Adam Kirsch: Thanks very much.

Adam Kirsch: Well, settler colonialism is an idea that is talked about a lot in the academy. I think if you've studied history or a lot of humanity subjects, social sciences in the last 15 years, you probably encountered the idea of settler colonialism.

And, it's a term that's undergone some changes in meaning over time.

Really, it refers to--sort of the best one-sentence definition I could give would be to say that it's the idea that countries founded by European colonialism--primarily countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, and then often by extension, Israel--are sort of permanently shaped by the original sin of colonization. So that the countries, even hundreds of years after the original settlement, remain shaped by this settler colonial experience. And that a lot of the injustices and problems, as critics see it, with those countries can be explained by reference to that European settlement.

The idea of a settler colony is older than the last 15 years. Really, when people started to talk about different kinds of colonialism after World War II, during the decolonization era, there were different models of colonialism in different parts of the world. And, a settler colony would be a colony like Algeria or Rhodesia where Europeans had come to settle but had not displaced or replaced the native population.

So, in those places--in Algeria, you've had maybe 10% European population, 90% Arab and Berber. Population in Rhodesia, slightly less European population.

But, in those situations you had a very clear and distinct settler class. And the idea of decolonization in those settings was to take power and property from the settlers, and maybe in the end to expel them. Which is what happened in Algeria after France declared defeat and Algeria became an independent country: most of the European settlers left very quickly.

And that was different from other models of colonialism. Like, in India where there was very little settlement and power was exercised in different ways.

But, in the 1990s, settler colonialism came to be applied to countries with a very different history and situation, first in Australia and then in North America.

And, thinking about those countries as settler colonial societies means something very different. Because, in those countries--to, say, the United States, where I am--98% of the population is not indigenous. Only 2% is indigenous. So, in that situation, you can't decolonize the United States in the same way that you could decolonize Algeria by getting rid of the settlers. Right?

So, if you refer to a country like the United States as a settler colonial country, it has different implications. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to drive out all the settlers. But instead it means that you want to acknowledge that the country was sort of founded on the crime of colonialism, of settlement, and change things about it that are directly related to that. And, it lines up with a lot of Progressive critique of the United States and other societies. So, people talk about the environment, about capitalism and inequality, about gender relations--but framing them as the results of settler colonialism.

Adam Kirsch: There are some academic theorists who do talk about what decolonization would mean in a more concrete way. Usually they don't have a program and can't spell it out. One of the things I say in the book is that it's significant that when activists and theorists talk about what it would mean to decolonize the United States, they usually say, 'We have to imagine it,' or, 'It belongs in the realm of dream,' or, 'The future will make it clear.' Because you can't really imagine what it would look like in real terms to get rid of hundreds of millions of people.

But, it raises an important point, which is that: for settler--for this theory or what I call the ideology of settler colonialism--there are only really two categories. You can either be a settler or you can be indigenous.

So, what that means is that to be a settler, you don't have to be someone who is actually settling the land like in the 17th century, and you don't even have to be a descendant of that person. You don't have to be someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. The idea is that since America was founded by settlers, everyone in America who is not indigenous sort of occupies the position of a settler.

So, there are some curious consequences that come from this.

One is that people don't like to use the term 'immigrant.' Don't like to talk about immigration because immigration implies that you're coming to an already-established country.

So, rather than immigrant, people will say that you are a settler. Even if your ancestors might have come here 10 years ago from East Asia, or even for many people, if your ancestors came as slaves from Africa, there are settler colonial theorists who will say, 'If your ancestors were slaves, that doesn't mean that you're any different from other settlers. You're still a settler because you're in a place that doesn't belong to you. You're not indigenous and you've taken a share in the settler society.'

Adam Kirsch: Yeah. Well, it's true I'm trying to shed light rather than heat, but I think that I'm critical of a lot of these things and let them speak for themselves or try to.

Land acknowledgments is a great example because it's a good example of how things that start out seeming very esoteric and academic can end up having real-world consequences.

