem the past. I get into this a little bit towards the end of the book of saying we've inherited this sinful past and we sort of want to atone for it and redeem it. And I mean, obviously one can't remake the past, redo the past. But it's a strange way of thinking about politics for an idea that is usually called progressive. People who embrace this idea would almost all describe themselves as progressive in some way. But in a way it's not a progressive way of thinking because it's not about progress. It's not about making the future better than the past, really. It's about seeing the past as this sort of heavy burden that we all carry that we have to atone for in some way. And in a similar way, it's not typical of progressive ideas because it's not about helping the majority of people at the expense of a minority that has done them wrong. When you look at most progressive movements, whether it's socialism, communism, or even more recently the sort of Occupy Wall street movement of about 10 years ago, which had a momentary big impact in the United States, the slogan of that movement was that it was for the 99% against the 1%, the richest 1%, the 1% with all the money and the power. And it's saying we were going to take that away from the 1% and give it back to the 99%. And that's sort of the fundamental idea of most progressive movements in various ways. It's that it's about helping the majority, punishing a minority that's guilty and helping the majority. And if you're in a situation where you're saying 98% of the population are settlers and that those are the people who have done wrong and are benefiting from wrong, it's sort of the inverse situation of a progressive movement. It's saying we're going to have 98% of the people pay back what they've taken from the 2%. So it puts the idea of a progressive movement in a new and different light that I think is surprising to a lot of people who are not already intimately familiar with it. And don't sort of imbibe these ideas from an early age the way I think a lot of younger people on the left have.
- [22:05]
B
I think about it in a different way. And I don't think you talk about this much in the book, and maybe it's not part of the movement and maybe I misunderstand it, but the way I consume this viewpoint is there's an Edenic flavor to it, E D E N, like the Garden of Eden, that there was something pristine and perfect about the pre European, say, invasion of. Of North America. And certainly it cuts across a whole range of cultural and social issues way beyond land ownership, the type of economy, the respect for the environment, the spiritual life, and so on. And it whitewashes probably the wrong word. It tries to gloss over any of the failings of the indigenous societies. Because it could never be the case in this ideology that there was a struggle between, a different kind of struggle between, say, two imperfect cultures, but rather there was a perfect, pristine, Edenic original culture and then a vulgar, flawed, grasping one, and ignores the possibility that of course, the Eden was preceded by something else, that Native Americans may have displaced others and had their own problems, of course, because they were human beings. And in that sense, it is a conservative philosophy because it's an attempt to return to a past that is idealized and romanticized somewhat unrealistically, the way Americans used to do the same way by ignoring these founding sins.
- [24:00]
C
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. It's quite clear in a lot of the writing on this subject, especially writing for popular audiences, the way that Native history is written about it touches to go back to the subject of land acknowledgments. A land acknowledgment will typically say, we're on the land which is the homeland of such and such a people who were its guardians from time immemorial or its custodians from time immemorial. Really what that means is that's the people that was there when Europeans made contact. Because these are societies with no written records. There's absolutely no way of knowing who was there 50 years before that or 100 years before that. And North America was inhabited for tens of thousands of years. The idea that there was no historical change, no conflict, is something that historically historians of Native America find problematic about the idea of settler colonialism. One of the things I get into in the book is that people who are actual historians of Native America, you know, who speak the languages and have. Have studied the. The records and the. The archives and the, you know, whatever there is to study, are. Have very mixed feelings about the idea of settler colonialism. On the one hand, they like that it brings attention to these parts of history and the suffering of the Native American peoples. But on the other hand, they recognize that it's fundamentally not historical, that it doesn't take account of the way history actually happens. One example is that over the course of the long period of American expansion, from the east coast to the west coast, there were different phases in different regions where Native Americans were more powerful than Europeans. And that there was a process of, you know, wars between two powerful entities. And that often the reason why expansion happened, or at least the form that it took, was a war between two peoples, two civilizations, over control of territory, it wasn't. When people describe that as a genocide, it's understandable why that. Why they use that term. But if that summons a comparison to, you know, like the Holocaust, like we're going to set out to exterminate every member of this people, that is not, not at all descriptive of the actual history of North America. The actual history of North America is much more complicated than that. So that's one point. The idea that Americans or Westerners are taking Native history as a sort of Eden