"Screen cap this and look at it again in ten years…"

I started writing the following post almost a year ago, in November 2023 in the early days of the genocide in Gaza, and forgot about it due to the whirlwind circumstances of my life at the time. In the months that followed (travel to Europe with the family to work on a research leave grant there for three months, return and reintegration, projects I needed to complete) I forgot I had even written this––it was itemized as a "draft" on my blogger dashboard. But I think it is worth publishing it now, almost a year later, because of the ways in which particular "left" intellectuals defend other "left" intellectuals despite the fact that the latter are defending colonialism. This post was clearly motivated by a fight over twitter with Katerina Katarina Kolozova, who was defending Seyla Benhabib's liberal refusal to sign a letter critical of Israel, an egregious refusal I had criticized at the beginning of November 2023. 

Since that time, Kolozova has deleted her tweets defending Seyla Benhabib, including those in response to me; I should have screen-capped them since much of the following post relies on that discussion. I'm publishing the draft here because, at this time, I think it is telling that the number of "left" intellectuals who waffled about Palestine directly following October 7th have largely still failed to apologize for their participation in outrage propaganda that was designed to justify a genocide. With Sinwar's recent martyrdom, the memory of those who condemned the actions he carried out––who accepted Israeli state-sponsored propaganda about Al-Aqsa Flood as factual (when it was not)––should be recalled until they publicly denounce their participation in what we should all recognize was propaganda to justify genocide.

My response to Kolozova's deleted tweets is a bit difficult to understand because those tweets were deleted. Much of this planned post is based on presuming that readers can also read the link to her tweets and her arguments. Hopefully what she was arguing at the time can be easily reconstructed based on what I wrote below. Also, I think it is worth publishing this now because a large part of this response has to do with the failure to properly understand settler-colonialism *and* the gross misuse of the category of "Indigenous" by Zionists.

After writing my response to Seyla Benhabib's shameful letter, I made the ill-advised decision to respond on Twitter to one of the academics supporting Benhabib's analysis, Katerina Katarina Kolozova, which led to her responding, and me responding to her responses, a discussion which I ended because I felt that it was going nowhere in that particular medium. Indeed, the weirdness of Kolozova's responses in the aforelinked thread (the claim that settlers are neutral, that claims to colonized status are not materialist, and an apparent naïveté about what settler-colonialism is), made me feel that I was either dealing with a dishonest individual asking bad faith questions or someone who had never studied (and was largely disinterested in studying) settler-colonialism as a social phenomenon. Kolozova's claim that we needed to have a Marxist analysis of this phenomenon, when such analyses have existed as far back as the Second Congress of the Third International, seemed to be an abdication of three basic Marxist injunctions I have attempted to follow in my work: i) the concrete analysis of a concrete situation; ii) seek truth from facts; iii) comprehend the world from below (from the position of the oppressed and exploited) rather than from above (the position of the oppressor and exploiter). But her interventions did get me thinking about the need to repeat some important insights, established from the history of anti-colonial struggles and the Marxist apprehension of these struggles, that need to be emphasized as part of any concrete analysis of the concrete situation of settler-colonialism.

