The HAMAS Case

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REPORT ON

THE ROOTS OF ANTI-COLONIAL VIOLENCE

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 demonstrate that the actions fit a much longer history of dispossession resistance to settler colonisation, whose violence is in legitimate reciprocity to extreme violence of settler colonial and occupation regimes. By situating the violence that has been undertaken in Palestine within a longer historical trajectory, commonalities of experience emerge – ones that find the roots of anti-colonial violence within the systems and structures of colonial occupation that brutalise local populations.

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 and mainstream media articles. My academic publications include several peer-reviewed papers, predominantly published in the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism among others.

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).

THE ROOTS OF ANTI-COLONIAL VIOLENCE

3. INTRODUCTION

8. This report has been prepared in support of the application to deproscribe the organisation Harakat al-Muqwamah al-Islamiyyah (Hamas). The proscription of the organisation is based on its designation as a ‘terrorist’ organisation. Such a designation is a political decision more than one that is rooted in an understanding of Hamas as a resistance movement that seeks restitution of one hundred years of dispossession by British forces during the period of the Mandate, and then by Zionists since the Nakba. This report will seek to place the violence enacted by anti-colonial organisations and movements – such as Hamas – within a wider historical context of those who have sought restitution for the dispossession they have been forced to suffer at the hands of colonial authorities.

9. After providing a general theory of politicisation that accounts for violence of those who are dispossessed, this report will present six case studies of historical circumstances in which those facing settler colonialism and occupation, chose to resist violently to regain their rights. These historical instances include:

   1. Palestinian resistance to the Zionist state during the Second Intifada.

   2. Chechen resistance to imperial Russia and later Soviet rule.

   3. Moro resistance of the US occupation of the Philippines.

   4. Uyghur resistance to Chinese settler colonisation of East Turkestan.

   5. French resistance to Nazi and Vichy occupation during WWII.

   6. Algerian resistance to French colonisation.

10. These disparate instances of resistance across varied historical and political contexts share in common a trend that places the moral right of the dispossessed to engage in armed struggle among a range of actions that have taken against occupying or colonising forces. It is this moral right that Palestinians have been exercising since the Nakba until the present day, and as such, should be the only frame through which governments should consider how the resistance operates within the occupied territories, rather than to use ‘terrorism’ as a blunt instrument to undermine that right.

4. RESISTANCE OF THE COLONISED

11. Any theory of violence of those dispossessed of their land, property and legal status can be captured by the opening words of the Martiniquais psychiatrist and resistance thinker Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

“National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”¹ [Emphasis added]

12. In the spirit of Fanon, the act of theorising the political and resistance violence of the dispossessed becomes somewhat meaningless in the material reality of their conditions. To have been killed, raped, pillaged and imprisoned in numbers that are seemingly unquantifiable, produces its own morality of resistance – beyond a liberal order that has largely served the interests of European colonisers.

13. In the course of colonial wealth extraction that was rooted in extreme massacres and genocide, local populations reacted with their own forms of violence that sought to exact revenge for their losses. Dierk Walter neatly summarises the connectivity between such forms of violence across geographies and time:

“indigenous adversaries did exactly the same in response—not least because the settlers, officials and missionaries on the frontiers of empires quite rightly seemed to them to pose a very real threat to their existence. Thus, at the end of the sixteenth century the Chichimeca of Central Mexico destroyed Spanish villages and farms and indiscriminately killed women, children and slaves. The first victims of the Pueblo Uprising were 380 Spaniards in settlements and on farms, especially many priests. North American Indians made basically no distinction between European soldiers and civilians and invariably attacked outlying frontier farms first. The same was true of the Maoris and Australian Aborigines. The Maji-Maji rebels first killed planters, government officials and missionaries. Both the Herero and the Algerian revolts began with the murder of European settlers. Rebels in Northern Angola indiscriminately put to death 1,000 Europeans in 1961, It became a deliberate strategy of proper terror campaigns such as that launched by the FLN in the Algerian rebellion to first and foremost target civilians.”²

14. Extreme colonial violence and control is the fertile ground on which the violence of the dispossessed finds its life blood. This creates fractures within the world of the colonised, as often the severity of colonial violence presents itself as an anathema to the cultural and spiritual practices of the dispossessed. Rules and regulations that relate to the conduct of hostilities are sometimes held to rigidly, and at other times broken in order to meet the violence of the coloniser with equal terror. The Libyan anti-colonial leader and martyr Omar Mukhtar, who fought Italian fascists in his country was once confronted with the opportunity to torture and execute prisoners of war his forces had captured - to which he responded with the words, “They are not our teachers” – indicating that the values of the resistance could not be reduced to the depravity of the fascist forces.

15. To what extent were Mukhtar’s an exception in the annuls of the violence of the dispossessed, who fight for a multitude of reasons, from seeking to regain their lands to acting out of revenge for the personal losses and indignities they have been forced to endure at the hands of those with overwhelming power and technology. What of the Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity (Moriscos) living in Spain during the 1500s? Between 1511 and 1526, Ferdinand and Isabella had heightened the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, leading to a multitude of abuses against the Morisco people. ‘Old Christian’ priests would often take advantage of the authority they had been given and climb into the rooms of young Morisca women to rape them. Due to the impunity these priests received by the Inquisition, there was nothing the town could do to ward off their advances and often people simply had to accept the situation. The decades-long continuation of abuse resulted in Farex Aben Farex leading a group of a hundred Morisco men to carry out a massacre in the Alpujarras on Christmas Eve in 1568, when the clergy class were targeted and massacred in their homes and streets for their abuse. Writing of this incident, the Christian chronicler Diego Hurtado de Mendoza wrote:

“These crimes were committed partly by people whom we had persecuted for vengeance, partly by the monftes whose way of life had so conditioned them to cruelty that cruelty had become part of their natures.”³

16. The reaction from Farex Aben Farex does not stand in isolation in history – it forms as a part of continuity of violence that emerges in the face of alien occupation, colonial domination and the installation of racist regimes. Both within the colonial period, and in the contemporary context, the framing of Farex would be constructed through the lens of terrorism, a word that has become devoid of meaning in the way it has been applied to conflicts around the world. This violent reaction can only be understood in the severity of the material conditions that those under extreme subjugation face. The creation of the United States of America through the annihilation of its first peoples and through a system of capitalism that relied heavily, first on slave labour, and then later indentured slavery produced long-lasting discontentment of those impacted by the unequal structures of society. In his travels across the US in the early 1900s, the black scholar WEB DuBois wrote of a specific interaction he had with a black farmer that led him to record it in The Souls of Black Folk:

“I remember one big red-eyed black whom we met by the roadside. Forty-five years he had labored on this farm, beginning with nothing, and still having nothing. To be sure, he had given four children a common-school training, and perhaps if the new fence-law had not allowed unfenced crops in West Dougherty he might have raised a little stock and kept ahead. As it is, he is hopelessly in debt, disappointed, and embittered. He stopped us to inquire after the black boy in Albany, whom it was said a policeman had shot and killed for loud talking on the sidewalk. And then he said slowly: “Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don’t boast this,––I don’t say it around loud, or before the children,––but I mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran...”⁴

17. This anger is two-fold, it is not merely the material conditions of a dispossession that were purposely created and maintained in order to keep former slaves from upward mobility, but also due to the precarity of life under a racial scheme of violence. The Baptist preacher and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, initially critical of his own communities engaging in the use of violence came to have his mind changed by his wife Coretta Scott King, who encouraged King to first condemn the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”⁵ This was taken up by the civil rights writer James Baldwin, who keenly understood that black people are criticised for their use of violence as an exception to the ubiquity of similar violence by those who are deemed part of the culture of the West – such as Israelis, “[i]n the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks.”⁶

18. Fundamentally, it is because there is no acknowledgement that the lived reality of the dispossessed creates the conditions of violence. In the early 1990s, a moral panic was created over a connection being made between rap music and the killing of police officers. The chief of police for New York made the public case that music can incite violence and sought to link rap music to the deaths of his officers. The rebuttal was simple enough...if rap music incites violence, why were white people who listened to the same music not killing police officers too? There must have been other intervening factors, such as social deprivation, police brutality and corruption, and other markers that could then go further in explaining first why that culture existed, and second why officers were targeted.

19. Much of this non-state violence has been captured as ‘terrorism’ by colonising or occupation powers over the last two centuries – a word that has normalised the status quo of colonisation, and made violence to it the unlawful exception. The word itself operates as a violent construction in such material circumstances, as the response of the dispossessed is framed only through the legitimacy of the state or colonial authority. As former CIA psychiatrist Marc Sageman argues in Turning to Political Violence:

“A word like terrorist comes fully loaded with emotional associations and preconceived notions of the types of people who commit such acts of political violence. These categories are very difficult to change and require a strong cognitive effort to do so.”⁷

20. There is a process of racialisation that is ascribed to specific forms of violence that reduces violent actors to ideology, religion or the influence of a charismatic leader, which may contribute to why a person might embark on a violent path, but such ascriptions in the absence of material conditions and root causes mask other more salient environmental factors, “empirical studies have failed to discover any such zombies with little or no free will.”⁸ As Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson further writes in Genealogies of Terrorism, “we cannot give a general description of terrorism as such. Instead, we must excavate the historically specific conditions under which terrorism emerges as an apparatus of social control.”⁹ In his earlier work Misunderstand Terrorism, Sageman sets out the ways in which violent action are encoded through a matrix of terrorism, is less on the notion of ‘suicide’, as much as it is celebrated as “self sacrifice in defense of their endangered community.”¹⁰ What Sageman wants his readers to know, is that violence is manufactured in a dialectic:

“Politically violent actors did not always view themselves as political. A politicized social identity is activated and a vague and diffuse political community materializes when a serious political grievance divides people into two contrasting sides. For instance, people with a nonpolitical grievance like students, workers, or citizens gathering for a peaceful demonstration become political when the state intervenes to repress their demonstration with violence. The original grievance loses its importance in the face of violence and activates a politicized social identity in contrast to the state.”¹¹

21. What he does is to reintroduce the role of the state into knowledge construction of the presence of violence in the world – rather than exceptionalising the state as a moral force somehow outside of the process. For Sageman, there is no possibility of analysing the violence of non-state actors without contextualising it within the actions of the state, which, “influences historical and social contingencies that give the path to political violence a “fits and starts” pattern, with intense periods of activity when moral outrage demands quick retaliation separated by longer period of relative calm.”¹²

22. While Marc Sageman helps to create a rupture between the ubiquity of the word ‘terrorism’ through promoting an understanding of ‘political violence’ instead – it still does not capture significantly the violence of the dispossessed, whose material reality is not so much an active political choice, as much as it is a resistance steeped in the need for existential survival to protect their people and ways of life.

5. PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE TO THE ZIONIST STATE DURING THE SECOND

INTIFADA

23. The conditions of Palestinians prior to the Second Intifada can be characterised by systematic restrictions, heightened tensions, and persistent human rights violations. These entrenched patterns of Israeli control did not emerge suddenly, but rather were the product of decades of occupation following 1967, and the subsequent failure of the Oslo Accords to bring about a viable and equitable resolution.¹³ During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Palestinians faced severe limitations on their freedom of movement. Military checkpoints, curfews, and closures fragmented Palestinian territories, disrupting daily life, impeding economic activity, and undermining social cohesion.¹⁴

24. Such restrictions were accompanied by land confiscations and the expansion of Israeli settlements, which encroached upon Palestinian land and resources, generating widespread resentment and hopelessness.¹⁵ The deepening economic hardship, coupled with the deterioration of public services, left many Palestinians struggling to secure basic necessities.¹⁶ Additionally, the Israeli security apparatus often employed excessive force against civilians, resulting in injuries, deaths, and the persistent fear of imminent violence.¹⁷

25. These oppressive measures contributed significantly to the growing sense among Palestinians that their aspirations for statehood, freedom, and dignity were being continually thwarted. The breakdown of diplomatic negotiations and the absence of meaningful political progress led to widespread disillusionment, laying the groundwork for renewed rebellion. In September 2000, following Ariel Sharon’s antagonising visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the simmering frustration and anger erupted into what became known as the Second Intifada. This uprising was not merely a spontaneous reaction to a single event, but rather the culmination of long-term structural violence, dispossession, and a profound sense of injustice perceived by Palestinians living under Israeli rule.¹⁸

26. The escalation in violence of the Second Intifada coincided with the development of suicide bombings/martyrdom operations. The discourse of ‘amaliyyat istishhadiyya (martyrdom operations) had begun with Hamas. They began to moot the idea of these operations in 1994 in the Israeli towns of Afula and Khedara as a protest against the failed Oslo process. After 1995, other groups began to use the same tactics, such as Harakat al-Jihad al-Islami (Islamic Jihad Movement) and also in the 2000s by more secular groups such as Harakat al-Taharur al-Watani al-Filistini (Palestinian Liberation Movement – Fatah) and al-Jabha al-Shaa’biyya li Tahrir Filistin (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).

