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The Idea Fueling the Anti-Israel Student Protest Movement

(Chronicle of Higher Education) Adam Kirsch interviewed by Evan Goldstein - Adam Kirsch, author of the new book, On Settler Colonialism, said in an interview: After the Hamas massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, I started noticing that a lot of the more sympathetic reactions to Hamas used the term "settler colonial" to describe Israel. It's an ideology in the sense that it's a story people tell about the world and its problems. The most common manifestation of this worldview is land acknowledgment. Now, every university or institution, whether a college or a museum, identifies the Native American peoples who once inhabited the same land. We learned in elementary school that America was conquered from Native Americans. So this reaffirms this idea that society and the institutions we've built sit on a false foundation, that they're rooted in an evil crime, and are therefore illegitimate in some way. Yet, why is there no serious plan to make reparations? There's never a sense that the university should dissolve itself or give back the land, or that the museum should sell off its paintings. The purpose is moral prestige. If you are willing to acknowledge that you're a settler, an inheritor of an original sin, paradoxically that makes you better than people who don't acknowledge it. Settler colonialism is a theory that was developed in the context of Anglophone countries colonized by the British in the 17th and 18th centuries - North America and Australia. That is not what happened in Israel. This template was developed for one type of scenario and is being applied to a context where it obviously doesn't fit. Oct. 7 was a terrorist raid to kill civilians. In Israel you see a real struggle to kill people and destroy a country. That's the logical endpoint of settler-colonial theory: Israel is an illegitimate country that should not exist. Therefore, if you're working to get rid of it, you're supporting a virtuous cause. Which explains why some of the responses to Oct. 7, especially among those who use the language of settler colonialism, were gleeful.
2024-08-18 00:00:00
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