When Settler-Colonialism Became Libel

How an Academic Framework Was Hollowed Out and Turned into Defamation

In contemporary academic and activist discourse, settler-colonialism has become more than an analytic—it has become a synonym for genocide. The shift may appear subtle, but its consequences are far-reaching. No longer a specific crime with a legal threshold, genocide is now often treated as a structural condition—something presumed wherever “settlers” remain and wherever power is exercised against an Indigenous group. Within this framework, genocide need not be proven. It need only be named.

The case of the Yanomami in Brazil makes this dynamic visible. What is happening in Yanomami territory is devastating: illegal gold mining, deforestation, mercury poisoning, the spread of disease, malnutrition, and armed violence—compounded by years of deliberate state neglect. Under Bolsonaro, health posts were closed, environmental enforcement was dismantled, and criminal networks allowed to operate with impunity. The result has been mass displacement and hundreds of preventable deaths.

This is a profound moral and political failure. It is criminal, it is structurally racist, and it has rightly provoked outrage. Many scholars, NGOs, and activists have described it as a genocide. But legally and conceptually, that charge does not hold.

Genocide, in international law, requires specific intent—a demonstrable aim to destroy a group as such. In the case of the Yanomami, what we see is not an attempt to exterminate, but a pattern of lawless extraction, opportunism, and racialized indifference. The destruction is real—but it is not genocide. It is what happens when profit is valued more than life, and when Indigenous people are treated as obstacles to be displaced rather than as human beings to be protected.

This distinction matters. Because when genocide is collapsed into settler-colonialism, it becomes unmoored from legal or moral specificity and available for rhetorical weaponization. And that is precisely what we see today in the discourse around Israel.

The charge of genocide against Israel is not the result of dispassionate legal analysis—it is the product of conceptual slippage, factual inaccuracy, and a revisionist erasure of the Jewish people. Israel is framed as a settler-colonial state, and thus, by this logic, any exercise of power becomes evidence of genocidal intent. But this framing is false. Israel is not a settler-colonial project. It is a project of indigenous return—a reconstitution of a people whose historical, civilizational, and spiritual ties to the land far predate modern colonial paradigms.

By contrast, the Palestinian national movement as it emerged in the twentieth century was shaped by populations whose presence was itself the result of earlier Arab settlement and imperial expansion. That movement has now hardened into an irredentist project—one that views Jewish return not as cohabitation but as intrusion, and seeks not coexistence but removal. It is not Israel pursuing extermination. It is a movement committed to the extermination of the indigenous returnees.

The Yanomami case shows us what catastrophic, criminal harm looks like without genocidal intent. The case of Israel shows us how the idea of genocide, once detached from legal specificity, can be turned into an instrument of political inversion—erasing history, obscuring responsibility, and recasting the very people who have endured genocide as its perpetrators.

If we are to confront real atrocities, defend Indigenous rights, and think with moral and legal clarity, we need to recover the integrity of our categories. When genocide becomes just another accusation—emptied of content and swollen with ideology—it ceases to serve justice. It becomes a tool of erasure.