The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Adam Kirsch: the dangerous ideology behind settler colonialism

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

On this Munk Dialogue we are talking about an academic theory that has become ubiquitous with criticism of Israel and to a larger extent, the West. Adam Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal and his new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, explains how this concept - which was once relegated to the halls of academia - has spilled out into the public sphere and is now shaping the way many young people understand history.  He argues that the modern concept of settler colonialism has become a dangerous ideology which seeks to avenge past injustices rather than trying to reconcile them. And he explains why Israel has become an easy target for protesters who view the world through this particular lens.    The host of this Munk Dialogue is Ricki Gurwitz Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran Lynch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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If you see these countries as settler colonial societies, as a lot of people in certain academic fields do now, what does that mean about the societies, about whether they're not? have a right to exist. Hello, monk listeners. Riki Gerwitz here, your guest host on today's monk dialogue. These are in-depth Q&A's with some of the world's leading minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into some of the big issues that are driving the public conversation. Well, it's the term you've probably seen written on protest signs at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or set on TV by academics and activists who oppose the war in Gaza. But what do you? But what What does settler colonialism actually mean? And how does it apply to criticism of Israel?

Well, Adam Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal and his new book on settler colonialism, explains how this concept, which was once relegated to the halls of academia, has spilled out into the public sphere and is now shaping the way many young people understand history. Adam explains how the ideology of settler colonialism, which has been embraced by left-wing progressives, seeks to avenge past injustices rather than reconcile them. And he explains why Israel has become an easy target for protesters who view the world through this particular lens. Adam, welcome to the monk dialogues. Thanks, I'm glad to be here. So let's start with the term settler colonialism.

which is the subject of your book. What does it actually mean? Well, I want to write this book because I noticed that after the Hamas attack last October, in the immediate aftermath when certain progressive and academic groups were sort of excited about the attack and hailing it as a victory, a lot of those people in the statements they should use the term settler colonial or settler colonialism to explain why they thought the Hamas attack was a good thing. And this is an academic theory, the idea of settler colonialism, but I realize that it was an academic theory that was now moving into real world politics, as these theories sometimes do.

And it seemed like a good occasion to sort of look deeper into what do people mean when they say settler colonialism and what are some of the implications for present-day political debates. Settler colonialism, yeah, as a term, really started in the 1950s and 60s, and it was referring to societies like Algeria, or Rhodesia in Africa, where there was a small European settler population ruling over a much larger native population. And so in those years when decolonization was happening and European empires were breaking apart, when people talked about settler colonial societies, the idea was to take power and property from the settlers and maybe drive them out, which is what happened, for example, in Algeria after a long war. Most of the Europeans in Algeria left. But in the 1990s, the idea of settler colonialism sort of got a new spin in the academy. And it started to be applied to

societies like Australia, the United States, and Canada, where we don't think of them as settler societies in the same way as Algeria or Rhodesia because the so-called settlers, the non-Indigenous people are almost the entire population, 98% of the population. So when you start to talk about those kinds of countries as settler colonial societies, it really changes what that term means and the way people use it and the way they think about it. And then by extension, when that term is applied to Israel, as it often is, it has consequences for what people think the future could hold or should hold there. And that's really the origin of the term.

So in the case of Britain and France, these were colonizing empires that had a quote, unquote, mother country that would go to foreign countries like India, basically set up shop there, purge and plunder and extract natural resources in order to enrich themselves. So can you explain in more detail how the term settler colonialism, as it is understood today, relates to these 18th and 19th century

European colonial conquests? Sure. Well, the idea of conquering another country and taking it over or exploiting it is very common in history and goes back to ancient times. It's sort of always been a driver of war and conflict. But when people talk,

about European colonialism, they're really talking about the process that began in 1492 when European explorers discovered the new world and also Africa and India began to visit those places and started to conquer much of the globe because as we know, in the early 20th century, if you looked at a globe, you'd see that most of it was colored in with the colors of European empires, especially the British Empire and the French. Those countries ruled a large part of the globe. And there are different kinds of colonialism, different ways of conquering territories and profiting from them. One way, which is the way, for example, that the British did in India or that the French did in Vietnam, doesn't involve settlement. It doesn't involve sending people out to live there from Britain or France to go live in the new country.

It really is about military occupation and then taking advantage of commercial interests of natural resources of captive markets. make money. And that involves violence and it involves political control, but it doesn't involve sort of remaking the population of the country. So one of the things I write about in the book is that if you look at how many actual English people were in India at the peak of the British Empire, it's a very small number in the tens of thousands compared to millions and millions of Indians. So that is one way of doing colonialism. And to rebel against that kind of colonialism is more straightforward because what it means is you're saying we're going to get rid of this small number of people who are running things and take power back for the 99% of people who live in this

country who are born here or the natives. Then there's the model of colonialism that we're sort of familiar with in the U.S. and Canada, which is successful settlement of an entire continent. And when I say successful, that means successful from the point of view of the European settlers, which means that it was a disaster from the point of view of the native peoples who were, were gradually over the course of hundreds of years evicted from almost the entire continent with wars and bloodshed and cultures and lives were destroyed in large numbers. So today, the population of the United States and of Canada is more than 95% descended from non-indigenous people.

Historically, that would have been Europeans, but today it's also people from all over the world who come as immigrants. But what they have in common is that they're not indigenous people, their ancestors weren't there before 1492. And in between, you have countries like the ones I started out talking about, Algeria is a classic example that I talk about in the book, where you had a small number of European settlers. In other words, it wasn't the kind of situation where Europeans came and destroyed the entire native population and replaced them. But it also wasn't the kind of situation where just an army came to take over and make money and exploit native labor. It was maybe

10% of the population would be European settlers. And that is originally what people meant by settler colonialism. They were saying these are societies where settlers, who are this very distinctive group racially and religiously and economically distinctive from the rest of the population, came here, and they're the other ones who hold power, and they have all the privileges, and to destroy settler colonialism in those settings meant getting rid of those people, at least taking away their power, maybe also taking away their property, or making them leave altogether. So when you talk about Canada, the U.S., Australia, you're talking about settlers who are moving to live there and make a home there for themselves versus going to a foreign country to extract

resources and return home, like, say, the British did in India, or going to a foreign country to rule over the indigenous population like the French did in Algeria. Is that correct? Exactly. And one of the most famous sentences in the sort of academic literature about this is from an Australian anthropologist named Patrick Wolf, who was, he's not alive anymore, but he wrote about this in the 1990s and 2000s, and is one of the sort of leading figures in this field. And he said, settlers came to stay. In other words, people who moved to the United States or to Canada, starting in the 17th century,

weren't coming to make money and go back home. they were coming to stay and start a new life and really a new civilization. And that is a different kind of imperialism, a different kind of colonialism. The question is, the real sort of part of the issue for settler colonialism, as it's discussed today, is are people who are descended from settlers of 400 years ago or even people who immigrated much later into these countries? Are they also settlers? In other words, do the countries that exist there now really have the right to exist? Do they have sovereignty over this land? Or should they be considered permanently illegitimate, permanently sort of usurpers on the indigenous people who they took the land from? And seen from that

point of view, especially in the U.S., leads to some sort of counterintuitive conclusions. For example, one thing that is often discussed in this literature of settler colonialism is the idea that descendants of black slaves are also settlers, which is certainly, not the way that people thought about settlement in the 17th or 18th century, but if the only relevant distinction is indigenous or not indigenous, then everyone who's not indigenous is a settler or occupies the sort of equivalent position of a settlement. Which in the U.S. is almost 97% of the population. Exactly. And the idea that you would think of yourself as a settler, even if your ancestors had been in these countries for generations, or even if your ancestors, you know,

came here 10 years ago, that that makes you a settler rather than an immigrant, which is what we usually say, what most people say about people who come to these countries is that they're immigrants, which suggests that they're coming to a new country. But to use the term settlers suggest that these new countries, there's something provisional about them or something permanently violent and illegitimate about them. Another thing that Patrick Wolfe says that is quoted a lot is invasion is a structure, not an event by which he meant that invasion isn't something that happened three or 400 years ago, the way we might ordinarily think of it if we're thinking about the history of New England or of Australia where British settlement began in 1788. But it's something that's permanent. It's going on now. It's a structure that the society that exists here now is an invasion, that it's sort of a perpetuation of that original invasion. And so when you think of these societies in those terms, you can't really imagine decolonization in the way that it took place in Africa, right? Because there's no place for 98% of the population to go. But it does change the way that people think and talk about these countries and their politics and their institutions in very critical ways.

And that's a lot of what I am talking about in the book is if you see these countries as settler colonial societies, as a lot of people in certain academic fields do now, what does that mean about the societies, about whether they have a right to exist? I want to ask you about a very famous Algerian philosopher named France Phana. And in your book, you talk about his influence over the modern settler colonial. movement and how he promoted the use of violence to achieve liberation. So I just, I wonder if you could go into a bit more detail about that. Fanon was a very interesting man and figure he had a short life. He died at, I think, 35 or 36. And he was born in Martinique, which was a French colony in the Caribbean, and ended up

fighting in the French army during World War II. And then afterwards went to Algeria, which was another French. He was a psychiatrist and a psychologist, but he also became very involved with the Algerian rebellion against French rule and was a sort of important spokesman for the FLN, the Front Liberation Nacional, which was the Algerian sort of nationalist and terrorist group that evicted the French. And in this book, The Wretched of the Earth, which was his last book before he died, he talks about the psychology of decolonization, the struggle against colonialism. and the effects that it has on the sort of minds of colonized people. And one of the reasons why the book became very celebrated and influential is that it's very positive about violence. Ultimately, you could argue that he had complicated ideas about violence, but a lot of

the book is sort of praising violence as a therapeutic tool saying that being colonized, being part of a colonized people is dehumanizing, and in particular it's de-masculinizing for men, and that the way that colonized people regain their humanity is through violence and by killing their oppressors. So Fanon writes in fairly positive terms about things like the bombing and killing of civilians that the FLM was undertaking at the time, saying that this wasn't just politically necessary, but sort of humanly valuable and justified because it's the way that a colonized people regains its human identity. And even from the beginning, that idea appealed to a lot of radical left thinkers in Europe, including most importantly, Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an

introduction to this book when it was published in France, basically saying, yes, this is a good idea, this is justified, and we have to understand why this kind of terrorism against us has this human purpose. It's valuable and necessary. So when people talk about decolonization as something that could happen in societies like America and Canada, they don't envision. and violent process in that way. I don't think anyone in the sort of world of settler colonial theory is arguing for that because it's obviously not a winning strategy in those contexts. But I think that people who see what's going on in Israel and Palestine, and particularly who saw the Hamas attack where 1,200 civilians were killed and raped and tortured and there was

sort of mass butchery, the idea that that would be a justified and in some ways sort of humanly positive thing to do for Palestinian terrorists, that idea, I think, can be traced back to Fanon in some ways. So how has this, I don't want to say glorification of violence, but seeing violence as a necessary means to an end, how did this reveal itself in the post-October 7th reaction in academic circles? I think that what it shows, what the reaction to that Hamasatak showed, and starting with at the very beginning, I know that since then, the sort of focus of a lot of the protests has moved towards Israel's retaliation in Gaza, which has killed many more people than were killed originally in the Hamas attack. And that sort of asymmetry in that conflict is something that has

been going on for years. There have been a series of wars between Israel and Hamas in which many more Palestinians are killed than Israelis. But what was different on October 7th was that it was the first time that Hamas did manage to kill a large number of Israeli civilians in one dramatic blow. And people who had protested the killing of Palestinian civilians were actually very positive and excited about the killing of Israeli civilians. That was, I think, a really telling moment. And it's something that you see a lot in young people, college-age people. There's been a real shift in the way this conflict is perceived. Older generations in the U.S. are very pro-Israel in the conflict, and people age 18 to 24 are split about 50-50 in terms of which side they

think is right or should be supported. The idea that you're justified in killing civilians that that's part of the colonial struggle, I think that does come from a way of thinking about colonialism that comes out of this historical background. And applying that lens to Israel and Palestine, I think, is very mistaken and will have very bad consequences for the future. That's one of the things that I argue in the book. Yeah, so let's talk about that, you know, aside from Israel, How do you see this kind of way of thinking that's very, very prevalent among young Western college-educated students? How do you see that changing the way Western countries operate in the world? Well, I don't think that most people, most college protesters, for example, are reading a lot of advanced settler colonial theory necessarily.

But the way that these things work is that ideas get worked out in theory. they sort of filter out into the real world and people take them to mean different things and put them to different uses. But I think that at the center of it is the idea that settlers are people who don't belong in the place where they are. And that could mean non-Indigenous people in North America or it could mean Jews in Israel. Through this frame of seeing things or through this lens, Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous people of Palestine and Jews are European colonizers in Palestine.

That's sort of the basic idea of settler colonialism as applied to the Middle East. You can't imagine long-established societies like the United States being decolonized, and most African and Asian colonies were given up by European empires. They were driven out after World War II. Israel is sort of the one place in the world where people who think about settler colonialism see an active settler colonial conflict with white European colonizers who have come and to take land from a native indigenous people and are sort of holding out there in a place where they don't belong. Obviously, the sort of fuel of this is that it's an ongoing war in which people are killed in large numbers, especially over the last year. And when people see this, they see the oppression of

Palestinians, for example, in the West Bank or deaths of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. They're naturally and sort of virtuously indignant about it. And they say these are people who are being oppressed and killed and we are against that. and therefore we're against Israel because Israel's perpetuating these crimes. What I think the settler colonial framing fails to understand is exactly what's happening in Israel and Palestine, why it's happening, and what possible outcomes might be. So there's no gain saying that Palestinians are suffering oppression and that many thousands of people are being killed in the current war. The question is, how does that situation get resolved?

How does a better future create it? And I think that in seeing this as a settler colonial conflict, what it essentially does is it brings Western progressives onto the side of the conflict of Hamas, saying the goal is to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. The goal is for Israel to no longer exist. In other words, that it should never have been created. It doesn't have a right to exist. And it should be destroyed, whether that means actually driving out the Jewish population or simply destroying the Jewish state and creating some kind of binational state, as some people think would be the right. solution where Jews and Arabs would live in the same state is sort of in equal numbers. That is the sort of conclusion of the settler colonial lens on this conflict. And I think that that is wrong. And I think that it is a recipe for continuing the conflict rather than ending it, because in certain crucial ways, Israel doesn't fit that model of settler colonialism. And you're saying that what these academics take to mean by decolonize is really to destroy the political and social structure that benefit the settler population?

Certainly. So take us, you know, apply that to the U.S. What do they mean by decolonize the U.S. Or what you often hear is decolonize this space. What does that mean? One thing I'd say is that academic settler colonial theorists don't say destroy the Jewish people and they don't call for violence against Jewish people, but they do definitely call for the end of the Jewish state. And when people say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, it's sort of similar to saying America will return to Native American sovereignty. It's saying that this foreign interloper that exists there now is not really part

of the place and it shouldn't be there and eventually it will disappear. And that is, I think, a lot easier to imagine in the case of Israel than it is in the case of the United States. So when people say decolonize, they can mean different things in different contexts. But at a minimum, I think, in the Israeli context, what it means is no Jewish state, undoing sort of what's happened since 1948. And then Hamas, you know, obviously Hamas is not settler colonial theorists. They're a terrorist organization. And for them, I think that means killing as many Jews as they can and evicting them, pushing them out, turning them into refugees. And one of the sort of key differences between Israel and other places that have been considered settler colonial like Algeria is that there is no mother country, as we've been saying. In Algeria, for example, when Algeria achieved

independence, most of the Europeans living there immediately left and went to France, because France was the sort of mother country of that colony. But Israel is not the colony of an empire. It's an independent country. And in fact, it's the only Jewish country in the world. So if that state were to be destroyed and seven million Jews became stateless refugees, there isn't any place where they could go. There isn't a home for them. And I think that that central, dynamic explains why terrorist tactics don't work in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the way they could work, for example, in Algeria. In Algeria, you had a long, seven or eight-year-long terrorist campaign against the French, and eventually France said, this is not worth it anymore.

We're going to leave. We'll give up. And in fact, that's how most anti-clonial struggles have been one going back to the American Revolution. The American Revolution is also an anti-colonial struggle. It was American saying, we don't want the British in our country anymore. and the British eventually left basically for the same reason, not because they couldn't keep fighting, but because they decided it wasn't worth it. But if you're Israeli and you don't have any other country and you don't have any other place to go, you're really more in the position of a native people saying we have no other home. This is our only home. We have to fight to defend it at any cost. So when something like the Hamas attack happens, the Israeli response isn't, okay, we give up,

we're going to pick up and leave. We're going to fight back 10 times as hard because our back is against the wall. Right. Terrorism in that context. does not get the response that it would in others. Exactly. You can't outlast the occupier because it's not an occupier. It's a native people. That was sort of off the topic of original question, but I can go back to the original question about the U.S.

Sure. So when people talk about decolonizing things in the U.S., they're not usually talking about a political solution, which would be, for example, you know, giving up American territory and handing it over to native tribes. Some people do want that, but it's a minority. And I think most people recognize that it's not viable. And in fact, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that Native American activist groups and advocacy groups generally don't say that at all. They don't use the language of settler colonialism because they know that that's not a useful tool for getting the things they want. This is much more something that academic theorists and sort of progressive activists say rather than Native American groups. So when people say decolonize, they can You talk about all kinds of things. People say decolonize your bookshelf was a popular one for a while.

Decolonized her backyard, meaning only plant native species. What it all comes down to is really a sort of change of mindset. And I talk in the book about how there's something really religious about it. It's about looking at yourself as a sinful person or as the inheritor of a sin that was committed long ago. I myself might not have committed it, but someone did in the past and I'm responsible for it. And how can I sort of purge myself of it? And in a way, it involves a lot of scrutiny of your conscience or changing the way you think and act in ways that look a lot like Protestantism. And there's this sort of interesting connection.

I think one reason why this idea is popular mainly in Protestant countries like the U.S. and Canada and Australia or historically Protestant countries is that it matches that traditional idea of what does it mean to be religious. It's you look inward. You are responsible for sin that you're sort of predestined to say. in, but if you scrutinize it and you repent for it, then you can escape from it. Right. You talk about people referring to North America's Turtle Island and being a settler of Turtle Island. So this is, in a sense, them publicly stating that they, you know, recognize their role in the displacement of indigenous people. Is that correct? Right. Turtle Island is a sort of not totally invented, but semi-invented,

idea that that sort of arose in the 1970s based on certain Native American creation myths, which in certain people's creation myths said that the earth was created on the back of a turtle. And so Turtle Island is a way of referring to North America pre-Columbus as sort of the reality of what's here is Turtle Island and America is sort of violently imposed on top of it. And so if you refer to this land as Turtle Island, it's a way of signaling that you reject this later Western colonial version. And you're adhering to this original theoretically native version of this land and what's supposed to be here. So when people say Turtle Island, that's a sort of ideological slogan. And one of the things that I talk about in the book is that particularly I think in Canada,

there are more and more people who will say that they are settlers who identify themselves. of settlers in their biographies, in their Twitter handles, or even in public, in talking in public, we'll say, I'm a settler, which is a way of saying, I recognize that this is not my country. I recognize that I don't belong here in a certain way. Hi, Roger Griffiths here, the executive director of the mug debates. Well, if you're enjoying the kind of civil and substantive conversations that we have at the debates, where we're really trying to get at the big issues and ideas that are driving the public conversation, I want to urge you to check out the hub. The hub is Canada's fastest growing digital

and news outlet. And like the monk debates, it's focused on those important conversations and bringing them to you in ways that are enlightening, enriching, and again, focused on civility above all. You can check out the hub right now at triple w the hub.com.ca or open your favorite podcast app and type in The Hub Canada. You'll go to the Hub's channel and see all kinds of great interviews, roundtables, discussions with thought leaders from around the world. So, Monk Debate community, check out the hub. We think you'll like what you see, listen, read, and hear. Do that right now at triple w the hub.ca. Now let's get back to our Monk Debates program. In your book, you talk about Martin Luther King's civil rights movement and how he sought to overcome racial segregation and

past injustice and how his vision was very much at odds with the current colonial settler ideology and movement. Can you explain a little bit more about that? Sure. Well, I think that among settler colonial theorists, there's a real desire to separate themselves from older ideas like multiculturalism or civil rights. These people don't like those ideas because for multiculturalism to work or for civil rights to work or equal sort of legal equality to work, it's the premise which King formulated and helped to make a sort of part of the American freed was America was a country founded on principles of freedom and equality and didn't keep the promise for everyone, that there were all groups of people who were excluded, obviously,

most importantly, African slaves and their descendants through racism, but also women and also ethnic minorities, that these people didn't get the promise. The promise wasn't kept for them. And so at the march on Washington, King famously said, we've come to collect on a promissory note. We were promised these things, and we didn't get them, and now we're going to demand them. And that was a sort of very ingenious way of thinking about American history because it allows Americans to say our country is good in theory or in essence that the ideas behind our country are good, but we haven't lived up to them. And therefore, in pursuing civil rights, in pursuing equality, we are making America what it was always supposed to be and what it should be. And that's a very powerful vision and really became a sort of official creed for I think Americans in certainly the leadership of both political parties over the, the last 50 years. I think you could see, you know, George W. Bush said things like that about Martin Luther

