Introducing a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies: Karl Jacoby, Magdalena Naum,’Introduction: new voices in settler colonial studies in a time of crisis’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Introducing a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies: Karl Jacoby, Magdalena Naum,’Introduction: new voices in settler colonial studies in a time of crisis’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

20Apr25

Excerpt: In late November of 2024, just as this special issue was being edited, the then-President of the United States, Joe Biden, created a stir when he was spotted leaving a bookstore on Nantucket clutching a copy of the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi’s 2017 monograph, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. The subtitle of Khalidi’s book, A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, encapsulated the work’s central theme: the efforts of Zionists to create a homeland in Palestine needs to be understood as a settler colonial project, in which Jews sought to replace the region’s Indigenous population and claim Palestinian lands as their own. ‘[R]adical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all settler colonial movements’, writes Khalidi. ‘In Palestine, it was a necessary precondition for transforming most of an overwhelmingly Arab country into a predominantly Jewish settler state’. Biden’s apparent interest in Khalidi’s work (which came ‘4 years too late’, according to the The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine’s author) speaks volumes as to the sudden and unprecedented entrance of Settler Colonial Studies into contemporary political debates. Hamas’s massacre of October 7, 2023 and Israel’s on-going response, which Amnesty International and others have labeled genocidal, has focused intense attention on whether Israel should be labeled a settler colonial state as well as on the relationship between settler colonialism and various forms of violence, up to and including genocide. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who seek to defend Israel’s behavior have adopted the tactic of issuing blanket dismissals of Settler Colonial Studies, designed to discredit the field in general and its application to Israel/Palestine in particular. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens labeled settler colonialism a ‘fatally flawed … academic theory’. Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, composed an essay entitled ‘The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism’ for The Atlantic. He subsequently expanded his article into a short book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, Justice, in which he claimed that settler colonial theory ‘offers a distorted account of history’, designed ‘to divide the world into the guilty and the innocent’. Not long afterwards, David Frum, a former speech-writer for George W. Bush–perhaps best known for coining the phrase ‘the axis of evil’ to describe Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–published his own article in The Atlantic decrying the concept of settler colonialism as ‘guilty history’ that offered little more than a sneering ‘condemnation of the new societies’ European colonialism created.

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