The "Set-Up" of Settler Colonialism: From the U.S. to Ireland to Palestine

How the rich and powerful have used settler colonialism to divide and rule over the global 99%

David Dean

Dec 21, 2023

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The infamous 1872 painting, “American Progress,” by John Gast, depicting U.S. settler colonialism as a “sacred” and “inevitable” westward expansion of Anglo-American society.1

Settler colonialism didn’t happen because some large-scale homogenous group of aspiring European settlers collectively decided, as one big united team, to leave home and dominate Indigenous Peoples around the world. In reality, settler colonialism was (and still is) a set-up, one in which a small western European ruling class found manipulative and violent ways to dislodge the European masses from their traditions of political, cultural, and religious resistance to domination, and enlist them as foot soldiers of a growing global capitalist empire. Like racism more broadly, settler colonialism functions as a tool of this capitalist class to divide and rule over the global 99%—in this case, by using some of us to displace, supplant, police, and genocide others. Settlers are certainly given some skin in this imperial game and significant advantage as compared to the colonized, yet their ultimate safety and material well-being, as well as their humanity itself, are not served by this system. Their primary purpose is always to secure land, resources, labor, trade routes and military outposts for their rulers.

Often, settlers are selected from groups of people who themselves have been victims of centuries of mass violence. Trauma, scholars tell us, is a physiological energy that needs to move, whether toward healing or toward replication. Thus, part of the heartbreaking power of settler colonialism is that it gives these settler populations a target—the indigenous—upon whom they are given state-sanctioned authorization to unleash this traumatic energy.

The reality of this “set-up” doesn’t make the history of settler colonialism any less horrific. Yet without understanding it, I don’t think we will ever be able to change this history’s course.

North America

I first began to clearly see this dynamic when I came across genealogical documents that described the story of my direct ancestors, Agnes and James Jones. They were Scots-Irish people who, along with their two sons, arrived in the colony of South Carolina in 1767. Their arrival was made possible by legislation explicitly designed by colonial elites to fund the travel of poor European Protestants, most coming from Northern Ireland like the Jones family, to settle in the western portion of the colony on the condition that they would act as an armed human buffer to protect the plantations of the rich from Native nations seeking to reclaim stolen land. One right-wing historian called this “an ingenious scheme of the planter class to protect their lives and investments.”2

The Jones’ experiences are similar to those of Scots-Irish people more broadly in the land we now call the United States. They were a people who were consistently offered land in the backcountry of the North American colonies to protect the elites and enslavers of the colonial center, and to continually steal land through horrific violence, most of which would ultimately be usurped again by land speculators, plantation owners, and mining companies.

Ireland

North America was not the first place this population was enlisted as settler-colonizers. Their two names, Scots and Irish, illustrate their broader journey. Their story began in southern Scotland, near the northern border of England. As borders are, this one was constantly contested. For 1500 years prior to the era of overseas colonialism, these people lived in a war-zone. The violence stemmed from invasions first by the Roman Empire whose northern border existed at this same location, then by feuding warlords, and then by the English state along with Scottish rulers hungry to expand their reign into British territory. Peasant men were constantly conscripted as soldiers and communities were victim to unceasing raids and attacks. The trauma of perpetual invasion would compound and leave a profound cultural mark, creating a more patriarchal, warrior culture and “a climate of fear even in periods of peace.”3

The Protestant Reformation of the 1500s brought this population a form of Calvinist Presbyterianism that replaced earlier forms of folk Christianity with a religion that valorized grueling work, demonized rest, festivity, and earth-honoring tradition, and, most tragically, provided an epistemological template for settler colonialism. Drawing heavily on the apocalyptic book of revelations, this new tradition called followers to travel far, engage in a holy war against the “demonic followers of the anti-Christ,” and build a “New Jerusalem” where there would be no more suffering or sin.4

Just after these cultural conditions for settler colonialism were put in place, the material conditions for it were laid as well. Immediately following the early years of the Reformation, capitalism began to expand in this region with the mass displacement of much of the peasantry from traditional land to create a dependent, exploitable workforce, as well as a destitute and thus willing settler-force who could expand this theft and exploitation abroad. At the same time that England began its settler colonialism across the Atlantic, it did so in Catholic Ireland.