or an ideal that we ourselves could never match up to is something with a very long history. It's something that Europeans started to do almost as soon as North America was, as the Americas were discovered. And I write about this a little bit in the book as well. Thomas More's Utopia, which gave us the word utopia, was written in 1516, I believe, so about 25 years after Columbus. And it's set on an newly discovered island in South America where Europeans discover this perfect society where there's no injustice, there's no property, there's no religion. All the things that More is saying cause conflict in Europe do not exist in this sort of New World situation. That's an idea that's had lots of different expressions in Western culture over the years, including in American literature. You see it in, like, James Fenimore Cooper. And this can be seen as another version of that, of saying the things that we don't like about ourselves, which are often things about exploiting the environment or inequality, income inequality, economic inequality. All of those things are sort of European sins or American sins, and that Native Americans represent the opposite of all those things that they were. They didn't have those problems. They hadn't caused those problems. We brought them with us to this country. And if we could sort of go back to this previous way of living, those problems would disappear. And that's sort of the link between the past and the future. For the ideology of settler colonialism, it's not about restoring sovereignty over territory, because that's not really on anyone's political agenda. And I note in passing that actual Native American advocacy groups don't use the language of settler colonialism. It's not. They don't see themselves as fighting a decolonization struggle. They see themselves as trying to hold the United States government to treaties and agreements and using legal means. Really, this is a sort of way of thinking about ourselves. Ourselves being settlers and criticizing ourselves. It's a conversation among settlers about what's wrong with us, about how we can solve the problems of our own society. And the term settler ways of being, which is something that comes up a lot in the academic literature of settler colonial studies, is a way of saying the things that caused European settlement or that Europeans brought with them when they settled North America are still with us, and they are settler ways of being, which can be both public ways of being, like economic and social and governmental or private ways of being, Things like spiritual attitudes and psychology, and that we have to sort of free ourselves of these settler ways of being. And that is such a flexible term that it can be applied to almost anything that one wants to criticize. And it puts critics, put social critics in a powerful position, because you can say, you know, anything that's wrong with our country, it's a settler way of being. That's how we explain it. And we have to sort of do penance for it. I say in the book that it's a. There's an odd similarity with evangelical Christianity, Protestantism, and even with the theology of the Puritans, who were the sort of original settler colonists in North America. It's about acknowledging that one is sinful of saying, I've inherited this original. Just as in the Christian doctrine of original sin, it's not something that I personally did. I personally didn't settle this country, but I've inherited it. I'm a settler, sort of by inheritance. And that the first step to curing yourself of this condition or purging the sin is to acknowledge that you are a sinner, to acknowledge that you're fallen. And so there's a sort of social prestige involved in these circles of identifying yourself as a settler, of acknowledging it, saying, I acknowledge I'm a settler, and I have these settler ways of being and these settler things that I have to purge in myself. And so people will sometimes introduce themselves as settlers in their Twitter handle, or I should say their X handle. I think especially in Canada, that seems to be a trend. I quote in the book people writing about how Canadians introducing themselves even personally as settlers in real life, certainly among academics, it's. It's common to say that one is a settler. I quote one example of someone who says that they're a trespasser, you know, like in their bio, in an academic paper. And all of these are ways of saying, I've. I'm a sinner. I've fallen. I accept that I'm fallen. And that that's sort of the beginning of grace, is to acknowledge the sin.
- [31:04]
B
There's a lot there. I mean, this is part of what you mentioned earlier, use it a number of times in the book, that it's a structure, not an event. It's not an historical sin that is in the past. It's living in the present. And of course, if I disavow that, as I might, either as a citizen of the United States or a citizen of Israel, if I said, I don't see myself as a settler, sure, I'm sure that's proof that I'm a settler, because I've taken on the incorrect mindset and I'm skeptical of it, when in fact, that's exactly why I need to acknowledge it. Right.
- [31:50]
C
And as you mentioned earlier in our conversation, a certain amount of this is about creating moral prestige among the group that believes these things. So to people who are not in the group or who are not familiar with the terms of settler colonial studies, who think about American history in that way, it might seem strange or just sort of eccentric to say, I'm a settler. But within the group, it is a way of acknowledging one's moral sensitivity, of saying, I recognize this is a moral issue and I'm taking responsibility for it. So in a sort of paradoxical way, which we also see in religious context, the guiltier you are, the better you are, because you are the one who acknowledges the guilt. You're aware of it where other people are not aware of it.
