Full Comment - They call us ‘settlers’ because they’re planning to kick us out

00:00:00.000 Ontario, the wait is over! The gold standard of online casinos has arrived! Golden Nugget Online

00:00:06.420 Casino is live, bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your

00:00:11.940 fingertips. Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting, signing up is fast and simple.

00:00:17.360 And in just a few clicks, you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots and

00:00:22.060 top-tier table games. Make the most of your downtime with unbeatable promotions and jackpots

00:00:27.220 that can turn any mundane moment into a golden opportunity at Golden Nugget Online Casino.

00:00:33.100 Take a spin on the slots, challenge yourself at the tables, or join a live dealer game to feel the

00:00:37.920 thrill of real-time action, all from the comfort of your own devices. Why settle for less when you

00:00:43.140 can go for the gold at Golden Nugget Online Casino? Gambling problem? Call ConnexOntario

00:00:49.080 1-866-531-2600. 19 and over, physically present in Ontario. Eligibility restrictions apply.

00:00:55.980 See GoldenNuggetCasino.com for details. Please play responsibly.

00:00:59.980 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners, I started wondering,

00:01:05.380 is every fabulous item I see from Winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. 1.00

00:01:11.200 Are those from Winners? Ooh, or those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that

00:01:16.820 leather tote? Or that cashmere sweater? Or those knee-high boots? That dress? That jacket?

00:01:21.560 Those shoes? Is anyone paying full price for anything?

00:01:25.660 Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners. Find fabulous for less.

00:01:37.020 Settler colonialism. It's one of the buzzwords of the day, and if you think it came out of

00:01:42.880 nowhere, well then, think again. Hello, welcome to the Full Comment Podcast. My name's Brian Lilly,

00:01:47.880 your host. We've been hearing this term, settler colonialism, increasingly. Since last October 7th,

00:01:54.400 if you've been paying attention on university and college campuses over the past few years,

00:01:58.740 you were probably already somewhat familiar with it, and other terms like decolonization,

00:02:05.380 white settler colonialism, and names of that nature. But where did they come from? Is it a new

00:02:12.960 phenomenon? Absolutely not. That's something that our next guest here on the Full Comment Podcast

00:02:18.280 examines in his book. It's called On Settler Colonialism. Adam Kirsch is an editor at the

00:02:24.360 Wall Street Journal and joins me now. Adam, fascinating book, interesting book, disturbing book,

00:02:32.740 but one that's needed because I've been looking at this term for a while, but I'm one of those people

00:02:38.760 that looks at crazy things that happen on university campuses and say, hey, wait a minute, maybe we

00:02:43.980 should pay attention to this. And people, oh no, that's just the campus. Well, as Professor Gadsad said

00:02:51.200 to me recently, what starts in the social science faculty does not stay in the social science faculty,

00:02:57.280 and it spreads. So tell me about where this idea, an ideology really, came from, and how it's impacting

00:03:06.780 not only what's going on in Israel now, but Canada and the United States to the point where some people

00:03:13.340 are saying, everyone that's not indigenous should be leaving now. 1.00

00:03:17.500 Sure. Well, thank you for what you say about the book, and thanks for having me on the podcast.

00:03:21.880 It's true. This is an idea that I think when most people first encounter it, the idea of settler

00:03:27.300 colonialism and the sort of conclusions that people draw from it might strike them as eccentric or sort of

00:03:34.020 purely academic. But the reason why I wanted to write this book, and it's a short book, was written

00:03:39.540 in the aftermath of October 7th last year, was because I saw that when people were sort of responding

00:03:46.680 positively to the Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, there were people,

00:03:53.700 as we saw at the time, before the Israeli response, before the invasion of Gaza, people were celebrating

00:04:00.500 this. As soon as the news came, they were celebrating it. And they were mainly people in academia or in

00:04:06.580 progressive groups, activist groups. And what I noticed is that many of these people used the term

00:04:12.300 settler colonialism or settler colonial in the statements that they issued approving of the Hamas

00:04:17.980 attack. They said things like, Israel is a settler colony, or this is resistance to settler colonialism,

00:04:24.020 or as one person said, the people killed in Israel were not civilians, they were settlers,

00:04:29.500 and therefore they were valid targets. And it seems to me that this is one of those cases where

00:04:34.040 an idea that started out in the academy was really starting to emerge into the public sphere and affect

00:04:39.520 real-life political debates. And I think that as the debate and protests over Israel and Palestine

00:04:45.280 have been going on since then, over the last year plus, the term settler colonialism has become more and

00:04:50.860 more widespread and more important. So what I try to do in this book, which is a sort of a short

00:04:56.460 introduction, is just to look at the genealogy of this idea, where it comes from, what some of the

00:05:01.860 implications are that people draw from it for the history of the United States and Canada, and then

00:05:05.860 finally, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Well, we've got people protesting outside events.