In 1609, the English military seized the province of Ulster (comprising six counties in Northern Ireland) and began encouraging this Protestant Scottish population to become settlers in order to secure their landholdings. Over the next century, 150,000 migrated along with 21,000 English peasants mostly from the same border region.5 As they would be a century later in North America, here they were also used as an armed human buffer to prevent Irish rebellion and ensure that the isle’s colonial system of exploitative commercial agriculture would endure. Their safeguarding of English control was also meant to ensure that Catholic powers from continental Europe would not ally with Catholic Ireland and use it as a launching pad for attacks on Britain.6

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells us that during this process of conquest in Ireland, one carried out by majority British troops and enforced in the northern region by majority Scottish settlers, “The Celtic social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated while the entire population was brutalized.”7 This colonial history alongside the legal system of Protestant privilege and Catholic subordination that emerged in the region are the roots of the often violent Catholic-Protestant division that has persisted in this land ever since.

Palestine

On November 2, 1917, in the midst of World War I, British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote of his country’s intent to support the creation of “a national home for the Jewish people” in what is now known as the “Balfour Declaration.” Following the war, when the defeated Ottoman empire ceded their control of Palestine to Britain, the British government took on the Zionist cause, endowing the fledgling Zionist movement, one whose leaders strived to eventually create a Jewish ethno-state in already-inhabited Palestine, with the military backing of the biggest empire in the world.

A major driver of the Zionist movement, which began in the 1870s, was to find a solution to the millennia-long struggle of Jewish people to escape persecution, continual displacement, stigmatization and scapegoating, and recurring massacre. At the same time, its leaders, including the most-known, Theodore Herzl, often spoke and wrote with explicitly colonialist sentiment and colonialist rationalizations (reminiscent of those present within all European colonial ventures) about the project that they dreamed of carrying out in Palestine. The aspirations of these leaders (who were European Ashkenazi Jews, not of Middle Eastern Mizrahi or Spanish/North African Sephardic descent) illustrate how Zionism also represented an internalization and replication of the forces of white supremacy and religious supremacy that had plagued Jewish communities in Europe for so long.8

Zionism was also not by any means the only possible solution offered by the many diverse Jewish social movements of the day to address the long history of extreme Jewish marginalization. There were many others—Socialist, Communist, and Bundist movements—that were based in inter-ethnic, inter-religious, and international working class solidarity and, often, a spiritual ethic that mirrored this political orientation. But this mass upliftment of Zionism, initially by the British empire, and the continued repression of these alternatives by European powers, initiated a hundred-year process in which Zionism would be more and more conflated with Jewishness itself, eventually making Zionism one of the only avenues of Jewish political struggle accepted in the mainstream.9

Arthur Balfour was a staunch antisemite and did not push his country to support the Zionist movement out of altruism or any desire to right a wrong. As Shireen Akram-Boshar writes,

“Britain saw the imminent downfall of the four-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire as an opportunity for them to occupy and exploit the region’s resources, with an eye to newly discovered oil and the trade routes and access to the markets and colonies of Asia provided by the Suez Canal.”10

Balfour’s boosting of Zionism was a way to justify British control of the region (by equating it with the need to create a safe haven for Jews), a method to keep Jews out of Britain, and a strategy to recruit loyal settlers to secure this region of such economic and geopolitical importance to the empire.

There happens to be an explicit connection between the British empire’s colonialism in Ireland and their colonization of Palestine, one encapsulated well in the words of the first British Governor-General of Jerusalem, Ronald Storrs: “Our aim is to create a little Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."

