On Settler Colonialism by Adam Kirsch

Author:Adam Kirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The Palestine Paradigm

In 2016 the Standing Rock Sioux, whose reservation spans the border of North and South Dakota and is home to about eight thousand people, launched a protest against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was planned to carry oil underneath their land. Concerned that the project would disturb sacred ground and contaminate the water supply, protesters blocked equipment from a construction site and were aggressively dispersed with attack dogs and water cannons. The confrontation attracted international attention. Like Occupy Wall Street five years earlier, Standing Rock became a focus for many strands of progressive activism, including environmentalism, anti-capitalism—and perhaps more surprisingly, Palestinian liberation.

Stopping an oil pipeline in North Dakota and ending the existence of Israel as a Jewish state might seem like very different goals, but to many progressives, they were two battlefields in the same struggle—against settler colonialism. In 2016 activists Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon founded Decolonize This Place, a New York City collective that started out by organizing pro-Palestinian protests at art museums. They soon began to demonstrate in solidarity with Standing Rock, on the grounds that it was impossible to talk “about Palestine—which is about occupation and settler colonialism and not talk about what does it mean to be part of, and complicit in, the settler colonialism happening here in the United States,” as Husein later told an interviewer.1

Palestinian groups made a similar connection, using language familiar from the discourse of settler colonialism. The Palestinian BDS National Committee, which advocates for “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” against Israel, declared that “as indigenous Palestinians, we pledge to stand in solidarity with indigenous peoples around the world, including in Turtle Island.” The Palestinian Youth Movement sent a delegation to Standing Rock to “stand together with our Indigenous siblings in the fight against corporate greed and the settler colonial state.”

Standing Rock was a peaceful protest against constructing civilian infrastructure, while Gaza is a long-standing military conflict that has cost thousands of lives. But for the ideology of settler colonialism, both are cases of an illegitimate government abusing its power over an indigenous people. As Canadian academic M. Muhannad Ayyash put it in 2020, “the settler-colonial state’s distinguishing feature is that it does not come into being and cannot continue to exist without claiming sovereignty over land that is forcefully taken from its native inhabitants. In short, the settler colony can only claim its sovereignty through the eradication and erasure of native sovereignty.”2 And since both the United States and Israel came into being against the will of the prior inhabitants of their land, everything they do is unjust. The question of whether the Dakota Access Pipeline would harm the Sioux, or how Israel ought to respond to deadly attacks from Gaza, are in a sense irrelevant, because they are merely practical. The more fundamental issue is that the United States and Israel do not have a right to govern at all.

Standing Rock was a key moment in what Australian theorist Rachel Busbridge called, in

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