00:05:13.480 Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was getting an award from Toronto's Jewish community,

00:05:17.840 and people standing outside saying that they're protesting it because, you know, obviously, Zionist

00:05:25.600 and Zionism, and they've got to denounce that, but they're also denouncing so-called Canada. 0.76

00:05:31.840 They're standing in the face of an event that is celebrating the despicable relationship between

00:05:36.940 so-called Canada and the criminal state of Israel. Now, when I heard that, I thought, okay, they're 0.98

00:05:43.500 taking what's being used against Israel, and they're now drawing it back to here, but in the book,

00:05:50.680 you say it really started with Australians moved to Canada and the U.S., and is now being applied to

00:05:59.040 Israel. Do people really go so far as to say, we should all be leaving? You cite a paper in the

00:06:10.240 Wang Yang and Eve Tuck. Eve Tuck is a University of Toronto professor. I guess she's about to move to

00:06:17.200 NYU, but she's at the Ontario Institute, or has been, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,

00:06:22.540 very radical school. And the quote that you have in the book says, settler colonization

00:06:29.300 can be visually understood as the unbroken pace of invasion and settler occupation into native lands.

00:06:36.100 Decolonization as a process would repatriate land to indigenous peoples, reversing the timeline of 0.55

00:06:44.840 these changes. They really do believe, give all the land back and go back. I don't know where we'd

00:06:52.500 all go back to where we came from, but that's not a metaphor, is the term they use, right?

00:06:59.060 Right. That's a very influential paper in this field, this academic field of settler colonial

00:07:03.600 studies called decolonization is not a metaphor. And it gets to one of the sort of key questions.

00:07:10.560 I hadn't heard so-called Canada, but it expresses a sort of basic insight into how settler colonial

00:07:17.640 studies views the history of these countries, primarily or originally Australia, Canada, and the

00:07:23.640 U.S., countries settled by the British. And then sort of by extension, Israel, which is now the one 0.63

00:07:30.760 that's most in the news and probably most talked about. The idea that it's so-called Canada expresses

00:07:35.860 the idea that these countries are not legitimate, that they should not have existed and in some sense

00:07:42.580 can never become legitimate. So I think that one of the key distinction for settler colonial theory is

00:07:50.480 it doesn't tell us anything about the history of these countries that we don't already know,

00:07:54.100 right? Everyone who learns the history of these countries starting in elementary school knows

00:07:58.100 they were founded by British and French colonists who came to North America or Australia and

00:08:04.580 eventually over generations took the land from the people who had been living there, from Native 0.99

00:08:09.200 Americans, First Nations people, Aboriginal Australians, and created new societies there. So that

00:08:14.700 is sort of not a controversial statement. What's controversial is the idea that as Patrick Wolfe,

00:08:22.140 who's an Australian anthropologist who's often considered the founder of this school of thought,

00:08:27.260 said, invasion is a process, not an event. That's a line that's often quoted. And what he meant by

00:08:34.080 that is you might think that the invasion of Australia by the British is something that took

00:08:38.100 place in 1788 or the colonization of North America in Massachusetts is something that happened in the

00:08:44.080 early 17th century more than 400 years ago. But in this way of looking at things, these are ongoing

00:08:49.540 processes so that everyone and everything created in the aftermath of these invasions is itself still part of

00:08:56.400 the invasion. And what that means is that America, Australia, Canada can never really be legitimate

00:09:02.500 sovereigns over their territory. They're always what people disparage as settler colonies, which means

00:09:08.580 that they were created by force, they're here and maintained by force, and that in an ideal future, they would

00:09:13.740 cease to exist. Now, it's impossible, even I think for most advocates of this idea, to actually envision in

00:09:21.960 concrete terms what it would mean for these countries to cease to exist. The term settler colonialism was

00:09:27.860 originally applied to countries like Algeria and Rhodesia in the decolonization period after World War II.