Richard Boyd Barret, current Irish politician within the country’s People Before Profit–Solidarity coalition, has spoken at length about this connection between the colonization of Palestinians and the colonization of his own people:

“Some of the key architects of the British colonial operation in Ireland were also some of the key architects of the Zionist project and what was done to the Palestinians. And many of the personnel that were actually leading commanders and officers, and the politicians above them, who were involved in trying to subdue the Irish revolution, particularly in the 1918 to 1921 period, were sent direct to Palestine… Ulster, of course, is a province in the North most associated with colonial settlement of Ireland and the divide-and-rule tactic between Catholic and Protestant. So, they very consciously exported the model that they had imposed on Ireland to Palestine with terrible consequences.”

After their violent campaigns in Ireland, these British military officials arrived to Palestine, suppressed Palestinian demonstrations with bullets, “quell[ed] protests by Palestinians against the expropriation of land where they lived and farmed,” and instituted a system of Jewish privilege and Palestinian-Muslim oppression incredibly reminiscent of the historic ethno-religious caste system of Ireland.

By 1940, Palestinian resistance led to a loosening of Britain’s grip on the region. Yet following World War II, the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. As Naomi Klein recently said (and wrote about), while this move was cast as “reparations” for an immense history of harm toward Jewish people, it paved the way for “replication” of harm. What unfolded is known as the “Nakba,” Arabic for the “catastrophe.”

In 1948, over 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed by the Haganah and Irgun Jewish militias. Many members of these groups were surely recent refugees who, like numerous other Jews, had come to this region fleeing Nazi genocide (or running from pogroms in the preceding decades) with no where else to go. In the Nakba, they carried out an enormous act of colonial ethnic cleansing, driving over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and committing acts of mass execution. Most of the land of Palestine was taken by Israel with Gaza going to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan.11

The fact of Jewish people’s ancestral connection to this region does not change the reality of what this period of dispossession was and what the following 80-years of continued dispossession would come to be—a tragic story of settler colonialism.

Following Israeli independence, European powers began seeking to gain influence in the country and Israeli elites themselves also began searching for a new imperial benefactor. For a short while it was France, who became the primary arms dealer to the new settler-colonial state in the 1950s. In return, Israel launched an attack in response to an Egyptian attempt to nationalize the Suez Canal, an essential trade route connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Soon though, the relationship with the French would be replaced by one with the United States.12

Emerging from the second World War as a global superpower, the U.S. began seeking to bring segments of the Middle East under its control in order to 1. Secure access to oil, and 2. Halt Soviet expansion and counter rising regional nationalist, anti-colonial, and socialist movements that threatened western geopolitical and corporate interests. Investment in Israel’s military capabilities was one primary strategy taken. U.S. aid began in 1959 and reached $90 million annually by 1966. In 1967, the investment paid off. In what is known as the Six Day War, Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Gaza strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. They expanded their settler colonialism further by expelling 300,000 more Palestinians from their homes and building out more militarized settlements in their place. Of particular interest to the U.S., was how the war dealt a major blow to nearby Arab nationalist-socialist governments and paved the way for U.S.-friendly neoliberal capitalist and, sometimes, fascist regimes to arise.13

In the coming decades, anytime leftist movements arose within neighboring countries (typically with significant participation from exiled Palestinians) or in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel would strive to crush them with military force, often at the direct request of the U.S. government. In these instances, U.S. officials were of the view that their direct military involvement in the region would elicit Soviet retaliation. Israel was the perfect proxy to avoid such an outcome.14

Yet Israel’s role as a middleman of U.S. capitalist empire was not only carried out in the Middle East. It was global. After CIA-backed military coups crushed left-wing, democratic governments in Latin America that threatened U.S. corporate interests, Israel secretly funneled U.S. weapons to the terroristic dictatorships that took their place, allowing the U.S. to avoid the international scrutiny of being associated with fascism. Israel also played a similar role throughout Africa. And in more recent decades, the U.S. has financed Israel’s transformation into a laboratory for policing and border patrol. ICE agents and police forces from cities throughout the U.S. regularly travel to Israel to train with the Israeli military.15