- [32:33]
B
Trying to put myself in the shoes of this movement, you know, the closest I can come, perhaps I have to think creatively about this. But one way to think about it is I remember being in. In Vienna recently for the first time, and it was clear to me that there were people who, despite the lack of visual identification, I wasn't wearing any sign of my Judaism on me. I felt a certain urge on the part of people there to be extra nice to Me, not all of them. There were some on the other side. But I felt an urge of people saying, basically without saying it, we did something, we participated in something shameful and we owe you something. And the way we're going to repay that is to be extra thoughtful, extra kind, extra solicitous of what might be helpful to you. And it feels. It beats the alternative, I have to confess, but it was unnecessary and it felt strange. The most common example, the most vivid example of it was a 25 year old who was helping me with something. And I remember thinking, it's okay, it was your grandparents or your parents. It wasn't you. I bear you no grudge. I love that you're not burdened by the beliefs of your ancestors and let me enjoy your city. I didn't feel a need to be acknowledged as a member of a people who had been abused. Partly because my parents were not in Vienna. I was not in Vienna in 1942, but also because that was in the past. But the idea that it's somehow burdening us into the future seems very challenging to making the world a better place. It seems to be the opposite of what you would want to do to make the world a better place. It's a negation of agency for me to say to this kid, you can't help that you're an anti Semite because you've grown up, up in a fundamentally anti Semitic Jew hating society. That would be a repellent thing for me to say, or to think. I don't want to think that could even be true. I would much prefer to live in a world I'm going to have a false belief. I'd like to have a false belief that we could all change.
- [35:08]
C
And I think that that situation, which I know, and I know the kind of thing you're talking about is very, very dissimilar from what we're talking about in the history of Australia or North America or Canada. If you wanted an analogy in German history, it would be more like the way Germany settled Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. It would be like saying we should not have settled East Prussia and sort of converted the people who lived there. The problem is that we're talking about things that happened such a long time ago and with no direct biographical connection to the people who are alive today, that it really isn't about. And again, I think this is really sort of key to understanding the phenomenon. When people talk about settler colonialism in North America, it's very rarely about benefiting actual living Native Americans or sort of taking into account what they want. It's much more a social critique. I say that it's a kind of critical theory. It's a critical theory about these societies in which settlement and colonialism are sort of the original source of the problems in the societies. In the same way that in earlier kinds of critical theory, race and slavery was the sort of master term or before that, property and capitalist exploitation, that those are sort of the frames in which you understand and analyze and criticize the society. So again, it has very little to do with practical issues affecting Native communities today. It has much more to do with internal critique of these societies, drawing on this idea in these histories.
- [36:45]
B
Yeah. And as you point out, it comes with a whole set of other critiques other than just of the past. It's anti capitalist because the settlers brought capitalism to North America. The settlers brought environmental degradation because they had technology and tools and other things. And so all of that is seen as an ongoing and continuing sin. Before we go on, I want to put a plug in for a book that's only tangentially related, but I just read Question seven by Richard Flanagan, which is a memoir. It's an extraordinary book. And. And in one part of the book he talks about. He's Australian, he grew up in Tasmania, and Tasmania was colonized by settlers who were probably committed a horrific genocide against the indigenous people there. So I want to recommend that book. It's a fascinating memoir. But secondly, I want to say that nothing that we're saying here is a defense of any of those past historical sins. And we also have to acknowledge, I think, Adam, you and I, to the extent that we are critical of this movement, there was a long time where people honored that settler colonialism in the past that honored the settling of, say, North America at the expense of Native Americans or Australia at the expense of the Aborigines. And you could argue that this movement has brought some of that recognition, which I believe is healthy. Just like many, many other nations have had to recognize their own historical failings in the past. Thoughts?
- [38:41]
C
Yes. No, I think that it's part of a wider reckoning with history that I think is a post World War II phenomenon in Western civilization where after a long period of sort of triumphalism and ethnocentrism and cultural chauvinism, nationalism. Yeah. And the sort of idea that European civilization, Western civilization was sort of self evidently superior to all the others and had the right to sort of take them over or rule them. That there's been this turn towards a more honest assessment of the past and acknowledging the horrors of the past, the crimes of colonialism and slavery, and sort of trying to reassess Western civilization in the light of that knowledge in a more humble and accurate way. And it's very difficult to achieve a balance between that and also needing to maintain the sort of basic level of self belief and self esteem that a society needs in order to function and in order to improve. Right. So I think that we're seeing that in the United States in a lot of ways over the last 10 years, there's been really intense battles over how we understand American history. And fundamentally the question is, should we be proud of America? Is America something that we should feel good about or is it something we should feel bad about? And of course, the answer is both, that there are both elements in our society and our history, as in every country and every history, because they're all made up of human beings, and human beings are capable of doing good things and bad things. So I think that absolutely the sort of first responsibility of all of us as citizens, and certainly of historians is to tell the truth about what happened in the past, to be honest, about what the history is, and then think about, and second to that, think about, you know, how it should guide and inform us in the present, what are our responsibilities to it. I think that all of those things are sort of of the positive fruits of this reassessment of Western history. But I do think also that the settler colonial sort of construction of all this, the way that it's understood is it sort of presents the maximal case against the civilization in ways that strike me as sort of zero sum and, and destructive of the future. And I think probably Israel is the best example of that. It's the best example of how this sort of idea, which sees itself as virtuous and on the side of justice, can end up being the opposite.
