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REPORT ON

DISPOSSESSION RESISTANCE AGAINST SETTLER COLONISATION AND OCCUPATION

BY

DR ASIM QURESHI

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1. INSTRUCTIONS

1. I have been instructed by Riverway Law to provide a report on matters within my expertise in support of the application to the British Home Secretary to deproscribe Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (‘Hamas’).

2. The British government has proscribed Hamas based on understanding that the organisation operates as a terrorist group in both its status and tactics. The purpose of this report is to assess how the dispossession of Palestinian land by the Zionist state has resulted in resistance by the Palestinian people to reclaim their land and property – a right enshrined in all natural and international law. The report further considers the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance to target settlements due to their fundamental role as part of the machinery of colonial violence.

2. QUALIFICATIONS

3. I give this report in my personal capacity.

4. I am the Research Director of the advocacy organisation CAGE International based in London, UK. The organisation advocates for those who have been unfairly impacted by a securitised world since 11 September 2001.

5. For the last fifteen years I have advised legal teams representing individuals accused of serious violent political crimes and acts in the US, Guantanamo Bay, UK and other jurisdictions around the world in my capacity as a mitigation investigator. This work involves investigating the intergenerational socio-political-historical-environmental trajectories of a violent actor’s past as a means of understanding the full context of their acts.

6. I graduated in Law (LLB Hons, LLM), specialising in International Law. Later I completed my Ph.D. in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent. My work product includes having authored a number of NGO reports, academic journal articles, and mainstream media articles.

7. I am the author of the following books; Rules of the Game: Detention, Deportation, Disappearance (Hurst & Co, Columbia UP, 2009); A Virtue of Disobedience (Unbound, 2019); the editor of I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting Racism in Times of National Security (Manchester UP, 2020) and When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners (Pluto, 2024).

DISPOSSESSION RESISTANCE AGAINST SETTLER COLONISATION AND OCCUPATION

3. INTRODUCTION

8. The Zionist state of Israel has established a complex series of settlements, fortifications, watch towers, walls, and drones – all of which serve the purpose of dispossessing Palestinians of their land from the period of the British Mandate until today. This report examines the way that dispossession has historically taken place and continues until this very day. It further considers the right of Palestinians to recover land that is dispossessed through a taxonomy of violence referred to as dispossession resistance.

9. Over the course of the report, the following arguments will be forwarded in defence of the right of Palestinians to exercise armed resistance for their self-determination, but also to recover all lands that were dispossessed. This work enters dispossession resistance into a taxonomy of violence that explains the right of those who have been denied what is rightfully theirs. This report will explain this in the following ways:

1. By defining dispossession resistance as a moral right rooted in natural law. As this report is in support of deproscribing the group Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (Hamas), dispossession resistance will also be contextualised through Qur’anic scripture as a unilateral moral right.

2. Through showing how violence associated with colonisation is very much rooted in a European tradition of wealth extraction and fundamentally changing the nature of the indigenous lands, as well as their culture and traditions. Reaction to such forms of violence always produce resistance violence to stem colonial power.

3. By focusing on settler colonisation specifically as an exercise in dispossessing native populations of their wealth, land and resources – it ultimately acts as part of the machinery of violence. The settlers take land and reinforce the presence of the colonial power through the settlements, but further act as paramilitaries in defence of Israel.

4. The final section of the report will focus explicitly on the dispossession Palestinians have experienced through a Zionist ideology that seeks to dispossess them of all their lands and enforce that dispossession through a system of settlements. The report ends by showing how Palestinians have a right under international law to resist the existence of such settlements.

10. Dispossession is a moral wrong that denies the fundamental right of those who have had their lands and property stolen to recover what was lost. The Palestinian people continue to exert their right to their dispossessed land through armed resistance, a right afforded to them by natural law, international law, and their spiritual connection to the land.

4. DISPOSSESSION RESISTANCE

11. The theft of land of others is an act condemned by religious texts and traditions throughout history. Whether it is the Old Testament’s injunction against moving the boundary stones of neighbours to increase the size of one’s own land, the New Testament explicitly commanding that one shall not steal, to the Qur’an that the property of others should not be consumed – the Abrahamic faith traditions share a common emphasis that the property and land of others cannot be taken unlawfully. Older traditions such as the Manusmriti from Hinduism states that the theft of land should result in a restitution a thousand times the value of the land – indicating the seriousness of the offence. At its centre, dispossession is an issue of the theft or wrongful appropriation of land, either through confiscation or through settlement.

12. International law has always placed emphasis on restitution of rights where they have been lost, but it was not until 2004 that Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the UN Special Rapporteur on Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons presented the Pinheiro Principles – specific UN guidance for States to provide justice to those who are dispossessed.¹ These principles assert that all refugees should be able to return to their former homes and receive restitution of property arbitrarily or unlawfully taken from them. For Palestinian refugees, the Pinheiro Principles reinforce long-standing legal arguments supported by international law, including General Assembly Resolution 194 and subsequent UN pronouncements, which affirm the right of return and compensation for lost property.

13. The reality for Palestinians, however, has been the continued denial of their dispossession through the fiction of their land being terra nullius – a land that was uninhabited for Zionists to occupy – a fiction that was rooted in a longer colonial history. The late Palestinian scholar Edward W Said, in his collection of essays and interviews The Politics of Dispossession, placed the history of dispossession for his people on a timeline that dates back to the period of European colonisation of the Middle East:

“The present struggle between the Palestinian people and the state of Israel very much belongs to the historical relationship created over time between the Arabs and the West, and that so far as any Palestinian is concerned, the destruction of our society in 1948, the expulsion and dispossession of our people since then, as well as the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is seen as extending and deepening the ravages in our midst of what began originally when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, Western European colonialism.”²

14. Said, like many Palestinians, was sympathetic to the antisemitic racism that plagued the Jews of Europe – the profound, “extent and the overpowering legacy of suffering and despair that informed the postwar Zionist movement.”³ However, this sympathy could not be countenanced as a replacement to dispossessed Palestinian land – that the suffering of the Jews could not stand in place of “a conscious dispossession, dislocation, and displacement of another people.”⁴ At the centre of the Palestinian struggle, is the notion of the dispossession as a loss of land and property that they have specifically claimed restitution for, including the right of Palestinians to return to their ancestral lands.

15. Regaining that land, like many anti-colonial struggles, has produced manifold forms of resistance, from peace negotiations, concessions, to violent struggle, to campaigns of hunger-strikes in prison – all come under the general rubric of resistance to gain rights, dignity and land. Resistance groups in Palestine, including the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (Hamas), and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have been engaged at various times and moments in armed struggle for the restitution of their rights – but always in an asymmetry of power with the Zionist state and its ally the United States of America. Edward Said captured this asymmetry, on how those dispossessed of their rights, have been forced to engage with those in power on unequal terms:

“After all, there has been no liberation movement in this or any other century that, like the Palestinian movement, has been so beset with such immense difficulties: No movement has had to deal with colonizers so morally creditable as the Jews. No movement has had to deal simultaneously with expulsion, dispossession, colonization, and a terrifying kind of international illegitimacy. No movement has had to fight from a hundred different locations (excluding a national base) against a military-political alliance (Israel and the United States) that would outclass any but one or two modern nation-states in strength, resources, and institutional power. No movement has been so unfortunate in its allies and its surrounding context.”⁵

16. The constancy of Palestinian resistance and movement is not merely tied to the land as a material concern but carries spiritual implications too – there are layers of obligation that dispossession brings. For Islamic armed groups such as Hamas and PIJ, the Qur’an becomes a central source that must be considered in relation to their commitment to regaining lands that have been lost. The following section provides a Qur’an specific focus to the ethics of restitution discussed above – a unilateral right to recover property and land.

Dispossession resistance in the Qur’an

17. “There is nothing in our book, the Qur’an, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone lays a hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion.”⁶

18. These words by the martyr Malcolm X brings into sharp contrast how different systems of laws across the world engage with notions of dignity and autonomy. Malcolm’s referencing the schema of defence that is presented in the Qur’an is particularly relevant due to the emphasis that a multitude of verses and chapters place on the rights of those who find themselves dispossessed of their land and property – giving a unilateral right to its reacquisition.

19. Across the world, a plethora of Muslim-majority countries implement the Qur’an and Islamic Law as part of their national legal structures, with countries such as Egypt placing the Qur’an as the highest source of law within its constitutional framework. Islamic Law as a normative legal system has a wide ranging application, even being included within framework of international law through the International Court of Justice’s statute which can rely on a wide framework of legal systems to deliver its verdicts.⁷ Almost 1.9 billion Muslims in the world (25% of the world’s population) practise their faith to varying degrees and ways, largely holding on to the centrality of the Qur’an as a book of guidance, ethics and laws that are central to the faith across divides.

