Adam Kirsch
WSJ, Aug. 16, 2024
“For the academic discipline of settler colonial studies, the goal of learning about settler colonialism in America and elsewhere is not simply to understand it, as a historian would, but to dismantle it.”
This week Minouche Shafik resigned as president of Columbia University, the latest Ivy League leader to become a casualty of campus strife over the Israel-Hamas conflict. As the new academic year begins, students, parents, faculty and administrators are worrying, or in some cases hoping, that last spring’s encampments and conflicts with police will return.
The passions on campus are focused on the war in Gaza, with protesters accusing the U.S. (and in many cases their own universities) of complicity in what they call Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. But the charge resonates for many young people, especially the most dedicated activists, for reasons that go beyond the conflict that began with Hamas’s attack last Oct. 7.
The ideological basis for the anti-Israel protests is a broader set of ideas about “settler colonialism,” an influential academic concept that understands certain countries as inherently and permanently illegitimate because of the way they were founded. And while Israel is currently the most prominent example, the ideology of settler colonialism has even deeper criticisms to make of the United States. Indeed, in recent years, theorists and writers inspired by the idea of settler colonialism have created what amounts to a new countermyth of American history.
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