The Eternal Settler

In Canada, a fresh iteration of anti-Judaism takes shape. Ben Wexler, a recent graduate from McGill University in Montreal, watched with alarm as a wave of attacks swept through his hometown’s Jewish community. A series of firebombings, shootings, and vandalism targeted Jewish schools, synagogues, community centres, and businesses, beginning after October 7 and continuing into the present.  At the same time, protests against Israel often cross into explicit antisemitism and incitement. Wexler notes a curious variation on anti-Zionist formulas: Canada’s Jews – the Diaspora’s third-largest community, at 300,000 strong – are regarded as a distinctly ‘settler’ population, alongside the Yishuv and the modern state of Israel.

 

 

“What did y’all think decolonization meant?,” reads the hyper-viral tweet that circulated after October 7.

As antisemitic violence erupted in Canada, I could not help but wonder if this, too, is “what decolonization meant.” When Jewish schools are shot at, is that decolonization? (There have been five gunfire attacks against Canadian Jewish schools since October 2023.) How about when a synagogue is firebombed? After all, I can think of no measure by which a Jew in Canada is less a settler than a Jew within Israel’s 1948 borders. And it must be admitted that most Canadian Jewish institutions are Zionist, so if “Zionism” is the threshold justifying murder, then those lives are equally forfeit.

Phoebe Maltz-Bovy, an editor at the Canadian Jewish News, has already asked “Where, on planet Earth, would a Jew not be considered a settler?”^[1] The people attacking synagogues in Montreal consider the Jews here a foreign element, just as Hamas considers Jews in the Middle East a foreign element. Indeed, a good portion of Jewish history consists of Jews persisting in places where the local population reviles them, a truth that coexists uneasily with the Manichean division between settler and indigene. Jewish settlement in Europe during the Middle Ages was in the gift of the ruler. In periods of peasant, noble, or burgher rebellion, Jewish presence itself became an instantiation of the sovereign’s oppression. 

References to Jews as colonists long predate Zionism. During the French Revolution, politicians and pamphleteers warned that granting Jews equality would transform Alsace into a “colonie des juifs”. Lorenzo Veracini – a leading scholar of settler colonial studies – argues that “vampire stories are inherently settler colonial stories…vampires, after all, are pale and exotic beings that empty the land and are obsessed about owning it [sic].”^[2] Not coincidentally, the vampire—unholy, avaricious, immortal, atavistic, parasitic, mystical, blood-drinking, lustful, “pale and exotic”—approximates a clear set of antisemitic typologies. So does the common notion of Israel as a fundamentally artificial society, appropriative rather than productive, international rather than rooted, a vampire among nations.

It is not surprising, given the instability of these categories, that some in the academy now talk about Canadian Jews as a specific class of settler. At Concordia University, pro-Palestine students chanted “colonizer!” at pro-Israel students (most born and raised in Montreal). At McGill, pro-Israel counter-demonstrators were met with the chant: “Settlers, settlers, go back home.”  Where is home? Not Israel, but not Montreal, either, apparently. A prominent student activist with the McGill encampment library wrote online: “would just like to remind quebec that the zionist community is overwhelmingly anglophone,” winking to the Quebecois nationalist idea of Jews as an outpost of anglophone hegemony.^[3] Universite de Montreal instructor Yanise Arab only made the logic explicit by shouting: “Go back to Poland!” 

In February, videos of pro-Palestine protestors outside of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital made the rounds on the Internet. Politicians and Jewish community organizations accused the protestors of targeting Mount Sinai because of its founding as a Jewish hospital. Protestors objected, most claiming that the hospital was not targeted at all. Dr. Katherine Blouin, an archeology professor at University of Toronto Scarborough, took a different tack. “A reminder: Mount Sinai is located in Egypt and a Greek Orthodox monastery bearing my name [St. Catherine] is located at its foot,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Zionist attempts to turn multi-faith, multiethnic, and historically layered spaces located in Palestine and Egypt into ‘purely’ Jewish loci is colonial erasure.”

Blouin echoes standard anti-Zionist formulas contrasting an idyllic, Christian/Islamic past with a Jewish exclusionary present. In this telling, the Christian and Islamic appropriation of Judaism testifies to their inclusivity; never mind that Jews were subsequently excluded and persecuted precisely for their failure to acknowledge the supremacy of Christianity or Islam. The construction of St. Catherine’s on Justinian I’s orders came around the same time as the emperor prohibited the study of the Mishnah to bring Jewish practice in line with Christian dogma (thus transforming a “purely Jewish” tradition into something “multifaith, multiethnic, and historically layered”).^[4] Blouin innovates by applying the imperial nostalgist approach not only to Palestine, not only to Egypt, but also to Canada! The founding of Mount Sinai Hospital in 1923 becomes part of a global project of “colonial erasure,” which now encompasses more or less the whole of Jewish tradition, insofar as it fails to be absorbed into the surrounding majority cultures. First Nations disappear in this telling entirely. Instead, the Jew becomes the settler par excellence in a melding of replacement theology and postcolonial jargon; he confiscates both the land and traditions of others at global scale.