20. Texts of International Humanitarian Law (the Laws of Armed Conflict and the Use of Force) often contain references to the practice of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, and later of the counter-Crusade leader Salah al-Din as part of their histories on the development of the conduct of hostilities. Islamic scholarship the world over has largely agreed on the Geneva Conventions as being a formalised understanding of prophetic guidance on the jus in bello – that protection of both combatants, civilians, agriculture and communities should be maintained. It is argued here that dispossession resistance is rooted in a jus ad bellum that centres fighting against alien occupation, colonial domination and racist regimes – and is thus covered by a moral framework that understands racism and colonisation as a moral injury that is to be fought.

21. The schema of the Qur’an presents the moral injury of dispossession as one that is deserving of restitution through any means necessary to reacquire what has been lost, until what was lost is recovered. While there are other verses in the Qur’an that speak more actively about jihad and fighting in other contexts, for the purposes of understanding dispossession resistance, I want to concentrate on those that root fighting back to an ethical schema of restitution and reacquisition through violence. In Surah al-Hajj of the Qur’an, God informs the believers that their initial position of not responding to injuries with violence has been lifted, and that they are now permitted to defend themselves:

“22:39 Those who have been attacked are permitted to take up arms because they have been wronged – God has the power to help them

22:40 those who have been driven unjustly from their homes only for saying, ‘Our Lord is God.’ If God did not repel some people by means of others, many monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, where God’s name is much invoked, would have been destroyed. God is sure to help those who help His cause – God is strong and mighty.”⁸

22. There are a number of elements to these verses that are important to consider. The first is the centrality of those who “have been wronged” – an understanding that a moral injury has taken place, one that is rooted in their material conditions. The following verse explicates the injury as “those who have been driven unjustly from their homes” – a recognition that something specific and material has been lost by the early community of believers. Through the invocation of other communities that were permitted to defend their monasteries, churches and synagogues, we can also understand from these verses is that this principle is rooted in a wider morality transcending time and place.

23. In the second chapter of the Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah, there are a number of verses that relate to the dispossessed being commanded to respond to the usurpation of their rights with violence:

“2:190 Fight in God’s cause against those who fight you, but do not overstep the limits. God does not love those who overstep the limits.

2:191 Kill them wherever you encounter them, and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution (fitna) is more serious than killing. Do not fight at the Sacred Mosque unless they fight you there. If they do fight you, kill them – this is what such disbelievers deserve -

2:192 but if they stop, then God is most forgiving and merciful.

2:193 Fight them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God. If they cease hostilities, there can be no [further] hostility, except towards aggressors.”⁹

24. Self-defence is centred at the heart of the ethical schema of the Qur’an when presented with the hostility of an aggressive force – yet limits to the inherent right to defend is qualified – to “not overstep the limits”. As with the verses from Surah al-Hajj, there is an emphasis on the believers being driven from their homes, but more than that, that persecution is presented as being worse than killing. When the companion of the Prophet, Abdullah ibn Umar, was asked about these verses, he said, “That we did during the time of Allah's Messenger when Islam was still weak and (the Muslim) man used to face trials in his religion, such as killing or torture. When Islam became stronger (and apparent), there was no more fitnah.”¹⁰

25. The Arabic word mustadafin in the Qur’an probably most closely connotes the dispossessed or oppressed, encapsulating those who are in circumstances that are beyond their control because of a power that is exerted over them. In Surah al-Nisa, the Qur’an connects the mustadafin directly to the ethical framework of fighting by calling on believers to intervene on behalf of those who are facing a system of oppression:

“4:75 Why should you not fight in God’s cause and for those oppressed men, women and children who cry out, ‘Lord, rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors! By your grace, give us a protector and give us a helper!’?”¹¹

26. Defending the oppressed and dispossessed is part of the ethical life of Muslims, and Qur’anic injunctions on its importance cannot be simply ignored within a world that has been split along national borders by a violent colonial order. The verses above all emphasise an ethical schema of fighting back and regaining what is lost, but within a certain set of limits – that Muslims should not exceed the boundaries of what is right within their own framework. The Qur’an does provide an exception to this in Surah al-Shurah and Surah al-Hajj where the Muslims are granted permission to fight their oppressors as they are fought:

“42:39 and defend themselves when they are oppressed.

42:40 Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself – He does not like those who do wrong. There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged, but there is cause to act against those who oppress people and transgress in the land against all justice – they will have an agonizing torment – though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one the greatest things.”

“22:60 So it will be. God will help those who retaliate against an aggressive act merely with its like and are then wronged again: God is pardoning and most forgiving.”

27. For the dispossessed, the Qur’an opens the door to reprisal in equal measure to an oppressor, “let harm be requited by an equal harm”, while at the same time offering the forgiveness and the higher hand as an ideal – yet according no blame to the one who chooses reprisal after being wronged. There is even recognition in Surah al-Hajj that resistance in kind may even bring about a further round of violence by the aggressor, but that this should not dissuade the resistance of the believers.

28. When the Libyan resistance leader Omar Mukhtar fought Italian fascists and took prisoners of war, he refused to torture them, saying, “they are not our teachers. There is a tension between what Islamic law permits at an ethical level for those who are dispossessed, and what classical Islamic jurisprudence lays out as appropriate conduct in hostilities. One of the ways in which this tension can be resolved, is through understanding the system of violence of the coloniser as being total, one that takes place through extreme physical violence against the civilian population to subdue it, but also through civilian infrastructure, the embedding of new legal systems, and systems of incarceration that depopulate military age men from the targeted communities. The classical jurisprudence of Islamic law barely engaged with dispossession, as an assumption was built into classical texts that there is a coherent central Islamic authority, but the Qur’an does deal explicitly with dispossession – bringing about a different ethical framework – one which centres the violence of dispossession as the edifice that requires resisting with equal force. There has never been a doctrine of self-defence in early texts on jihad, largely because of a Qur’anic schema that provides guidance on defensive resistance.

29. Notwithstanding its being bound by ethical parameters forbidding the targeting of civilians and minors and other transgressions such as sexual violence, the all-encompassing and suffocating nature of a racist and colonial regime compels dispossession resistance to function in an alternative framework. There is a total absence of symmetry in any sense between parties – on that is entirely asymmetric. Grégoire Chamayou captures the nature of this disproportionality vividly in his reflection on the distance between a suicidal operation, and that of the drone operator:

“Whereas the kamikaze implies a total fusion of the fighter’s body and weapon, the drone ensures their radical separation. The kamikaze: My body is a weapon. The drone: My weapon has no body. The former implies the death of the agent. The latter totally excludes it. Kamikazes are those for whom death is certain. Drone pilots are those for whom death is impossible. In this sense, they represent two opposite poles on the spectrum of exposure to death. In between the two are classic fighters, those for whom death is a risk.

One speaks of “suicide bombing” or of “suicide assassination,” but what would be the antonym? There is no specific expression to designate those who kill by explosion without ever risking their lives. Not only is it not necessary for them to die in order to kill, but it is impossible for them to be killed as they kill.”¹²

30. The asymmetry between the occupying force and the dispossessed prompts a rethinking of the tactics and strategies of armed resistance, as the coloniser can no longer be met on a battlefield that he is largely absent from – whether through air strikes or targeted killings by drones. In her work on the resistance of Abrek fighters in the Caucasus against Russian imperialism, Rebecca Ruth Gould writes of transgressive sanctity as a formulation for the ways in which these Muslim fighters chose to resist the asymmetry and violence of Russian forces. Key to this concept, is the way in which their traditional understandings of Islamic law and tradition are reconfigured in order to meet the specific challenges before them:

“Transgressive sanctity is generated when indigenous law is emptied of its old meaning and filled with new content. This new content asserts its power by staging acts of violence against the new legal order. Transgressive sanctity differs from other kinds of violence, as well as from other kinds of sanctities, in that it thrives on performance and display.”¹³

31. Much in the way Gould theorises transgressive sanctity, this report centres dispossession resistance as a particular ethical form of armed force within a taxonomy of violence – one that permits the dispossessed to recover what was lost by any means available to them in their struggle. The following sections provide an outline of how dispossession took place across the period of European colonisation, and how that process provided a platform for Israel’s settler colonisation of Palestine.

5. THE VIOLENCE OF COLONISATION

32. “Exalted in their pain and sorrow above our—wicked—existence they went on their way and we could also see how something was happening in the heart of the boy, something that, when he grew up, could only become a viper inside him, that same thing that was now the weeping of a helpless child.

Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like.

I couldn’t stay where I was. The place itself couldn’t bear me. I went round to the other side. There the blind people were sitting. I hastily skirted round them. I went through the gap into the field that was bounded by the cactus hedge. Things were piling up inside me.

I had never been in the Diaspora—I said to myself— I had never known what it was like… but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me, from every direction, in books and newspapers, everywhere: exile. They had played on all my nerves. Our nation’s protest to the world: exile! It had entered me[…]”¹⁴

33. Yizhar Smilansky (writing under the nom-de-plume S. Yizhar) wrote these words based on his experience as a soldier in the nascent Israeli Defence Forces during the Nakba in 1948 – they capture how dispossession of Palestinian land and property was something that was familiar to a people that had experienced pogroms and the Holocaust. As Smilansky acknowledged, it was their acts of oppression that were not only making a child cry, but “could only become a viper inside him.”