00:09:34.360 And in those places, when you say you're fighting for decolonization, it's a very concrete goal. It means

00:09:39.820 something like 10% of the population in Algeria and Rhodesia were European. They had all the power and the

00:09:46.620 land and the money. And the idea was by decolonizing, you were going to expropriate them, return the power 0.79

00:09:52.980 and the money and the land to the 90% of the people who are the native population. And that is basically

00:09:58.420 what happened in Algeria. There was a long war, the French lost, and all the European settlers, almost all

00:10:04.260 of them left the country. But you can't imagine that outcome in Australia or North America, because in these

00:10:10.440 countries, the indigenous population is only about 2% of the total. European settlement and then

00:10:17.680 settlement from other places is something that happened much longer ago and much more thoroughly.

00:10:22.560 So if you're talking about decolonizing the United States, for example, I'm American, and this is the 0.68

00:10:27.560 part of it that I'm most familiar with, you can't really imagine a situation in which 98% of the American

00:10:33.840 population pulls up and leaves, right? That's not going to happen.

00:10:37.220 And again, where would they go?

00:10:40.160 Where would they go? Exactly. I mean, when you think when people in these countries think about

00:10:44.640 themselves, traditionally, they do not think of themselves as settlers. Settlers is not a term

00:10:48.780 that we would apply to ourselves, because we're not the ones who settled the land. You might say

00:10:52.860 the pilgrims and Puritans were settlers in the United States. But people who are here now don't think of

00:10:58.400 themselves as settlers. But if you think of it as a binary distinction between settler and indigenous,

00:11:04.360 so that you're either indigenous, meaning your ancestors were here before the Europeans arrived,

00:11:09.240 or you're a settler, that means that everyone who's not indigenous is a settler. And that can include

00:11:14.200 people who who might not think of as settlers at all. For example, in American history,

00:11:20.040 many of these theorists would say descendants of African slaves are settlers, because they're not

00:11:24.940 indigenous, and they occupy the position of a settler in this binary. So even if they were slaves and did 0.96

00:11:30.760 not choose to come to here, they are now settlers. Or the same is true if you're an immigrant who came 1.00

00:11:35.780 here last year. You know, you came on an airplane rather than on the Mayflower. You still are a

00:11:40.560 settler because you occupy the settler position and not the indigenous position. So when you frame things

00:11:45.960 in that way, it's basically impossible to imagine decolonization or the end of settlement. But I think

00:11:52.320 one reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so important and so exciting to a lot of people in this

00:11:59.020 field is that they see there a place where you could actually imagine the settlers, which for

00:12:05.040 them means the Jews, being kicked out, the end of the settler state, which for them is Israel.

00:12:10.980 So just before we get in, move on to focusing on Israel, just keeping it in North America for a 0.77

00:12:17.080 moment, we had a protest about two months ago here in Toronto. A couple dozen schools from middle school,

00:12:27.780 actually from grade three on, so elementary through middle school kids, were taken to a protest. Now,

00:12:34.080 the protest was ostensibly about a First Nations reserve in northern Ontario called Grassy Narrows.

00:12:41.440 Their water supply in their region was poisoned by, I believe, a paper mill decades and decades ago.

00:12:49.200 And so there's, you know, long calls for something needs to be done for the water,

00:12:53.060 get rid of the mercury poison. And the kids are all told, and the parents who are approving

00:12:58.540 of this are told, we are going to observe the protest, but not participate. Not only did they

00:13:05.480 participate, but at least one teacher, if not more, told the kids, wear blue to identify yourself as a

00:13:12.740 settler, wear your native regalia if you're indigenous. That's down to grade three. And then, 0.98

00:13:21.040 of course, the confluence of this ideology and the anti-Semitism that is so rampant. While

00:13:28.240 they're at a protest for water on a reserve in northern Ontario, but the protest is in downtown

00:13:35.960 Toronto, they're chanting from Palestine to Turtle Island, occupation is a crime. So, you know,

00:13:43.700 this has gone from theoretical academics down to grade three students being told, you're a settler,

00:13:53.280 you're an occupier, and occupation is a crime.

00:13:56.980 Right, exactly. I mean, the whole term Turtle Island, which was sort of coined or popularized in

00:14:04.700 the 1970s as a ostensibly authentic Native American term for North America, suggests that the things

00:14:12.860 that are here now, things like Canada and the United States, are not real, that they're not what

00:14:19.020 should be here. What should be here is Turtle Island, which is the way that Native Americans, 1.00

00:14:24.140 First Nations people thought of this continent. It's a spurious concept because, as I say in the book,

00:14:30.520 before 1492, neither Europeans nor people living in North America had any concept of North America

00:14:35.500 as a continent. There was no idea that this is something called Turtle Island. This was created by

00:14:40.440 taking elements from certain people's creation myths and sort of turning it into this term. But it's a

00:14:47.560 modern term. It's a 21st century term, not a sort of old authentic term. And what it means is that,

00:14:52.960 as you say, that we are all occupiers on this land. In the same way that Israel occupies its land, 0.82

00:14:58.840 Canada and the United States and Australia occupy land that really belongs to other people.

