Dr. Gilad Noam ד"ר גיל-עד נועם

@drgiladnoam · Twitter · 2025-02-04 15:41 UTC

I recently read "On Settler Colonialism", a thought-provoking book by Adam Kirsch. It delves into the rise of “settler-colonialism” narratives, highlighting how they often oversimplify complex issues. Kirsch notes also how these narratives have been used to justify violence like the Hamas Oct.7 attacks. Two personal take-aways on the problem with these approaches: 1. Factual blind spots: When the world is categorized into “oppressor” and “oppressed”, facts that don’t neatly fit in these categories are dismissed or ignored altogether. Cognitive bias at its worst. 2. Legal blind spots: Framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict solely through the lens of settler-colonialism ignores – and outright negates – the Jew people's right to self-determination in its ancient homeland. Over the last 30-40 years, critical theories have challenged existing legal constructs, such as third world approaches to international law (TWAIL) and feminist approaches to international law. While I didn’t agree with much of what they promoted, I appreciated their quintessentially “Jewish” spirit of questioning common assumptions. However, Adam Kirsch's book makes a compelling case that settler-colonialist theories have reached a creative dead-end: rather than challenging existing assumptions and empowering us to develop new sensitivities, they now dilute the discourse, leading to absurd results that defy basic human rights principles. In other words, settler-colonialist approaches have themselves become a new dogma. It’s time for a critical reassessment of these approaches.