34. To situate the dispossession resistance of Palestinians, before, during and after the current enhanced genocide taking place in Palestine, it is crucial to understand how European colonial and settler colonial violence produced similar forms of resistance violence. What remains a constant, is the material reality of land dispossession and killing, nearly always leading to non-state responses to European organised violence. According to Dierk Walter in his Colonial Violence, the dispossession fits a pattern of wealth extraction for the purposes of enriching colonial metropoles – ultimately driving local populations to seek to arrest this global theft. While the colonisers brought a mixture of religious proselytisation, civilising missions and ideology, it was the economic impetus of capitalism that underpinned a ‘discriminatory global legal system’¹⁵, but tied to a violence that was inherent in liberalism. As Caroline Elkins shows in Legacy of Violence, the colonisers referenced a liberal tradition of freedom and modernity, but it was paradoxically accompanied by extreme use of violence – the economic extraction that took place could not happen without a racialising liberal order.¹⁶

35. In the period from the fifteen hundreds to the late eighteen hundreds alone, those who found themselves in crosshairs of Britain suffered on a ‘catastrophic scale’. As evidenced by David Veevers in The Great Defiance, British:

“diseases brought over by colonists could cause demographic collapse; military violence and endemic settler violence regularly culminated in massacres and genocide; intense economic exploitation displaced people from their land and contributed to widespread famine; and conquest politically and culturally disenfranchised them.”¹⁷

36. What Veevers also reminds us though, is that while the colonisers brought a level of violence that was unprecedented for these peoples, and while they were largely successful in their resource extraction, they did not have it entirely their own way. Upon encountering these non-centralised societies, the colonists were compelled to engage armed non-state entities and militias, which ostensibly would have operated in a manner akin to ‘terrorism cells’ against much larger colonial forces. European invaders and settlers were able to move quickly against larger cities and built-up towns, but struggled when coming into contact with habitations on the peripheries of societies, where the landscape would change to dense forests, swamps, deserts or mountains – making heavy machinery and movement far more cumbersome.¹⁸ In various colonial contexts, euphemisms such as a ‘winning hearts and minds’ became central to the idea of counterinsurgency tactics that were designed to force local populations into total submission to a new colonial reality of ‘benevolence’ that was backed by extreme violence.¹⁹ According to Elkins, the central idea was that the ‘terrorists’ could be made compliant through the use of detention and torture as a means of pacifying them in what was referred to as ‘rehabilitation’. In that vein, British officials in Kenya hung the words Mwiteithia Niateithagio over the entrance to their worst detention camp – abandon hope all ye who enter here.²⁰

37. The winning of hearts and minds euphemism operates as an extreme form of double-speak, for it ultimately carries the purpose of disciplining populations with the aim of controlling their behaviour. They are not ‘won’ as much as they are defeated into accepting the status quo. In Laleh Khalili’s Time in the Shadows, she cites David Kilcullen – one of the foremost advocates of contemporary counterinsurgency strategy – as explaining that ultimately a hearts and minds strategy is about showing that resistance is pointless and that the suppressed population should concede on any matter of higher principle, and instead, centre their own self-interest.²¹ Khalili evidences how British officers in the Northwest Frontier of India during the colonial period used civilians as part of their modalities of violence to control the behaviour of the tribes they were seeking to suppress:

“It might be worthwhile forming a “hostage corps” composed of the sons of hostiles. A couple of these in the front of a convoy would discourage the use of land mines. On the Frontiers we often push the relatives of an outlaw in front of a police party when entering a house where an outlaw is suspected of hiding.”²²

38. What Khalili argues, is that liberal empires – those Europeans who conquered and settled on land – created a system of lawless places through a “deliberate legal process of temporarily and functionally setting aside one body of law and adopting another, or in rarer and more extreme instances, replacing legal procedures with administrative procedures.”²³ Thus, in order to maintain the fiction of benevolent liberal order, a capricious system of order was created to maintain not only violence, but dispossession of the occupied population.

39. The French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou has sought to trace the development of colonial technological violence and suppression through his work Drone Theory – through assessing the ever-increasing distances that have been created between colonial authorities and the colonised. The drone being the final manifestation of such asymmetric violence, what he terms as the eradication of “all direct reciprocity in any exposure to hostile violence.”²⁴ Chamayou roots the use of drones in the bombing campaigns of western colonisers as a tactic of ‘annihilation’ and ‘execution’. Citing Sir John Bagot Glubb, who was responsible for the British aerial bombings campaigns of the Middle East in the early twentieth century, Chamayou shows how aerial bombardment had the specific goal of demoralising tribesmen into a feeling of helplessness. This perspective is reiterated by Charles Dunlap, a major general in the US Air Force, “Death per se does not extinguish the will to fight in such opponents; rather, it is the hopelessness that arises from the inevitability of death from a source they cannot fight.”²⁵

40. As a modern panopticon, Chamayou writes of the mass terror that drones inflict on entire populations, that “it amounts to a psychic imprisonment within a perimeter no longer defined by bars, barriers, and walls, but by the endless circling of flying watchtowers up above.”²⁶ This ‘psychic imprisonment’ itself leads to a population-wide sense of grievance against the occupier where new recruits for the resistance emerge in the course of the annihilation of entire families, but there is no real success, as “successes become statistics. Their evaluation is totally disconnected from their real effects on the ground.”²⁷ This form of annihilation has always been central to the process of genocide by European colonisers across contexts around the world. As recently cited by the Lemkin Institute in the context of Israel’s continued genocide in Palestine, the process of genocide is the pacification of populations through destruction, but also through a pattern of behaviour:

“Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor’s own nationals.”²⁸

41. The purpose of the air-controlled violence is to establish a sense of omniscience or omnipotence over the captive population, that at all times the ‘psychic imprisonment’ through the drone becomes the all-seeing eye through which, “you will find out who is important in a network, where they live, where they get their support from, where their friends are.”²⁹ However, this air-based annihilation is always devoid of any reasonable expectation of humanity – because although the killing is operated from a distance, the target population exists in a state of perpetual terror, under the ceaseless whirring rotators of the drone that are regularly error-strewn in their targeting.³⁰

42. This was perhaps most recently evidenced in the video released by the Zionist Israeli Defence Forces of the last moments of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Too frightened to engage in hostilities with Hamas soldiers, a drone is flying into a decrepit building through an opening that was shelled open by the Israeli military. The drone enters a large room, hovering as it scans for signs of life, to find Sinwar sitting upright on an armchair, staring the drone directly in its camera – his eyes seemingly conveying a message of strength and resolve to those hiding behind the controllers that fly the drone. In a final act of defiance, Sinwar attempts to throw what seems to be a harmless stick at the drones, which moves in a terrified jerk away from the stick, seemingly frightened of what the Hamas leader might be capable doing with only one functional arm. As Chamayou writes, “a drone looks like the weapon of cowards.”³¹

6. SETTLER COLONISATION AS A PART OF THE MACHINERY OF VIOLENCE

43. Settlements in settler colonial contexts are an integral part of the structure of violence inherent to the colonial state. Settlements operate not just as places of habitation but as mechanisms of territorial control, dispossession, and cultural erasure. These processes are deeply embedded in the violent logic of settler colonialism, which seeks to replace indigenous populations and establish a permanent settler presence. To understand how settlements contribute to the colonial state’s structure of violence, it is essential to frame settler colonialism as an ongoing process rather than a historical event. According to Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism is a “structure, not an event,”³² where the primary goal is the elimination of indigenous societies to secure land for the settler population. This process is justified through various legal and ideological frameworks, such as the doctrine of terra nullius, which declared that land was “empty” if it was not being used in ways that European settlers deemed productive.³³

44. The concept of structural violence, as articulated by Johan Galtung, refers to a form of violence where social structures or institutions harm individuals by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.³⁴ In settler colonial contexts, settlements are a form of structural violence as they disrupt indigenous ways of life, sever connections to ancestral lands, and erode traditional socio-political structures. In Canada, for example, the expansion of settlements has historically gone hand-in-hand with policies aimed at assimilating indigenous populations, such as the residential school system. These schools were explicitly designed to “kill the Indian in the child”.³⁵ Settlements served as the material infrastructure that enabled these policies by creating spaces that excluded indigenous people or forced them into marginalised enclaves.