00:15:04.320 And the consequences that flow from that are hard to discern sometimes. I mean, it doesn't

00:15:10.640 exactly lead to a concrete political program, but it definitely leads to the idea that we should be

00:15:15.440 ashamed of being here, that the civilization that we've created here is criminal, is sort of something

00:15:21.300 that should be apologized for or atoned for. And that goes beyond the original settlement. I think

00:15:26.380 what gives this idea its political appeal to those who do find it appealing is that it draws these

00:15:32.740 lines from settlement to everything in contemporary society that one might want to protest. So people

00:15:38.400 will say environmental damage, capitalism, patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, that these are all

00:15:45.500 sort of legacies of settler colonialism. And settler colonialism becomes, as I say in the book,

00:15:50.580 it's almost a religious concept. It's sort of like original sin. It's saying because these countries were

00:15:55.080 born in sin, they remain tainted by it in perpetuity.

00:15:58.340 Yeah, well, that was one of the notes that I'd made was to ask you to expand on that, the idea

00:16:03.880 that settler colonialism is the original sin of this movement. So, you know, I'm very familiar with

00:16:11.480 the term original sin. I'm sure most of the listeners are, but given the way societies move,

00:16:17.760 some may not be. So fill me in on what you mean by that.

00:16:21.280 So original sin is a term in Christian theology, which is a way of interpreting the story of Adam

00:16:27.600 and Eve in the Bible, which says that when Adam and Eve sinned by eating from the tree that God

00:16:34.640 had forbidden, that they committed the original sin, the first sin, and that they passed on that sin

00:16:40.320 or the guilt for that sin to everyone afterwards, so that all of humanity is sort of tainted by that

00:16:45.200 sin, bears that sin, and it's responsible for the reasons why we act sinfully ourselves. We live in

00:16:51.260 a fallen world, we've fallen from Eden, and we are all sort of affected by this original sin. And it's

00:16:57.580 not something that you or I did in the course of our own individual lives. It's sort of part of our

00:17:03.320 condition as human beings is that we are fallen, we're in sin. And that's why we need to repent and

00:17:08.620 we need God's grace in Christian thought in order to atone for this sin. It's a very similar way of

00:17:15.280 thinking about settler colonial societies in that it's not something that you or I did. You could be

00:17:21.660 born hundreds of years after settlement took place. But if you're a settler, you are sort of

00:17:26.160 responsible for and affected by this event that took place long before your birth. And the sort of terms

00:17:32.740 of your spiritual and moral life are dictated by how you respond to this, how you atone for it, how you

00:17:38.700 make up for what's sometimes called settler ways of being.

00:17:42.860 Well, you've touched on this a bit earlier, but it appears that we do continue to sin. As you write in the

00:17:49.860 book, if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then

00:17:56.480 everything, and perhaps everyone, that sustains a settler colonial society today is also

00:18:01.980 genocidal. I don't know how many times our prime minister has called Canada a genocidal state.

00:18:08.340 He's very careful about referring to other events happening in other countries as genocide, but he's

00:18:14.600 happy to say that we are a genocidal country. So it's gone all the way from grade three up to the,

00:18:20.080 well, from university down to grade three up to the prime minister. This is a deeply embedded

00:18:24.840 viewpoint in parts of our society.

00:18:27.560 Yeah, and I think that it's part of a larger debate, maybe the most extreme expression of a

00:18:33.720 larger debate that is happening in America and Canada, and maybe in Europe as well, about history,

00:18:41.120 about how we understand our history. For a long time, I think in the 19th century, if you look at

00:18:45.980 the way American history was written, it was very patriotic, and sort of saw the foundation of the

00:18:50.940 United States as the hinge on which world history turned, the idea that the sort of the fate of liberty and

00:18:56.460 self-government in the world depended on the United States. Then sort of Abraham Lincoln famously said

00:19:02.540 that the civil war was about whether government by the people would perish from the earth. In other words,

00:19:07.900 America was the bearer of liberty for the entire planet. In a similar way, now I think the foundation of

00:19:14.560 these countries and the colonization of North America is often described as the worst thing that ever happened.