27. Returning to Palestine from the US in the middle of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian-American scholar and anthropologist Nasser Abufarha visited his home town of Jenin to study the phenomenon of martyrdom operations as an ethnography – culminating in his book The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance. Abufarha’s work seeks to understand the iconography of martyrdom as an attempt to seek a better life for a cause – not an act of seeking death for the individual. That the death of a person is about the life of the collective. His call is one of understanding the violence as being situated in the material realities of the dispossessed:

“If we seek to understand these violent practices, we must move beyond condemning them and

questioning their legitimacy and examine the social and political processes that make them meaningful in their local settings. If we were to limit our discussion of this form of violence to issues of legitimacy, we would not even begin to understand its production, much less be any better equipped to deal with it. And if we continue to think of violence as fuelled by the inherent hatred of its perpetrators, we will be blinded to the social processes through which violence is constructed, and the only policy options we will have for dealing with violence will involve applying similar or greater violence, thus validating the acts of the perpetrators and leaving us hostage to cycles of violence and counter-violence. A better understanding of violent practices is a must if we seek to develop more appropriate and effective responses to it. The widespread use of suicide bombings makes clear that this form of violence is becoming more meaningful to more people around the world. And with this increase in popularity, the military response becomes increasingly invalid and ineffective. Pure military responses seem only to have contributed to the intensification of suicide bombing thus far.”¹⁹

28. Abufarha wrote about the genesis of martyrdom operations by Hamas: at Afula, by Ra’id Zakarneh on 6 April 1994 and at Khedara, by Ammar Amaneh on 13 April 1994. Their acts were directly linked to the massacre committed earlier at the Ibrahimi Mosque by an Israeli settler in Hebron, where 29 Palestinians were killed during morning prayers, as well as the failed PLO Oslo process. Thus, the attacks were linked to a specific political context rather than any generic hatred for Israelis. It was further the collapse of the Oslo Peace process and the visit of Ariel Sharon to the al-Aqsa Mosque in September 2000, triggering the Second Intifada, that really escalated the use of martyrdom operations.

29. One of the key aspects of Abufarha’s account is the extent to which Palestinians account for the banality of Israeli occupation as a form of direct terror they feel in their lives. He recounts a chance meeting with a man from his village outside a bank that is telling of the daily indignities that Palestinians feel:

“I needed to go to the bank to withdraw some funds. I got to the bank at 10:00 a.m. Outside the bank was a long line at the Tyme machine, about fifty people. Inside the bank I took a number for the teller: my number was 415, and the “now serving” number was 66.1 sat down only to write the day’s notes because there was no point in waiting. The bank closes at noon and there was no way my number would be reached by then. As I came out of the bank I met a man from my village, Ahmed, and he commented: “What you are doing? Are you working on your research? Are you researching terror? This is the terror. The seizure is the terror. The boy barred from his school is the terror. Tell your American friends about the terror.””²⁰

30. In this regard, Nasser Abufarha moots the notion of imaginary violence as a theorisation of what Palestinians experience beyond the direct experiences of violence of the everyday. The notion of imaginary violence is important as it speak to a ubiquity of violence by the occupying forces and the way such violence creates terror for the Palestinian population:

“The condition of suspense that people live under—crossing a ditch at the risk of being caught; fearing that they will run into a tank or hummer up the hill, around the next turn, in the valley, or next to the tree on the side of the road; sleeping in the hallway when bullets might be fired through the window at night—are all examples of violence in the imaginary (Whitehead 2004). This imaginary violence affects people more than the experiences of physical violence itself. First of all, imaginary violence has a much larger set of victims. All those who travel and who fear being caught experience violence in the imaginary; only those who actually are caught experience physical abuse at the hands of the Israeli army. The tales of those who fall victims to Israeli abuse become part of the construction of violence in the imaginary. Second, imaginary violence affects victims for an extended period: the entire time one spends away from home, or on the road, or sleeping in a hallway. There have been recent reports that the Israeli Air Force continued to fly fighter jets at low altitude over Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal, projecting sonic terror (El-Haddad 2005) on the whole city, since a missile could hit anywhere. These long periods are punctuated by moments of fear, each of which feels as if it could be one’s last. The constant suspense produced by the imaginary violence affects people in different ways. Some may become psychologically traumatized, and there are many reports of children with mental problems, particularly in the Gaza Strip. Others react by deploying social processes like the one developed in the first intifada and turn enduring the abuse into a meaningful act.”²¹

31. During his research in Palestine, Abufarha was present during a martyrdom operation carried out by Hanadi Jaradat. Born in 1975, Hanadi would become known as the Bride of Haifa, as the first female to carry out a martyrdom operation. Hanadi graduated from the School of Law at that University of Jenin in 1999. She worked and trained as a lawyer for three years across two law firms. Her family described her as loving, kind and resolute. From both her father’s and her mother’s sides, she was dispossessed of her land since the Nakba and thus lived as an internally displaced Palestinian. The year after she graduated, she was engaged to her cousin in the year 2000 – soon after, he was murdered by the Israelis at the start of the second Intifada. Later, Hanadi would witness the killing of her other cousin and brother in front of her house, even as she attempted with the Israeli soldiers to try and save her brother’s life. They knocked her out and executed her brother Fadi after having injured him. Both men were unarmed. At the funeral, Hanadi was heard uttering an oath between the zaghruda, “His blood will not be shed in vain. The killers will pay the price. We will not keep crying alone. Damn the whole world if our people will continue to be denied freedom and dignity.”²²

32. On 4 October 2003, Hanadi carried out a martyrdom operation in Haifa after being dropped off in a taxi with an Israeli number plate to the beachfront restaurant Maxim – the explosion killed 21 Israelis and injured fifty others – including the Israeli naval general Zai’v Almong. In her martyrdom note left by Hanadi, she wrote:

“I have chosen this path for myself by my own determination. I have worked for this until God rewarded me with martyrdom, God willing. Martyrdom is not for every human on earth, only for those who are dignified from God. Are you sad because God has dignified me in martyrdom!? Do you repay God by what he does not like and I don’t like either!? Give me to God.... We are all dying. No one is eternal on this earth, but the rational who gives himself to God’s call. This is a jihad country only. We live in it for jihad. It is incumbent upon us to lift the oppression we live in over the past years. I know I will not bring back Palestine. I know this fully. But I also know that this is my duty and I have done my duty in front of God. I have answered the call after my belief in my religion... My main concern has become to see the light of God. This is his country and this is his religion and they want to extinguish his light and we know that My duty towards God’s religion and his obligation on me is to defend him. Nothing is in my possession other than this body, which I will turn into shrapnel, that will uproot the heart of everyone that tries to uproot us from our country. Everyone who plants death for us will get it even if it was a small fraction...”²³

33. In a piece of analysis written by the Palestinian writer Rashad Abu Shawar entitled Hanadi’s Litigation, he explains the lack of options that someone like Hanadi has in life as a Palestinian:

“… what can the Palestinian attorney Hanadi Jaradat do? Does she litigate in the courts of the thieves that occupy her homeland? Should she ask for justice from her people’s oppressors? According to the articles of what law would Hanadi litigate before Sharon’s, Mofaz’s, and Yalon’s courts? How would she persuade the bulldozer drivers to stop tearing down homes over the heads of their Palestinian residents? How would she go by invoking mercy and humanistic feeling in the hearts of the Apache leaders, and the leaders of the Markava tanks that harvest Palestinians daily and terrify their children and daughters, and humiliate them at the roadblocks!?

Should Hanadi litigate before the Security Council? Before the representatives of the five Great Powers? By what language would Hanadi convince the American representative of the extent of suffering and injustice that Palestinians are subjected to? The injustice that is supported by the American blessing, is executed by American aircrafts, and is protected by the readiness of the American Veto all the time?

Why are Hanadi’s people denied a free homeland with a simple life where the human has the right to drink tea with his relative, or his wife, or fiancée under the olive tree, or a fruiting fig tree, and instead is being taken over by death decided and executed by the occupiers? Why do Hanadi’s people have to pay daily in death, destroyed homes, uprooted trees while the Zionist assembly continues to live near the seas of Haifa, Jaffa and Acre, clear of worries and relaxed in their security, feeling secure as long as their war machine grinds the Palestinians and as long as their defense army harasses Palestinians!?

What a litigation Hanadi exploded in Haifa. Destroying the sense of calm from the life of a reckless human assembly that shows off carelessness, relaxed for the wisdom of its generals, police, and security apparatuses that sentence Palestinians based on the security needs of the settlers…

Hanadi’s litigation is one of the Palestinian litigations that say in the articulation of blood that the roots in this land are Arab Palestinian roots that will be impossible to uproot. These roots are protected by sacrifice and not by the litigation of writers, journalists, and corrupt leaders.”²⁴

34. Twenty years and four days after Hanadi’s specific form of litigation, an operation carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023 led to a breaking out of militants and civilians from the concentration of Gaza into neighbouring settlements. Israeli soldiers, settler paramilitaries, and civilians were attacked in the chaos of the security fence surrounding Gaza being breached. Since 2004, there has been an acknowledgement by security officials within Israel that Israel that Gaza is a “huge concentration camp” as stated by Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland in private communications with counterparts in the US.²⁵

35. What does it mean, twenty years after Hanadi, to have Israelis – the majority of whom who can be assumed to be above the eighteen and thus to have either still be in, or have completed their military service in the Israel Defense Forces – to be dancing and raving in Re’im, less than three miles from Gaza? Re’im, a kibbutz, was established in 1949 by the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, settling immigrants from Eastern Europe into the area. Although Re’im was not a Palestinian town, it is close to the dispossessed villages of al-Muharraqa and Najd from which Palestinians were forced to leave after the Nakba. The festival ravers chose to dance on dispossessed Palestinian land, made more significant considering that 70% of Gazans are refugees or descendants of refugees dispossessed from that region during the Nakba. In thinking about Hamas initiated operation on 7 October, the US-based lawyer and anthropologist Darryl Li reflected on the proximity of Gaza to the targets of the Hamas attack:

“there is another force of nature metaphor that’s right in the name: the Deluge of al-Aqsa, Hamas’s name for the October 7 attack. What’s a deluge other than an unfathomable number of little drops that on their own seem tiny but when brought together can wash away so much, in ways so indiscriminate and unpredictable? Including very basic assumptions like, there is Israel, this “normal” country that just happens to be next to the very abnormal Gaza Strip, this isolated, besieged enclave, object of colonial violence, humanitarian pity, or both. Gaza is so exotic to most Israelis it might as well be the other side of the moon, but Palestinians there know all too well how close by their old villages are. These events shattered those psychological barriers and highlighted—in ways terrifying to many Israeli Jews—the proximity, the geographical contiguity that Zionism has worked so feverishly to deny.

As the Palestinian anthropologist Hadeel Assali reminds us, Gaza is a city in southern Palestine—the eponymous “Gaza Strip” is an amputated geography produced by the Nakba. Compounding this violent spatial language is this phrase the Israelis have that I detest, עוטף עזה, or the “Gaza Envelope,” which refers to the area surrounding the Gaza Strip. Here, instead, was a situation where it seemed like it was Gaza that was doing the enveloping, as fighters and civilians crossed what had until then been a one-way frontier and literally unsettled Zionism’s grip on the surrounding lands, however temporarily.”²⁶

6. RUSSIAN IMPERIAL DOMINATION OF THE CAUCASUS

36. In 1722, Tsarist Russia attempted to conquer the Caucasus region with a vastly superior army to that of the people of the Caucasus. Although there was small-scale rebellion in the early years, the main resistance began in 1785 under Shaykh Mansur Ushurma who had the dream of establishing an Islamic state subject to shariah law throughout the region. By 1791 Shaykh Mansur had been arrested and was executed while imprisoned at Slisselarg.

37. Although damaging the resistance, the quelling of this early insurrection did not immobilise it completely. In the mid-1800s insurgencies erupted in response to a genocide spearheaded by newly-appointed General Yermelov leading a huge military operation across the region. Imam Shamil emerged to unite the Chechen, Dagestani and Ingush insurgents – who fought the Russians from 1834 until 1864 - until they were annihilated through Russia’s policy of total war. In these ways, small bands of rebels managed to hold out against a superior force for a period of 142 years before they were forced to submit.