A similar ideological development can be traced in a referendum question posed to students at the University of British Columbia with the backing of campus pro-Palestine and progressive groups (before widespread outrage prevented its moving forward). Alongside much more expansive demands for BDS, the referendum called for the university to “end Hillel BC’s lease on unceded Musqueam territory.” There were other reasons given for the targeting of the campus’ main Jewish student organization, but the emphasis on unceded land should not be overlooked as a justifying factor. Other UBC locales did not receive such a disclaimer in the same referendum. The Nest Building is merely the Nest Building, the AMS Food Bank is merely the AMS Food Bank. But the Jews squat on unceded land.

Efforts to sacralize Canadian anti-Zionism took on a quasi-parodic character by April. Students established an encampment for Palestine on McGill campus, and the university administrators quickly threatened removal. In response, a letter circulated from the Kanienkehaka Traditional Council, ostensibly on behalf of the Mohawk People, approving of the encampment and denouncing “the behavior of the european for the last 500 hundred years [sic].” Dozens of Canadian professors shared the letter enthusiastically, as did their faculty organizations for Palestine. “This is a wonderful text,” wrote Dr. Blouin. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” wrote Vincent Wong, Assistant Professor of Law at Windsor University (referencing a widely read text of postcolonial theory, which insists very vaguely that decolonization should mean something more concrete). “The decapitalization of europe and colonial terms and assertion of rightful sovereignty is just 🔥🔥,” wrote Vasanthi Venkatesh, another Professor of Law at the University of Windsor. The student protestors printed out a large version of the letter to pin up outside their encampment. To these protestors, the letter was not simply politically agreeable, but sacred and legally binding.

Organizations like the Kanienkehaka Traditional Council are distinct from the Mohawk band council that governs and is elected by Mohawk people. Sovereignty is not unified among First Nations; band councils work through the Canadian state, while a proliferation of traditional councils contest the authority of the band councils. Many traditional councils are fringe among Indigenous communities, but Canadian academics latch onto their favored sacred tokens with much the same enthusiasm as they do Jewish anti-Zionists. The Kanienkehaka Traditional Council is led by Stuart Myiow, signatory to the letter. He attempted a failed putsch against the band council in the 1990s. Today, his “traditional council” appears to consist of hokey spiritualists and far right influencers, few of them Native.

A characteristic rant from Stuart Myiow’s public Facebook, denouncing what he calls “the jewish/zionist/free mason/british-nazi corruption” (note the clever decapitalization):

“The world is seeing first hand as to why things have been collectively done against the jews world wide – they are the very thing that they claimed genocided upon them and so the whole world has had it with the colonial invasion they have been ushered into by britain to continue their holy war invasion of the seat of the devil that spawns world wide corruption of humanity!”

Nazism, Satanism, Colonialism, and Imperialism are thus recapitulated in the Jewish “colonial invasion” of the world itself. Antisemitic theories of these sorts are nothing new. Apparently, they translate with shocking ease into academic postcolonial language, promising to expiate the original colonial sin through global struggle against Zionism.

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One should not entirely dismiss settler-colonial theory, or even its application to Israel. Yet it must be said that the contortions presented above find their source in some of the field’s foundational works. Patrick Wolfe is widely considered the founder of settler colonial studies. His writing is assigned in every class on the subject. In discussing Zionism, he combines a stark ignorance of Jewish history with a conviction that Israel is not only a settler colonial state but the ideal type of a settler colonial state. This ideal settler state, largely Wolfe’s tautological construction, buttresses the distinctness of settler colonial studies and represents his trademark ‘elimination of the native’ in its most refined form.

Wolfe’s highly influential 2006 article, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” introduces Theodor Herzl and promptly misattributes a quote from Der Judenstaat to Altneuland. This is a clerical error, but the mishandling of such fundamental works does not bode well. Even more shocking is Wolfe’s claim that the Zionists imagined a “goyim-rein (Gentile-free) zone,” a deafening echo of Nazi language.^[5] He seems to consider this an historic Zionist term, although no source is provided. In Wolfe’s telling, Zionism speaks the language of Nazism decades before Nazism itself, and the Holocaust transforms into a mere echo of the eliminationist ideal of Zionism. The closest analogue to this paradox of anachronism might be Marty McFly teaching Chuck Berry “Johnny B. Goode.” 

