Ideology, Settler Colonialism and Moral Derangement
Roger Berkowitz
Simon Critchley begins his 2013 book Infinitely Demanding with the insight that we’re living through a time of massive political disappointment. The political disappointment of the present, he writes, is a response to a conviction about the injustices in the world that demands not a political response — because there’s nothing we can do — but an ethical response. In abandoning the political for the ethical, Critchley argues we must confront what he calls a motivational deficit in secular liberal democracy. We need to ask: Why we should try and engage in politics? If engagement is not going to change anything, what is the point?
If politics doesn’t motivate citizens to work for some common good, he writes, it is in part because of a loss of political faith and a rejection of all grand political narratives. Communism is dead; capitalism is largely a welfare state; democracy is experiencing a loss of support around the world; and progressivism is largely in question. The one ideal left us, as Samuel Moyn incisively argues in his book The Last Utopia, is human rights, the idea that man is like an animal, to be kept alive and well fed; but such a biological politics of life is hardly a vibrant political idea. It is, as Moyn says, the lowest common denominator that has survived the nihilist project, whereby all higher political ideals have been devalued and thus lost.
Given this depoliticizing motivational deficit, Critchley argues we must turn from politics to ethics. “What is lacking at the present time of massive political disappointment is a motivating, empowering conception of ethics that can face and face down the drift of the present, an ethics that is able to respond to and resist the political situation in which we find ourselves.” Critchley then renames his ethics a radical politics and calls it a meta-politics.
Critchley’s renaming of ethics as politics should not deflect from the truth that he advocates a retreat from politics into ethics. We can see this retreat in Critchley’s critique of Marx. He argues, against Marxism, that capitalism does not lead to the emergence of a political subject, namely the proletariat; as is known, Marx believed that in the dialectical move from capitalism to communism goes through the politicization of the proletariat. But Critchley writes that “the multiplication of social actors, defined in terms of locality, language, ethnicity, sexuality, or whatever” that characterizes modern politics leads not to a Marxist politics but to identity politics.
The political task for Critchley is the “reactivation of politics through the articulation of new political subjectivities.” We need, he says, to create a “new political subject [that] arises in a situation against the repressive activity of the state through, the articulation of a new universal name, the indigenous.” In short, Marxist politics is over. The proletariat is not going to become a political subject. And the place to resist the capitalist state is through new subject positions that take on the name of the indigenous, new anti-state identities. Capitalism leads not to a politics of class struggle but to identity politics.
In my essay “Protest and Democracy,” I wrote about Critchley’s turn from politics to ethics to raise questions about a turn in leftist politics from democracy to protest. I focused on how the turn to indigeneity in left politics focuses on a moral innocence in indigenous subjects that motivates compassion and protest, but is divorced from meaningful political action to build a better world. I worried that the rise of identity politics replaces a politics that tries to build democratic institutions of self-determination with protest that finds freedom not in state institutions but in the act of protesting against them.
Critchley, along with Jacques Ranciere and the late David Graeber, is among the leftist intellectuals who propose an anti-institutional politics that, in his words, “should be conceived at a distance from the state, taking up a distance in a specific situation.” His aim is to develop a non-state-centered politics that exists outside the traditional politics of government: “I claim that the task of radical political articulations is the creation of interstitial distance within the state territory.” And Critchley finds such radical non-state politics has its examples in anti-state protests like the “mobilization against the meeting of the WTO in Seattle in 1999.” His is a politics of anti-state resistance. In the face of massive political disappointment, he argues that politics must abandon the effort to engage in governing institutions. Instead, the new politics emerges as a criticism of the state and sets itself up on the outside as a politics of protest against the unmovable injustice of the state. That is what I mean by a politics of protest.
I thought of Critchley’s work while reading Adam Kirsch’s recent essay on “settler colonialism.” Kirsch points out that many of the left-wing defences of Hamas’ October 7th terror attack on Israel justify the attack as a response to “settler colonialism.” The term settler colonialism has become a staple of literature used by the Democratic Socialists of America, which opposes “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and has called to “decolonize Palestine — from the river to the sea.” As Kirsch explains, this is “a slogan that, by invoking the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. Mondoweiss, an anti-Israel online publication, has called the Hamas attack “part of the Palestinians’ century-long struggle for liberation” from “Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism.”
As Kirsch explains, using the definition supplied by Cornell Law School: Settler colonialism is “‘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’.” He then quotes the online journal Truthout: “an understanding of settler colonialism remains essential for anyone seeking to make sense of daily injustices in Palestine and in many other places, including the U.S.” Why? Because it is “‘a system rather than a historical event.’ In other words, the displacement of the indigenous population is not something that happened centuries ago but something that is still being perpetrated today, by all the non-indigenous inhabitants of the land and by the culture and institutions they have created.”