38. It was this period that Imam Shamil surrendered to the Tsarist forces in 1859 after having led a valiant resistance to Russian attempts to conquer the Caucasus – ultimately becoming a trophy wheeled out at Russian imperial high society events. For the following five years, there entered a different stage of resistance as figures such as Haji Murad (fictionalised by Leo Tolstoy) and other na’ibs of Shamil who emerged to continue resistance against imperial forces – refusing to surrender and feeling betrayed by Imam Shamil. These resistance fighters came to be known as the abrek, those who refused to accept dispossession of the Caucasus by imperial forces – but also being forced to engage in a new theory of resistance that broke from traditional understandings of the peoples of the region:

“…the abrek violates coercively imposed legal norms in the process of fulfilling the mandate of a higher ethical order. In crafting an alternative ethical system by violating an external legal order, he also reconfigures indigenous norms. Paradoxically, these violations, when performed against laws that have been coercively imposed, validate transgressions that would otherwise be seen as unethical. Transfixed by an ethically ambiguous aestheticization of violence, transgressive sanctity makes the profane sacred and the sacred profane. Through the workings of transgressive sanctity, figures who violated indigenous laws came to be locally regarded as sacred as a result of the colonial dispensation's naturalization of violence.”²⁷

39. As per Gould’s transgressive sanctity,²⁸ different tactics were envisaged by the abrek fighters, who would attempt to find ways of carrying out raids against imperial forces – specifically with the purpose of the reversing the dispossession they had experienced. The years of conflict culminated in the Battle of Daggers in 1864, the largest scale battle in Chechnya since the surrender of Imam Shamil after 3000 Muslim men and women gathered in the village of Shali in order to protest the unlawful imprisonment of the pacifist Sufi leader Kunta Hajji²⁹:

“When their demand for Kunta Hajji's release was refused, the Chechens assembled at the Shali fort in 1864 and began loudly performing the chanting ritual (dhikr) their leader had learned in Baghdad. Traditionally addressed to God, the dhikr as practiced by Chechens had more recently come to be associated with anticolonial protest. The protestors' peaceful chanting frightened the soldiers, who began shooting in the air. The Chechens then picked up their daggers and stormed the troops. Daggers were no match for bullets, and the pious but weakly armed insurgents were drastically unprepared for the confrontation that awaited them.”³⁰

40. It is estimated that anywhere between one hundred to four hundred Chechens were killed that day.³¹ This incident began a renewed cycle of violence where those who subscribed to Kunta Hajji’s pacifist approach decided to take up arms and join the abrek, leading to further abuses by the Tsarist state.³² In 1865, Russia decided to deport 5,000 Chechen families to Ottoman territories in order to begin its programme of ethnic cleansing. This method of large-scale genocide set a model case for subsequent ethnic cleansing programmes, whether Tsarist or Soviet. The wave of pogroms against the Jews followed as a direct result of the massacre of the Muslims. Seeing that they had an effective way of dealing with ethnic groupings that they did not want living within their territories, the Russians simply rid themselves of minorities.³³

41. Between 1865 through to 1917, with the formation of the Soviet Union, the Chechens made multiple attempts to gain autonomy – taking any opportunities they had to reclaim dispossessed land. The Russian Revolutions of 1905, 1917, and the ensuing Civil War all provided platforms to stage insurgencies. On 20 January 1921, the Commissar for Nationalities, Joseph Stalin, supported the sovereignty of Chechnya and Ingushetia as an autonomous region under Soviet control which would be allowed to rule by Islamic law and have all captured territory returned.³⁴ The autonomous Chechen Republic that had been granted was dissolved quickly by the end of 1924. It was not until 1929 though that the Soviets really put forward their policy of Collectivisation and decided to incorporate the northern Caucasus into the Federated Socialist Republic.

42. The promises that had been made to a people who felt that they had finally achieved self-determination were all too quickly broken, prompting the war-stricken Chechens to swiftly take up arms once again to fight for their political independence. The fighting kept on going until March 1930 when Stalin made a tactical retreat. From then on the Soviets used terror tactics in Chechnya harassing and hurting the people through the internal security agency The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) who were backed by the Soviet army.³⁵ Stalin rid himself of the Chechen problem through a simple solution. He decided to liquidate the whole Chechen-Ingushetia political entity. Despite the existence of other warring peoples against the Soviet regime, Stalin decided to annihilate only the Chechens due to their long-standing rebellion.

43. He managed to justify such a strategy by claiming that the people would have collaborated with the Germans during World War II when they had reached the Malgobek hills in Ingushetia. The reality of the situation is that the German army did not reach anywhere near the Chechens and Stalin was using this as a weak excuse for what he saw to be a final solution.³⁶ Red Army Memorial Day for the Soviet people was supposed to be a day when the population were expected to be celebrating in their respective villages. In February 1944, Stalin chose this day specifically to act as the moment when the Chechen people would finally be liquidated. Lavrenty Beria, chief of the NKVD, said that the secret service laid siege to all the Chechen villages effectively imprisoning them.

44. Those who resisted and all those unable to endure the coming relocation were shot on sight. Pregnant women, the elderly and children were not spared the horror. In the village of Khaibakh, 700 villagers were taken to a granary where they were burned alive inside. This was the holocaust of the Chechen people.³⁷ The genocide that resulted from these mass deportations and massacres led to the slaughter of over 60 percent of the Chechen population. Those who survived the trip to the Gulags usually died of hunger, cold or disease.³⁸ It was the aim of Stalin to completely wipe from the memory of history the existence of these people. Any literature, academic works, archives and memorials were burnt to the ground.