So, I think that maybe five years ago, few people in the United States would have been familiar with the term land acknowledgments or what they were. They had started in Australia and Canada and were becoming more common there, but not in the United States. And then, very quickly, in just a couple of years, they became basically required for all universities and most cultural institutions.

A land acknowledgement is simply a statement which says that this institution occupies the land of a Native American people that used to live here. And, it can be phrased in different ways. It can say, 'This university sits on the historic homeland of such and such a people.' Or it can go in a more aggressive direction and say, 'We're occupying this and we're benefiting from their displacement, and this is an act of privilege,' which some of them say.

But, I think however it's phrased, the implication is clear: that it's a sort of act of symbolic reparation to the people who were displaced in the settlement of North America.

And, it carries the suggestion that, in a way, the Native American people who used to, sort of, be in control of this land are still the legitimate possessors of it or sovereigns of it, and that Americans or American institutions are sort of squatting on this land or occupying it without permission. And that makes some sort of apology required.

So, they're strictly symbolic. You've never heard of a university saying, 'We're going to give up our land and return it to the descendants of the people who lived here 200 years ago.' But, these things are very common. They're often recited at public events or someone introducing an event will say the formula or they're put on signage. I live in New York City: you see them on signs at theaters a lot now, and sometimes recited as well.

And so, for a whole sector--academic nonprofit sector--it's become really an expectation that you will have a land acknowledgement. And that if you don't have one, you're sort of neglecting a moral duty.

And, it's a concrete expression of this idea that we should be thinking about the United States and American civilization as, in some basic sense, illegitimate and needing to apologize for its existence. That, what came here before is the real legitimate inhabitants and possessors of this land, and America, which is the society that we all actually live in, is sort of a usurper.

Adam Kirsch: Sure, absolutely. I mean, one of the interesting things about this way of thinking about--just to keep it on America for now, American history--is that none of these are new claims or surprising claims. I mean, the fact that America was founded by European settlers who over generations conquered the entire continent and displaced and often made war on and killed Native Americans, and so reduced them to small reservations--that is the history of the United States. Everyone in America knows it and has always known it. All you have to do is look at a map and see all the Indian place names or take a class in American history, even starting in elementary school. And, I think by extension the same is true of Australia and Canada as well.

So, settler colonialism as a theory doesn't make new factual claims about the history of these places. What it really does is it makes theoretical claims or moral claims about: What are the obligations that we have now coming in the aftermath of those events? How should we remember them? How should we analyze them? And, how should we think about ourselves as in some sense inheriting those events?

So, one person who wrote to me after the book was published made an analogy which I hadn't thought of and I thought was illuminating, which was that: in the 19th century in America before a public event, like a college graduation for example, you would have a Christian prayer. Or you'd have an invocation--a minister would say a prayer. And, in a sense, the land acknowledgement is a secular equivalent of that prayer. They're both ways of acknowledging in public: These are the values that we believe in, these are the things that are important to us, and we want to honor them in this public way.

And, if the value that we believe in is, in some basic sense the United States should not exist or should never have been created and its creation was a wrong and we're symbolically atoning for that wrong, I think that has pretty serious implications for the United States' future. Right? It has implications for our future as a civilization. If what we're saying about ourselves is the foundation of this country was a mistake or should never have happened--which is what a lot of settler colonial theorists explicitly say--then how can we repair it? How can we improve it? How can we make the future better for the people who actually live here now?

And, one of the things I talk about in the book is that there's a real distinction between the settler-colonial way of thinking of American history and an earlier way which was focused on race and civil rights. That, in the Civil Rights Movement in mid-20th-century America, there evolved a new way of thinking about American history, which was much more honest and open about the wrongdoings of the past--which had always been previously thought of as not the real American story, but a side note or something subsidiary to the real American story, which was the story of liberty and the foundation of democracy.