00:19:19.700 It was sort of a hinge of history that sent things in the wrong direction, that was responsible for

00:19:24.180 introducing a lot of crime and sin and greed and unhappiness into the world, and that we have to sort of

00:19:30.520 make up for it. And since we can't abolish ourselves physically, what we have to do is abolish what people

00:19:36.620 call settler ways of being, which are all the things that we inherit from settlement, from colonialism,

00:19:42.520 which are things like insatiability, rapacity, appetite, but also things like the desire for

00:19:49.600 scientific progress, or for material improvements in life, or even in some cases, you know, individualism.

00:19:55.680 These are all seen as settler ways of being, they're legacies of European colonialism that we have to 0.82

00:20:00.520 overcome in order to have a better future.

00:20:03.940 And as you mentioned earlier, of course, throw capitalism in there because, you know,

00:20:08.720 of course we have to get rid of capitalism. It's evil. It improves lives. It, you know,

00:20:16.500 improves living standards, but therefore is evil.

00:20:20.160 Well, it's definitely part of a bigger progressive critique. And one of the ironies is that

00:20:24.860 one of the sort of main things that was charged to settler colonialism is despoiling the environment, right?

00:20:31.560 So the idea that settlers came and they took more and more and more land and more and more and more

00:20:36.860 resources, and that this is a sort of settler way of being versus indigenous ways of being,

00:20:41.080 which live lightly on the land and don't take from the earth. Well, so there are people who will say,

00:20:46.480 and I quote some of them in the book, if we want to reduce carbon emissions or stop global warming,

00:20:51.700 we have to get rid of settler colonialism. But if you look at who are the biggest carbon emitters in

00:20:56.460 the world, the United States is one of the top five and others are China and India, which are not

00:21:01.820 settler colonial societies in the terms of this discourse. And in fact, in those societies,

00:21:06.860 achieving industrial power and capitalist wealth are sort of signs of emancipation from colonialism.

00:21:13.600 They're saying we're catching up with the West and going beyond the West. So if you think that

00:21:17.620 the desire for, say, automobiles, right, or cheap manufactured goods or other things that consume

00:21:22.200 natural resources is due to settler colonialism, it doesn't really explain the fact that everyone

00:21:27.160 everywhere in the world wants and needs these things. It's a very ideological way of looking at

00:21:32.380 reality, which leaves out a lot of the picture.

00:21:34.560 I'll ask you to comment on one idiosyncrasy before we take a break and then move on to how

00:21:40.000 this applies to Israel, because it's disturbing what I see go by my window every single week. I'm 0.97

00:21:47.120 sure I'll be seeing them later tonight or tomorrow with the screams of settler colonialism and take us

00:21:54.300 back to 48. But it does strike me that so many of the people that buy into and propagate this theory

00:22:01.680 also seem to believe that we should have open borders of immigration. And have you understood

00:22:08.780 how they reconcile that, that this is all indigenous land, that anyone else being here is settler

00:22:15.840 colonialism, but that we should throw the doors wide open?

00:22:19.640 Well, it's interesting. You mentioned Eve Tuck at the beginning. I believe in that essay that I was

00:22:27.960 talking about, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, she describes herself in the course of the essay as

00:22:32.280 a trespasser, meaning she lives on land that she shouldn't be on. She sort of is a trespasser on

00:22:37.760 native land. So if you have this idea that everyone has a certain piece of land that they are aboriginal

00:22:42.540 to or indigenous to, and if you go to someone else's land, you're a trespasser, you sort of have to

00:22:47.720 start to unravel the entire thread of world history because everywhere you look, people have moved

00:22:52.380 onto and taken, conquered, and settled on other people's land. And this concept can cut in lots

00:22:58.560 of different ways. One of the examples in the book is in the American Southwest, it became a sort of

00:23:05.600 slogan or rallying call in the 1960s for Latinos to say, we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us,

00:23:13.600 meaning that Mexico used to own the land that's now part of the southwestern U.S.

00:23:17.720 so that when people came to the United States, they weren't crossing a border, they were sort of going

00:23:22.100 to a land that had originally been Hispanic in the 19th century and earlier. Well, and that's true, 1.00

00:23:27.940 of course, but then the Hispanic civilization there was also the result of settlement. It was the result

00:23:32.820 of Spanish settlement and conquest. So if you keep going back and sort of looking at earlier points

00:23:38.600 in history, everyone is a settler and a colonizer depending on where you draw the line.

00:23:42.680 And one of the things about land acknowledgments in particular is that they often take the form

00:23:48.560 of saying that we, the institution making the acknowledgment, acknowledge the people who were

00:23:53.960 on this land as the custodians of the land from time immemorial. Well, of course, all that really

00:23:59.740 means is that those are the people who were there when Canadian-American civilization encountered them.