U.S. leaders have always been clear about the role Israel plays within American imperialism. Ronald Reagan said of his administration’s aid to the country, “This isn’t just altruism on our part… [Israel is] a strategic asset.”16 In 1986, Joe Biden took to the Senate floor and pushed back on criticism of the U.S.-Israel relationship with these words:

“If we look at the Middle East, I think it’s about time we stopped… apologizing for our support for Israel. There’s no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”

Unfulfilled Promises

In each of these cases of settler colonialism—that of the Scots-Irish in Ulster and North America, and that of Jewish people in Palestine, along with so many more not mentioned here—the ruling class of the imperial core along with elite leaders of settler movements themselves promised their settler populations 1. Safety, 2. Economic security, and 3. A noble, meaning-filled, even “holy” purpose in exchange for their participation in the settler-colonial venture. While these examples have resulted in horrific, frequently genocidal ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations, apartheid regimes, and thus, significant comparative settler privilege, none of these settler-promises are ultimately fulfilled. When we understand their lack of fulfillment, we can see even more clearly who settler colonialism ultimately serves, and with this clarity, we can better organize against it.

The Settler-Promise of Safety: It is dangerous to exist in an imperial military outpost or on a colonial frontier and as a member of the group who is supposed to secure and expand it. A few decades after the initial conquest of Ulster, the Scottish-Protestant settler population were the recipients of a retaliatory attack from the Native Irish population that killed 10,000 of them. The Northern Ireland region has been subject to severe religious, sectarian violence ever since.

In South Carolina, my ancestors came to a territory in 1767 that had just been stolen by British colonists in the French and Indian War and that was only two miles from Cherokee villages. There are documented attacks on their settlement with sizable settler death tolls. The North American colonial backcountry more broadly was also, quite simply, a dangerous place for settlers to exist.

The killing of Israelis that took place on October 7th of this year is the most severe example of the danger that many Israelis have lived under since the founding of the country. While nowhere close to the danger experienced by Palestinians, it is not insignificant. Many Israelis’ lives include experience with bomb shelters, streets patrolled by soldiers, mandatory military service, forced participation in unnecessary wars to serve the interests of U.S. and Israeli elites, and legitimate fear of attack from a surrounding region that has been so violated by the Israeli military over the course of decades.

The Settler-Promise of Economic Security: The non-fulfillment of the settler promise of economic security in Northern Ireland was evidenced by the reality that there were many times through the settler-colonial history of the region in which native-Catholics and settler-Protestants did come together to fight for economic justice and affordable rents. Yet “in virtually every case, the authorities successfully used religion and privilege to split such alliances.” Historians agree that while Irish Catholics were always third-class citizens, Ulster Scots were no better than second class.

To illustrate the non-fulfillment of this promise in the case of the settler-colonial United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is worth quoting at length:

“For nearly three hundred years, the English Crown and then the United States had offered free or cheap land to British and Ulster-Scot settlers, then to Germans and Scandinavians, then to Polish and Czech peasants. If a farming family fell on hard times or wanted greater opportunity, they picked up and moved on, homesteading newly ‘opened’ territory. By 1880 all the arable land on the continent was owned — much of it by large operators — and millions were landless. While many of those pushed off the land poured into the cities to work, most stayed in rural areas as tenants, sharecroppers, migrant farm workers, cowpunchers and miners, and later as roughnecks and roustabouts in the oil fields.”17

Historian Lorenzo Veracini has highlighted a similar phenomenon: "Settler colonial movements... promise land, and everyone ends up a tenant of some bank (if they're lucky)."