And so, after the Civil Rights Movement, historians and then also the public began to say: We can't ignore this part of our history, which is about slavery and racism. That's also key to American identity. But, the Civil Rights Movement, particularly Martin Luther King, developed this way of thinking and talking about the history, which was to say: America was founded as a promise of liberty to all of its people, and that promise has not been kept. And, King famously said in the March on Washington that they had come to collect on a promissory note. The promissory note was the Declaration of Independence and for Black Americans that had not been kept. And so, now we're coming to demand payment on that note.

And, that way of thinking about American history says: It is founded on ideals of liberty that we need to fulfill that have not yet been fulfilled. And in doing so, it honors the identity of America that has always been sort of the official identity, and it makes us all partners in continuing the Founding, in a certain way. It's now up to all of us--all us who are living now--to forge the more perfect union that America started out to create but hadn't succeeded in creating.

But, seeing America in terms of settler colonialism is a much more absolute judgment because it says: Going back to the very beginnings of European settlement, America was always an act of war and genocide--which is what people will usually say--and America is sort of based on genocide, and in that sense continues the genocide. Structurally. We're continuing the genocide because as long as we are here on land that shouldn't be ours because we're not indigenous, we're continuing the suppression and the erasure of native peoples and cultures.

And, if that's the judgment on America, it's very hard to see what can be done to make things better for the people who are actually here or to improve America in the future. Because you're saying from the beginning: This thing should not exist. This civilization should not exist.

Adam Kirsch: Well, definitely it is a backward-looking view. It's a way of looking at society that, as you say, is about wanting to redeem the past. I get into this a little bit towards the end of the book of saying, 'We've inherited this sinful past and we want to atone for it and redeem it.'

And, I mean, obviously one can't remake the past, redo the past, but it's a strange way of thinking about politics for an idea that is usually called 'Progressive.' People who embrace this idea would almost all describe themselves as Progressive in some way.

But in a way, it's not a progressive way of thinking because it's not about progress. It's not about making the future better than the past. Really, it's about seeing the past as this heavy burden that we all carry that we have to atone for in some way.

And, in a similar way, it's not typical of Progressive ideas because it's not about helping the majority of people at the expense of a minority that has done them wrong. When you look at most Progressive movements, whether it's Socialism, Communism, or even more recently, the Occupy Wall Street movement of about 10 years ago--which had a momentary big impact in the United States--the slogan of that movement was that it was for the 99% against the 1%--the richest 1%, the 1% with all the money and the power. And, it was saying we were going to take that away from the 1% and give it back to the 99%. And that's sort of the fundamental idea of most Progressive movements in various ways: it's that it's about helping the majority: punishing a minority that's guilty, and helping the majority.

And, if you're in a situation where you're saying 98% of the population are settlers and that those are the people who have done wrong and are benefiting from wrong, it's sort of the inverse situation of a Progressive Movement. It's saying: We're going to have 98% of the people pay back what they've taken from the 2%.

So, it puts the idea of a Progressive Movement in a new and different light that I think is surprising to a lot of people who are not already intimately familiar with it and don't sort of imbibe these ideas from an early age the way I think a lot of younger people on the Left have.

Adam Kirsch: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. It's quite clear in a lot of the writing on this subject, especially writing for popular audiences, the way that native history is written about. To go back to the subject of land acknowledgments, a land acknowledgment will typically say we're on the land, which is the homeland of such and such a people who were its guardians from time immemorial--or it's custodians from time immemorial. Really what that means is: that's the people that was there when Europeans made contact. Because these are societies with no written records, there's absolutely no way of knowing who was there 50 years before that or 100 years before that, and North America was inhabited for tens of thousands of years.

The idea that there was no historical change, no conflict, is something that historians of Native America find problematic about the idea of settler colonialism. One of the things I get into in the book is that people who are actual historians of Native America--who speak the languages and have studied the records and the archives and whatever there is to study--have very mixed feelings about the idea of settler colonialism. On the one hand, they like that it brings attention to these parts of history and the suffering of the Native American peoples. But, on the other hand, they recognize that it's fundamentally not historical, that it doesn't take account of the way history actually happens.