00:24:07.040 We have no way of knowing who occupied or who controlled any particular piece of land before that

00:24:11.420 because there are no records. And if you look at, you know, what we do know about Native American

00:24:15.740 history, there was constant warfare, displacement, rise and fall of civilizations. So the idea that any

00:24:21.100 group of people is indigenous to a place and has lived there since time immemorial is sort of

00:24:25.780 fundamentally ahistorical. And I think that that's one reason why it's not really an enduring or

00:24:32.080 lasting basis for a better future because it rests on a myth, a historical myth.

00:24:36.220 The Six Nations Reserve that I grew up near, they were all settler colonialists who moved north with

00:24:46.960 Joseph Brandt from New York State after the American War of Independence. I do like how you

00:24:52.500 describe land acknowledgments in the book. You said, rather, these formulas serve to ritually renew the

00:24:59.140 audience's responsibility for the act of dispossession in accordance with the settler colonial view of

00:25:05.040 history. It reminds me of the group act of contrition in the old Latin Catholic mass where you strike your

00:25:15.280 breast three times and say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, except there is no absolution for the

00:25:21.200 sin. You're just saying, I'm a sinner over and over again. And there's no relief. You are just perpetually

00:25:28.660 a sinner. We'll take a quick break. And when we come back, we will discuss how this theory is now 0.96

00:25:35.260 being applied in Israel and is the basis for so many of the people who are supporting a terrorist

00:25:43.160 group back in moments. Settler colonialism, the idea that came out of the academy, took over college

00:25:49.840 campuses. And as we discussed, elementary schools now headed towards or being used against the state

00:25:56.100 of Israel. Adam, I know this is an ongoing fight, but let's be honest, how anyone can say that Jews 0.57

00:26:03.940 are not indigenous to that region, to Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria is obviously ignorant of history

00:26:13.640 or wanting to rewrite it. But they are using the indigenous narrative, the settler colonial narrative

00:26:19.920 to try and erase Jewish history from the region of Israel, you know, predates the state in 1948.

00:26:30.340 Well, one of the sort of basic ideas of settler colonialism is that in every situation, there's an indigenous

00:26:37.280 and a colonizing population. And seen through that lens, Israel and Zionism is a white European 0.82

00:26:43.980 colonial movement, which came to dispossess a non-white native indigenous people. And that's 0.97

00:26:50.920 the way of framing the conflict that Palestinian activists and leadership resisted for a long time.

00:26:57.260 I say in the book that Yasser Arafat specifically said, we are not red Indians, meaning he did not

00:27:03.100 want people to think of Palestinians as being like Native Americans, because he thought that that was a

00:27:07.460 defeatist approach, because in the end, Native Americans were defeated and lost their land. And he didn't 0.86

00:27:12.040 want people to think the Palestinian struggle was analogous to that. But in a new generation in the

00:27:18.240 last 10, 15 years, I think younger people have started to see the idea of being an indigenous people

00:27:23.840 as morally very powerful. So they are embracing the idea of Palestinians as an indigenous people

00:27:29.740 and Jews as settler colonizers from Europe. You mentioned the sort of way that this can, there's

00:27:35.920 this odd confluence between Native American and Palestinian activism. In America, we saw that 0.83

00:27:41.460 in a big way in 2016, in the Standing Rock protests, which were about a pipeline that was going to be

00:27:48.880 built underneath a Native American reservation, Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, exactly. And it

00:27:55.620 became a sort of rallying point for a lot of different left causes. And one of them was Palestinian

00:28:00.820 activism. And there were a lot of the slogan was from Standing Rock to Gaza. In other words, these are both

00:28:06.100 occupied territories. North America is occupied by settlers in the same way that Israel occupies the 0.79

00:28:12.220 West Bank and Gaza. And that these are sort of the same situation in two different places. In order to

00:28:18.100 maintain that idea, you have to deny, or at least sort of overlook the fact that Zionism was a 0.93

00:28:24.040 self-consciously indigenous movement. It was a movement in which people said we were going back to our

00:28:28.920 indigenous homeland that was taken from us almost 2000 years ago. And we're going to create our own

00:28:33.980 sort of self-determination in our historic homeland.

00:28:36.540 And it's, but it's not like all Jews had left. Jews have been living there for 4,000 years, at least?

00:28:44.780 Three, 4,000 years?

