Book Review | Israel Doesn’t Fit Your Frameworks

On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice
By Adam Kirsch
W.W. Norton, 160 pp.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
By Peter Beinart
Alfred A. Knopf, 192 pp.

Is it possible to be evenhanded in discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Israeli-Hamas war? Is it even desirable? Scholars and diplomats who see two historical narratives of injustice colliding believe one must at least try. Others, partisans on both sides, insist one story substantially outweighs the other on the scales of justice. No world political dispute finds so few intellectuals and activists occupying middle ground. For those clustering around the poles, you’re either with us or against us.

Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice and Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning illustrate that reality. Neither succeeds at evenhandedness, and one doubts either would want to. Kirsch’s book, the more tightly researched and convincing one, explains a concept and movement that few Jews or others understand despite its rapid advancement in academe. Without making an explicit pro-Israel argument, it dissects the premise on which much anti-Israel activism, or at least rhetoric, is constructed. Beinart’s book, on the other hand, reinforces his reputation in recent years as aggregator-in-chief of every possible anti-Israel position.

Both books provide useful information and talking points for anyone invested in these issues. But it logically behooves one to read Kirsch’s first, because On Settler Colonialism examines the philosophical assumptions that create the policy choices that are Beinart’s focus. His analysis sets the table for evaluating Beinart’s views.

Kirsch declares at the outset that he’s not writing “about Israeli politics or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” or “the conduct of the war or how the larger conflict should be resolved.” Of course, he inevitably is, however obliquely, because “the idea of settler colonialism” and Israel’s putative embodiment of it fuel much of the resistance of Palestinian Arabs to Israel.

Although he foreshadows the application of this framework to Israel by citing a few leading denunciations of the country, such as Yale professor Zareena Grewal’s X post (on October 7, 2023!) calling Israel “a murderous, genocidal settler state,” he concentrates first on describing the concept’s broad outlines.

To Kirsch, settler colonialism is not a historical concept but an influential radical ideology. It began in the 1980s and 1990s in reference to the United States, Canada and Australia—not Israel—and deems countries founded on land that rightly belongs to indigenous inhabitants illegitimate. Such countries, it holds, are perpetrators of a world-historical crime.

Kirsch explores the idea’s multi-decade rise in academe, quoting canonical texts and exponents. The concept, he explains, covers any historical process in which a colonizing power erased, replaced or displaced an indigenous population. Its early theorists castigated the United States and Canada for what they did to Native Americans and Australia for its treatment of Aboriginals. It maintains that the enormous injustice of settler colonialism continues in those nations to this day and that all who live there except for indigenous victims remain guilty.

Kirsch lays out some corollaries and implications of the concept for which its chief theorists argue. For instance: Settler colonialism always incorporates genocide of one type or another.

Assimilation of its victims, through citizenship or complacency, does not whitewash the crime. The oppression that continues can be solved only by decolonization, and it justifies retaliatory, liberationist violence. Within academe, settler colonialism theorists engage in rhetoric with which few outsiders will be familiar, such as referring to North America as “Turtle Island,” a nod to a supposed pre-Columbus usage.

In most of the book, Kirsch questions aspects of settler colonialism writ large. He argues that the very notion of an “indigenous people” is a myth, that everyone except the first East African humans came from somewhere else. (He criticizes the recently fashionable “land acknowledgements” among progressive institutions as hypocritical virtue signaling.) And in a case where one people displaced another by force without either one being indigenous, the concept of settler colonialism simply doesn’t apply.

Only in the last third of his book does Kirsch zero in on the ideology’s application to Israel, arguing that, despite having become the paradigm of settler colonialism for many pro-Palestinian activists, Israel does not fit the concept. Unlike the French pieds-noirs in Algeria, or the Germans in Africa, Kirsch contends, the Israelis enjoy no “colonial” mother country to return to. Unlike settler colonial states whose actions severely reduced the population of their victims—Aboriginals, for instance, are now only about 3 percent of Australians—the 150,000 Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel after 1948 have grown to two million. Unlike the Europeans who came to America, the Jews can argue that their community predated the notion of a Palestinian community and that they themselves had suffered exile. Unlike the Belgians in Africa, Israelis didn’t seek to exploit the so-called “native” population for profit. Unlike the Chinese in Tibet and Xinjiang, the Israelis are not acting to destroy the native culture or language of their minority citizens.

Kirsch expresses sympathy at several points for Palestinians. He concedes that they’re often marginalized and oppressed. He remains in favor of an independent Palestinian state. But he rejects the decolonizer’s goal of eliminating Israel (and also its likelihood of happening). Further, in recognition of the immense amounts of fierce hatred toward Jewish Israelis by many Palestinians—he cites a poll showing a large majority of Palestinians supporting Hamas’s October 7 massacre—he accepts Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s famous insistence in his “Iron Wall” essay that Jewish Israelis must hold the upper hand militarily in their homeland or risk a genocide being committed against them.