One example is that over the course of the long period of American expansion from the East Coast to the West Coast, there were different phases in different regions where Native Americans were more powerful than Europeans and that there was a process of wars between two powerful entities. And, that often the reason why expansion happened, or at least the form that it took, was a war between two peoples, two civilizations over control of territory. When people describe that as a genocide, it's understandable why they use that term, but if that summons a comparison to the Holocaust--like we're going to set out to exterminate every member of this people--that is not at all descriptive of the actual history of North America. The actual history of North America is much more complicated than that.

So, that's one point.

The idea that Americans or Westerners are taking native history as a sort of Eden or an ideal that we ourselves could never match up to is something with a very long history. It's something that Europeans started to do almost as soon as the Americas were discovered. And, I write about this a little bit in the book as well. Thomas More's Utopia, which gave us the word 'utopia,' was written in 1516, I believe, so about 25 years after Columbus. It's set on a newly discovered island in South America where Europeans discover this perfect society where there's no injustice, there's no property, there's no religion. All the things that More is saying caused conflict in Europe do not exist in this sort of new world situation.

That's an idea that's had lots of different expressions in Western culture over the years, including in American literature. You see it in James Fenimore Cooper. And, this can be seen as another version of that--of saying: The things that we don't like about ourselves, which are often things about exploiting the environment or inequality--income inequality, economic inequality--all of those things are European sins or American sins, and that Native Americans represent the opposite of all those things. That they didn't have those problems. They hadn't caused those problems. We brought them with us to this country. And, if we could go back to this previous way of living, those problems would disappear.

And, that's sort of the link between the past and the future for the ideology of settler colonialism. It's not about restoring sovereignty over territory, because that's not really on anyone's political agenda.

And I note in passing that actual Native American advocacy groups don't use the language of settler colonialism. They don't see themselves as fighting a decolonization struggle. They see themselves as trying to hold the U.S. government to treaties and agreements, and using legal means.

Really, this is a way of thinking about ourselves--ourselves being settlers--and criticizing ourselves. It's a conversation among settlers about what's wrong with us, about how we can solve the problems of our own society.

And, the term 'settler ways of being,' which is something that comes up a lot in the academic literature of settler colonial studies, is a way of saying: The things that caused European settlement or that Europeans brought with them when they settled North America are still with us and they are settler ways of being. Which can be both public ways of being--like economic and social and governmental--or private ways of being--things like spiritual attitudes and psychology. And that we have to sort of free ourselves of these settler ways of being.

And, that is such a flexible term that it can be applied to almost anything that one wants to criticize; and it puts social critics in a powerful position because you can say, 'Anything that's wrong with our country, it's a settler way of being. That's how we explain it, and we have to do penance for it.'

I say in the book that there's an odd similarity with evangelical Christianity, Protestantism, and even with the theology of the Puritans who were the original settler colonists in North America. It's about acknowledging that one is sinful, of saying: I've inherited this original sin, just as in the Christian doctrine of original sin. It's not something that I personally did. I personally didn't settle this country, but I've inherited it. I'm a settler by inheritance, and that the first step to curing yourself of this condition or purging the sin is to acknowledge that you are a sinner, to acknowledge that you're fallen.

And so, there's a sort of social prestige involved in these circles of identifying yourself as a settler, of acknowledging it, saying, 'I acknowledge I'm a settler and I have these settler ways of being and these settler things that I have to purge in myself.' And so, people will sometimes introduce themselves as settlers in their Twitter handle--or I should say their X handle. I think especially in Canada, that seems to be a trend. I quote in the book, people writing about how Canadians introducing themselves, even personally as settlers in real life. Certainly among academics, it's common to say that one is a settler. I quote one example of someone who says that they're a trespasser in their bio in an academic paper. And, all of these are ways of saying: I'm a sinner. I've fallen. I accept that I'm fallen; and that that's the beginning of grace, is to acknowledge the sin.