00:28:46.180 Well, I'd say that since ancient times, there were probably always at least some Jews in the land of

00:28:50.660 Israel, but often very few, numbering in the hundreds or low thousands, say in the Middle Ages

00:28:55.580 during the Crusader period. So there were never absolutely no Jews there, but there was, it was not by any

00:29:01.260 means a Jewish majority. And when the Zionists began to settle there in the 1880s, they were a 0.72

00:29:06.800 very small minority. Jews were coming to settle in a province of what was then the Turkish Empire

00:29:11.800 that was predominantly Arab and Muslim. And so it's true, on the one hand, it's true that from the

00:29:20.600 Palestinian Arab point of view, Zionists appeared as colonizers. They came from outside.

00:29:25.120 They wanted to buy and take over land. And the people living there, the Palestinian Arabs, 1.00

00:29:30.520 strongly opposed this from the very beginning, eventually by force. And it ended up being the,

00:29:35.980 coming down to a war, which the Israelis won. And that's why there's a state of Israel,

00:29:40.020 because they were able to win the war in 1948. But the idea that maybe both of these peoples have

00:29:46.940 some sort of claim on the land, or that more than one people can be indigenous to a land,

00:29:50.960 to a parcel of land, that really complicates the settler colonial framework, the settler colonial

00:29:59.420 idea. It means that you can't just say, these people belong here, and these people don't.

00:30:03.820 And one of the things I say at the end of the book is that in treating Jews in Israel as settler 0.96

00:30:10.060 colonists who came from elsewhere, and ought to go back to elsewhere, or that their possession of the

00:30:15.040 land is illegitimate, it makes it into a zero-sum conflict, which can never be resolved. I mean,

00:30:19.760 the Israelis have nowhere else to go. In that way, they're unlike colonists in Algeria or 0.98

00:30:24.360 Rhodesia and other places. There's no mother country. That's one of the chief ways in which

00:30:28.820 Israel is not like a colony. It wasn't the colony of an imperial power, it was established sort of

00:30:33.060 in defiance of imperial powers, in particular, in defiance of the British Empire. And so if you say

00:30:40.240 Israel must be destroyed, Israel, the Jewish state cannot exist, it should never have been created, 1.00

00:30:44.640 then the seven million Jews in Israel have no choice but to fight for their survival, 1.00

00:30:49.620 right? The only way to a peaceful future is to acknowledge that there are two peoples here that

00:30:54.960 both aren't going anywhere. Well, unfortunately, one side has outright refused to acknowledge that.

00:31:02.120 But if you take the settler colonial narrative, and okay, let's apply it to the people that we now

00:31:08.100 call the Palestinians, we used to just call it the Arabs. Arabs came primarily, from my understanding,

00:31:18.880 with the movement of Islam into the region. And Islam didn't exist until the 670s, early 700s,

00:31:25.680 showing up in that part of the world. So would they therefore not also be settler colonialists?

00:31:32.640 Right. I mean, if you look at it historically, there's always going to be someone who was there

00:31:37.000 before you. In this scenario, I think the reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 0.99

00:31:43.080 appeals to and energizes the ideology of settler colonialism is that you say it sort of overlaps

00:31:51.080 with or is compared to different situations, so that there's a powerful white conqueror from Europe

00:31:56.560 and a powerless non-white native population, and one commits genocide against the other, right?

00:32:02.800 That's the way that the history of Canada and the United States is seen through the lens of

00:32:06.460 settler colonialism. But in fact, that's not the history of Israel and Palestine. And right now,

00:32:12.380 there are about equal numbers of Arabs and Jews living between the river and the sea,

00:32:16.180 about 7 million of each between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. So it's not a story of

00:32:21.800 conquest and displacement and genocide. It's really a story of Jews gradually gaining a

00:32:27.600 foothold in this territory and sort of wanting to defend it. Now, I think the situation is different

00:32:33.740 if you look at the West Bank, which is occupied territory, where there is a sort of two-level

00:32:38.980 society where the Israeli government attends to the needs of Jewish settlers and not to the needs of

00:32:43.880 Palestinian Arabs. And I think that that's why traditionally those are the people who are

00:32:48.260 called settlers, right? Jews living in the West Bank, which is not officially Israeli territory,

00:32:53.160 have been called settlers on the West Bank. But in the view of settler colonialism, you saw this very

00:32:58.260 clearly after October 7th, all Jews anywhere in that region are settler colonialists. There's no

00:33:03.700 difference between the West Bank and what is officially recognized as Israel. The Hamas attacks

00:33:08.340 on October 7th were not in occupied territory. They were behind what's called the Green Line,

00:33:12.360 the internationally recognized border of Israel. So when people say everyone, every Israeli is a

00:33:18.800 target, they're not civilians, they're settlers, you're basically saying there's no solution to 0.97

00:33:23.240 this conflict short of driving out all the Jews or at the very least abolishing the Jewish state. 0.91

00:33:27.520 Well, you go to somewhere like Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a city that didn't exist previously. There was

00:33:34.720 no settlement there. It's next to Jaffa, but it's its own city. That was built out of sand. 0.99

00:33:45.600 But it's still considered settler colonialist areas.

