The Immoral Morality Play of Settler-Colonial Theory

Distorting History to Justify Murder

An early example of settler colonialism. Source: DALL-E

If you’re reading this and live in a country founded by European colonists, such as the US or Australia, there’s a very good chance that academic theory considers you a “settler-colonizer.” The term “settler colonialism” entered mainstream discourse via celebratory reactions to the October 7 attacks and the current anti-Israel protest movement. However, the theory has a longer history and a broader array of targets. According to scholar Patrick Wolfe, who popularized the concept in the 1990s, “elimination is an organizing principal [sic] of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence.” Thus, for example, the European settlement of North America was not a historical event but an “eliminatory" process that continues to this day.¹ The binary logic of the theory is summarized by a Southern Poverty Law Center article: “Understanding settler-colonialism means understanding that all non-Indigenous people are settler-colonizers, whether they were born here or not.” All non-indigenous people includes the descendants of immigrants, immigrants themselves, and even the descendants of enslaved Africans (though here there is some internal theoretical dispute).

On that last point, an article in the Yale Daily News inadvertently sheds light on the theory’s pervasiveness and uncritical acceptance in elite institutions. In the course of arguing that (Generational) African Americans should not qualify as settlers, the writer says that he often hears some variation of the following statement in class: “We all have to recognize our privilege in perpetuating the settler-colonial state of the U.S. We are all either settlers or indigenous.” This apparently commonplace notion is usually accompanied by “the nodding and quiet agreement of the professor and other students.” One such Yale professor is Zareena Grewal, who tweeted an implication of the settler/indigenous dichotomy on October 7: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” That a prima facie radical theory—one that most Americans would reject—goes unquestioned in academia helps explain the extreme rhetoric of anti-Israel student protesters and the disconnect between elite and mainstream opinion more broadly. What is insanity to the man on the street is received wisdom to the Ivy League student whom his tax dollars help fund.

The term “settler colonialism,” while misused with wild abandon, does have validity as an objective descriptor. As historian Caroline Elkins says, “From a strictly empirical perspective, there are colonies—and in some cases, nations today—that were founded on the premise of sending settlers to different locations in the world.” For example, the British quite obviously colonized and settled North America, whereas other British possessions (eg, India, Nigeria) were extracted for resources but not settled by colonists. But as a theory, settler colonialism is more than just a tool for historical analysis. Instead, it is an ideology that villainizes certain nations as indelibly stained by their origins, minimizes or ignores non-European examples of the phenomenon, and falsely asserts ongoing complicity in genocide through the reductionist binary of settler/indigenous. For reasons linked to its own feckless grandiosity, settler-colonial theory is also fixated on Israel, which serves as an academically acceptable target for elimination in ways that the US or Canada (usually) don’t.²

Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute representatively defines settler colonialism as “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.” Furthermore, and here ideology fully takes the place of objective analysis: “History and current conflicts have shown that this ongoing system of oppression is mainly based on racism and white supremacy.” Actually, history and current conflicts show that settler colonialism is mainly based on military and technological supremacy. In other words, militarily and technologically powerful peoples tend to dominate and exploit those that are less advanced. In relatively recent history, these peoples have tended to be white and European. But this is a historical outlier that has now ended with the universal spread of European arms and ideas. Among these universalized ideas is the religiously rooted notion (which traveled from the Near East to Europe to the world) that the powerful shouldn’t dominate and exploit the weak, which has been perverted into secular theologies like settler-colonial theory.³

History as Settler-Colonial Project

An early history of settler colonialism might include the Homo sapien genocide of fellow human species like the Neanderthals. Resource competition from our better-armed and organized ancestors likely contributed to their extinction around 40,000 years ago (though they live on in our genes). Fast forward to circa 10,000 BCE, when the development of agriculture allowed more complex and populous societies to begin displacing hunter-gatherers. An example is the Bantu expansion from West Africa into subequatorial Africa, which started around 1500 BCE and drove the indigenous Pygmies and Khoisans into rainforests and deserts. As Jared Diamond writes, “distributional and linguistic clues combine to suggest that the Pygmy homeland [as well as that of the Khoisans] was engulfed by black [Bantu] farmers.” Diamond uses the term “engulfed” because it is “a neutral all-embracing word, regardless of whether the process involved conquest, expulsion, interbreeding, killing, or epidemics.” But if we are to embrace the polemical terminology of settler-colonial theory, then the apposite word for the Bantu repopulation of formerly Pygmy and Khoisan lands is genocide.