Adam Kirsch: Right. And, as you mentioned earlier in our conversation, a certain amount of this is about creating moral prestige among the group that believes these things. So, to people who are not in the group or who are not familiar with the terms of settler colonial studies who don't think about American history in that way, it might seem strange or just eccentric to say, 'I'm a settler.' But, within the group, it is a way of acknowledging one's moral sensitivity--of saying, 'I recognize this is a moral issue and I'm taking responsibility for it.' So, in a paradoxical way--and which we also see in a religious context--the guiltier you are, the better you are because you are the one who acknowledges the guilt. You're aware of it where other people are not aware of it.

Adam Kirsch: And, I think that that situation which I know--and I know the kind of thing you're talking about--is very, very dissimilar from what we're talking about in the history of Australia or North America or Canada. If you wanted an analogy in German history, it would be more like the way Germany settled Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. It would be like saying, 'We should not have settled East Prussia and converted the people who lived there.'

The problem is that we're talking about things that happened such a long time ago and with no direct biographical connection to the people who are alive today that it really isn't about--and again, I think this is really key to understanding the phenomenon--when people talk about settler colonialism in North America, it's very rarely about benefiting actual living Native Americans or taking into account what they want. It's much more a social critique. I say that it's a kind of critical theory. It's a critical theory about these societies in which settlement and colonialism are the original source of the problems in the societies in the same way that in earlier kinds of critical theory, race and slavery was the master term, or before that, property and capitalist exploitation. Those are the frames in which you understand and analyze and criticize the society.

So, again, it has very little to do with practical issues affecting native communities today. It has much more to do with internal critique of these societies drawing on this idea in these histories.

Adam Kirsch: Yes, no; I think that it's part of a wider reckoning with history that I think is a post-World War II phenomenon in Western civilization where, after a long period of triumphalism and ethnocentrism and cultural chauvinism--

Adam Kirsch: Yeah, and this sort of idea that European civilization--Western civilization--was self-evidently superior to all the others and had the right to take them over or rule them, that there's been this turn towards a more honest assessment of the past and acknowledging the horrors of the past, the crimes of colonialism, and slavery, and trying to reassess Western civilization in the light of that knowledge, in a more humble and accurate way. And, it's very difficult to achieve a balance between that and also needing to maintain the basic level of self-belief and self-esteem that a society needs in order to function and in order to improve, right?

So, I think that we're seeing that in the United States. In a lot of ways over the last 10 years, there's been really intense battles over how we understand American history. And fundamentally the question is: Should we be proud of America? Is America something that we should feel good about, or is it something we should feel bad about? And of course, the answer is both: that there are both elements in our society and our history, as in every country and every history, because they're all made up of human beings, and human beings are capable of doing good things and bad things.

So, I think that absolutely the first responsibility of all of us as citizens and certainly of historians is to tell the truth about what happened in the past: to be honest about what the history is. And then, second to that, think about how it should guide and inform us in the present; what are our responsibilities to it?

I think that all of those things are the positive fruits of this reassessment of Western history. But, I do think also that the settler colonial construction of all this, the way that it's understood, it presents the maximal case against the civilization in ways that strike me as zero-sum and destructive of the future.

And, I think probably Israel is the best example of that. It's the best example of how this idea, which sees itself as virtuous and on the side of justice, can end up being the opposite.

Adam Kirsch: Right. Well, it's a good example of telling the truth about history. When I was growing up, I was also taught, in an American Hebrew school, that in 1948, the Arabs left, planning to return after the Jews were defeated. And then, in the 1990s, the Israeli new historians--Benny Morris and other historians, Tom Segev--did the historical research to show that in fact, that was not the case and--

Adam Kirsch: Right. And then, many were driven out at some point.

Adam Kirsch: Well, let me just step back to talk about the settler colonialism idea.

So, after October 7th, the reason I wrote the book--and as you say, it's a short book, and it was written in about six months after October 7th--the reason I wanted to write about settler colonialism is because on October 7th, October 8th, when the news of the Hamas attack was first coming to the United States, there were a lot of people--not a lot, but a surprising number of people--came out to celebrate the attack. Especially, it got a lot of attention on university campuses and progressive organizations.