- [41:24]
B
And just to transition to Israel as an example. And the accusations against Israel, which have proliferated much more widely since October 7th, ironically, in one sense, maybe not so much in another, but, but the old school rah rah history of Israel is that Israel was founded in 1948. The Jewish people were allowed to return to the ancestral homeland. The Arab nations around us declared war on the establishment of the state. They encouraged their citizens to leave while this war took place, assuring them that they would be able to come back once the Zionists had been defeated. There ensued a war that Israel won, and that's the founding of the state of Israel. Now it is a little more complicated than that and I think Israeli historians have been the proudly have been those who have spoken out with more nuance as to what actually happened. So what actually happened was some Arab residents of Israel in 1948 were hounded out, pushed out, whatever you want to call it. Hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom chose voluntarily leave, but many did not choose voluntary to leave. They were coerced, terrorized, threatened, fearful for all kinds of complicated verbs and adjectives we could use. And they left. Those people became, those 700,000 people became refugees. And they were unlike any other conflict in the history of the world. Their refugee status was sacrosanct. They were not allowed to give it up. Anything that would encourage them to give it up was squashed. And so the truth is the establishment of the state of Israel is complicated. There were things that Israel did that were shameful, but it's also true at the same time time that there was a partition of the state that would have given some of the land to Israel to the Jews and some to the Arabs, and the Arabs turned it down. That's a fact. Whether you think that's fair or not doesn't matter. That's a fact. And now for 76 years we've lived here as a Jewish in a Jewish state. I haven't personally, I've only been here three years, but it's a, that's the. Those are the facts on the ground that is currently a Jewish state. What is the goal of the settler colonialist movement with respect to Israel? And how does it complicate that pristine story I told? And then the not so the more nuanced story.
- [44:02]
C
Right. Well, it's a good example of telling the truth about history. When I was growing up, I was also taught in an American Hebrew school that in 1948 the Arabs left and planning to return after the Jews were defeated. And then in the 1990s, the Israeli New historians, Benny Morris and other historians. Tom Sev. You did the historical research to show that in fact that was not the case.
- [44:27]
B
And some did, some did. Some were told and they were told. Some did leave thinking they'd come back, but many of them didn't. They didn't want to leave.
- [44:34]
C
Right. And then many were driven out at.
- [44:36]
B
And many of them stayed. Sorry, interrupt. Hundreds of thousands stayed. They now number 2 million. They are living here in Israel with full civil rights. They have the. They're living in the only democracy unfortunately in the Middle east and they have a higher standard of living than their neighbors. And some of them have, I'm sure Mixed feelings, we know that about living in a Jewish state and an ethnostate, but many of them are probably prefer that to living elsewhere.