45. Settler colonialism is also deeply invested in the erasure of indigenous presence and histories, a process that settlements actively facilitate. As Wolfe argues, the settler colonial project is not merely about the occupation of land but also about the erasure of indigenous cultures and histories to replace them with settler narratives.³⁶ The construction of settlements often involves the renaming of places, the destruction of sacred sites, and the imposition of settler law and customs. In occupied Palestine, for instance, the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is often accompanied by the demolition of Palestinian homes and the appropriation of land, which not only displaces Palestinians physically but also erases their historical and cultural ties to the land.³⁷

46. Settlements are also sites where direct violence against indigenous populations can occur. The appropriation of land for settlements often involves the use of military force or paramilitary violence. In South Africa, during the apartheid era, the creation of settlements for white citizens was enforced through violent removals of Black South Africans, resulting in the loss of homes, livelihoods, and lives.³⁸ However, even in contexts where direct violence is less overt, the presence of settlements continues to inflict harm through the denial of resources, such as access to water, healthcare, or education. In Palestine, for example, the encroachment of Israeli settlements has resulted in the restriction of Palestinian movement, creating Bantustans where Palestinians are confined to overcrowded and under-resourced areas.³⁹

Settler colonialism in Palestine

47. The Zionist occupation of Palestine is fundamentally rooted in a settler colonial framework that has persisted since the early twentieth century and continues to shape the landscape today. The processes of settler colonialism began since before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 through the forced migration of Jews onto Palestinian land through the British Mandate, and have been perpetuated through systematic land appropriation, settlement expansion, and the displacement of Palestinians. According to Dov Gavish:

“[…] the roots of the modern survey system of Palestine set up by the military government are to be sought in the Balfour Declaration and its implications regarding land. The system was formally established in July 1920 with only one objective: to survey and map the lands of the country as demanded by the Zionist Organisation, in order to implement legally binding land settlement and registration of tenure rights.”⁴⁰ 

48. The Mandate in Palestine became intimately connected to surveying Palestinian land with the specific purpose of reconstituting the land through legal fictions. This permitted a new system of registration attributed to the migrating European Jews seeking to settle on land dispossessed of the Palestinian population.

49. The roots of the Zionist settler colonial project can be traced to before the events of 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe).⁴¹ The creation of the State of Israel was accompanied by the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and the destruction of over 500 villages.⁴² This mass displacement was not merely incidental but was part of a deliberate strategy to secure a Jewish demographic majority on the land. Zionist leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, explicitly recognised that the establishment of a Jewish state would necessitate the removal of the indigenous Palestinian population to create a “land without a people for a people without a land.”⁴³

50. The Nakba represents the foundational act of settler colonial violence in Palestine, setting the stage for subsequent policies of land appropriation, demographic engineering, and settlement expansion. As Patrick Wolfe notes, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, meaning that the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 was not a one-time occurrence but an ongoing process that continues to this day.⁴⁴ Settler colonialism in Israel-Palestine operates through both legal frameworks and ideological justifications. The Zionist project has relied heavily on the doctrine of terra nullius, the notion that the land was “empty” or underutilised, which justified its expropriation by Jewish settlers. This colonial logic is akin to that employed by European settlers in North America and Australia, where indigenous peoples were dispossessed based on the assumption that they did not “properly” use the land.⁴⁵

51. Not all European Jews that arrived in a Palestine that was being emptied of its native inhabitants were willing to engage in the process of dispossession. Writing a chapter in The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammer of Trauma and History, Alon Confino centres the story of Genya and Henryk Kowalski who arrived fresh from surviving a Nazi concentration camp to Haifa on a ship:

“We were shaved, we were naked, we did not cry. We did not know what a crematorium is, they lead you inside, you don’t know where you are going. They told us, you see, look at the chimney there with smoke coming out, you are waiting to go inside. I never wanted to tell…In Haifa we got out [of the ship] and they took us to Pardes Katz…There were tents, and it was a hard winter in 1949, there were heavy rains and it was cold, our clothes were soaked, and we cried. So I decided I’m not staying here. The Jewish Agency promised to give us an apartment, we went to them and they gave us a key and we arrived at Jaffa. It was not far from the harbor, it was a house enclosed by a fence. We opened the gate, opened the door and went in and we couldn’t believe our eyes…We were in shock. The house was beautiful but we didn’t even enter the house because in the yard there was a round table set with plates, and as soon as we saw this…we were frightened. And besides the fear, we could not look, it hurt us, how could people, it reminded us how we had to leave the house and everything behind when the Germans arrived and threw us into the ghetto. And here it was just the same situation, and it was not in us to stay. I did not want to do the same thing that the Germans did. We left, returned the key, and stayed in Nachlat [Yehuda, south of Tel Aviv] where the family lived in a section of an orange depository located in the yard of a local family.”⁴⁶

52. Confino’s essay acknowledges the extent to which the Kowalskis are exceptional – that there were very few who chose to exercise their own moral agency when faced with the prospect of dispossessing others in the way they were once dispossessed themselves, “their act spat in the face of history, that history that first made them refugees and then offered them in compensation in the form of profiteering from the refugeedom of others.”⁴⁷ The Nakba was an operation of dispossessing Palestinians, as even children were permitted to loot the property of displaced Palestinians, as described by Avital Mossinsohn in his recollection of the aftermath of a Haganah attack on Balad al-Sheikh, “The next day I and two older children went to the village and got some loot. The Jews from Haifa and the kibbutz, too, went and took furniture and whatever was left. I took a pack of cards and a donkey.”⁴⁸

53. Writing of UN recognition of the state of Israel in 1949, Shahd Hammouri has written on the centrality of the Palestinian right to return to their original properties occupied by Israelis as being key to the acceptance of the Israeli state by the (very colonial) international community. Hammouri shows through officials that the Palestinian right of return was a conditio sine qua non (condition without which) Israel could not be recognised. This was affirmed as early as 1948 when Count Bernadotte, the official UN mediator between Israel and Palestine noted:

“No settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The majority of these refugees have come from territory which, under the Assembly resolution of 29 November [1947], was to be included in the Jewish State […] It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.”⁴⁹

54. The conditio sine qua non – of the right of return – cannot simply be ignored with the passage of time. The right of dispossessed Palestinians to maintain their entitlement to recover their land and property stands in stark contradistinction to the existence of Israel as a state – the lack of restitution cannot exist in conjunction with Israel’s continued normalisation as a state that has dispossessed the native inhabitants of their rights. Of significance is UNGA Resolution ES-9/1 on 5 February 1982 which explicitly stated that Israel could no longer be considered a “peace-loving Member State”:

“Declares that Israel’s record and actions confirm that it is not a peace-loving Member State and that it has carried out neither its obligations under the Charter not its commitment under General Assembly resolution 273 (III) of 11 May 1949.”

55. Just over thirty years after the creation of the Zionist state, there was widespread recognition that Israel had not fulfilled the conditions for its existence as a Member State to be accepted. This was largely based on Israel’s legal system facilitating an increased dispossession through a range of policies that began two days after the expulsion of 70,000 inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle on 15 July 1948, when the Minister of Finance was appointed to the new role of ‘Custodian of Abandoned Property’ – a fictional position created to steal Palestinian land and property. At the same time, the Ministry of Agriculture was permitted to ‘lease’ refugee land to settlers in the Kibbutzim⁵⁰ through the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950, which allowed the state to confiscate the property of Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the Nakba. This law essentially rendered these refugees ‘absentees’ and legalised the seizure of their land. Further, the Law of Return (1950) and the Citizenship Law (1952) enabled Jews from around the world to immigrate to Israel and acquire citizenship, while denying the right of return to Palestinian refugees.⁵¹

56. The Six-Day War of 1967 marked a significant escalation in the Israeli settler colonial project, with Israel occupying the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Following the war, Israel began establishing settlements in these territories in violation of international law, specifically UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into the territory it occupies.⁵² The settlement project in the West Bank has been central to Israel’s settler colonial strategy, transforming the region into a fragmented landscape where Palestinian towns and villages are surrounded by ever-expanding Israeli settlements.

57. This policy has been driven by both state support and private settler organisations, often with the backing of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). According to the NGO Peace Now, there are currently over 450,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), with around 150 settlements and numerous outposts.⁵³ Settlements are strategically located to maximise control over fertile agricultural land and water resources while creating a contiguous Jewish presence that prevents the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.⁵⁴

58. East Jerusalem, which was occupied and annexed by Israel in 1967, has been a focal point of Israel’s settler colonial ambitions. The state has pursued a policy of Judaization — the systematic attempt to alter the demographic and cultural character of the city. This has involved the forced displacement of Palestinian residents, house demolitions, and the construction of Jewish neighbourhoods and settlements, such as Gilo, Har Homa, and Pisgat Ze’ev.⁵⁵ These settlements are intended to solidify Israeli control over the city and undermine Palestinian claims to it as the capital of a future state.