In Israel, nearly ¼ of the population is below the poverty line (a percentage twice that of the very unequal United States) and in response to housing affordability protests in recent decades, Netanyahu and other political leaders have encouraged working class Israelis to settle in the Palestinian West Bank. Class consciousness has again been strategically supplanted with colonial consciousness.

Like much of the Western-dominated world, the current state of settler-colonial countries—particularly that of the U.S. and Israel—is one of continually growing neoliberalism, meaning ever-expanding privatization of public services, economic deregulation, tax reduction for the rich, and “free” trade. This modern form of capitalism harms the entire 99%, settlers included.

The Settler-Promise of Humanizing Purpose: In virtually all settler-ventures, settlers are peddled a “sacred” purpose, a theology that they are God’s “chosen people” destined to create a holy paradise in a promised land. In reality, the process of being enlisted as a settler and carrying out one’s duties as such is one of profound loss and self-dehumanization. The settler is led to replace the political and religious traditions of their ancestors with new forms that are toxic and with the self-inflicted traumatization that comes with complicity or direct participation in mass violence.

In an antisemitic rant penned in 1920 just after the British adoption of the Zionist cause, Winston Churchill wrote an article titled, “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.” He conveyed the message that a “good Jew” is a Zionist Jew, while a “bad Jew” is an internationalist, socialist Jew who follows in the tradition of those such as Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, who he mentioned by name. Churchill wrote,

“It becomes, therefore, specially important to develop any strongly marked Jewish movement which leads directly away from these fatal associations. And it is here that Zionism has such a deep significance for the whole world at this present time.”

Not only is this piece demonstrative of Churchill’s deep antisemitism. It is also revealing of one key purpose of settler colonialism, to strip people of their traditions that threaten ruling class power and push them to identify with new, dehumanizing traditions meant to make them foot soldiers of their oppressor. Churchill’s words illustrate the aim of the British elite to manipulate Jewish identity itself such that it would be, as he wrote, “in harmony with the truest interests of the British empire.”

Revealing the Set-Up and Remembering Who We Are

I wrote this essay because of my belief that revealing the set-up of settler colonialism must be one part of the movement to transform and decolonize settler societies, and part of a broader movement to create a world where the rights of all people to safety, economic security, and humanization are guaranteed.

While the experiences of the colonized should be the focal point of our decolonial politics and movement-building, we must also do what Poor People’s Campaign leader, Reverend William Barber, calls, “show them the trick.” By “them,” I mean, primarily, settlers, as well as our movements as a whole. In order to be fully informed and effective, our organizing strategy must reveal the connection between settler-colonialism (as well as racism more broadly) and the corporate domination of us all.

For those of us who are settlers seeking to bring our settler-community members and family members into a struggle against these forces, unveiling this set-up may be a good first step. Doing so offers the comprehensive analysis of the past and present required to find our place in the work of social change. It also opens up a pathway to remember who we are and to reclaim the very thing that racialized settler colonialism was meant to take from us: a profound sense of belonging to a centuries-long struggle for collective liberation.

“American Progress” Photo Credit

Mary Bondurant Warren and Jack Moreland Jones, South Carolina Immigrants, 1760 to 1770 (Danielsville, GA: Heritage Papers, 1988), 6.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s seed: Four British folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 626.

Note: Scots living in the Northern Scottish highlands were a separate cultural group from the southern Scots who would eventually become "Scots-Irish." These northerners lived in an intact Gaelic-speaking, non-Protestant, clan-based system until their defeat and displacement by the British following the battle of Culloden in 1746.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014), 51-52.

Michael Dewar, The British Army in Northern Ireland (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1985), 12.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press), 44.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Picador, 2020), 1-15.

Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Booklyn, New York: Ayin Press, 2023).

Shireen Akram-Boshar, “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East,” essay, in Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, ed. Sumaya Awad and brian bean (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2020), 40.

Khalidi, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, 55-95.

Shireen Akram-Boshar, “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East.”

Ibid.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt, 47.