- [45:08]
C
Well, let me just step back to talk about the sort of settler colonialism idea. So after October 7th, the reason I wrote the book, and as you say, it's a short book, and it was written in about six months after October 7th, the reason I wanted to write about Southern colonialism is because on October 7, October 8, when the news of the Hamas attack was first coming to the United States, there were a lot of people. Not a lot, but a surprising number of people came out to celebrate the attack, especially got a lot of attention on university campuses and. And progressive organizations. And in the statements that those people were making, they very often use the term settler colonial. They said that the Hamas attack was resistance to settler colonialism. One statement I quote in the book is that there are no Israeli civilians because they're all settlers, and so they're all legitimate targets. And so I was familiar with the idea and some of the theory of settler colonialism. And it seemed to me that this was an example of how this idea, which might seem very academic and not. Not having anything to do with the real world, was starting to influence the way people talked about and thought about real world political conflicts. So if you think if Israel is a settler colonial state, and I think it's absolutely taken for granted in the academic discourse that Israel is a settler colonial state, then anyone who's sort of resisting settler colonialism is by definition on the right side, on the side of justice. And I could compare it to in the 60s, when people in the west championed Maoist China or Castro's Cuba, because they said the real problem in the world is Western imperialism and capitalism. So anyone who's fighting those things is on the side of justice. In the similar way you have people in America who consider themselves progressives waving Hamas flags or Hezbollah flags and saying, we're on the side of Hamas. We sort of approve of what they're doing because they're fighting settler colonialism. And in that fight, any means are justified, because that's the ultimate conflict of our time. So in linking Israel in the history of Israel to these other much larger and much older examples of settler colonialism, it's almost like you're saying we can't fight settler colonialism in any concrete way in Australia or in Canada or in the United States, but here in Israel, you have people who are taking up arms to fight Israelis and kill Israelis. And so that is sort of the Struggle against settler colonialism. That's the front. That's the front in this battle. And a lot of people express that by saying after October 7th that they were, you know, exhilarated and energized and things like that, because it was like a theoretical struggle that had now become concrete. And it was very eye opening to me and I think to a lot of American Jews to see that there were people who felt that way, and particularly among younger people, that's a much more common view than it ever was before. If you look at sort of polling data on the war in Gaza among people 18 to 24 in America, sympathies are sort of divided, 50, 50 between Israel and Hamas, which is very different from in the past. So it's really, it is changing the way that people think about Israel and with potentially serious consequences for the future.
- [48:26]
B
And there's a lot to be said. You know, we could. We've. We've devoted a number of programs. The original first of two episodes I did with Havi Verdegur. I think he talks about this issue of is it really an accurate analogy to call the establishment of the Jewish state a settler colonialist enterprise? He makes the point that the Jews who lived here in 1948 were mainly refugees either from Arab Jew hatred or European Jew hatred and the Holocaust. It was not a colonial project in the sense that, say, the Belgian Congo was or India or Australia or the United States. Just. I want to put that to the side. I think the part that's quite extraordinary is that all the sloganeering of free Palestine from the river to the sea. I realized embarrassingly recently that this is really a fundamental desire to turn the clock back to 1948 and saying the estate, no matter whether you think, you know, my little thumbnail sketch of Israeli founding, forget whether you think that's true or not. There are a number of people traditionally associated with the progressive cause who think that the establishment of a Jewish state, state which at the time had an Arab majority, it was a Jewish minority. We had been here for a long time, but it was a minority that the establishment of a Jewish state is somehow illegitimate. And it's not a question of and therefore there should be a two state solution. It's not and therefore there should be some kind of right of return. It's basically the world would be a better place if this hadn't happened. And we should honor those who are working to unravel it. That's the way I'm seeing the current extreme political views on this issue.
- [50:32]
C
Definitely. I think that For a lot of people, when you think about the scale of the Israeli Palestinian conflict compared to the scale of a lot of other conflicts in the world, it's often surprising at how much attention it gets. And so sort of how much of the focus of the world, and particularly of the left, is on Israel, Palestine, and not on, you know, any of a dozen other conflicts we could name that involve a lot more territory and a lot more people. I think that the reason is that it is a really a symbolic issue in which a lot of these issues, a lot of these concerns or judgments about Western civilization in general are now being litigated in terms of Israel and Palestine. So a lot of the things that people object to about the entire history of Europe or the entire history of the west, colonialism, settler colonialism, racism, all the things that in our own societies we talk about so much, have been projected onto Israel, Palestine, and that that is sort of the place where these issues are going to be fought out in real terms, in real world terms, with guns. And so I think that for a lot of people on the left, it's not just about the welfare of Palestinians, although it is certainly about that. And especially since October 7th and the war in Gaza, that is, I think, the main driver of all of these protests. But it's also a sense that by undoing the creation of the Jewish state, you're sort of undoing a legacy of colonialism, a legacy of white supremacy. Because for a lot of these people, it's sort of taken for granted that that Jewish settlement in Palestine was equivalent to, you know, British settlement in Australia, that it