But let us move to Wolfe’s 2012 “Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics,” where he opens a more focused discussion of Zionism’s uniqueness. He admits to certain exceptional factors: first, the lack of a Zionist metropole; second, that most Zionist land purchases prior to 1947 occurred in “at least notional conformity” with Ottoman and later British colonial law. But fear not! While Zionism “differed strikingly” from Australian or American settler colonialism, it actually “constituted an intensification of, rather than a departure from, settler colonialism.” So, Zionism’s seeming disqualifications actually make it the most settler colonialist, presenting an even “more exclusive logic of elimination” while simultaneously casting in stark relief general logics of settler colonialism.

To the first point, i.e., Zionism’s lack of metropole, Wolfe presents “world Zionism” as a “diffuse metropole” in its influence over colonial governments. Its internationalism is, paradoxically, both exceptional and unexceptional. After all, land speculation in Australia and the United States was itself an international enterprise. Zionism therefore “enables us to see some of the general features of settler colonialism with enhanced clarity.” In a jarring moment of self-awareness, Wolfe describes Zionism’s relationship to settler colonialism as analogous to the way that “antisemitism furnished a lexicon for capitalism to talk about itself.” One wonders where Wolfe sees himself in this analogy: perhaps arguing that Jewish usury merely represents the most efficient and ruthless manifestation of capitalism. In the case of the Jewish colonialists, at least, he notes that they coordinated “international finance and east-European migrants” with “unparalleled effectiveness.”

On the question of the purchase of land, Wolfe’s argument is pretzel-shaped. After all, he has already established Zionism as an intensification of settler colonialism. Yet, he admits, pre-state Zionist land policy “contrasts sharply with the lawless violence that characterized the acquisition of Native territory in Australia and the United States.” So, the lawful acquisition of land must move teleologically toward violent and lawless dispossession: “The Nakba simply accelerated, very radically, the slow-motion means to those ends that had been the only means available to Zionists while they were still building their colonial state.” The policies of land purchase and the construction of a Jewish economy are more brutal even than the lawless violence of colonization in the anglophone colonies, and we can be certain of this, because they led to the lawless violence of the Nakba. 

Wolfe sinks deeper into contradiction in another article from the same year, “New Jews for Old: Settler State Formation and the Impossibility of Zionism.” He insists that the experience of the native overrides the ideology of the settler: “Palestinian entitlement does not depend on whether or not it can be shown that, somewhere in nineteenth-century Europe, a Jewish theorist or theorists imagined expelling the Natives from the land of Zion.” Yet his conception of Zionism as a uniquely exclusionary settler colonialism is entirely based on inference from ideology: “Whereas Natives might be assimilated (albeit in manageable quantities) into Euro-Australian or Euro- American futures, there was no place for Palestinians in Ashkenazi Zionism’s renovated past.” Again: “the atavistic structuring of Zionism’s Jewish nation subtended a particularly rigorous form of settler colonialism that comprehensively excluded non-Jews.” Goyim-rein, remember? Zionism supplants the anglophone colonies as the image of settler colonial eliminationism.

As argued in Dmitri Shumsky’s Beyond the Nation State, multinational formations predominated in Zionist thought until the late 1920s. This suggests strong assimilationist possibilities within the movement – although Wolfe’s theories are determinedly resistant to such petty details. It is true that plans for the violent “transfer” of Arabs persisted well beyond 1948 and gain newfound strength today, emboldened by the state’s fascist turn and the 2018 Nation State Law. The actual policy pursued by the state following 1948, however, hews closer to assimilationist policies of the anglophone settler colonies. In a process termed “subordinate integration” by Arnon Degani, the extension of citizenship encouraged Palestinians to advocate against their unequal treatment through the methods of liberal democracy.^[6] Insofar as Israel is distinct in the settler colonial paradigm, it is because of the continued possibility for a national resolution—the fulfillment of Palestinian national desires in the West Bank and Gaza. Even Wolfe admits to the importance of the West Bank occupation in transforming the status of Arab citizens of Israel. The 1948 Palestinian population was “manageably contained” until 1967, when they “suddenly became part of a demographic threat.” But to acknowledge the reversibility of West Bank occupation and the legitimacy of Palestinian ethnic-national aspirations would undermine the monologic role that Israel embodies in Wolfe’s work. He manages this problem by presenting 1967 as activating Zionism’s latent essence: “this thoroughgoing exclusiveness, which continues to inform Israeli resistance to anything resembling a policy of Native assimilation, was not effectively tested until 1967.”  Wolfe therefore goes on to argue that the two-state solution merely implies another Nakba, the elimination of Israel’s domestic Palestinian population (the Jewish state still supposed to be Goyim-rein, whatever its current status). 

