Table of Contents
Greg Bouwer
IINZ
In recent years, ‘settler-colonialism’ has ceased to function merely as an academic framework. Applied to Israel, it has become something else entirely: a moral sorting mechanism that determines who counts as indigenous, who is cast as illegitimate, and whose rights may be suspended in the name of ‘decolonisation’.
This shift matters – because when a theory consistently produces one outcome for one people, regardless of evidence, history, or complexity, it stops being analysis and starts becoming ideology. And when that ideology uniquely excludes Jews from categories of legitimacy afforded to others, it begins to function as a contemporary form of antisemitism.
Not the old, crude antisemitism of caricatures and conspiracies – but a modern, structural version, expressed in the language of justice.
From Description to Delegitimisation
Settler-colonial theory was originally designed to describe specific historical formations – distant imperial metropoles implanting settler populations to permanently replace indigenous peoples. When stretched to fit Israel – despite the absence of a metropole, despite continuous Jewish presence, despite anti-imperial struggle – the theory does not merely misdescribe reality. It reassigns moral status.
Once Israel is defined as a settler-colonial project, several conclusions follow automatically:
- Jewish sovereignty becomes illegitimate by definition.
- Jewish self-defence becomes colonial violence.
- Jewish presence becomes provisional, contingent, revocable.
- Violence against Israelis can be reframed as ‘resistance’.
These conclusions are not argued for: they are inherited from the label. This is why the label is so fiercely defended even when its historical foundations collapse. It does ideological work that facts cannot.
The Exception That Reveals the Pattern
Indigeneity is recognised globally as a lived relationship between a people, a land, a language, and a history – often including exile and return. This recognition is extended to indigenous peoples in the Americas, to Māori in New Zealand, to Armenians, Kurds, Tibetans, and others.
But Jews are treated differently.
When Jews maintain continuous presence for millennia, it is ignored. When Jews return after forced exile, it is reclassified as invasion.When Jews revive their indigenous language, it is called artificial. When Jews resist empire, they are accused of collaboration. When Jews assert sovereignty, it is deemed uniquely illegitimate.
This is not coincidence. It is patterned exception.
A framework that recognises every indigenous return except the Jewish one is not neutral. It encodes an exclusion – and that exclusion mirrors older antisemitic tropes – Jews as perpetual outsiders, never truly belonging, always suspect, always provisional.
Why Jews Are Uniquely Disqualified
The settler-colonial frame resolves a moral tension within progressive politics.
If Jews are indigenous, then:
- Jewish self-determination is legitimate.
- Jewish vulnerability must be taken seriously.
- Antisemitism cannot be dismissed as a distraction.
- Violence against Jews cannot be morally sanitised.
Declaring Jews ‘settlers’ removes all of these obligations.
It recasts Jews as powerful interlopers rather than a people with a history of displacement and persecution. It allows antisemitism to be reframed as ‘anti-colonial critique’. And it permits the exclusion of Jews from coalitions, protections, and solidarities that are otherwise universalised.
In this way, settler-colonialism does not merely describe Jews – it disciplines them.
From Theory to Practice: The Real-World Consequences
This ideological move is not abstract. It has concrete effects:
- Jewish students are told their presence is ‘colonial’ and therefore illegitimate.
- Jewish institutions are singled out for boycott regardless of political stance.
- Zionism – a core component of Jewish identity for most Jews – is treated as inherently racist.
- Antisemitic harassment is minimised if framed as ‘anti-Zionist’.
In each case, Jews are denied the protections afforded to other minorities because they have been conceptually relocated from ‘vulnerable people’ to ‘oppressor class’.
This is how antisemitism adapts. It does not always announce itself with hatred – sometimes it arrives cloaked in moral certainty.
New Zealand as a Case Study: When Ideology Becomes Institutional
This dynamic is not confined to distant campuses or abstract debates. It is increasingly visible in New Zealand – a society that understands itself as attentive to indigeneity, minority rights, and historical injustice.
Following October 7, settler-colonial framing became the dominant interpretive lens for Israel-Palestine activism across New Zealand universities and civil society. In this framing, Israel was not criticised as a state with contestable policies, but defined as illegitimate in principle. That definitional move had predictable effects.
On multiple campuses, Jewish students reported being told that Zionism rendered them complicit in colonialism, and therefore unwelcome in progressive spaces. Protest materials and social-media campaigns declared “Zionists not welcome” or framed Zionist presence as inherently violent, without distinction between political positions, personal beliefs, or institutional roles.
In at least one instance, a Jewish academic was publicly targeted by name and image under anti-Zionist slogans, with no comparable institutional response to what would be recognised immediately as racial or religious harassment if directed at other minorities. Elsewhere, student groups reported pressure to denounce Israel as a condition of participation in broader social-justice coalitions – a demand not imposed on members of any other ethnic or national group.
What unites these cases is not hostility to Israeli government policy. It is the conceptual relocation of Jews from protected minority to illegitimate presence. Once Zionism is defined as settler-colonialism, Jewish identity itself becomes morally suspect, and exclusion can be justified as anti-colonial virtue rather than discrimination.
Notably, this occurs in a national context where indigeneity is otherwise treated with care and seriousness. Māori claims to land, language revival, political autonomy, and historical redress are rightly understood as expressions of justice rather than aggression. That same interpretive generosity is categorically denied to Jews.
The result is a double standard that is not incidental but structural. Jews are the only people whose claims to peoplehood, return, and self-determination are reframed as uniquely illegitimate – even in a society deeply committed to indigenous rights elsewhere.
This is how a theory migrates from seminar room to social practice. And it is how antisemitism adapts to environments that believe themselves immune to it.
The Moral Asymmetry at the Core
Perhaps the clearest sign that something has gone wrong is the moral asymmetry the framework produces.
Under the settler-colonial lens:
- Jewish violence is structural and illegitimate.
- Violence against Jews is contextual, reactive, and often excused.
- Jewish history is flattened.
- Jewish fear is discounted.
- Jewish survival is treated as negotiable.
No other people are asked to justify their existence in this way. No other national movement is declared illegitimate in principle while its adversaries are absolved of agency.
That asymmetry is not accidental. It is the function.
Why This Matters Beyond Israel
This is not only about Israel. It is about how antisemitism now operates in democratic societies.
When Jews are excluded from indigeneity, from minority status, from historical empathy, and from moral concern – all through the language of justice – the result is not progress. It is regression, wearing better clothes.
A society that teaches itself that Jews are uniquely undeserving of collective rights, uniquely suspect when asserting self-determination, and uniquely fair game for ideological erasure is not confronting antisemitism. It is reproducing it in a new register.
Conclusion: The Warning Embedded in the Framework
The settler-colonial libel fails as history. That has been shown.
Its persistence, therefore, must be explained by what it enables.
It enables the erasure of Jewish indigeneity. It enables the delegitimisation of Jewish sovereignty. It enables the moral laundering of hostility toward Jews. And it enables antisemitism to pass through spaces that believe themselves immune to it.
This is not accidental misuse. It is a structural outcome.
And recognising that fact is no longer optional — because when theory becomes targeting, silence becomes complicity.
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