was a white European people coming to displace a non white indigenous people. And of course, that is not at all the way a Zionism understood itself. That's not what Zionism thought it was doing. On the contrary, Zionism thought it was taking a people that was never fully accepted as European and was sort of persecuted in Europe and returning them to their original homeland. Because for Jews, Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. So one of the sort of paradoxes of, of the way settler colonialism talks about Zionism and about Israel is that there's a sort of insistence, a doctrinal, dogmatic insistence that Palestinians are indigenous and Jews are colonizers, whereas for Jews, Jews are indigenous and have been exiled from this land which they're now returning to their historic homeland. The truth is that. That both are right. There's elements of truth in both positions. It's true that Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and came back to it at a moment when they felt that they had no future in Europe and turned out were correct that they had no future in Europe and needed another place to live and to exist as a people. And it's also correct that that Jewish state was created sort of in the teeth of Arab opposition. The people who were already living there did not want it to happen, did not want Jews settling there, and in a sort of basic sense have never accepted it, even after 75 years or more. So when Western progressives, using the language of settler colonialism, say we want the state of Israel to be undone to sort of reverse the verdict of 1948, what they're saying is the same thing that Palestinian nationalist groups and Islamic fundamentalist groups have been saying also since 1948, which is, this is a sort of invasion of our land and we're going to eventually destroy it. And what's, what's sort of peculiar about it is that Israel has sort of defeated every attempt to do that and has emerged as the strongest country in the region. But that doesn't seem to change the way it's discussed. It doesn't change the sort of intellectual or moral calculus for anyone. For its critics, it's still always sort of 1948. Everything that has happened since then is this sort of temporary injustice and one day is going to be wiped out. And that's exactly also the way that people talk about, about America in North America, about United States in North America, they say it is a very much bigger and very much longer scale usurpation occupation of this land. But one day it's going to disappear and this will go back to being Native American land. And that's. It's the same sort of idea as liberating all the land between the river and the sea. So I think that when we talk about the history of Israel, and I certainly do this as much as anyone, we off Jews. Jews often talk about all of the complicated history that's taken place there since the 1880s and the various sort of turning points and the diplomatic rights and wrongs. In a way, I think that all of that is irrelevant. What's relevant is There are now 7.5 million Jews living in Israel and there are seven and a half million Arabs living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean in different jurisdictions, right in Gaza, in the west bank, or in Israel as Israeli citizens. So you have this very small piece of territory about equivalent in size to the American state of New Jersey, which I think, incidentally, a lot of people who talk about Israel don't realize just how small the land they're talking about is. You have about 50, 50 Jews and Arabs in this small territory. And the question is, how are those people going to live together in a way that involves minimum suffering and violence for everyone? That is sort of in the end of my book, that's where I come down. Because I say that as long as this is cast as a conflict of historic right and wrong and whose rights to the land are going to be vindicated, it becomes a game, a zero sum game where one side has to win and the other has to lose. And all of the sort of heightened rhetoric against Israel that we've seen since October 7th makes it clear that there are a lot of people who just want to destroy the Jewish state. They want it to not exist. Usually they will deny that that means they want to kill all Jews who live in it. They'll say, no, that's not what we want.
- [56:23]
B
They need to go back.
- [56:24]
C
Either they could have to go back or it'll be a binational state. But I think that October 7th shows what the reality of that would look like is horrible and probably genocidal. So it's an absolutely existential need for Jews to have a Jewish state, as I think everyone in Israel agrees it's a red line that must be maintained. And the question is, how can that Jewish state continue to exist in a way that doesn't involve perpetual war and conflict and occupation and injustice towards Palestinians? And I don't know what the answer to that is. As I say, as I've gone around talking about this book, I say, I.
- [57:03]
B
Don'T know any book.
- [57:05]
C
Yeah, exactly. I don't know any better than anyone else what the answer is. But where I come down is the two state solution seems to be the only solution that I can envision that doesn't involve perpetuating a massive injustice against either Jews or Arabs. And so I feel like that is the solution that ultimately has to come to pass unless something much worse comes to pass. And what's much worse right now, a much worse solution, much worse outcome does seem more likely, especially since October 7th, because there's absolutely no interest in a two state solution on either side. There's enormous hatred and resentment and desire for revenge. And in the long term, I don't know whether there is a Solution. I'm almost 50 years old. This conflict has been going on my entire lifetime. I sort of suspect that when I'm gone, it will still be going on. I don't know if it's a conflict that can be resolved absent some big changes in the world or in the situation on the ground. But I think that the wrong way to look at it is to say Jews are settler colonizers who don't belong here and should be expelled. That's the sort of way that's guaranteed to produce more bloodshed.
- [58:18]
B
My guest today has been Adam Kirsch. His book is on settler colonialism. It is. When I said it's a short book, it's just over 100 pages. I recommend it. I learned a lot from it. Adam, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.
- [58:33]
C
Thanks so much.
- [58:40]
A
This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econtalk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyet. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.