Adam Kirsch’s colonial revisionism should shame his publishers

Last week, Adam Kirsch published a controversial column in The Atlantic, based on a forthcoming book, criticising what he described as the “false narrative” of settler colonial studies.

Kirsch is not alone in his efforts at delegitimisation. In his 2023 book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar dismissed postcolonial approaches as something simply “fashionable, opening doors to posts, promotions and grants”. Robert Tombs, one of the founders of the History Reclaimed project, argued that the entire field was “sophisticated propaganda”.

Kirsch’s intervention expands this new “anti-postcolonial” trend to argue that the “ideology” of settler colonialism fails to meet its mark when it comes to Israel/Palestine. He argues that Israel does not fit the profile of “European settlers discovering a land that they consider ‘terra nullius’” because Israel did not “erase or replace” Palestinians, but rather “coexists” with them.

These two claims will sound quite bizarre to anyone with an introductory level awareness of postcolonial theories and approaches.

In omitting the work of numerous Global South scholars, Kirsch’s essay reveals a severely deficient literature review that leads him to make the remarkable statement that “[t]he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the US, as a way of linking social evils in these countries today (…) to their origin in colonial settlement”.

Already in 1950, the famous Martinican scholar, Aimé Césaire, wrote in his classic Discourse on Colonialism that the key characteristic of colonialism was the impetus to civilise the so-called barbarian.

Colonialism is therefore defined not by European explorers claiming res nullius on behalf of their empires, but by the “relations of domination and submission” that underpin it, that turn the coloniser into “prison guard” and the indigenous person into an “instrument of production”; a “thing”.

Colonialism is a set of relations, not a specific period in history. It is entirely possible to argue that a postcolonial Global South state is colonially oppressing an indigenous population.

In fact, this is the state of the discipline in Latin America since at least the 1960s. In his influential 1969 book Sociology of Exploitation Mexican scholar Pablo González Casanova famously argued that in Latin America, Spanish domination was substituted for that of white elites of European descent, in such a way that “the exploitation of the indigenous continues to have the same characteristics as in the time before independence”.

In other words, the Spanish empire is no more, but colonial relations of domination remain very much in place.

Colonialism is rooted in the present

Understanding colonialism as a set of relations of domination explains how and why Israel’s policies in Palestine are colonial in nature. As the famous Palestinian scholar Edward Said noted in his classic 1979 essay Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, Zionists portray themselves as a movement “bringing civilization to a barbaric and/or empty locale”.

It is this fact that allows Said to identify a key connection between Zionism and European colonialism, conceived as two types of imperialist praxis, both seeking to change supposedly “uselessly unoccupied territories” into “useful new versions of the European metropolitan society”.

Thus, a good decade before Kirsch’s proposed origin date for the term, Said concludes that “everything the Zionist did in Palestine they did of course as settler-colonialists”.

Similarly, in his 1973 book, Israel: A Colonial Settler State? French historian Maxime Rodinson concluded that Israel’s settler-colonial nature was an “obvious diagnosis”, as its creation was “the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the great European-American movement of expansion (…) whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other peoples or to dominate them economically and politically”.

In fact, according to Rodinson, that Zionism was a colonial ideology because it met the key requirement of establishing a relation of domination through a “mission civilisatrice” was an “almost unanimous accusation” among the Arab intelligentsia of the 1970s. Kirsch simply never mentions them.

This lack of rigorous engagement with fundamental pieces of literature is also behind Kirsch’s second misrepresentation, that the model of settler colonialism does not fit Israel because it “did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine”.

And yet, as is well known, the Spanish colonial empire also did not (could not) eradicate the indigenous people of the Americas, preferring instead to set up what Peruvian decolonial scholar Aníbal Quijano defines as a relation “of direct, political, social and cultural domination”.

In his 1992 classic Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Quijano offers a very simple answer to Kirsch’s conundrum.

When indigeneity is not eradicated, the colonial structure of power produces “specific social discriminations”, codified as “racial, ethnic, anthropological or national” which are then “assumed to be objective, scientific categories” of historical significance.

In other words, this type of colonialism produces what the International Court of Justice recently described as Israel’s system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinians.

Kirsch would probably reject this comparison to Latin America. In his article he suggests that the very concept of indigeneity is antisemitic, originating from 19th-century German philosophers who enabled the “blood-and-soil nationalism” of Nazi Germany.

For Kirsch, indigeneity is the “irrational” idea that “different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape”.

This concept, however, is exactly the kind of essentialism that anticolonial Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, an Aymara indigenous herself, criticises.

In her highly influential 2010 essay Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization, she argues, that the liberal construction of indigeneity that Kirsch adopts uncritically “denies the contemporaneity of these populations and excludes them from the struggles of modernity”, turning them into rural stereotypes “in an almost theatrical display of alterity”.

In other words, if Kirsch had bothered to read indigenous authors, he would know that they often also reject the concepts he criticises.

That Kirsch ignores this vast array of literature is, however, something that postcolonial scholars entirely predict.

Building on Argentinean scholar Enrique Dussel’s ideas regarding the “geopolitics of knowledge”, scholars like Quijano argue that the “perspective and concrete mode of producing knowledge is Eurocentrism”. Global South scholars fully expect to be ignored by the Global North. The very existence of Kirsch’s article then proves a key post-colonial point.

The claim that settler colonialism was developed as a concept in the 1990s in the Global North for entirely selfish Anglo-centric aims is absurd but entirely consistent with the predictions of postcolonial theory.

In reality, Global South scholars have concluded since at least the 1970s that Israel’s policies in Palestine are colonial in nature, in ways that refute Kirsch’s key arguments: colonialism does not need to meet the paradigm of European imperial explorers claiming res nullius on behalf of their empires nor does it need to lead to the eradication or replacement of the indigenous population.

As Postcolonialism prescribes, Kirsch simply — and predictably — ignored these findings, and his publishers did not take the trouble to fact-check him.

Alonso Gurmendi is a Fellow in Human Rights & Politics at the London School of Economics & Political Science’s Department of Sociology.

Follow him on X: @Alonso_GD

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