I am hardly the first to observe that Wolfe’s theory is defeatist, anti-political even.^[7] The details of a Palestinian nationalism do not feature in this calculus. But for all Wolfe insists that “the logic of elimination is prior to features that distinguish settler societies among themselves,” he seems inexorably drawn to Zionism’s specificities. Rather than consider that Zionism might be a rather peculiar settler colonialism – or best understood through another lens – Wolfe shapes his theory backward to fit an idea of the ultimate settler state. Israel is constructed as especially settler colonial: through its internationalism; through its “atavistic structuring”; through Holocaust inversion; in a word, through Judaism. The Australian scholar migrates into abstraction, placing the Jewish state at the center of his moral universe. 

To undo settler colonialism, then, the Jews themselves must be reformed. In a de-Zionized Holy Land, Wolfe explains, “Europeans, Ashkenazi citizens of a plural democracy…would gain [in the new state] a lot of Arabs, many of them coincidentally Jewish.” Paradoxically, this unified, postcolonial state demands a reabsorption of Jews into their supposedly natural racial identities. Wolfe’s “Arab Jews,” we are assured, do not share “ethnicity, culture, or history with European Jews”; they are temporarily disgraced Arabs, brought to Israel by the trickery of the Zionists. Decolonization becomes synonymous with re-assimilation—not assimilation to a shared, civic, Israeli-Palestinian identity, but rather to the antediluvian categories of European or Arab. 

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To some extent these ideas recall longstanding Arab and Islamic nationalist convictions. Jews in the Arab world were suspected first as allies of the colonial world powers, later as hidden Zionists. Their denaturalization and forced emigration to France and Israel literalized their social alterity, transforming them from internal enemies into colonists foreign to the Middle East. The discontents of decolonization in the Arab world found an easy target in Zionism. Noémie Issan-Benchimol and Elie Beressi write in K: “just as in Christian mythology Judah obscures Rome as the embodiment of evil, so in contemporary Arab discourse Jews and Zionism embody, recapitulate and ultimately supplant European colonialism as the figure of oppression.”^[8] The Franco-Algerian writer Houria Bouteldja is perhaps the most enthusiastic standard-bearer for these ideas in the modern Western academy. In her 2016 book Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous, Bouteldja declares that Jean-Paul Sartre’s support for the existence of a Jewish state means that “Sartre will die anti-colonialist and Zionist. He will die white.” For Bouteldja, Zionism defines the line between white and indigene. As Ivan Segre writes in his review, “this is a new cosmology with Israel at its center and nothing at its periphery.”^[9] The entire history of imperialism now is recapitulated in the relationship to Israel. European imperialism and Zionism “tore you from us, from your land, from your Arab-Berberness” (note the foregrounding of the possessive). Jews became Zionists, upon whom the course of imperialist history since 1492 must be resolved. 

Pro-Palestine activists laid out the same philosophy on March 5 while gathered outside Montreal’s oldest synagogue, the Spanish & Portuguese.^[10] The protest was nominally organized by the anti-Zionist group Independent Jewish Voices against a real estate fair advertising land in Israel and the occupied West Bank. They gave a Jewish façade to Montreal4Palestine, whose representatives led with a torrent of antisemitic abuse livestreamed to 30 000 Instagram followers.  “You tried to oppress and colonialize South Africa and Germany…every single tree and rock you touch is going to be free,” announced one man with a megaphone, shifting from neo-Nazi conspiracy to a Hadith about Muslims slaughtering Jews. “Every single one of you is a settler,” declared another. “In Palestine, like you are a settler here. Because half of you are either from Poland, or Romania, or Germany, or Morocco, or Tunisia, or Iraq. You can’t even claim your own country; you want to claim Palestine.” The discourse is religious as well as political, decreeing the Jew’s appropriate position after their supersession. As in Augustine, he is cursed to wander the earth – the Zionist is a settler everywhere. Like Bouteldja, like Blouin, the man extends love to Jews who understand their place in this theological order. He mocks the counter-protestors for their secularism, telling the women to cover their heads. “They don’t claim Judaism and Judaism does not claim them,” he says. Pointing at the Neturei Karta: “The real Jews are standing over here.”