What reminded me of Critchley’s work — beyond the focus on indigenous peoples as the subject of politics — is how Kirsch describes settler colonialism as a systemic and continuing event, one that therefore leads to a moralized politics, a politics of protest, of outrage. Since every state is a settler colonial state — the United States, Italy, Brazil, China, and Russia are all states with settler colonial histories — a settler colonialist politics is fundamentally moral rather than political. It operates on a simple innocent and guilty matrix that sees every existing state as guilty and everything before it as blessedly innocent. Settler colonial politics is outraged by this reality, and incapable of seeing these states as the accomplishment of dreams for self-determination and collective action by their people over generations and centuries. These states are facts and are not going anywhere simply because there were once people who lived in these places before them. Settler colonialism is not just, but neither is it necessarily unjust. There is something simplistic about immediately imagining every state to be evil simply because it is not eternal. And in such a context calls for decolonization are either meaningless or mere ethical performances rather than political actions. They nurture a politics of outraged protest at the injustices of the world rather than a real politics that addresses the world as it is. We see this in the United States and in Australia where so much effort is put into incorporating land acknowledgements that yield little of political substance.
More troublingly still, the critique of settler colonialism essentializes as good, by nature so to speak, all so-called indigenous people while damning without possibility for redemption all those who are said to be settlers. But what makes someone indigenous, or a settler, is hard to determine. There are, it is true, Jewish settlements today in the West Bank that are a present attempt to take land given to the Palestinian people in 1948. Some of those settlements are nearly 70 years old, some are newer, part of an aggressive attempt to claim land in the wake of the first and second Intifadas. But there are Jews who trace their roots on the land back millennia. Many Jews arrived during the Ottoman control of Palestine in the 1880s. Others continued to arrive after the Dreyfuss affair in France in 1894. These Jews bought land, farmed, and have lived in the region for 150 years. So too did many Israeli Jews arrive after the Holocaust as refugees. A plurality of Israelis are Mizrahim, Jews who were expelled from their homes in Arab Countries after 1948 who found a refuge and home in Israel. Are all of these people settlers? To be damned? What makes Jewish Israelis who have lived in Israel for over 100 years colonials? And what is it that makes those who came from the Arabian Peninsula many years ago indigenous, not themselves settler colonists?
What the left gets right is that the Palestinians have suffered grave injustices. The mandate system of the League of Nations that gave the land we call Israel or Palestine to the British after World War I treated the Palestinians unjustly. The United Nations decision to partition British Palestine into two countries, one Jewish, one Arab, was tragic and in hindsight ill-fated. The unwillingness of other Arab countries to embrace Palestinians as Israel embraced Jews expelled from other countries in the region left many Palestinians homeless after their failed attacks on Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. And in recent years, Palestinians have been subjected to a brutal occupation in the the West Bank. In Gaza, they have suffered from Israeli and Egyptian isolation and repression from Hamas. It is difficult to not have sympathy with their plight. Especially so now as Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from a war on their territory, one begun with a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas and is now being waged without mercy and to the full extent of the laws of war by the powerful Israeli army.
Of course, Jews have suffered more than their share of injustices going back to the crusades, antisemitism in the diaspora, pogroms, the Holocaust, the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands, wars launched against the Jewish state, hijackings, taking of hostages, terrorism, and more, including the absolutely horrific attacks of October 7th by Hamas that included brutal torturing and killing of teens at a concert and elderly in their homes.
The tragic truth is that both Jews and Palestinian Arabs have been treated unjustly. The two-state solution was not perfect, but it sought to do justice to the legitimate desires for self-determination of both peoples who had been treated unjustly; it sought to honor both of their dreams of building a state and a homeland. While the two-state solution is still the only reasonable solution that would honor the aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians, it is clearly less likely to succeed now than it was in 1948. I don’t claim to have a solution to the continuing tragedy unfolding in the Middle East.
The justification of Hamas’ attacks by the argument against settler colonialism is, then, a form of outrage politics. It seeks to justify terror on ideological claims of authentic indigeneity, on indigenous innocence and suffering. Hannah Arendt argued that ideologies are pseudo-scientific theories that attempt to explain all that is wrong with the world and that thereby justify violence and terror to set the world right. The two ideologies that Arendt thought had succeeded in inspiring large followings in the 20th century were Nazi racism and Soviet Bolshevism. What is scary today is how many people have come to embrace the similar ideological foundations of the critique of settler colonialism. For according to such ideological foundations, one group of people is eternally innocent, and another group is inescapably evil simply because one group came later than the other (which of course, came later than a previous group). Such reasoning is morally senseless, depriving the “victims” of any degree of ethical agency, and the “oppressors” of any chance of redemption.