45. By 1957, Nikita Khrushchev eventually permitted a limited return of the Chechen people, with limited autonomy though, resulting in a political contestation with the Soviet State that resulted in moments of tension between the Soviet state and the Caucasus, ultimately leading to First and Second Chechen Wars. It was in May 2000, that Russian President Vladimir Putin carpet bombed the Chechen capital Grozny, killing thousands of Chechens – initiating the second Chechen war, one that would result in a great deal of asymmetric violence that harkened back to the violence of the abrek from the 1800s, including that by female shahidkas:

“On 29 November 2001, Aizan Gazueva of Urus-Martan, twenty-five kilometers south of Grozny and Chechnya's second-largest city, visited the barracks of Gaidar Gadzhiev, a Daghestani general who had killed her husband before her eyes. Shortly prior to killing her husband, Gadzhiev had kidnapped and killed Gazueva's brothers under secret circumstances. Gazueva addressed to the general a simple question in Russian: "Do you recognize me?" (Vyi menya uznaete?). Gazueva wanted to know whether the general recognized her as the woman whose husband he had recently killed. Rather than acknowledge her gaze, Gadzhiev dismissed her. "Go away!" he said. "I don't have time to speak with you!" Then there was an explosion. "A young widow detonated the instrument hidden on her body," runs one journalists account. According to the human rights organization Memorial, two soldiers were killed, and Gadzhiev died the next day from his wounds.”³⁹

46. In Beyond Mothers Monsters Whores Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg highlight the Russian analysis of zombirovniye – of Chechen women fighter after the second levelling of Grozny being turned into zombies through the use of psychotropic drugs⁴⁰ – hailing back to a somewhat mythical history of Hassan al-Sabah’s drugged assassins, the hashashiyun. The zombification of these women became the only frame that their actions could be understood, instead of the material reality of not only witnessing the entire levelling of their communities through carpet bombing, but built on two hundred years of colonial repression and dispossession.

7. RESISTANCE OF THE MOROS TO US OCCUPATION IN THE PHILIPPINES

47. The annexation of the Philippines by the United States following the Spanish-American War, culminating in the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), and the subsequent occupation well into the early twentieth century, was marked by widespread brutality, coercive policies, and grievous abuses against Filipino combatants and civilians. Although often justified under the rubric of ‘benevolent assimilation’, American military conduct revealed a systemic pattern of violence and oppression. The conflict, which began ostensibly as an effort to counter Filipino aspirations for independence, became a war of subjugation, leaving enduring legacies of trauma and resistance within the archipelago’s communities.

48. Under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States, effectively discarding Filipino claims to self-rule that had been articulated during the anti-colonial revolution against Spain. From the outset, the United States refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the First Philippine Republic. Instead, American forces, after a brief period of uneasy truce, confronted Filipino independence fighters led by Emilio Aguinaldo. The initial skirmish on the night of 4 February 1899 near Manila rapidly escalated into a protracted war, characterised by the markedly asymmetrical capabilities of the two sides. American troops, equipped with modern firearms, artillery, and later machine guns, quickly resorted to tactics that exceeded conventional rules of engagement, often treating Filipino combatants and civilians interchangeably.⁴¹

49. Central to the brutality of the occupation was the American army’s use of the ‘water cure’ (water-boarding), a form of torture that involved forcing large amounts of water into a prisoner’s mouth and nose until near-asphyxiation – a form of mock execution. Ostensibly used to extract intelligence on the whereabouts of insurgents, weapons caches, and supply lines, the water cure symbolised a calculated form of cruelty designed to terrorise local populations into submission. Although some American officers expressed discomfort with these methods, their use was neither isolated nor marginal. Rather, it was condoned — tacitly or openly — by high-ranking military officials who considered the Filipino insurgents as racial inferiors and unworthy of legal protections accorded to enemies in European conflicts.⁴² Newspaper reports and testimonies from soldiers themselves corroborate that the water cure and other forms of abuse were not exceptional instances, but integral parts of American counterinsurgency practice.⁴³

50. The racialised dimension of American brutality cannot be overstated. The United States’ imperial endeavour in the Philippines was deeply intertwined with contemporary beliefs in Anglo-Saxon superiority and the so-called ‘white man’s burden.’ American soldiers, many hailing from an increasingly segregated and racially charged homeland, carried with them racial slurs and demeaning stereotypes that dehumanised Filipinos. Such views contributed directly to the normalisation of cruelty, making it easier for officers and enlisted men alike to rationalise atrocities. The conflation of Filipinos with perceived racial inferiors led to summary executions, the burning of entire villages, and the internment of civilians in concentration camps known as reconcentration zones.⁴⁴ These camps, established to separate insurgents from their civilian support base, were often unsanitary and overcrowded, causing the spread of disease and significant civilian mortality.⁴⁵

51. In addition to extrajudicial executions, forced labour, and the appropriation of local produce and property, one of the most systematic expressions of brutality was the “scorched earth” strategy. Particularly notorious was General J. Franklin Bell’s campaign in Batangas and Laguna provinces in 1901–1902. Bell’s tactics included the destruction of food supplies, the burning of homes, and the removal of civilians into concentration camps under conditions designed to break the will of the population. Within these “protected zones,” civilians lived under strict surveillance and curfews, and anyone found outside designated areas could be shot on sight. As Glenn Anthony May notes, mortality rates soared in these camps because of disease and malnutrition, directly attributable to American policies that prioritised military convenience over human life.⁴⁶ Such measures aimed at “teaching the Filipinos a lesson” exemplify how violence was not merely reactive but strategic, intended to dissuade any future resistance to colonial rule.

52. By 1906, the United States had consolidated its hold over most of the Philippine archipelago, leaving only the predominantly Muslim areas of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago yet to be fully brought under colonial authority. The Muslim communities in these regions were commonly labelled ‘Moros,’ a designation derived from the Spanish term ‘Moors.’ At this stage, the American public knew remarkably little about the Moros, aside from impressions formed through George Ade’s musical The Sultan of Sulu, or through encounters at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, where some Moros were exhibited in the Philippine Reservation in a manner akin to zoo displays.⁴⁷

53. In the province of Jolo, the Americans had installed a military governor, Colonel W. M. Wallace, in 1903. Although he was technically under the authority of the local maharajah, he in practice wielded autonomous power. In March of that year, following a disturbance in the Jolo marketplace, several datus (local traders) were arrested and sent to Manila’s prisons, provoking widespread anger among the Moro population over perceived American encroachments. As tensions continued to rise, U.S. forces soon found themselves facing opposition from juramentados:

“The American military colony was in a commotion when we arrived. A soldier had been terribly gashed and killed by a juramentado. These juramentados, as the Spanish word expresses, are religious maniacs, who, after having undergone certain exorcisms in the mosque, proceed to kill any non-Mahommedan and then commit suicide, in order to obtain a happy existence in paradise. This makes it rather unpleasant for those who do not believe in the Koran, for one never knows when one of these devils may be about and treacherously hack one to pieces.”⁴⁸