The existence of a Jewish state presents an eschatological hiccup, but it is brushed away as a brief interlude to a god-decreed condition of statelessness. “The state of Israel will be dismantled,” he promises, “and you will all be settlers, looking for a place to take you, just like when you came to Palestine.” For a moment, ‘settler’ shifts from description to prescription – a promise to make Jews refugees, therefore ‘settlers,’ once more. The merging of ‘settler’ with ‘refugee’ should not be overlooked. In Home Rule, sociologist Nandita Sharma argues for understanding modern statelessness in terms of a “Postcolonial New World Order,” in which National-Natives protected by the state resist Colonizer-Migrants designated outside of the protection of the state. Buddhist officials in Myanmar and Hindu officials in India appeal to the colonizer-native logic against Muslim minorities; Israelis appeal to it in their dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank; Azerbaijan appealed to it in the expulsion of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, anti-migrant rhetoric reliably constructs migrants as invaders or colonizers. Renaud Camus, the French author who helped popularize the Great Replacement Theory, crows his admiration of Fanon.

The promise to return Jews to statelessness, making them ‘settlers’ once again, reflects this assimilation of indigeneity to the power of the nation state. It modernizes historical religious and racial supremacism, but also displaces real anxiety about today’s postcolonial matrix. Few populations know more of statelessness in the past century than Palestinians. Expelled from the nascent Jewish state; denied a state by mutual intransigence and the Israeli settler project; denied citizenship by many of the Arab states to which they fled; displaced in the hundreds of thousands by war in Kuwait and more recently Syria; now over a million displaced by Israel’s war in Gaza. As for Canada, Arabs and Muslims are victims of a growing nativism from the left and right, in a country with an acute housing crisis no party seems ready to solve. “If you don’t want to be ‘kidnapped,’ get out of someone else’s country,” declares one pro-Palestine poster in downtown Toronto. An ugly principle, certainly, but uglier still because it echoes so clearly anti-migrant rhetoric, yet the author seems completely unaware. In K, Cyril Lemieux argues that French Muslim antisemitism involves a partial assimilation of Republican antisemitism.^[11] French Muslim antisemites believe French Jews enjoy a state-sanctioned communal solidarity denied to Muslims; they therefore blame their exclusion from the national collective on a pollution of French universalism by Jews. Likewise, the relative stability of Jewish life in Canada vis-à-vis the state can make the Jewish community appear as the perverting force within Canadian multiculturalism. 

A certain decolonial antisemitism therefore emerges at the intersection between theological, academic, and activist cultures. It offers a palliative to unresolved dilemmas of Canadian multiculturalism and settler colonialism. “At the end of this road,” writes David Schraub, “Jewishness exists as Whiteness’ crystallized, undislodgeable core.”^[12] By way of anti-Zionist critique, a Muslim Arab finds another group to call invaders. By way of anti-Zionist critique, a white settler transforms her Christian name into an embodiment of multiculturalism. Indeed, multiculturalism itself is rescued from disrepute in the Canadian academy, ceasing to be a settler colonial ideology justifying Canada’s land theft so long as it excludes “Zionists.” By way of anti-Zionist critique, a student union of settlers can finally make authoritative decisions over unceded indigenous land. The good kind of multiculturalism, the good kind of settler, can be distinguished from the bad by its relationship to the Zionists. Israel becomes the ultimate settler colony, and global Jewry its “diffuse metropole.”  

Nor is this process unidirectional. Fear of rising antisemitism can sanitize nativist and anti-Arab hatred in the Canadian language of politesse, and Canadian politicians—Jewish and non-Jewish—take advantage. The dominant Jewish community frames for understanding antisemitism, in Canada as elsewhere, remain either martyrological or triumphalist. The former anticipates mass violence behind every corner, while the latter foresees divine rescue. The West replaces the hand of God in a certain secularized triumphalism; Israel, the Jews, and Western society defeat their enemies as one. But neither mass violence nor “total victory” lies in any near future for Canadian Jewry.  Rather, we risk an intensification of the status quo: more securitized synagogues and community centres; more random violence and vandalisms; more open antisemitism in schools and universities; and more political dependence on the state and the police. If antisemitism is social fact—not divine judgment—it is incumbent upon Jewish communities to treat it as such. If Jewish safety in the public sphere requires violent enforcement and an intensification of the fetishistic identification of Jewishness with “the West,” we transform ourselves into colonists. It is an unfair choice, but it is the choice that stands before us.

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Benjamin Wexler