Structural readings of settler colonialism shut down the possibility of political change and reifies settler control.

The prescription for decolonization – that is, a normative project committed to the liberation of the colonized and the overturning of colonial relationships of power (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 3) – is indeed one of the most counter-hegemonic implications of the settler colonial paradigm as applied to Israel-Palestine, potentially shifting it from a diagnostic frame to a prognostic one which offers a ‘proposed solution to the problem, or at least a plan of attack’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 616). What, however, does the settler colonial paradigm offer by way of envisioning decolonization? As Veracini (2007) notes, while settler colonial studies scholars have sought to address the lack of attention paid to the experiences of indigenous peoples in conventional historiographical accounts of decolonization (which have mostly focused on settler independence and the loosening of ties to the ‘motherland’), there is nevertheless a ‘narrative deficit’ when it comes to imagining settler decolonization. While Veracini (2007) relates this deficit to a matter of conceptualization, it is apparent that the structural perspective of the paradigm in many ways closes down possibilities of imagining the type of social and political transformation to which the notion of decolonization aspires. In this regard, there is a worrying tendency (if not tautological discrepancy) in settler colonial studies, where the only solution to settler colonialism is decolonization – which a faithful adherence to the paradigm renders largely unachievable, if not impossible.

To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to return to Wolfe’s (2013a: 257) account of settler colonialism as guided by a ‘zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives’. The structuralism of this account has immense power as a means of mapping forms of injustice and indignity as well as strategies of resistance and refusal, and Wolfe is careful to show how transmutations of the logic of elimination are complex, variable, discontinuous and uneven. Yet, in seeking to elucidate the logic of elimination as the overarching historical force guiding settlernative relations there is an operational weakness in the theory, whereby such a logic is simply there, omnipresent and manifest even when (and perhaps especially when) it appears not to be; the settler colonial studies scholar need only read it into a situation or context. It thus hurtles from the past to the present into the future, never to be fully extinguished until the native is, or until history itself ends. There is thus a powerful ontological (if not metaphysical) dimension to Wolfe’s account, where there is such thing as a ‘settler will’ that inherently desires the elimination of the native and the distinction between the settler and the native can only ever be categorical, founded as it is on the ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ (2013a: 258). It is here that the differences between earlier settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and the recent settler colonial turn come into clearest view. While Jamal Hilal’s (1976) Marxist account of the conflict, for instance, engaged Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in terms of their relations to the means of production, Wolfe’s account brings its own ontology: the bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction becomes that of settler/native, and the class struggle the struggle between settler, who seeks to destroy and replace the native, and native, who can only ever push back. Indeed, if the settler colonial paradigm views history in similar teleological terms to the Marxist framework, it does not offer the same hopeful vision of a liberated future. After all, settler colonialism has only one story to tell – ‘either total victory or total failure’ (Veracini, 2007).

Veracini’s attempt to disaggregate different forms of settler decolonization is revealing of the difficulties that come along with this zero-sum perspective. It is significant to note that beyond settler evacuation (which may decolonize territory, he cautions, but not necessarily relationships) the picture he paints is a relatively bleak one. For Veracini (2011: 5), claims for decolonization from indigenous peoples in settler societies can take two broad forms: an ‘anti-colonial rhetoric expressing a demand for indigenous sovereign independence and self-determination ... and an ‘‘ultra’’-colonial one that seeks a reconstituted partnership with the [settler state] and advocates a return to a relatively more respectful middle ground and ‘‘treaty’’ conditions’. While both, he suggests, are tempting strategies in the struggle for change, though ‘ultimately ineffective against settler colonial structures of domination’ (2011: 5), it is the latter strategy that invites Veracini’s most scathing assessment. As he writes,

under settler colonial conditions the independent polity is the settler polity and sanctioning the equal rights of indigenous peoples has historically been used as a powerful weapon in the denial of indigenous entitlement and in the enactment of various forms of coercive assimilation. This decolonisation actually enhances the subjection of indigenous peoples... it is at best irrelevant and at worst detrimental to indigenous peoples in settler societies. (2011: 6–7)

The ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ plays a particularly ambivalent role in Veracini’s (2011: 6) formulation, where the categorical distinction between settler and native obstructs the ‘possibility of a genuinely decolonized relationship’ (by virtue of its lopsidedness) yet is a necessary political strategy to guard against the absorption of indigenous people into the settler fold, which would represent settler colonialism’s final victory. The battle here is between a ‘settler colonialism [that] is designed to produce a fundamental discontinuity as its ‘‘logic of elimination’’ runs its course until it actually extinguishes the settler colonial relation’ and an anti-colonial struggle that ‘must aim to keep the settler-indigenous relationship going’ (2011: 7). In other words, the categorical distinction produced by the frontier must be maintained in order to struggle against its effects. Given the lack of options presented to indigenous peoples by Veracini (2014: 315), his conclusion that settler decolonization demands a ‘radical, post-settler colonial passage’ is perhaps not surprising – although he has ‘no suggestion as to how this may be achieved and [is] pessimistic about its feasibility’.

Scholars have long reckoned with the ambivalence of the settler colonial situation, which is simultaneously colonial and postcolonial, colonizing and decolonizing (Curthoys, 1999: 288). Given the generally dreadful Fourth World circumstances facing many indigenous peoples in settler societies, it could be argued that there is good reason for such pessimism. The settler colonial paradigm, in this sense, offers an important caution against celebratory narratives of progress. Wolfe (1994), it must be recalled, wrote the original articulation of his thesis precisely against the idea of ‘historical rupture’ that dominated in Australia postMabo, and was thus as much a scholarly intervention as it was a political challenge to the idea of Australia having broken with its colonial past. Nonetheless, the fatalism of the settler colonial paradigm – whereby decolonization is by and large put beyond the realms of possibility – has seen it come under considerable critique for reifying settler colonialism as a transhistorical meta-structure where colonial relations of domination are inevitable (Macoun and Strakosch, 2013: 435 ; Snelgrove et al., 2014: 9). Not only does Wolfe’s ontology erase contingency, heterogeneity and (crucially) agency (Merlan, 1997; Rowse, 2014), but its polarized framework effectively ‘puts politics to death’ (Svirsky, 2014: 327). In response to such critiques, Wolfe (2013a: 213) suggests that ‘the repudiation of binarism’ may just represent a ‘settler perspective’. However, as Elizabeth Povinelli (1997: 22) has astutely shown, it is in this regard that the totalizing logic of Wolfe’s structure of invasion rests on a disciplinary gesture where ‘any discussion which does not insist on the polarity of the [settler] colonial project’ is assimilationist, worse still, genocidal in effect if not intent. Any attempt to ‘explore the dialogical or hybrid nature of colonial subjectivity’ – which would entail working beyond the bounds of absolute polarity – is disciplined as complicit in the settler colonial project itself, leaving ‘the only nonassimilationist position one that adheres strictly and solely to a critique of [settler] state discourse’. This gesture not only disallows the possibility of counter-publics and strategic alliances (even limited ones), but also comes dangerously close to ‘resistance as acquiescence’ insofar as the settler colonial studies scholar may malign the structures set in play by settler colonialism, but only from a safe distance unsullied by the messy ambivalences and contradictions of settler and native subjectivities and relations. Opposition is thus left as our only option, but, as we know from critical anti-colonial and postcolonial scholarship, opposition in itself is not decolonization.