54. The U.S. now faced a formidable adversary: the juramentados, whose political grievances against foreign occupiers were cast as expressions of inherent malevolence. Such attacks included an incident on 14 March 1903 when three Moros entered the marketplace at Tando Point in Jolo and targeted both local residents and members of the U.S. 15th Cavalry Regiment — ultimately, all three attackers were killed. Drawing on Spanish-era sources describing Moros before and during their own occupation, U.S. troops adopted the Spanish portrayal of juramentados (meaning ‘oath-takers’ in Spanish) as frenzied fanatics seeking martyrdom and eternal reward through the mass killing of Christians.⁴⁹

55. From the perspective of the Moros themselves, what the Americans and Spaniards called juramentado had a distinct local meaning. Known as parang sabil — war in the path of Allah — it was far more nuanced than the colonial interpretation. Unlike the restrictive colonial definition of juramentado, parang sabil could also apply to women and children who were unjustly killed, and who were thus considered martyrs. Although it had clear origins in an Islamic tradition of martyrdom, parang sabil or juramentado was neither reducible to a simplistic notion of jihad nor the product of a deranged mind. Instead, it was a historically shaped, multifaceted phenomenon that was as much social and political as it was religious. ⁵⁰

56. Islam took root in the Sulu region during the fourteenth century, spread along the trade and pilgrimage networks that spanned the Indian Ocean. By around 1450, the first Muslim sultan had established his rule in Jolo. About a century later, the Spanish arrived, occupying the northern islands of the Philippines and enforcing a policy of compulsory conversion to Roman Catholicism. In 1578, they launched the first of many military campaigns against Jolo, both to assert authority in the South and to convert the Moros of the Sulu Archipelago. For the following three centuries, the Moros fiercely resisted Spanish incursions through near-constant and often brutal conflicts. In the absence of a unifying national identity, religion served as a critical source of collective mobilisation. Just as conquest and conversion were integral to the Iberian imperial project, Moro resistance to colonial rule was intimately bound up with the defence of Islam. Under foreign domination, faith itself seemed under attack, inspiring a religious ethos that emphasised a willingness to sacrifice one’s life in the struggle against non-believers—a pattern also evident in other Muslim regions, including Malabar and Aceh.⁵¹

57. The Spanish narrative of juramentado — on which the Americans placed considerable reliance — was originally recorded by a French observer, Dr Joseph Montano, who visited Jolo around 1880. Montano personally witnessed an attack and even photographed its aftermath. Portions of his account were translated into Spanish, but the version the Americans accessed was incomplete, omitting many of its key elements. According to Montano, after the sultan accepted Spanish control of Jolo in 1876, several prominent datus continued to resist colonial rule, resorting to small-scale, suicidal assaults. He characterised the juramentado as essentially an enslaved individual who earned his family’s freedom by sacrificing his own life against the Spanish. While Montano did depict the juramentado as a frenzied, suicidal fighter expecting death and heavenly reward, he also provided crucial political and socioeconomic context for the practice — context the Americans never fully acknowledged. Following Montano’s original description, juramentado in the 1870s appears as part of an open struggle against Spanish occupation, framed in religious terms as a defence of the faith. By 1903, however, it had largely become a symbolic act of despair: an ongoing armed resistance expressed through religious language at a time when conventional warfare was no longer possible.⁵²

58. To the Americans, juramentado attacks seemed to be nothing more than mindless eruptions of frenzied fanaticism, yet they were in reality influenced by a host of specific, contextual factors. Concerns about cholera outbreaks, rising food prices, and political unrest occurred alongside festivities honouring Muslims who had recently completed the pilgrimage to Mecca — factors suggesting that the timing of these assaults was far from random. Almost alone among the Americans in grasping the complexity of Moro life, the US-Lebanese military physician Najeeb Saleeby acknowledged the political significance behind the attacks:

““Juramentados” are not religious fanatics.... There has been no greater misunderstanding by Spaniards and Americans on any one Moro subject than on this—the juramentado question. The juramentado is not actuated by a religious feeling. It is fierce patriotism that excites his rashness.... A man who runs amuck in a manner avenges himself and his personal grievances, but the juramentado avenges his people and his chief. His chief's call for vengeance rings in his ears and he immediately comes forward as the hero and avenger of the datuship.”⁵³

59. As the historian Kim Wagner accounts in Massacre in the Clouds, the US racialised dehumanisation of the Moros resulted in one of the worst massacres in US military history at Bud Dajo – worse indeed than the My Lai massacre that would take place 62 years later in Vietnam. The level of violence was indicative of how US military personnel in the region failed to understand the basic humanity of the Moro peoples. The Moros had consistently fought the Spanish and then the Americans in a desperate attempt to hold on to their land, their local economies, but most importantly, to their religion and way of life. The emergence of the juramentado was only ever a response to an exceptional situation, one where resistance became necessary in an entirely asymmetric context.

8. THE SETTLER COLONISATION OF EAST TURKESTAN BY CHINA

60. The region historically known as East Turkestan, more commonly referred to in Chinese state discourse as Xinjiang, has been a site of intense contestation and settler colonialism since its incorporation into the Qing Empire in the mid-eighteenth century and, more aggressively, under the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The term ‘settler colonisation’ here denotes a process wherein the ruling power encourages, or enforces, the migration of its own dominant ethnic group — primarily Han Chinese — into a territory inhabited predominantly by another people — in this case, Uyghurs, as well as other Turkic and Islamic communities — aiming to replace, subdue, or assimilate them. This project has been accompanied by patterns of brutality, encompassing violent suppression of local resistance, forced cultural assimilation, systematic marginalisation of the local populace, and the destruction of religious and cultural sites. Such brutality manifests itself across military, economic, cultural, and demographic domains.