Similarly, Australia and New Guinea were first populated by colonists from Southeast Asia. However, as Diamond recounts, “the original Southeast Asian stock from which the colonists of Greater Australia were derived has by now been largely replaced by other Asians expanding out of China” starting around 4000 BCE. Today, only isolated hunter-gatherers like the Andaman Islanders and Semang “remain to suggest that tropical Southeast Asia’s former inhabitants may have been dark-skinned and curly-haired, like modern New Guineans and unlike the light-skinned South Chinese and the modern tropical Southeast Asians who are their offshoots.” Diamond refers to the “Sinification” of Southeast Asia and “the Chinese steamroller,” but again, from the perspective of settler-colonial theory, the replacement of indigenous peoples with a new population is genocide. Vietnam and Thailand are simply settler-colonial states with a longer pedigree.

What settler-colonial theory is unable to explain is how the displacement of Pygmies and Khoisans by Bantus, of Southeast Asian Negritos by South Chinese, and the other “settler-colonial projects” that constitute so much of human history (and, in the case of the Neanderthal extinction, prehistory) were based on “white supremacy.” The numerous historical examples of Europe itself being invaded—including by Huns, Magyars, Moors, and Turks—also complicate academia’s morality play. Diamond’s running thesis to explain “the main process running through the history of the last 10,000 years” is that “human groups with guns, germs, and steel, or with earlier technological and military advantages” spread “at the expense of other groups, until either the latter groups become replaced” or share in the new advantages. Settler-colonial theory’s rival thesis, that Europeans are uniquely rapacious, is only plausible (and even then, is riddled with counter-examples and flaws) if history is arbitrarily set to begin in 1492.

All of this is to contextualize, not minimize, the epic scale of the European conquest and colonization of the Americas. As Diamond observes, “The largest population replacement of the last 13,000 years has been the one resulting from the recent collision between Old World and New World societies.” But a difference in scale of population replacement is not a difference in kind. Moreover, as Diamond emphasizes, the advantages that allowed Europeans to dominate the Americas were ultimately Eurasian advantages. Specifically, he points to “Eurasia’s long head start on human settlement; its more effective food production, resulting from greater availability of domesticable wild plants and especially of animals; and its less formidable geographic and ecological barriers to intracontinental diffusion.”⁴ Europeans benefited from technologies, crops, and ideas that often originated in Asia, just as Asia (and the world) now benefit from European contributions.

Most dramatically, Eurasians had developed immunity or genetic resistance to the infectious diseases that wiped out an estimated 90% of Native Americans. Any Eurasian population that “discovered” the New World would have brought those same diseases, like smallpox and influenza, with them to the same devastating effect. As historian John Darwin writes, it was Europe’s “geographic position—closest to the Caribbean antechambers of the pre-Columbian empires” that “gave it a decisive lead in the acquisition of new lands.”⁵ Other Eurasian powers were not restricted from conquering the Americas by the goodness of their hearts. If the Ottomans had been the first Old World empire to establish themselves in the Americas, bringing with them the same “guns, germs, and steel” as Europeans, it is difficult to imagine a better outcome for indigenous peoples. The dominant religion in the Americas would be Islam instead of Christianity, and the major languages would be Turkish and Arabic instead of English and Spanish, but Native Americans would still have been decimated, displaced, and assimilated.

I don’t begrudge settler-colonial theory for its moral outrage at what Hegel describes as “the slaughter-bench” of history. As an adolescent, I cried after reading Gary Jennings’ historical fiction novel Aztec. The notion that an entire civilization could be obliterated struck me as a horror beyond words.⁶ But to indict only Europeans for colonization and conquest suggests a failure of nerve. What Augustine calls libido dominandi, the lust for domination, is a human universal. Despite castigating Eurocentrism, settler-colonial theory is based on a Eurocentric interpretation of history, with Europeans centered as villains instead of protagonists. For example, the Legal Information Institute says that “the term Imperialism found its meaning when European States expanded their power,” including through “the distribution of the land of the defeated Ottoman Empire” (emphasis on unintended irony is mine). To accept that imperialism, colonialism, and displacement are constituent of history as a whole, and are not just European inventions, requires a harder and deeper look at human nature than settler-colonial theory is willing to countenance.

Real and Imagined Settler Colonialism in Today’s World

What about settler-colonial theory as a framework for evaluating today’s world? On a basic moral level, we should care about the sociopolitical issues that indigenous peoples still face, which are often downstream consequences of their tragic histories. But on that same basic moral level, we should also accept the Biblical and humanistic principle that children don’t inherit the sins of their parents. If living in a land previously inhabited by another people makes you a “settler-colonizer,” then we are all settler-colonizers and the term is rendered meaningless. To describe the modern US or Canada as a “settler-colonial state” engaged in an ongoing genocide is to substitute theory for reality. Far from seeking to displace non-white populations, Western countries are encouraging multiracial demographics through mass migration (which, since immigrants are inherently non-indigenous, a settler-colonial theorist should “theoretically” oppose). The year 2024 is not the year 1492, roving bands of conquistadors are not searching for El Dorado, and Native Americans have legal and political rights.

