Settler colonialism seeks to totally dominate the land with the political, economic, military, cultural, linguistic and religious hegemony of the bourgeois settler state for the purpose of replacing the previous inhabitants on their land with their own homes and towards capitalist development.
This means ethnically cleansing increasing amounts of territory until the indigenous peoples are totally surrounded, transformed into a permanent demographic minority, have lost all but the most minimal of sovereignty, economic independence and political autonomy, and have been concentrated into small isolated territories.
Settler colonialism is a genocidal project. It by necessity instills a sense of racial nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and religious supremacy in its settler agents. It trains its settlers to be combatants in a war of extermination. It ties the livelihood of the settler to the destruction of the native. It replaces the hegemonic social and economic institutions within that territory with its own to service capitalism and empire.
Israel is a settler colony much like the United States is. The major difference between the United States and Israel is that Israel has not achieved the same objectives as the United States as a bourgeois settler colonial project because Israel is a younger settler state that has only recently achieved political sovereignty.
By this I mean the United States has totally surrounded the indigenous inhabitants of this land, transformed them into a permanent demographic minority, have dispossessed them of all but the most minimal of sovereignty, economic independence and political autonomy, and they’ve been concentrated into small isolated territories with individual governments that are forced to recognize the legitimacy of the settler government or be considered a hostile nation. Thus these native governments cannot build a united front based on their shared concerns, form tactical alliances with other states or engage in open militant conflict with the settler government.
Israel has achieved some of these goals but not all in their colonization of Palestine. The indigenous peoples of Palestine intimately recognize their own position as potential or real combatants in the eyes of the settler state because the settler state has yet to reach the stage of invisiblized violence against the indigenous on the peripheries of that settler state, instead both the settler militias and armed vigilantes engage in open genocidal violence on the frontlines of the colonial frontier as seen in the early development of all settler colonies. Israel is after all a very young settler colony and it makes sense these higher objectives have not been reached by the settler state. This means there’s organized mass militant resistance from the Palestinian people that Israel has been unable to suppress.
This was also true in the United States until the late 1800s with the conclusion of the so-called “Indian Wars” which put an end to entire indigenous nations being in open war with the United States government to resist encroachment on their lands. Even then, this tradition was never fully defeated as seen with the reconquest of Alcatraz, the American Indian Movement standoffs with federal agents, and the Standing Rock resistance against oil companies, local police, hired mercenaries, and federal agents. So as long as indigenous peoples continue to survive, there will be resistance to the settler colonial structure and process.
But in both the settler colonies and fascist states there is an obsession with the “Demographic Question” or the population ratio between the settler-colonizer/“master race” and the colonized/“enemy races.” There is a great anxiety about the birthrate of the colonizer and the colonized and how that translates to the colonizer’s political, economic, military, cultural and linguistic hegemony on the land. The settler knows that as long as the native, descendants of slaves, or foreign worker is close, equal or greater in population in relation to the settler, that their hold on power is tenuous and fragile. The indigenous peoples could unite, build solidarity with other sympathetic groups within the settler colony, form an organized militia and overthrow the rule of the colonizer with the settler ruling class being powerless to oppose it. The settler therefore seeks to build and maintain a supremacy of technology and arms and this is impossible without the near total elimination of the native. This anxiety can be seen in the white genocide and “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories, which calls for genocide against multiple ethnic, racial and religious others due to fears their increase in population will mean an end to the settler hegemony.