59. The Israeli settler colonial ambition and project can be summarised by the Hebraic word nishul – meaning dispossession – an active process of removing the Palestinian people from the homes and land (although Israelis prefer the word ‘transfer’). The Israeli anthropologist and scholar Jeff Halper has written extensively of the process of nishul in his work An Israeli in Palestine, where he recounts that while this process of dispossession has taken many forms over the years, “all of them by necessity violent since the population being displaced can never agree to it or ever be reconciled with it.”⁵⁶ Zionists saw themselves as ‘returning natives’ while using the words ‘conquest’ and ‘colonization’ to describe their settler colonisation.⁵⁷ Halper connects how dispossession took place in different ways, first from displacement to depopulation, finally to confinement:

“After the ethnic cleansing which accompanied the establishment of an expanded Israel, nishul took the form of removing Palestinians from vast tracts of the country and concentrating them in small, disconnected, and densely packed enclaves or cantons. To be sure, policies to induce emigration remained in place, targeting in particular the Palestinian middle classes, but the thrust of dispossession and de-Arabization shifted from expulsion to confinement.” ⁵⁸

60. Beyond physical settlements, Israel’s settler colonial project is maintained through a range of structural mechanisms that perpetuate control over the Palestinian population. The construction of the Separation Barrier (often referred to as the “Apartheid Wall”) since 2002 has had profound implications for Palestinians. The barrier, which snakes deep into the West Bank, effectively annexes large swathes of Palestinian land, separating communities from their agricultural fields, workplaces, and schools. It serves not only as a physical manifestation of Israeli territorial control but also as a tool of fragmentation that isolates Palestinians from each other and from the outside world.⁵⁹ The restrictions on movement also serve to consolidate Israel’s control over the West Bank and its settlements, reinforcing the spatial fragmentation of Palestinian Territories.⁶⁰ According to the former ad hoc judge to the International Court of Justice, John Dugard, in his role as Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied by Israel:

“The Wall does not follow the Green Line, that is the 1967 boundary between Israel and Palestine which is generally accepted as the border between the two entities.  Instead, it follows a route that incorporates substantial parts of Palestine within Israel.  At present the Wall intrudes six to seven kilometres within Palestine, but there are proposals to penetrate still deeper into Palestinian territory in order to include the settlements of Ariel, Immanuel and Kedumim.  In some places the winding route creates a barrier that completely encircles Palestinian villages while at many points it separates Palestinian villages from the rest of the West Bank and converts them into isolated enclaves.  Qalqiliya, a city with a population of 40,000, is completely surrounded by the Wall and residents can only enter or leave through a single military checkpoint open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.  Palestinians between the Wall and the Green Line will effectively be cut off from their land and workplaces, schools, health clinics and other social services.  Much of the Palestinian land on the Israeli side of the Wall consists of fertile agricultural land and some of the most important water wells in the region.  The Wall is constructed on Palestinian lands expropriated by Israeli military order, justified on grounds of military necessity.  Many fruit and olive trees had been destroyed in the course of building the barrier.  B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights NGO, estimates that the barrier will cause direct harm to at least 210,000 Palestinians living in 67 villages, towns and cities.”⁶¹

61. Israel’s control over Palestinian resources, particularly water and arable land, has been a key aspect of its settler colonial strategy. According to Amnesty International, Israel exploits approximately 80% of the West Bank’s water resources for its own use, leaving Palestinians with limited access. The economic strangulation of the Palestinian territories has resulted in what Sara Roy terms “de-development” — a process by which economic growth is systematically impeded, leaving Palestinians dependent on Israel.⁶² In the view of Jean Ziegler, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food:

“The confiscation of land, extension of settlements and settler-only roads, and the building of the security fence/apartheid wall, where this deprives thousands of Palestinians of their lands, homes, crops and means of subsistence, is a violation of the right to food.  The right to food requires the respect of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits settlement, given that settlements by their nature lead to the confiscation of Palestinian lands and other resources.  If there were no settlements, then there would be no need for the harsh internal closures that restrict movement inside the OPT.”⁶³

62. Since 2007, the blockade of Gaza has been another mechanism of structural violence that enforces Israel’s settler colonial goals. The blockade restricts the movement of goods and people, effectively isolating Gaza from the outside world. This policy has led to severe economic hardship, with high levels of poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity. The ongoing blockade is accompanied by periodic military assaults that further devastate Gaza’s infrastructure, as seen in the 2008-09, 2014, and 2021 offensives.⁶⁴

63. The settler colonial project in Israel is also underpinned by religious and ideological narratives that justify the appropriation of Palestinian land. The concept of Greater Israel, which envisions Jewish sovereignty over all historical Palestine, has been a driving force behind the expansion of settlements. Religious Zionism, in particular, has played a crucial role in mobilising support for the settlement movement, with settlers viewing their presence in the West Bank as a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy.⁶⁵ Despite the entrenched nature of Israel’s settler colonial project, Palestinian resistance continues to challenge its legitimacy. This resistance takes multiple forms, ranging from armed struggle to peaceful protests, legal battles, and international advocacy.⁶⁶

Settlers as paramilitaries central to the machinery of Zionist violence and Palestinian dispossession

64. As mentioned above, recognition of Israel as a member of the United Nations was predicated on the conditio sine qua non that Palestinians dispossessed of their land and property must be permitted to return. The two cannot exist at the same time – Israel cannot legally be permitted to benefit from land acquired unlawfully through the dispossession of Palestine, and thus holds on to land that can be rightfully claimed. This fact alone is uncontroversial due to the consistency with which Palestinians have restated their case on the right of return – individually and collectively – a sui generis right. In 1975, the Committee on the exercise of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people emphasised that:

“[T]he inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination could be exercised only in Palestine. Consequently, the exercise of the individual right of the Palestinian to return to his homeland was a conditio sine qua non for the exercise by this people of its rights to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty.”⁶⁷

65. According to the scholar of international law, Shahd Hammouri, the right to return for Palestinians displaced from the mandate period to the created state of Israel in 1948 is ipso facto recognised by the international community⁶⁸ – with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) only ever having been intended as a temporary solution until such time that the right of return could be exercised.

66. There are layers of dispossession that Palestinians have been consistently asserting their rights over – ones that are crucial to understanding their resistance efforts through political, non-violent and violent means:

1. The dispossession of Palestinian land from the British Mandate period through to the Nakba in 1948. During the Mandate period the first Zionist settlement of Kfar Etzion was built in the West Bank in 1927, it was destroyed in 1948, only to be rebuilt in 1968⁶⁹, the same year that the first settlement was established in the major Palestinian city of Hebron. This land still belongs to the displaced Palestinian people – as evidenced by the refusal of Gertha and Henrik Kowalski from occupying the home of a Palestinian family when arriving in Palestine from Nazi concentration camps. This land and property belonged to Palestinians that have never forgone those rights.

2. A secondary layer to the dispossession is the land that Israel occupied in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War in 1967. This land was occupied by the Zionist forces, but further had their own civilian population settle on the occupied territory in contravention of international law.⁷⁰

3. In 1971, Ariel Sharon, then head of the IDF’s Southern Command, initiated a programme to encourage settlements in Gaza.⁷¹ From that time through to 1984, settlements in the West Bank and Gaza dramatically increased from 5,000 after the Six Day War, to 44,000 in the occupied territories.⁷² This was not a series of random settlement encroachments, but rather formed part of a systematic expansion that became a central element of the Likud party’s election win with then Prime Minister Menachem Begin making settlements a part of official government policy.⁷³ By 1983, the Israeli Civil Administration was established over the occupied territories – explicitly integrating settlement policies into the military administration.⁷⁴

4. After Oslo I in 1993 was signed with the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the settler population in the West Bank increased 110,000 to 200,000.⁷⁵ These settlements were provided with support by the Israeli government after the Oslo II Accord divided 60% of the West Bank into three areas – allowing for further settlement expansion.⁷⁶ By 2009, the settler population had increased to 300,000.

5. The most recent period of structural violence and dispossession of the Palestinian people came between 2012 through to 2017. In April 2012 the Israeli government began the process to legalise settlement outposts previously considered illegal under Israeli law⁷⁷, with the Levy report concluding that the West Bank is not an occupied territory, thereby recommending legalising of all outposts.⁷⁸ By 2017, the Israeli Knesset took the decision to pass the Land Regularisation Law, which retroactively legalised thousands of settler homes built on private Palestinian land⁷⁹, leading to the settler population increasing to 400,000.

67. The history of settler colonisation and subsequent encroachments by the Zionist regime have today resulted in a situation where today there are 475,000 settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. Israeli settlers are not a homogeneous group; they range from secular individuals seeking affordable housing to religious nationalists driven by ideological motives. Within this spectrum, certain groups are involved with organisational structures and exhibit behaviours characteristic of paramilitary entities.

