Patrick Wolfe (1949 ā 18 February 2016) was an English historian and scholar who lived and wrote in Australia.
Born into an Irish Catholic and German Jewish family in Yorkshire, England, his works are credited with establishing the field of settler colonial studies. He also made significant contributions to several academic fields, including anthropology, genocide studies, Indigenous studies, and the historiography of race, colonialism, and imperialism.
Colonialism's emphasis on imperialism, land dispossession, resource extraction, and cultural destruction frequently resulted in genocidal practices aimed at attacking Indigenous peoples and existing populations as a means to attain colonial goals. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism." Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.
States have practised colonialism during various periods in history, even during progressive eras such as the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, a period in the history of 17th- and 18th-century Europe which was marked by some progressive reforms, natural social hierarchies were reinforced. Europeans who were educated, white, and native-born were considered high-class, whereas less-educated, non-European people were considered low-class. These "natural" hierarchies were reinforced by progressives such as the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), a French mathematician, who believed that slaves were savages due to their lack of modern practices, despite the fact that he advocated the abolition of slavery. The colonization process usually starts by attacking the homes of its targets. Typically, the people who are subjected to colonizing practices are portrayed as lacking modernity, because they and the colonialists do not have the same level of education or technology.
Zionism has been described by its founders and early leaders, as well as by many scholars, as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the IsraeliāPalestinian conflict. Zionism's founders and early leaders were aware and unapologetic about their status as colonizers, with early leading Zionists such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky described Zionism as colonization. The paradigm of settler colonialism was also later applied to Zionism by various scholars and figures, including Patrick Wolfe, Edward Said, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, Ilan PappĆ© and Noam Chomsky.
The settler colonial framework on the conflict emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational myths and considered the Nakba to be ongoing. This perspective contends that Zionism involves processes of elimination and assimilation of Palestinians, akin to other settler colonial contexts similar to the creation of the United States and Australia.