The first of these insights is that every class-divided society requires people invested in this class division. Kolozova, in the aforementioned string, wants to make a division between people and the state, but this division does not exist under any Marxist analysis. If class struggle divides societies, then people exist in dominating or dominated classes; there are people who choose to support domination or fight against it, this is the essence of historical materialism. States and governments aren't abstract machines that function above class subjects. When it comes to states and governments that have a settler-colonial history, we have a further complication because class structure develops according to colonial (which is also racial) logic. Hence, in the early days of US and Canadian colonization of the upper western hemisphere, settlers saw themselves as garrison societies opposed to the existence of colonized nations. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and others have examined how these societies were armed colonial enclaves devoted to replacing the native with a new society. Kolozova and those like her seem to be hung up on the notion that "settlers" cannot be occupiers because they just moved to Israel for who knows what random reasons. Okay there is some truth to this: people can end up being migrants into a colonial society for a lot of reasons beyond their control, or they can just be born into these societies due to choices made by previous generations. I live in Canada, which is a settler capitalist state, and I didn't choose to be born here––but I am a descendant of European settlers. I understand that, to paraphrase Patrick Wolfe, colonialism is not an event but an ongoing structural process; I possess a number of social assets that colonized people in Canada do not possess because of how Canada remains a settler-colonial society where the violence from settlement persists to this day in a variety of quotidian forms that sometimes become spectacular when colonized people resist. And the average unreflective Canadian remains invested in this colonial class division. When it comes to Israel, however, we are not talking about 500 years of settler-colonialism, but something very recent in time. So when Kolozova and others complain that Israeli settlers should be treated as a generalized migrant population, they are ignoring the entire logic of this very population: Israel calls on people from every country to move to their state so as to be part of a colonial process; settlers in the occupied territories are usually the most reactionary of this population because they are convinced that they must be armed garrison populations against Palestinians––their racism is quite open. Worries that these people are innocent would be like worrying that Europeans moving to South Africa during the height of Apartheid are also innocent. So we should instead ask the question: why are people intentionally moving into apartheid situations to defend apartheid, what does this tell us about the division of class?

The second of these insights is that comprehending colonialism has nothing to do with appeals to some primordial essence, but about the structural functioning of a system that came into being when a space was colonized by people coming from outside of this space. In the case of Israel, the people who appeal to this primordial essence are the colonizers: largely Ashkenazim who refer to the fact that their religion emerged from Ancient Israel to claim that they are the true natives, when in fact they are Europeans and North Americans. The meaning of colonialism is about how it functions structurally, not by some appeal to a primordial history: did people, for whatever historical or social justification, create a society on top of people who already existed in the same space––is this society violently parasitical? We are talking about the material logic of a social formation and the ideology this formation generates. Palestinians are people who resulted from a history of successive pre-modern wars and conversions: Judaism was once the dominant religion in the region, but then there was Christianization, and then there was Islamicization. The same Indigenous population saw portions of the population convert to Christianity, and then convert to Islam, while remnants of the previous religious alignments continued to exist. There was an unbroken existence of the Indigenous population's life there, with its own history of migration in regards to the surrounding nations, that was demarcated by religious conversions. The establishment of the modern State of Israel, however, was a colonial event: it was the result of Europeans who upheld a religious expression that originated from this area deciding that, since their religion came from that area they had the right to claim it as their own. Again: an appeal to a primordial essence based on religion, and it is noteworthy that the original Zionist movement was very aware that they were not the Indigenous population (because at that time anything non-European and Indigenous outside of Europe was scene as thoroughly barbaric and savage), but in fact European colonizers. Similarly, and in a pre-modern terminology, the Crusaders marched on Jerusalem because they felt they had the right to it because they were Christians and Christianity––not Islam––originated from this space. This is why today's Christian Zionism aligns with the aims of Israel: they both see themselves as the possessors of this space, based on a notion of religious primordial essence, regardless of the fact that people have lived there for generations through multiple religious conversions.

I am not sure if I was planning to add a third or even a fourth insight to my response to Kolozova. The fact that she deleted her tweets makes it difficult to recall what I wanted to write in this context. As an aside, it is funny I don't recall writing this blog draft; it exists in a time of a lot of anxiety and stress. But it is worth noting that some of what I was saying here was related to an essay about settler-colonialism I was working on at the time, and that showed up in that issue of Material that I also worked on as an editor in the months I was away in Europe.

I think it is telling that one of my last communiques with Kolozova before she deleted her tweets was: "Screen cap this and look at it again in ten years, when everyone understands that a genocide happened, and see how you feel then." Clearly I didn't listen to my own advice and screen-cap whatever she said at the time. Hopefully she did, and learns from what she wrote, and that her deletion of her part of that tweet string means that she has reconsidered her poor understanding of settler-colonialism and Israel's genocidal war.