68. Many settlements are established with integral local defence teams, sometimes referred to as ‘rapid response teams,’ which are composed of armed residents trained to respond to security incidents. These teams often operate under the guidance of a settlement’s security coordinator, who liaises directly with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).⁸⁰ The security coordinators are typically residents appointed by the IDF and are trained and granted access to military equipment and intelligence. Furthermore, some settler groups have formed militia-like organisations. For example, the Hilltop Youth is a loosely organised group of young settlers known for establishing illegal ‘outposts’ and engaging in confrontations with Palestinians and Israeli security forces alike.⁸¹ Their activities are often coordinated and exhibit a sophisticated level of organisation beyond spontaneous civilian actions:

“The military avoids confronting violent settlers as a matter of policy, although soldiers have the authority and duty to detain and arrest them. Israeli security forces routinely enable settler violence against Palestinians and their property. As a rule, the military prefers to remove Palestinians from their own farmland or pastureland rather than confront settlers, using various tactics such as issuing closed military zone orders that apply to Palestinians only, or firing tear gas, stun grenades, rubber-coated metal bullets and even live rounds. Sometimes, soldiers actively participate in the settler attacks or look on from the sidelines.”⁸²

69. Incidents involving violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians have been well-documented. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there has been a significant increase in settler-related violence over the past decade.⁸³ These incidents include physical assaults on Palestinians, property damage, agricultural sabotage and arson attacks. These actions are not random but often appear to be part of a broader strategy to intimidate and displace Palestinian communities.⁸⁴ The ‘Price Tag’ policy is a manifestation of this approach, wherein settlers retaliate against Palestinians and Israeli security forces for any action perceived as threatening to the settlement enterprise.⁸⁵

70. While the IDF is responsible for maintaining security in the occupied territories, there are instances where settlers operate with a degree of autonomy and impunity. Reports have indicated that settlers sometimes coordinate their activities with the IDF or receive assistance, whether directly or indirectly. For example, during clashes in the village of Burin in 2019, settlers attacked Palestinian residents in the presence of IDF soldiers. Instead of intervening to stop the settlers, the soldiers reportedly dispersed the Palestinians using tear gas and rubber bullets.⁸⁶ Raz Segal, writing on the implications of the Holocaust and genocide on the continued violence by settlers, begins his journal piece with the following vignette:

“It was the day after the Jewish holiday of Purim, and Jewish settlers stormed Huwara, a Palestinian town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and began dancing in celebration of the holiday. Israeli soldiers first joined them, but soon stood by as the settlers, armed with rocks, axes, and pepper spray, set upon a Palestinian family in a parked car. Footage from a security camera shows the settlers attacking the car and the family from all sides. The father, Omar, eventually managed to start the car, pull back, and speed away, but their ordeal continued: other settlers pursued them with a car and fired on them with guns. The grandfather suffered serious injuries to his head, and his two-year-old granddaughter, with her eyes burning from the pepper spray, could not open them in the hospital; in pain, in shock, in trauma, she could only scream.

The attack came just a week after settlers descended on Huwara in a carnage of violence reported as a pogrom, a term used historically to describe violence against Jews, including during and immediately after the Holocaust. The attack so resembled horrific images of pogrom violence, especially the burning of parts of the town, that the term appeared even in the mainstream Israeli press.”⁸⁷

71. The Israeli government’s support for settlements extends beyond security coordination. Settlements receive substantial state funding for infrastructure, education, and housing incentives. Additionally, the government has been criticised for failing to hold settlers accountable for acts of violence against Palestinians. According to a report by the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din, between 2005 and 2019, over 91% of investigations into ideologically motivated offences against Palestinians were closed without indictment.⁸⁸ This lack of accountability may embolden settlers to continue or escalate their activities.

72. In his essay for the London Review of Books, the British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman wrote Exchange Rate less than a month after the 7 October attacks, highlighting the specific role that dispossession has played for Palestinians resisting from Gaza. In the Spring of 1956, a group of Palestinian fighters entered the kibbutz of Nahal Oz after overcoming a ditch the Israelis had constructed to separate Gaza from the occupied land. The Palestinian fighters killed an Israeli security officer – returning back to Gaza with his body. Wiezman quotes the then chief of general staff for Israel, Moshe Dayan in response to the killing of the officer:

“Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and saw in front of their eyes how we turned the lands and the villages in which they and their forefathers once dwelled into our homeland.”⁸⁹

73. What Weizman evidences is how the ditch that was initially constructed to keep Palestinians from their dispossessed land, eventually became solidified through a ‘complex system of fortifications’, allowing for the formalisation of what Israel called ‘frontier settlements’. 67 years after Gazan fighters carried out an operation against the settlement Nahal Oz, their descendants returned in a larger and more audacious operation on 7 October 2023:

“Hamas struck at all the elements of this interlinked system. Nahal Oz, the closest settlement to the fence, was one of the attack’s focal points. The term ‘Nahal’ refers to the military unit that established the frontier settlements. Nahal settlements started life as military outposts and were supposed to turn into civilian villages, mostly of the kibbutz type. But the transformation is never complete, and some residents are expected to double as defenders when the time comes.”⁹⁰

74. ‘Frontier settlements’ were not simply villages or kibbutzim, they were formed explicitly in the model of an outpost to defend Israel as it increasingly encroached on Palestinian land. Of key importance, is the centrality of settler colonisation as a programme that is initiated and maintained by the Zionist state. In an attempt to create a legal fiction, Israel begin to try and create a distinction between ‘settlements’ and ‘outposts’, a distinction considered by the International Court of Justice in its 2024 Advisory Opinion:

“The Court is aware that a distinction is sometimes made between “settlements” and “outposts”, the latter having been established in contravention of domestic Israeli law. In the Court’s view, this distinction is immaterial for the purpose of ascertaining whether the communities in question form part of Israel’s settlement policy. What matters is whether they are established or maintained with Israel’s support. In this regard, the Court notes that Israel regularly takes steps retroactively to legalize outposts and that it provides them with the infrastructure necessary for their maintenance.”⁹¹

75. The infrastructure that is made available to settlers by the Zionist state, as evidenced above, include arms and training so that settlers are able to operate as paramilitaries that maintain and defend Israel as outposts. From these positions, settlers regularly make incursions further into Palestinian territories. The IDF plays a role in this maintenance – reminding us of Wolfe’s formulation that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and thus settlements are central to the machinery of Zionist violence.

7. DISPOSSESSION RESISTANCE IN PALESTINE

Fighting Settler Colonialism in Palestine

76. Resistance to dispossession of Palestinian land and properties began as a process well before the Nakba. The Palestinian Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 was the first significant staging-post in the uprising against British colonial rule and the increasing influx of Zionist settlers into Mandatory Palestine.⁹² This revolt was largely driven by the displacement and dispossession experienced by the indigenous Arab population, exacerbated by British policies that facilitated Jewish immigration and land acquisition. ⁹³ Such policies significantly altered the demographic and economic landscape, resulting in widespread resentment among Palestinian Arabs.⁹⁴ 

77. By the early 1930s, substantial tracts of land had been purchased by Zionist organisations, often displacing Palestinian peasants (fellahin). The Landless Arab Inquiry Commission of 1930 noted that these land transfers frequently rendered rural Palestinian communities landless and vulnerable to poverty.⁹⁵ This landlessness, compounded by the socio-economic pressures of British rule, fuelled growing unrest, particularly as Jewish immigration surged in response to European anti-Semitism during the 1930s.⁹⁶

78. The Arab Revolt began in 1936 with a general strike, encompassing various sectors such as transportation and commerce. The Arab Higher Committee, led by notable figures such as Hajj Amin al-Husseini, demanded the cessation of Jewish immigration, prohibition of land sales to Zionists, and the establishment of a representative national government.⁹⁷ As the revolt progressed, it escalated into armed resistance, targeting both British administrative structures and Jewish settlements. The British responded with harsh measures, including mass arrests, demolitions, and the execution of suspected rebels.⁹⁸ The revolt was suppressed at great cost to the Palestinian Arab community. Approximately 5,000 Palestinians were killed, and thousands more were wounded or imprisoned. The revolt underscored the depth of Palestinian resentment towards their displacement and the collaboration between the British and Zionists.⁹⁹

79. It was really the repression of the Arab Revolt in 1936-1939 that further diminished the population of Palestine, reducing the total population of Arab men by 10% who were either killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. The British sent a hundred thousand troops and air power to decimate the resistance – all the while Jewish immigration to escape the Nazis doubled – such that the proportion of Jews in Palestine settled from 18% in 1932, to 31% of the country’s total population in 1939. The change in demographic gave the Zionists the necessary manpower to carry out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.¹⁰⁰ The British army played the central role in ensuring that Palestinian resistance to Zionism was completely demobilised by a brutal system of killing and execution:

The refinements of callousness and cruelty employed went well beyond summary executions. For possession of a single bullet, Shaykh Farhan al-Sa'di, an eighty-one-year-old rebel leader, was put to death in 1937. Under the martial law in force at the time, that single bullet was sufficient to merit capital punishment, particularly for an accomplished guerrilla fighter like al-Sa‘di. Well over a hundred such sentences of execution were handed down after summary trials by military tribunals, with many more Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops. Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921.¹⁰¹

80. Once the Palestinians had been dispossessed of their land after the Nakba, the resistance did not simply vanish entirely. As Yezid Sayigh evidences in his work Armed Struggle and the Search for State, from 1949 onwards, there was a consistent move to continue resistance in order to establish Palestinian self-determination. Sayigh argues that armed struggle was not merely a military campaign but a mechanism through which Palestinians constructed a political identity, institutional frameworks, and organisational legitimacy. The struggle provided a dynamic for building parastatal entities, creating a political class, and asserting autonomy within the regional and international arenas.¹⁰² His book focuses on four periods that have come to symbolise the way the resistance has operated; marked by Zionist wars of 1948, 1967, 1973, and 1982, and culminating in the Oslo Accords of 1993.