And, in the statements that those people were making, they very often used the term 'settler colonial.' They said that the Hamas attack was resistance to settler colonialism. One statement I quote in the book is that there are no Israeli civilians because they're all settlers--and so they're all legitimate targets.

So, I was familiar with the idea and some of the theory of settler colonialism, and it seemed to me that this was an example of how this idea which might seem very academic and not having anything to do with the real world was starting to influence the way people talked about and thought about real world political conflicts.

So, if you think: if Israel is a settler colonial state--and I think it's absolutely taken for granted in the academic discourse that Israel is a settler colonial state--then anyone who is resisting settler colonialism is by definition on the right side, on the side of justice. And, I could compare it to in the 1960s, when people in the West championed Maoist China or Castro's Cuba, because they said: the real problem in the world is Western imperialism and capitalism, so, anyone who is fighting those things is on the side of justice. In a similar way, you have people in America who consider themselves Progressives waving Hamas flags or Hezbollah flags and saying, 'We're on the side of Hamas. We approve of what they're doing because they're fighting settler colonialism.' And, in that fight, any means are justified because that's the ultimate conflict of our time.

So, in linking Israel and the history of Israel to these other much larger and much older examples of settler colonialism, it's almost like you're saying we can't fight settler colonialism in any concrete way in Australia or in Canada, or in the United States; but here in Israel, you have people who are taking up arms to fight Israelis and kill Israelis. And so, that is the struggle against settler colonialism: that's the front. That's the front in this battle.

And, a lot of people expressed that by saying after October 7th that they were exhilarated and energized and things like that because it was like a theoretical struggle that had now become concrete.

And, it was very eye-opening to me and I think to a lot of American Jews, to see that there were people who felt that way. And, particularly among younger people, that's a much more common view than it ever was before. If you look at polling data on the war in Gaza, among people 18 to 24 in America, sympathies are sort of divided 50/50 between Israel and Hamas, which is very different from in the past. So, it is changing the way that people think about Israel and with potentially serious consequences for the future.

Adam Kirsch: Definitely. I think that for a lot of people--when you think about the scale of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict compared to the scale of a lot of other conflicts in the world, it's often surprising at how much attention it gets. And so, how much of the focus of the world, and particularly of the Left, is on Israel-Palestine and not on any of a dozen other conflicts we could name that involve a lot more territory and a lot more people.

I think that the reason is that it is really a symbolic issue in which a lot of these concerns or judgments about Western civilization in general are now being litigated in terms of Israel and Palestine. So, a lot of the things that people object to about the entire history of Europe or the entire history of the West--colonialism, settler colonialism, racism, all the things that in our own societies we talk about so much--have been projected onto Israel or[?] Palestine. And, that is the place where these issues are going to be fought out in real world terms with guns.

So, I think that for a lot of people on the Left, it's not just about the welfare of Palestinians--although it is certainly about that, and especially since October 7th and the war in Gaza, that is I think, the main driver of all of these protests. But, it's also a sense that by undoing the creation of the Jewish state, you're undoing a legacy of colonialism, a legacy of white supremacy, because for a lot of these people, it's taken for granted that Jewish settlement in Palestine was equivalent to British settlement on Australia: that it was a white European people coming to displace a non-white indigenous people.

And, of course, that is not at all the way Zionism understood itself. That's not what Zionism thought it was doing. On the contrary, Zionism thought it was taking a people that was never fully accepted as European and was persecuted in Europe and returning them to their original homeland. Because for Jews, Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.

So, one of the paradoxes of the way settler colonialism talks about Zionism and about Israel is that there's a sort of insistence--a doctrinal, dogmatic insistence--that Palestinians are indigenous and Jews are colonizers. Whereas for Jews, Jews are indigenous and have been exiled from this land, which they're now returning to--their historic homeland.