Beinart would call that military upper hand “supremacy.” To Kirsch’s grim size-up of the contemporary situation, he brings an equally grim view but an almost wholly opposed perspective on who’s responsible for it. Like Kirsch, Beinart occasionally makes gestures toward those he knows will disagree with his current (if still evolving) beliefs. In regard to October 7, he remains “shaken by its horror.” He considers himself “a Jewish loyalist.” His family, he tells us, printed out the names of the hostages after October 7 and put them on the refrigerator door. He calls Hamas “a corrupt and despotic organization with a long history of brutality against both Israelis and Palestinians.”

But he completely rejects that the security of Israel’s Jews justifies, in its war on Hamas, “the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name.” Israel, he asserts, is guilty of the mass killing of children, and “evil resides not only in our enemies—Haman, Amalek, Hamas—but in us and the state that speaks in our name.”

The backstory of Beinart’s perspective involves that phrase he regularly invokes—“in our name.” It implies that if, as he later suggests, Israel as a Jewish state is a settler colonialist entity, then all Jews who support it are, to revive an old-fashioned political term, fellow travelers in settler colonialism.

Fleshing out the “in our name” point, Beinart shares how he was “raised to see the world; Jews are an extended family.” It leads him to repeatedly speak of “our people,” to begin sentences with “We,” as if all Jews should act or think in a similar, cohesive voice. He repeatedly writes that way even as he offers the passing traditional nod to Jewish disagreement: “Jews have always quarreled, and we should.” Yet the dominant thrust of his book is that Jews should not quarrel about what the present Israeli government has done. There’s a moral right and a wrong, a Jewish way to deal with hostility and threat and a non-Jewish way.

Beinart blisters Israel throughout “for the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated with the support of many Jews around the world.” Supporters of current Israeli policy “justify starvation and slaughter.” Jews ignore “the crimes we commit.” The Israeli government fights for “supremacy,” not “security.” Israel is an apartheid society, he maintains, despite two million Arab Israelis enjoying citizenship and, as he himself notes, their constituting “25 percent of Israel’s doctors, 30 percent of its nurses, and 60 percent of its pharmacists.”

On larger issues apart from the Israel-Hamas war, Beinart’s views line up with his well-known announcement a few years ago that he believes Israel should be replaced by a single state encompassing both Jews and Palestinians, including those from the West Bank and Gaza. (Beinart now describes Jewish support of Israel as a primarily Jewish state as “idolatry.”) “Palestinians made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home,” he writes, not making clear whether he means the 150,000 actually displaced in 1948—most of them now dead—or the more than 6 million the UN currently places in that category.

As it moves forward, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza confirms just how far Beinart has tilted to perspectives shared by few even on the liberal left. Israel’s longtime prisoner Marwan Barghouti, whom Beinart describes as “Hamas’s most formidable political rival,” is touted as someone who has praised Nelson Mandela. No mention there that Israel sentenced him to five life sentences for murderous attacks on Israelis. Similarly, Beinart never writes concretely of Hamas’s mayhem. Rather, he cites and offers the Palestinian position on almost every controversial event in Israeli history, from the 1948 war and what caused Palestinians to flee to the claim that, at American universities, the “students and faculty in greatest danger are Palestinians and their supporters.”

Inevitably, Beinart’s position on “settler colonialism” as applied to Israel clashes completely with Kirsch’s. In the passages where he deals with the notion, Beinart raises examples of cruel Jewish violence in the Bible, such as the violence that concludes the Purim story. He asserts that Jewish leaders who emphasize Jewish continuity with the land of Israel since time immemorial cite Genesis, Exodus and the “books of Judges and Kings,” but that they like to leave out the Book of Joshua, which tells how “the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua Ben Nun conquered Canaan from the seven nations that lived there.” Jews, he maintains, have always preferred to ignore that they “can be oppressors,” preferring their image as victims. (He does concede that “no one knows whether Joshua Ben Nun actually conquered the territory or existed at all” and that “Jews have an ancient and profound spiritual connection to this patch of land.”) Beinart leaves unclear whether he thinks who was there first matters in the end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seemingly accepting that both Jews and Arabs go back far enough to invoke justice claims to their disputed lands.

In finally assessing where Beinart has ended up ideologically, one has to return to his “in our name” leitmotif. It’s the key to why he feels current Israeli policy violates what it means to be Jewish.

He thinks Jews worldwide are a family—maybe just like his family. But Jews worldwide aren’t a family, any more than they are a settler colonialist movement. They share key features and characteristics, in Wittgenstein’s sense of family resemblances, but not others—it does no good to pretend otherwise. That makes it the height of chutzpah for Beinart, an American Jew with South African roots, to pronounce to Israeli Jews what they may or may not do to protect their lives.

From his safe perch as a highly connected media figure in the Northeast, Beinart can afford to take a sentimental view of Judaism and Jewish ethics. Let us simply be the best, kindest people we can, he seemingly urges, and everything will turn out all right. Many Israeli Jews have painfully learned the naivete of that view. They’ve become realists. Kirsch’s own reluctance to condemn Israelis for how they’ve reacted to October 7 shows his understanding of that development. The certainty Beinart exudes throughout his book does not alter a simple truth: The current Israeli government does not speak or act in Beinart’s name or “our” name. It speaks, until it is toppled, for the state of Israel.

Carlin Romano teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delhi and Visiting Professor of Humanities at Ashoka University on a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar grant to India.

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