81. The 1948 Nakba (the catastrophe), devastated Palestinian society, erasing its agrarian economy, dispersing its population, and dismantling its socio-political structures. The loss of territorial and economic bases transformed Palestinians into a fragmented refugee community, subjected to rival Arab authorities and disconnected from the nascent Arab state systems. The first major attempts at armed resistance emerged in the 1950s, notably under the influence of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) and the eventual formation of Fatah in the late 1950s. Fatah co-founder Khalil al-Wazir emphasised that armed struggle was integral to reclaiming identity and autonomy, that it was:

“a central, comprehensive and multi-dimensional process. Its sum-total embodies the various facets and activities of the Palestinian people as a whole, whether those facets and activi­ties are political, social, economic, military, or cultural. This is how we under­stand the armed struggle. This is also how we have proceeded to rebuild our people and reassert its national identity, in order to achieve its aims of return and liberation of the land. We understand [the armed struggle] as an integrated process involving three dimensions: organization, production, and combat.”¹⁰³

82. For the next forty years Sayigh charts the impact of the 1967 war on Palestine and the ascendency of guerilla movements, leading to a period where genuine attempts were made to incrementally realise a Palestinian state – through short-term expediency and long-term ambitions. The short-term expediency contributed to the conditions being ripe for the First Intifada – born out of the lack of options the stagnating political reality posed for Palestinians. On 8 December 1987, a Zionist purposely drove an agricultural truck into two cars carrying Palestinian workers returning to Gaza after working inside Israel – killing four and sparking outrage across the Palestinian territories and highlighting the disposability of Palestinian life.

83. The First Intifada marked a departure from the traditional reliance on armed struggle. This grassroots uprising was characterised by mass civil disobedience, demonstrations, and economic boycotts. While initially non-violent, escalating Israeli repression and internal divisions within the Palestinian movement led to the re-emergence of violent resistance. During this period, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (Hamas) emerged as a significant force, challenging the PLO’s dominance. Founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas combined Islamic ideology with militant tactics, offering an alternative vision for Palestinian resistance.¹⁰⁴ Sayigh notes that the rise of Hamas reflected broader societal shifts and frustrations with the PLO’s perceived ineffectiveness and corruption.

84. Israeli authorities responded with harsh repression, including mass arrests, administrative detentions, and the use of lethal and non-lethal force, which escalated the conflict. Tactics such as curfews, deportations, and punitive economic measures further alienated the Palestinian population and pushed many towards more violent forms of resistance. By 1989, the extensive use of undercover units by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and the relaxation of rules of engagement, including the use of plastic bullets, had politicised segments of the movement.

85. The events of the First Intifada brought together a negotiated peace between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Zionist state. In the imagination of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the purpose of this was to clear the way for the emergence of a fully sovereign Palestine state. Since then, the creation of the Palestine Authority (PA) and the failure of the Oslo Peace process has only brought into sharper focus the lack of desire on the side of the Zionist to grant any form of autonomy to the Palestinians. According to Rashid Khalidi:

“In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield.”¹⁰⁵

86. In the period between the signing of Oslo in 1993 through to 2000, tensions were extremely high between the PA and Hamas – as the PA continually acted as a line of defence for Israel. This came to head in September 2000 when Ariel Sharon visited Masjid al-Aqsa surrounded by security personnel. There was a great increase in violence during the Second Intifada, “the eight-plus years of the First Intifada, some 1,600 people were killed, an average of 177 per year (12 percent of them Israelis). In the calmer four years that followed, 90 people died, or about 20 per year (22 percent of them Israelis). By contrast, the eight years of the Second Intifada left 6,600 dead, an average of 825 per year— about 1,100 Israelis (just under 17 percent) and 4,916 Palestinians, who were killed by Israeli security forces and settlers (over 600 Palestinians were also killed by other Palestinians). Most of the Israelis who died in the latter period were civilians killed by Palestinian suicide.”¹⁰⁶

87. Acts of resistance must be understood within the context of the occupation and dispossession Palestinians have suffered since the period of the British Mandate to the contemporary moment. In December 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was interviewed by Mike Wagenheim for i24NEWS, where she clarified the international law position in relation to armed resistance by Palestinians. Taking care to explain that any targeting or injuring of civilians – including taking civilians as hostages – were not legitimate acts of resistance, she maintained that “an illegitimate act of resistance doesn’t delegitimize the resistance itself.” In the same interview Albanese clarifies that the killing of IDF soldiers by Hamas cannot be considered an international crime, as the right of resistance of Palestinians is linked to the oppressive conditions of their lives.¹⁰⁷

88. When considering the Palestinian right to dispossession resistance within the boundaries of morality, ethics, religion and international law, it is important for groups to know what military targets look like in the process of seeking restitution for what they have lost. The Palestinian struggle is not one that is limited merely to establishing an autonomous sovereign state, but also one that has consistently pushed for the right of return of refugees and displaced (and dispossessed) Palestinians inside the Zionist state, within the West Bank and Gaza, and those who are living as refugees within the international diaspora. With that in mind, it is important to understand the nature of dispossession and settlements across the Zionist occupied territories.

The legitimacy of dispossession resistance against settlers and settlements as well as the Zionist state

89. The most significant treaty relating to the self-determination of the Palestinian people is the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Although this treaty has never been ratified by Israel, it is commonly accepted that the convention has attained the status of customary international law. The relevant article pertinent to Palestinian self-determination is under Article 1(4),

4. The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

90. To understand the fundamental nature of the Palestinian resistance, it is to understand the Zionist state as a racist apartheid regime that has established a settler colonial system of domination as well as an alien occupation over the Palestinian people. Palestinian self-determination is rooted in a dispossession resistance that seeks to reclaim what has been lost, through a multitude of means, armed resistance included.

91. Borrowing from Shahd Hammouri’s detailed legal opinion The Palestinian People Have the Right to Resistance by All means Available at their Disposal, this report will set out to summarise her arguments in setting out the position under international law:

“Resistance by the Palestinian people against an illegal occupying power by all means available at their disposal is a legitimate act. To deprive peoples of such a right is to deny their right to equality and human dignity in contravention to the UN Charter. The legitimacy of resistance is prompted by the gravity of the illegality at hand, the absence of political will to seize the international community on the matter, and the asymmetrical position in which the subjugated peoples are placed.”¹⁰⁸

92. Hammouri’s opinion rests on five legal contentions: (1) that the Palestinian people are subjects of international law who have an inherent right to self-determination; (2) efforts to gain independence from an occupying power are legitimate in the exercise of that right; (3) resistance is consistent with international law on the use of force as a people are exercising their collective self-defence; (4) international humanitarian law permits armed resistance as the Palestinian people are not obliged to show allegiance to the occupying colonial power and may oppose it; finally (5) third party states are obliged to recognise the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance, while Israel is obliged to refrain from persecuting Palestinians for their resistance – they are further not permitted to cite self-defence to justify their own breaches of international law.¹⁰⁹ As Hammouri writes, “The Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal. The premises of this illegality are multifaceted. First, it is a form of alien domination and subjugation, otherwise referred to as colonisation. While there are no clear criteria for what alien domination and subjugation entails, elements of systemic exploitation, dispossession, fragmentation, inhumane acts, and discrimination are common indicators.”¹¹⁰

93. Setting out her argument further, Hammouri cites, the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion in Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, who made it clear that colonisation is illegal¹¹¹ – but further that self-determination is a jus cogens right with erga omnes effects.¹¹² With the fundamental status of the illegality established, the opinion goes further to show that a line of UNGA resolutions, the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and the Western Sahara case all point to a consistent state practice and opinio juris of the right to armed struggle to exercise self-determination¹¹³:

A similar logic is mirrored in the work of Cassese who argues that a forcible re-acquisition of territory is lawful if “all possible means for a peaceful settlement of the dispute have been used before resorting to armed violence”. Furthermore, this logic echoes the Roman legal principle vim vi repellere licet ("it is permitted to repel force by force").¹¹⁴

94. Antonio Cassese arguing that repelling force by force is a powerful one in the context of dispossession resistance, as the power dynamics are asymmetric. In the Chagos case, Judge Robinson provided a separate concurring ruling, where he explicitly recognised the power differential between the coloniser and those who are subjugated, commenting on paragraph 4 of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence¹¹⁵, “This paragraph shows a sensitivity on the part of the General Assembly to the imbalance in the power relationship between a colonial administration and a dependent people.”¹¹⁶ The UN General Assembly asserted the significance in Resolution 35/35 in the specific context of Palestinian right to self-determination:

“that the activities of Israel, in particular the denial to the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination and independence, constitute a serious and increasing threat to international peace and security¹¹⁷…

the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle¹¹⁸ [emphasis added].”