What is so unsettling about the critique of settler colonialism is not simply its anti-political retreat into moral righteousness. More dangerous still is the elevation of all so-called indigenous people to be in some way more pure, more deserving, and more innocent than so-called setters. The ideology at the bottom of the critique of settler colonialism forgoes self-determination in the name of a righteous embrace and unshakeable exculpation of whomever is seen to be a displaced indigenous person. The elevation of one people as morally superior to another is, quite simply, a form of ideological racism. As Kirsch writes, the “Nazi slogan ‘blood and soil’ conveyed the idea that German land could only truly belong to its primeval inhabitants.” And all manner of terror was justified, by an outraged Nazism, in securing that land for such inhabitants. Similarly, the settler colonial ideology frames and thus defends the violence of Hamas “in terms of indigenous rights and redemptive violence.”
The critique of settler colonialism believes itself to be, as Kirsch writes, “morally impeccable because it is grounded in . . . indignation at violence and oppression, hope for freedom and equality.” It is grounded in outrage. But for this very reason, it “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.”
The world may often outrage us. But surely, when it comes to politics, we can do better than simplistic slogans that imagine colonizers are evil by nature, while all so-called indigenous people are innocent victims. One consequence of the ideological fervor around decolonization is that it makes it difficult to have sympathy with wrongs or harms done to those who are labelled colonizers. This is why too many students and faculty on American college campuses find it so difficult to sympathize with Jewish suffering. They issue statements of solidarity with Palestinians, but ignore any mention of Jewish suffering. They tear down posters of Jewish hostages because the fact of Jewish suffering is incongruent with their ideological frame. They deny that the Jewish Temple ever existed. They insist that Jews have no connection to the land of Israel. When facts put ideological tenets in question, the facts must be denied.
None of this is to deny the pain and suffering of Palestinians. There is no doubt that the Palestinian people have suffered injustice. They have seen their dreams of a nation-state denied. They have suffered through five wars that they have lost and an increasingly brutal occupation of their remaining lands. Most recently, the people of Gaza are experiencing one of the most devastating campaigns of aerial bombardment and destruction in the history of warfare. It is heartless to not sympathize with the plight of Palestinians. Those who say that Palestinian children deserve what they have coming to them are speaking a racist language that must be called out and resisted. Especially on college campuses, students should be encouraged to express their sympathies with the awful death and destruction occurring in Gaza.
The sad fact of injustice suffered by Palestinians should not, however, blind us to injustices suffered by Jews. Too often, however, this is what is happening. The incapacity to recognize Jewish suffering is widespread today, and it is ultimately what lay behind the resignation of two college presidents from Harvard, Claudine Gay and from the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill. Gay and Magill, along with MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, were unable to condemn calls for a genocide against the Jewish people. The question they were asked was stupid in its simplicity: Is calling for a Jewish genocide a violation of campus policy. The obvious answer is, yes. Just like calling for lynching Black students is a violation of campus policy. Who can deny this?
To say that calling for murder of Jews is wrong and violates campus policy does not mean that all students who might hypothetically make such a call should be punished or that they should all be punished in the same way. And it is important to note that this was a ridiculous hypothetical question as I don’t know of any students or faculty calling for a genocide of the Jews. But if such a call for genocide were to be made, the reaction to such heartless and thoughtless comments would have to balance clear condemnation with our pedagogical responsibilities. Our job at universities is not to punish students but to educate them. With that in mind, how we respond to individual students should be a pedagogical decision. Still, none of that changes the simple fact that calling for the killing of people based on their race or their religion is wrong and violates basic norms of an academic institution.
The fact that three college presidents had such difficulty expressing basic sympathy with Jews is based in the powerful hold de-colonial ideology has on college campuses. As Wolpe writes, “Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe. Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.” These should be simple and non-controversial statements. That they are not is evidence of the extent of the problem with ideological antisemitism.
It is not at all obvious how to combat ideological antisemitism. Educating people, explaining to them the factual inaccuracies in their arguments, is often ineffective because the whole point of ideological thinking is to simplify the world in ways that make it necessary to deny inconvenient facts. If ideological thinking is like a logical vice that captures its adherents and squeezes out fact, nuance, and complexity, thinking — what Arendt called the activity of thinking from the perspective of others — demands challenging our own perspectives, seeking out facts and insights that make us question our prejudices. Only such a commitment to thinking in the Arendtian sense can help undo the word-and-thought defying banality of ideological thinking so prevalent today. The work before us on campuses and in certain fields populated by recent college graduates is immense. There is no silver bullet, but we must recommit ourselves to the difficult task of thinking.