The truth is that both are right. There's elements of truth in both positions. It's true that Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and came back to it at a moment when they felt that they had no future in Europe--and it turned out were correct, that they had no future in Europe--and needed another place to live and to exist as a people. And, it's also correct that that Jewish state was created in the teeth of Arab opposition. The people who were already living there did not want it to happen, did not want Jews settling there, and in a basic sense have never accepted it, even after 75 years or more.

So, when Western Progressives, using the language of settler colonialism, say, 'We want the state of Israel to be undone, to reverse the verdict of 1948,' what they're saying is the same thing that Palestinian Nationalist groups and Islamic Fundamentalist groups have been saying also since 1948, which is: This is a sort of invasion of our land and we're going to eventually destroy it.

And, what's peculiar about it is that Israel has defeated every attempt to do that and has emerged as the strongest country in the region, but that doesn't seem to change the way it's discussed. It doesn't change the intellectual or moral calculus for anyone. For its critics, it's still always sort of 1948: everything that has happened since then is this temporary injustice and one day is going to be wiped out.

And, that's exactly also the way that people talk about America in North America--about United States and North America. They say it is a very much bigger and very much longer-scale usurpation--occupation--of this land, but one day it's going to disappear and this will go back to being Native American land. And, it's the same sort of idea as liberating all the land between the river and the sea.

So, I think that when we talk about the history of Israel--and I certainly do this as much as anyone--Jews often talk about all of the complicated history that's taken place there since the 1880s and the various turning points and the diplomatic rights and wrongs. In a way, I think that all of that is irrelevant. What's relevant is: There are now seven and a half million Jews living in Israel, and there are seven and a half million Arabs living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean in different jurisdictions, right? In Gaza, in the West Bank or in Israel as Israeli citizens.

So, you have this very small piece of territory, equivalent in size to the American state of New Jersey--which I think incidentally, a lot of people who talk about Israel and Palestine don't realize just how small the land they're talking about is. You have about 50/50 Jews and Arabs in this small territory. And, the question is: How are those people going to live together in a way that involves minimum suffering and violence for everyone?

In the end of my book, that's where I come down because I say that as long as this is cast as a conflict of historic right and wrong, and whose rights to the land are going to be vindicated, it becomes a zero-sum game where one side has to win and the other has to lose. And, all of the heightened rhetoric against Israel that we've seen since October 7th makes it clear that there are a lot of people who just want to destroy the Jewish state. They want it to not exist. Usually they will deny that that means they want to kill all the Jews who live in it. They'll say, 'No, that's not what we want'--

Adam Kirsch: Either they have to go back or it'll be a bi-national state. But, I think that October 7th shows what the reality of that would look like is horrible and probably genocidal.

So, it's an absolutely existential need for Jews to have a Jewish state--as I think everyone in Israel agrees. It's a red line that must be maintained. And, the question is: How can that Jewish state continue to exist in a way that doesn't involve perpetual war and conflict and occupation and injustice towards Palestinians?

And, I don't know what the answer to that is. As I say--as I've gone around talking about this book, I say I don't--

Adam Kirsch: Yeah, exactly. I don't know any better than anyone else what the answer is. But, where I come down is: the two-state solution seems to be the only solution that I can envision that doesn't involve perpetuating a massive injustice against either Jews or Arabs. And so, I feel like that is the solution that ultimately has to come to pass unless something much worse comes to pass.

And what's much worse--right now, a much worse solution, much worse outcome does seem more likely. Especially since October 7th, because there's absolutely no interest in a two-state solution on either side. There's enormous hatred and resentment and desire for revenge.

And, in the long term, I don't know whether there is a solution. I'm almost 50 years old. This conflict has been going on my entire lifetime. I suspect that when I'm gone, it will still be going on. I don't know if it's a conflict that can be resolved absent some big changes in the world or in the situation on the ground. But, I think that the wrong way to look at it is to say, 'Jews are settler colonizers who don't belong here and should be expelled.' That's the way that's guaranteed to produce more bloodshed.

Adam Kirsch: Thanks so much.