95. The right to not only defend a people against colonial domination and the establishment of settlements is not only enshrined in international law, but also to seek restitution of the loss of land, property and rights through armed force. In an interview conducted with the populist television host Piers Morgan, Francesca Albanese clarified the status of settlements themselves as war crimes that warrant armed resistance:

“In line with international law, Israel had to do what they have not done in 57 years and, what the International Court of Justice has reminded all member states as of July this year, Israel needs to withdraw the occupation in whole or in part. Because the occupation has caused the conditions for violence to fester in the occupied Palestinian territory. And the court has been very specific, has said that Israel needs to withdraw the troops, dismantle the settlements which are war crimes, and including the control over the natural resources. Israel has continued to expand in the occupied territory and it continues to do that even now as it commits a genocide…

It’s key to understand, because Israel – the whole purpose of advancing the occupation is to continue to take Palestinian land. So my question to you is, what do Palestinians have to do? Because they have tried armed resistance, they have renounced armed resistance, they have gone to the International Court of Justice, to the ICC, they’ve tried… the advocacy with all member states, and member states have continued to kick the can in the air.”¹¹⁹

96. The Zionist state, as a colonial enterprise relies on an infrastructure to displace Palestinians and dispossess them of their land, property and rights. This is most significantly carried out through the use of settlers, as discussed in the section above. Settler presence and settlements are a direct part of Israel’s machinery of violence and thus become legitimate military targets for the purpose of Palestinian resistance fighters gaining restitution of lands that have been dispossessed. According to Steven Ratner,

“There’s a difference with attacks on armed settlers. While they are technically civilians, because they have taken up arms, they are also paramilitaries. They are much, much harder to define as combatants or non-combatants.”¹²⁰

97. While Ratner focuses specifically on the element of deployment of arms to settlers as indicative of the their quasi-combatant status, there are additional two features that must be borne in mind: (1) that the presence of the settlement dispossesses Palestinians and thus part of the structure of violence against them, (2) the settlers themselves, by living in the settlements, are actively engaged in the dispossession. These features produce a conundrum within international law. Settlements and settlers are central to the machinery of violence and dispossession, but at times they are unarmed – so how can the resistance attack such targets, particularly where they unarmed.

98. Some have made the argument that all settlers have undergone mandatory military conscription, which applies to all Israeli men and women above the age of 18 who have no exemption. While this makes all military age Israeli citizens complicit in the IDF and it military control of Palestine, international law does recognise that individuals lose their combatant status once they put down their arms. Instead, it is more fruitful to understand settlements as a legitimate military objective as defined under the jus in bello – international humanitarian law. Article 52 of the Additional Protocol I (API) to the Geneva Conventions defines a legitimate military target:

“1. Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2.

2. Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

3. In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.”¹²¹

99. This report does not advocate any unequivocal right to inflict violence against all targets within settlements – those engaged in armed resistance are still under due obligations to ensure that at all times, protected persons are safe-guarded to the maximum degree possible in the process of achieving a military objective. That said, within a structure of colonial violence, settlements stand as a legitimate military target specifically due to the role the settlement plays in dispossessing Palestinians.

100. Returning to the consideration of residents of settlements as civilians, we have the wider question of how to best account for the presence of minors, the elderly, the sick, chaplains, and other protected classes of persons in the settlements? This report argues that their presence in the settlements stands contrary to international law. By settling Israeli citizens into dispossessed Palestinian territories, the Israeli government and the IDF are effectively using civilian population as a human wall between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli colonial metropole. This is notion was built into the very DNA of Israel’s founding, as David Ben Gurion explained that the establishment of settlements was to:

“…constitute a human wall against the dangers of invasion…Our territorial conquests and redemptions will not be assured if we do not succeed in erecting a great and closely linked chain of settlements of soldiers, on the borders, in the Negev, on the coast, in the Jerusalem corridor, around Safed, and in all other areas of strategic importance.”¹²² [emphasis added]

101. Ben Gurion’s desire to see a human wall of settlements has all but been achieved in the intervening years. It is important to engage with the language used by Ben Gurion – explicitly that settlers served the specific function of being a ‘human wall’ an effective buffer zone to proper the Zionist colonial metropole. Further, the settlements were considered as part of the martial system of colonial violence as they were always intended to be manned by soldiers. Settlements form part of what Ariel Sharon systemised through the Matrix of Control¹²³ – a means by which Palestinian society could be controlled systemically. According to Jeff Halper:

“it’s crucial to grasp the significance of the settlement blocs, not simply individual settlements. For settlements alone were not sufficient for reconfiguring the country and guaranteeing that Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and Gaza could never be severed from Israel proper. To ensure the irreversibility of the Matrix, the settlements had to become part of the seamless fabric of Israel, indistinguishable from the Galilee, the Sharon Plain or the Negev. The “Green Line” had to be erased, not only from the maps of children’s school books or the TV weather reports, not only in the public’s consciousness, but from any barrier or sign on the ground.”¹²⁴

102. Returning to the notion of nishul – the settlements exist as the manifestation of dispossession policies – one that creates a class of Israeli that protects the borders with their lives as paramilitaries-cum-settlers. As Ilan Pappe recognises in The Biggest Prison on Earth, there is also a class element to these settlements as certain colonial settlements “attracted the less fortunate Jewish dwellers of Jerusalem”¹²⁵ – a recognition of the disposability of settler communities to the colonial metropole.

103. Settlements are legitimate targets for the Palestinian resistance under international humanitarian law, and the land upon which they have been constructed must be returned to Palestinians, and in the interim, at least be evacuated of all civilian populations. By maintaining the presence of civilians in such settlements, it is Israel that bears the burden of Palestinian resistance strikes against legitimate military objectives. As stated above, the resistance is under a duty to comply with international humanitarian in how it targets settlements as objectives to recover dispossessed land and property in their cause for self-determination – however, the loss of civilian life in settlements carries obligations on the Zionist state to remove those civilians from being on unlawful settler land – and most definitely to cease arming, training and supporting militias among them.

8. CONCLUSION

104. Israel’s status as a settler colonial regime that has dispossessed Palestinians of their land has been well established over the course of this report. That dispossession took place in the context of European powers colonising large parts of the world – leading to Zionism as a racist settler colonial ideology to not only emerge, but to be ruthlessly enforced on an indigenous Palestinian population, who were displaced and dispossessed of their lands. This settler colonialism was no different to that of other forms in the past, whether it be the genocide of Native American peoples or the French occupation and settler domination of Algeria – it exists on that continuum.

105. In circumstances of dispossession, violence inevitably emerges as a means by which dispossessed people gain their rights, land and property from their coloniser. This report centres dispossession resistance as part of a taxonomy of violences – one that is a natural consequence to colonisation. To quote Fanon, “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”¹²⁶ As evidenced by the numerous historical examples presented over the course of this report, resistance to colonial powers has taken different forms, but there is always an asymmetry in power between those resisting and their occupiers/colonisers leading to forms of violence that seek to gain rights outside of a traditional total war battlefield.

106. This dispossession resistance is centred around a restitution of rights, land and property – all in the cause of self-determination away from the violence of colonisers whose machinery of violence is ubiquitous, not only through use of force, but also in the way that societies are restructured through new regimes of law and politics.

107. The Palestinian people have been resisting the settler colonial nature of Israel since before the Nakba in 1948 and have never wavered from seeking their rights through a multifaceted approach of political negotiations, civil disobedience and armed resistance. This armed resistance is protected and enshrined under international law, against all settlements that have dispossessed the Palestinians inside Israel, in the occupied territories and across the diaspora.

108. Israel’s colonial machinery of violence has established settlements, dispossessing Palestinians of land that rightfully belongs to them. These settlements are legitimate military objectives for the Palestinian resistance in order to gain restitution for what they have lost – but the settlements create a human buffer zone to protect the central Israeli colonial metropole. In the course of Palestinians exercising their right to self-determination through dispossession resistance, Israel is under a duty to remove civilians from any settlement that is considered a legitimate target.

109. At times, in the course of resistance, there will be acts of violence that go beyond what is permitted under international law – these must be minimised and ended by all means possible by the leaders of the resistance – including holding war crimes to account. However, to reiterate the words of Francesca Albanese, “an illegitimate act of resistance doesn’t delegitimize the resistance itself.” Whereas, the existence of a settler colonial regime is always illegitimate, and must be ended by all moral conscience and by any means necessary at the disposal of the Palestinians.

9. EXPERT OBLIGATIONS

110. I confirm that I have made clear which facts and matters referred to in this report are within my own knowledge and which are not. Those that are within my own knowledge I confirm to be true. The opinions I have expressed represent my true and complete professional opinions on the matters to which they refer.

111. I understand that proceedings for contempt of court may be brought by anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement in a document verified by a statement of truth without an honest belief in its truth.

112. I confirm that I have not received any remuneration for preparing this report.

Dr Asim Qureshi

London

United Kingdom

26 December 2024