00:33:49.580 Definitely. And that's a classic example because it's an example of an Israeli city that sort of

00:33:55.600 springs up next to when it comes to absorb and displace an Arab city of Jaffa. And I think there's 0.99

00:34:02.020 no question that just as with the history of the United States and Canada and Australia, it is a

00:34:05.900 history of conflict and conquest and in which the people who won were able to create a new society.

00:34:11.660 But the way in which that happened in Israel is the scale, the time frame, and the results

00:34:16.880 are so different from those other places that I think comparing them is really a

00:34:21.600 tendentious ideological move. It doesn't accurately describe what's going on.

00:34:26.320 So, what do we do about this movement, this ideology? Is there a way to counter it? To me,

00:34:34.860 it seems an incredibly misguided and at times dangerous ideology.

00:34:41.760 Well, one reason I wanted to write this book, and it's a short book written in about six months

00:34:46.020 after October 7th, is because I think that this is an idea that usually people are exposed to in

00:34:53.140 in the academy and universities or in progressive spaces where they don't hear any dissenting voices.

00:35:00.580 It's not sort of one idea among many. It's sort of like, this is the truth. This is the way

00:35:04.200 we understand things. And I think that by shedding some sunlight on it and saying,

00:35:09.260 actually, there's other ways of looking at these phenomena. There's other reasons to not

00:35:13.060 use the settler colonial paradigm to understand these things, that that's already a step in the

00:35:17.580 right direction because it shows that there are alternatives.

00:35:19.800 I think that it's an idea that is very entrenched in those places. It will not

00:35:24.820 easily be displaced. But just having a sort of debate about it, discussion about it, and saying

00:35:31.020 that there are other ways that are maybe better ways to understand this history, I think that's

00:35:35.960 the sort of contribution that I was hoping to make with the book.

00:35:38.920 Well, just being aware of it would be, as you say, a good start. And perhaps

00:35:45.860 making sure that if you've got kids or grandkids headed off to university, that they're made aware

00:35:53.720 of a book such as yours and ideas such as yours so that when they arrive, they've got some kind of

00:36:00.340 defense. Because this is overwhelming on campus. I live right next to the University of Toronto

00:36:05.460 campus. I walk through it. You look at the signs posts on the lamps as you walk through, on the

00:36:11.820 billboards. This is a dominant ideology. Or not dominant. Perhaps that's the wrong word. It is

00:36:18.420 pervasive, though. It is everywhere, even if many of the students are just ignoring it.

00:36:23.580 No, I think that's true. I think it's taken for granted in those places. And one of the reasons,

00:36:27.400 I think, is that, just to talk about the American context, over the last 10 years, America,

00:36:34.460 politics and culture have become so polarized that the extremes polarize each other. So that you have

00:36:40.100 people on the left who say, everything about American history is bad, or America is a settler

00:36:44.540 colony and should not have existed. And then you have people on the right who say, well, we don't

00:36:47.940 want to teach anything critical of American history. We only want to teach the things that can be

00:36:52.640 celebrated. And then those extremes sort of drive each other further apart. And I think really what

00:36:58.600 we need is a way of looking at our history that acknowledges the full truth and also, you know,

00:37:02.620 which means the good and the bad, the hopeful parts, rather than the hopeless parts.

00:37:07.460 I would agree. And I've been making that argument for a long time. Adam,

00:37:11.820 thanks so much for the time. You can get On Settler Colonialism. I'm looking at it right now. It's

00:37:17.920 an audio book on Audible. You can get it on Kindle. You can get a hardcover. Thank you so much for the

00:37:24.740 time today. Thank you. Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host.

00:37:30.960 This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive

00:37:36.380 producer. Please remember to hit subscribe, whether you're listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

00:37:42.260 YouTube, wherever you're listening, hit subscribe. Help us out by leaving us a rating or review and

00:37:47.500 forward this episode on to your friends and family. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.

00:37:52.360 you

00:37:54.420 you

00:38:12.240 you

Full Comment - November 25, 2024

They call us ‘settlers’ because they’re planning to kick us out

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript