No Settler Colonial State has a Right to Exist
Resources for Pushing Back against the Orgy of Assent
Greetings.
This probably won’t be an essay of precision or profound coherency, because if you read my Twitter feed you’ll know that my political convictions and passions have been running high for the past few days. Last night Israel announced that the entire northern half of Gaza must be evacuated. This is nothing more than a second Nakba, a form of what we now call ethnic cleansing. If the evacuation happens, there will be no return. Add to this the violence with impunity that has been happening at the hands of settlers on the West Bank, and it’s fair to call it genocide. What’s perhaps worse (or at least just as bad) is the fact that Western, liberal democracies are supporting these awful things; the so-called rules-based international order has at its core some problematic assumptions about the legitimacy of settler-colonial political states like Israel. Just a few weeks (or even days) ago, Israel’s critics were openly calling it an apartheid state. Now they are silent and complicit. If you are reading this, I would encourage you not to do the same. Find something meaningful to do in these very dark days. Do not be complicit, do not engage in “inner rebellion;” there are meaningful forums for us to make a difference, if only to bear witness to what may unfold very soon.
In his passage on so-called primitive accumulation, Marx correctly notes that the abstract history of the political economists was in fact a history of blood and fire. Ideological constructions like the Doctrine of Discovery, the Labor Theory of Value, and the Will of God are all various ideological accretions, various attempts at turning force, power, violence and might into discourses of natural right. This is especially the case in settler-colonial orders, where colonists need to engage in a two-front conceptual battle, namely to convince the international community of the fundamental justice of removal and occupation, and perhaps more importantly to convince themselves. This process takes up a monumental amount of intellectual energy, and under profound stress cracks in the system of ideas can appear. I have written quite a bit here about the old neoliberal consensus and the new conjuncture; I would suggest that a similar (and related!) thing is happening when it comes to conceiving forms of American empire. American attitudes towards our own imperial ambitions and obligations are changing generationally. Like it or not, Israel’s fate is tied to that empire and these changes; this is in part because both states are egregious examples of settler-colonialism. I would suggest that if events happen as it appears they will, and a second Nakba happens, then all pretenses of justice, equanimity and even basic humanity will fall away. It may take years to happen, but in the order of settler-colonial ideas and practices, the old consensus will shatter and a new conjuncture will appear. We need to intervene now to prepare for that event.
No settler-colonial state has a “right to exist.” Not the US, not Israel. See Marx’s comments above on blood and fire, which must be redeemed and not turned into grist for an ideological mill.
My final point may be the most controversial. North Americans in particular imbibe settler colonial myths from infancy; this is perhaps why they (we) are so vulnerable to infantilizing narratives about natural right, why we have engaged in an actual paroxysm of surplus assent over the past few days. In a proximate sense, I would suggest that this collective orgy of genocidal wish-fulfillment is a return and remainder of the years immediately following 9/11; at least in the national mythological imagination, Americans were tempted to lash out at our own Muslim populations, but we restrained from doing so. At the level of both economics and culture, there are no longer any reasons for restraint: at least in the common American mind, nothing is gained by it. After Trump, all we have left is grievance and rage, and now it has found a target. The best way to understand the righteousness behind that rage from a North American perspective, is by a better understanding of Native American history. All eyes must be on Gaza, but that gaze should be informed by Indigenous understandings. As much as possible, I would encourage my dear readers to endeavor to understand how tribal communities experienced removal, assimilation and of course most importantly extirpation and genocide at the hands of settlers. There are subterranean currents flowing between the Indigenous populations of both North America and Gaza, past and present: the best way to comprehend the shared history of settler-colonialism is by attending to those narrative currents, cultivating them for a discourse of resistance that might survive the awful derangements of the current moment.