"Settlers"-style discourse will never benefit Palestinians
The left's default adjudication mechanism has minimal utility and cannot defeat entrenched interests
Identity politics are infinitely elastic. The purveyors of identity politics seek not to adjudicate claims regarding truth or morality, nor to weigh the costs vs. benefits of any potential beliefs or actions. The solitary goal of these politics is the establishment of a hierarchy wherein some are broadly deemed “good” according to their identity markers and others are deemed “bad.” The Good Ones are always correct, always wise, and always moral. Even their most heinous actions must be understood within an identity context and forgiven as a consequence of uncontrollable social forces. The Bad Ones, meanwhile, are always suspect, typically tainted, and even if they happen to agree with the proper cause their opinions are never fully correct by virtue of emanating from someone who is bad.
This is by definition and design. There is no way around it. And it applies 100% equally to the identity politics we associate with the right wing as it does to those we associate with the left wing.
The trouble is, identity politics do not exist in a vacuum. They are embedded in much larger social and institutional systems in which some people already have power and others do not. These empowered people will not countenance any real threats to their power, and this fact will inevitably be reflected in the design of the identity hierarchies.
Again, this is a very basic observation, and it’s why the broad American left spent several decades promoting the ideal of racial blindness: if people succeed or fail not by virtue of their actions or the content of their characters but according the presence or absence of arbitrary markers, people who belong to privileged groups will inevitably succeed, and those on the outside will inevitably fail. The only fair way to run a society is to strive to provide a baseline of comfort and dignity to everyone. Accepting the fact that material wealth will never be distributed fully equitably, we should at least make an earnest attempt to ensure every human has their needs fulfilled, and establish a system for allocating comforts according to objective baselines that reward decency and competence regardless of uncontrollable identity factors.
This paradigm did not result immediate equality, however, and therefore it was evil. Reactionary elements among the identitiarian left began to insist that the idealization of de-racialization was the primary or even sole cause of the existence of racial disparities. We made a horrible mistake in abandoning a system in which comfort is unfairly allocated according to identity. Instead, we should embrace an even more extreme version of such a system, only with the identity poles inverted. Th–that’ll fix everything.
While this approach to racist anti-racism has only entered the mainstream in the last several years, it’s been percolating among the dumbest factions of the left for decades. One of its stupidest manifestations is found in an analytical frame called “Settler Colonialism,” popularized by a book by J. Sakai (a mysterious figure who is almost certainly a fictional creation of some malignant government agency). It’s called Settlers, and is summarized by Wikipedia thusly:
Settlers argues that the class system in the United States is built upon the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and that the white working class in the United States constitutes a privileged labor aristocracy that lacks proletarian consciousness. Arguing that the white working class possesses a petit-bourgeois and reformist consciousness, Sakai posits that the colonized peoples of the United States constitutes its proletariat.
Awesome, great. Real big brain shit.
Now, of course, First Nations Americans were horrifically displaced, and many Black Americans were horrifically enslaved, and these undeniable facts should have a prominent place in any honest reading of American history. But that’s not what Settlers seeks to achieve. The point of the book, and the project it spawned, is to bifurcate the American people into those who are always good by virtue of the (largely imagined and/or inapplicable) historical implications of their identity markers, and those who are always bad according those same implications. It’s almost as idiotically dualistic as Ibram Kendi’s work, only with some superficial Marxian lingo sprinkled throughout.
The Settlers frame leaves us with two choices, 1) you can recognize that human history is rife with violent conflict, that the present-day locations of all people are a consequence of immeasurably complex struggles dating back millennia, and then work toward a relatively equitable society with the goal of ensuring that no person suffers unduly because of events that occurred years or even centuries before they were born. Or, 2) you can arbitrarily declare some people as the rightful inhabitants of certain areas and others inherently immoral and violent occupiers of those areas. If you choose option 2, the moral calculus remains the same regardless of whether your sympathies lie with the winners or the losers of past conflicts. The framing is reactionary, which is why it’s gotten so popular so quickly.
Option 2 might appear to have some material grounding, but in practice it always, without exception, redounds to paper-thin claims of ancestral righteousness. Take, for example, the following cartoon, which I have seen posted sincerely in dozens of venues:
Now, of course, it’s fair to say that the wealth of the United States and EU has been built largely via the exploitation of the global south. I’m not denying that. But what is being suggested by this cartoon? East Asia apparently does not exist. Spain and Portugal–two of the most brutal imperial powers of the last millennium–are exempted from the stains of colonial spoils, presumably due to the left’s very recent decision that Spanish and Portuguese-speaking people no longer count as white. South America, a continent containing 400 million speakers of Spanish and Portuguese that is 90% Christian, is inscrutably neutral… and so is California for some reason. And, of course, the entire African people have always existed as one cohesive entity, not quite human beings but resources to be mined, their existence bereft of the conflicts, massacres, enslavements, and displacements that have been perpetrated and suffered by every other group throughout the whole of human history.
My point is that didactic manichaeism inevitably results in a very stupid understanding of world events. And the stupidity of this framing is very, very easy to exploit.
The left is fine with this framing when it’s exploited by their own–hence the widespread tolerance of white ladies who have gained influential positions within academe by pretending to be Native American or Hispanic. Since the late 1960’s, the primary goal of the American left has been to lower the bar of access to the Professional and Managerial class for members of their preferred identity groups. Childish morality plays serve this function excellently. But when it comes to matters of international affairs, the reactionary nature of this frame is impossible to overcome.
Here is the American Jewish Community’s online whitepaper about how Jewish people are the rightful inhabitants of Palestine, due to vague claims of being colonized. Here is a midwit actor from Stranger Things proclaiming his support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians by telling American viewers they are the real settlers. Here is a pre-10/7 piece in the Jerusalem Post about how it’s terrorism for people to not want to lose their homes to annexation, because Israelis have an ancestral claim to them. Here is a story from the Times of Israel about the purported discovery of a 2000-year-old coin that proves Palestine was always the land of Zion.
All of these pieces come to the same general conclusion, and all are taken from the playbook of the identitarian left.
Feel free to scoff at any of these. Your response does not matter. These claims can be made freely and loudly and effectively because they are being made by empowered people who are playing within the bounds of discourse that you have for designed them. So far as the official narrative is concerned, they are the good guys. Everything they say is correct, by virtue of them being the good guys. And there’s nothing you can do to contradict or complicate their claims without casting yourselves among the bad guys.
You have abandoned principles. You have forbidden all considerations of context. You demanded everyone understand the world as good vs. evil. You think you won, and in some narrow areas you have, but it turns out you’re not always gonna be the one who gets to makes the designations.