King and Obama said things like that as well, the idea that we're being summoned to make our country better. But the settler colonial idea is more radical than that because it goes back to the very beginning of European settlement and says this should never have happened at all. And it's not that America is a good idea that hasn't been executed. It's that America is a bad idea and its foundation was crime. And if you think about America that way, it makes any kind of vision of multiculturalism or equality with an American society seem unimportant or sort of hypocritical even or beside the point. What's really wanted is something more radical, which is decolonization, which is to somehow undo this original founding crime. And because it can't really be undone in any practical terms,

it leads to this position of sort of permanent criticism or permanent opposition to American society and American civilization. A lot of what we're talking about today is very popular within academic circles. You talk- Yes, I think with academic humanities, it's a very familiar idea, especially among other people. Right. So for the layperson, the person who is not in academia, are these concepts ones that should really worry them? I would say not worry in the sense of, like there's a conspiracy or a dangerous threat or something like that. That's not really what I'm arguing in the book. But I do think that these are ideas that more and more people are being exposed to either

directly or indirectly, that, you know, the way that we talk about our history or the way that we talk about morality changes over time. And one of the sources of those change are new ideas. And those new ideas often start out seeming very esoteric. And then they become gradually more and more popular and important. Sometimes they're good ideas and sometimes they're bad ideas. Well, you're making me think about, you know, Marxism. in Russia in the early 1900s.

This is what it kind of feels like. There's definitely a parallel. I think that there's an important difference, which is that Marxism, this is also something I get into in the book a bit, was supposed to be an ideology about liberating 99% of humanity from the 1% who are the oppressors. And that's been the case with most progressive movements in the past.

And this settler colonial way of thinking, although it calls itself progressive, is very different structurally because in America or in Canada, it's really pitting the 1% against the 99%, right? It's saying the guilty people are all of us or everyone. It's not saying the capitalists are wrong or the aristocrats are wrong. And once we get rid of them, things will be better. It's saying that we're all guilty and we're all responsible. So I think that that means that it can't really become the basis of a mass political movement in the same way. But I do think that it changes the way that people think about their country. It changes the way we think about, should we love our country? Should we admire it?

Do we think it's a good thing that it exists? And more and more people I'd say would answer that, those questions negatively. And settler colonialism is one of the reasons why. Right. Patriotism helps unify a country. And if young voters are critical of America's history and how it was founded, then this could affect how they approach other countries they see in a similar negative light like Israel. and whether they should provide them with military or financial aid. Is that correct? Definitely. And I think that that's not yet a majority position in American or Canadian politics,

but if you look at these demographic trends, as I said, when the people who are now 18 to 24 are the ones running things, and if they have a very different sort of intuition about this conflict, you could definitely see changes in foreign policy. My last question to you is about populism. Because you talk about how the ideology of settler colonialism is flourishing at the same time as right-wing populism in the U.S. So why is that? Well, the one way that I see it playing out is that extremes polarize each other and they drive each other towards more and more radical ways of thinking.

So if you are someone on the left in the United States and you think that America is becoming fascist and racist, more fascist and racist and sort of heading in that direction, it will make you feel worse about America and think about American history in much more critical ways. And if you're on the right and you see people on the left saying America is an evil country or America should not have existed, that polarizes you in the opposite direction. And you say, we have to fight these people and not let them teach in our schools. And, you know, take away academic freedom because they're indoctrinating our children. That kind of debate, which has been going on in the U.S. for the last 10 years or so, has a tendency to drive people further and further to extremes. So I think that in that sense, right-wing populism and left-wing sort of what we would call it criticism or critical theory about American history feed into each other. And you can see that happening, I think, you know, month by month in the way that these things get debated both online and then in state legislatures. How much of this will inform American politics and even the outcome of the election?

It's hard to say, and specifically with settler colonialism, I think it's hard to say because it is still a term that's new to a lot of people. It's not something that a lot of people are thinking about. But I think to the extent that it feeds into this cycle of polarization, it is playing into this divide, which is sort of the central divide in American politics. For example, over the last couple of years, there was a lot of political debate in the U.S. about critical race theory. And I could see similar debate happening about some of these ideas. It hasn't happened yet, but I could see that happening in the future. And that debate, again, pushed people further towards the extremes in each direction. Part of this is that, as I say at the beginning of the book,

and it's important to acknowledge, these people are reacting against real suffering and real injustice and that's true in the Middle East, and it's obviously true in American history, which is full of both of those things. So the answer isn't to deny that those things are happening or have happened in the past. It's not to deny the suffering and the injustice. The question is, given that history and the place that we are now, how do we move to a future where there's less of it? And I think that this sort of zero-sum conflict way of thinking about it is not likely to give us a better future. Adam, thank you so much. This has been been a really informative and interesting discussion. And you've provided us with so much insight

into the motivations and ideology behind anti-Israel and, to a larger extent, anti-Western movements. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for. I really enjoyed it. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Adam Kirsch. You've given us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email at podcast at monk debates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate and dialogues one conversation at a time. I'm Ricky Gerwitz. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk charitable foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a

five-star rating. again for listening.