To find evidence of settler-colonial reality, rather than theory, the modern observer must look beyond North America. Contemporary examples of settler colonialism include China settling millions of Han Chinese in Xinjiang and Tibet; Morocco sponsoring over 300,000 settlers in occupied Western Sahara; and Myanmar enticing Buddhists to move to Muslim Rohingya lands. Yet as scholar Lachlan McNamee observes, “settler colonialism in the Global South fails to attract international attention. . . . Colonised peoples in the Global South have experienced a double erasure: first by settlers and second by settler colonial studies.” McNamee attributes this erasure to two interrelated assumptions: that racist ideology is integral to colonization and that “the colour line is the defining axis of political conflict around the world.” By imposing a Eurocentric interpretation of a universal human phenomenon, settler-colonial theory obscures, rather than explains, geopolitical reality.

Decolonization advocates depict all European-derived nations as settler-colonial projects. But though their language is designed to delegitimize, even ethnic studies majors have enough political sense to know that Americans and Australians are not going to self-deport. Major Western democracies are too large, well-established, and internationally recognized to disappear. Hence the appeal of Israel as a target: it is small, was founded relatively recently, and already goes unrecognized by much of the Muslim world. So while settler-colonial theorists must resign themselves to land acknowledgments when it comes to “Turtle Island,” attacks on Israel present the tantalizing possibility of actually toppling a settler-colonial state. The cognitive dissonance of declaring that “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” while generally treating decolonization as just a metaphor, finds relief through support for Israel’s destruction. Even if they are too comfortably tenured to commit acts of violence themselves, academics can fulfill their revolutionary dreams by tweeting in support of Hamas.

Never mind that, to pick one of the constituent terms of “settler colonialism,” Israel was not founded as the “colony” of an empire. As

Jake Mackey

writes, “Zionism was not a land grab by an existing state but rather a national movement to create a state for a people without one.” Furthermore, Jews themselves originated in the land of Israel thousands of years ago, which was then settled and colonized by foreign empires. The Zionist project of returning to an ancestral land, reviving a tribal language, and rejecting assimilation into surrounding cultures is more an example of auto-decolonization than of settler colonialism. Palestinians were displaced not because of Jewish migration, but as a consequence of an Arab-initiated war to destroy the nascent Jewish state. The tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict actually points to the incoherency of settler-colonial theory itself. Jews are an indigenous people (though ethnically admixed, like many of today’s Native Americans) who have returned to the land of their ancestors. Palestinians, while descended in part from Arab settlers, trace much of their ancestry to converted Jews and have lived long enough in that land to be called indigenous as well.⁷ The reductionist binary of settler/indigenous collapses in the face of history’s complexity.

Israeli settlement of the West Bank, rather than the formation of Israel itself, more plausibly fits the label of settler colonialism. Unlike Jews in Israel proper, Jewish settlers in the West Bank are not a previously stateless people. They could be repatriated back to their home country: namely Israel, within its pre-1967 borders. Indeed, such a repatriation (in addition to land swaps) has been proposed by Israeli leaders in previous peace negotiations, and rightly so. As a comparison with Chinese policy toward the Uyghurs in Xinjiang shows, Israeli settlement of the West Bank, insofar as it has coherent settler-colonial aims, is doomed to failure. While there are 1.2 billion Han Chinese and 11.5 million Uyghurs in China, there are around the same number of Jews and Arabs (~ 7 million) in the Holy Land. Moreover, China is a totalitarian superpower willing and able to take extreme measures (re-education camps, forced sterilization) to further its settler-colonial goals, whereas Israel is a small democracy subject to internal opposition and external pressures that make population replacement impossible. China will likely succeed in demographically engulfing the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Israeli settlers are succeeding only in exacerbating a broader conflict and eroding their country’s international standing.

Still, the Israeli settler movement is guilty of short-sighted expansionism and brutality, not systematic genocide. Population growth in the West Bank and Gaza is among the highest in the world, while, according to the New Lines Institute, “China has simultaneously pursued a dual systematic strategy of forcibly sterilizing Uyghur women of childbearing age and interning Uyghur men of child-bearing years, preventing the regenerative capacity of the group and evincing an intent to biologically destroy the group as such.” The disproportionate attention paid by settler-colonial theory to Israeli, as opposed to Chinese, misdeeds is a consequence not of greater Israeli malfeasance, but of the theory’s own biases. If we start from the assumption that settler colonialism is inherently European, and look for examples accordingly, then Chinese actions don’t qualify. But because the Zionist movement was founded by Europeans—never mind that they were Europeans with ancient Levantine roots, seeking refuge from European persecution⁸—then Israel is forever guilty; even though a plurality of modern Israelis are descendants of Jews expelled from Middle Eastern countries.

Reverse Settler-Colonial Fantasies

A theory should help us make sense of reality. It should not distort reality in order to fit the theory. If settler-colonial theory cannot account for non-European examples of settler colonialism, make sense of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or regard modern Western democracies with any proper perspective, then the theory itself is flawed. All of this would be mere academic discussion if not for settler-colonial theory’s violent implications, which were revealed in the “anti-colonialist” celebration of October 7. As Adam Kirsch observes, “anticolonialism contains all the elements needed for moral derangement: the permanent division of the world into innocent people and guilty people; the belief that history can be fixed once and for all, if violence is applied in the right way; the idea that the world is a battlefield and everyone is a combatant, whether they realize it or not.” Students of history—which settler-colonial theorists are decidedly not—know where such totalizing ideologies lead. Under the mask (or keffiyeh) of opposition to settler-colonial genocide, decolonization itself becomes an excuse for mass murder.

The settler/indigenous binary, which pits oppressor against oppressed in a world-historical struggle, is an epigone of Marxism’s bourgeois/proletarian opposition. For Marx and his radical heirs, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." Marxist thought is meant to serve the cause of revolutionary action. Similarly, settler-colonial theory is mere intellectual scaffolding for actual decolonization. According to Frantz Fanon, anti-colonialism’s patron saint, “The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it.” Academics express the same sentiment using jargon like “Breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole.” But in practice, as noted by Teen Vogue writer Najma Sharif on October 7, “the dismantling of the imperial metropole” means indiscriminate slaughter: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

A clear-eyed look at human history, unfiltered by ideology, reveals a succession of conquests and displacements going back thousands of years. As far back as the fifth century BCE, Thucydides observed that “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Europeans, aided by factors within (eg, technology) and beyond (eg, germs) their control, scaled up but did not invent settler colonialism. Nor are they its main practitioners today. (Arguably the only current European example is the “white-on-white” attempt by Russia to resettle its citizens in occupied Ukraine.) By defining settler colonialism as the original sin of the West, which can be righted only through the redemptive violence of decolonization, settler-colonial theory both misinterprets the past and falsifies the present. Despite moralistic rhetoric, it does so with the goal of absolving, not preventing, future atrocities. If racism and white supremacy helped justify historic settler colonialism, accusations of racism and white supremacy now justify fantasies of reverse settler colonialism. That they should remain only fantasies is why settler-colonial theory must be exposed for its historical distortions and murderous logic.

1. Wolfe’s examples of the “positive outcomes of the logic of elimination” include “the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship [emphasis mine], child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations.” The inclusion of “native citizenship” next to “child abduction” on Wolfe’s list highlights the hysterical lack of perspective of settler-colonial theory as a whole.

2. Although University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie said the quiet part out loud at a “From Minnesota to Palestine” panel: “We want U.S. out of everywhere. We want U.S. out of Palestine. We want U.S. out of Turtle Island. The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States.”

3. In his 1961 anti-colonial anti-Bible The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon bases his notion of decolonization explicitly on Matthew 20:16: “In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first and the first last.’ Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence.”

4. Quotations are from (in order) ”Chapter 19: How Africa Became Black,” “Chapter 15: Yali’s People,” “Chapter 16: How China Became Chinese,” “2003 Afterword,” and “Chapter 18: Hemispheres Colliding” in Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

5. See Darwin’s 2009 survey of modern imperialism, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (p. 62).

6. I assume most pre-teens feel similar existential angst when reading about lost civilizations.

7. As summarized in a 2020 study published in Cell, “the genomes of present-day groups geographically and historically linked to the Bronze Age Levant, including the great majority of present-day Jewish groups and Levantine Arabic-speaking groups, are consistent with having 50% or more of their ancestry from people related to groups who lived in the Bronze Age Levant and the Chalcolithic Zagros.”

8. As noted by Sam Fleischacker, “The Jews from Russia, Poland, and Germany who came to Palestine from the 1880s through the 1940s did not see themselves as Russian, Polish, or German — they saw themselves simply as Jews, who had been badly treated and not regarded as part of the dominant ethnic group in their countries of origin, and who had no interest in extending the power or presence of Russia, Poland, or Germany to Palestine.”

Or as Amos Oz writes in A Tale Of Love And Darkness (2004), “When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, ‘Jews go home to Palestine.’ Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, ‘Jews get out of Palestine.’”