61. The Qing Empire’s conquest of the Tarim Basin in the mid-eighteenth century initiated a long trajectory of foreign domination over East Turkestan’s indigenous Muslim Turkic populations. Although the Qing approach was initially one of military occupation and relatively loose administrative control, it also set important precedents for future strategies. The Qing, for instance, sponsored Han and Hui (Chinese-speaking Muslim) migration into the region, albeit on a modest scale, and utilised military garrisons to ensure loyalty and quell dissent.⁵⁴ Over time, Qing authorities sought to transform the region into a frontier of imperial stability, but faced recurrent rebellions, particularly those under Yaqub Beg in the late nineteenth century, which were met with harsh reprisals.⁵⁵ The legacy of Qing brutality — ranging from mass executions of rebels to punitive tax regimes — helped create a deep reservoir of local resentment. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the Republican and subsequently Nationalist governments in China struggled to maintain control. Warlords and local strongmen vied for power, and periodic attempts to tighten Han Chinese rule produced violence and suffering. Although the scale of Han settlement was not yet massive, the groundwork had been laid for the region’s later reconfiguration under the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which would set in motion a more systematic and centralised programme of settler colonisation.⁵⁶

62. According to Sean R Roberts in his book The War on the Uyghurs, the Uyghur of East Turkestan have experienced two forms of colonisation by China:

“…the Uyghur homeland is a colony that is geographically contiguous to China. Such situations generally foster one of two different colonial relationships – a frontier colony that is held at arms-length from the colonial metropole and a settler colony that is absorbed into the colonial power’s polity and settled by the dominant colonizing population.”⁵⁷

63. In the early 1930s a rebellion began against the Han leadership of Xinjiang in the Kumul Khanate, which eventually spread across the entirety of the province. By the end of 1932, the Muslim population of Xinjiang was in open rebellion when forces trained by the nascent Soviet State under the command of Sheng Shicai arrived to regain control of the region. In 1933, Sheng signed an agreement retaining control of northern Xinjiang, but allowing for the south to found the first Eastern Turkestan Republic (ETR) – the first modern manifestation of an East Turkestani state. By March 1934, the Soviet Union militarily assisted Sheng to decimate the ETR by sacking Kashgar leaving Sheng the ruler of Xinjiang – but only as a proxy to the Soviet Union.⁵⁸ Sheng’s policies resulted in a further revolt in 1937 in Kashgar and Khotan, which again with the assistance of the Soviets resulted in the decimation of the Uyghur rebellion – being denied the right to exercise their autonomy.

64. With the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) brought East Turkestan under a regime that aimed to integrate it politically, economically, and culturally into the Chinese nation-state. Although the PRC initially acknowledged the region’s cultural diversity and created the nominal Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in 1955, the reality was a concerted effort to dilute the Uyghur majority and their claims to the land. Central to this effort was the state-sponsored in-migration of Han Chinese settlers. Through the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan), founded in 1954, the government provided incentives and infrastructure to facilitate large-scale Han settlement.⁵⁹ The result was a demographic transformation: whereas Han made up a negligible share of the population at the start of the PRC era, by the twenty-first century, they accounted for at least 40% of the population in some areas.⁶⁰

65. This demographic engineering was accompanied by administrative and legal frameworks designed to control and marginalise indigenous communities. State policies have long prioritised Han cultural norms and the Mandarin language. Educational reforms sidelined Turkic languages, while official media and cultural industries promoted narratives that framed Uyghurs and other indigenous groups as “backward” and in need of “modernisation” through Han guidance.⁶¹ In practice, these policies reinforced a settler colonial order in which the indigenous population was systematically excluded from centres of political and economic power, leading to structural violence and dispossession.

66. Following the formation of the XUAR in 1955, and the PRC’s intensified programmes of economic development and Han in-migration, resistance took on new dimensions. As the Uyghur experienced increasing marginalisation in their own homeland, a range of opposition strategies emerged. In the early decades of the PRC’s rule, open revolts were sporadic but recurrent, often triggered by violent state measures and policies targeting religious leaders and cultural institutions.⁶² Although such movements were invariably met with heavy state suppression, their very existence highlights an enduring desire for political self-determination.

67. At the core of Chinese settler colonisation lies the state’s willingness to employ direct physical violence, both episodic and systematic, against indigenous inhabitants. Since at least the 1990s, crackdowns on even the slightest sign of Uyghur dissent have been severe – being framed as acts of ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ by the Chinese state as a means of delegitimising their grievances:

68. In April 1990, a major disturbance broke out in a rural area of the XUAR called Baren township near the southern city of Kashgar. Although the details of the 'Baren incident' remain unclear, the event ended in the occupation of local government buildings for nearly three days until Chinese military and security forces were able to take back the buildings and either kill or arrest the Uyghurs who had occupied them. Some reports suggest that the violence that broke out in Baren was spontaneous, occurring after the Chinese military clashed with some 200 Uyghur demonstrators protesting against recently applied limits on the number of births allotted to minority families. Other reports, including official Chinese sources, maintain that the incident was a premeditated attempt to overthrow state control of this small rural area by a religiously oriented pro-independence group calling itself the East Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP).⁶³

69. The Uyghur uprisings of the 1990s and subsequent rounds of violence sporadic violence resulted in further entrenching of Chinese policy to the Uyghur population as one that is subversive to the state. The CCP’s Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism launched in the early 2010s, has provided the legal and rhetorical pretext for mass arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial arrests on an unprecedented scale. According to Smith Finley the intensification of securitisation measures included the establishment of a vast network of internment camps — officially termed ‘re-education centres’ — in which an estimated one million or more Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities have been detained.⁶⁴ Reports of torture, including beatings, electric shocks, and sexual abuse, have emerged from detainees.⁶⁵

70. The brutality of this campaign is not merely a by-product of authoritarian governance; it is a key instrument in transforming East Turkestan into a region in which the indigenous population is too intimidated or broken to resist the influx of settlers and the destruction of their cultural lifeways. Here, settler colonialism is intertwined with what some scholars have labelled “cultural genocide,” a term used to describe attempts to eradicate cultural and religious identity through oppressive, and sometimes violent, means.⁶⁶

71. Settler colonialism often relies on economic exploitation and dispossession, and East Turkestan is no exception. The PRC’s intensive development strategies, involving resource extraction, agricultural colonisation, and industrial projects, have overwhelmingly benefited Han settlers and state-owned enterprises. The fertile oases, once predominantly farmed by Uyghurs practising traditional agriculture, have been targeted for large-scale cotton production and other cash crops under the guidance of the Bingtuan.⁶⁷ Uyghur farmers often find themselves dispossessed of their ancestral lands through opaque legal processes, facing coercive “land transfers” that favour Han newcomers. This pattern of economic transformation parallels settler colonial dynamics seen elsewhere, where the colonising group uses superior political power, legal regimes, and security forces to seize control of resources and ensure economic domination. The resulting economic inequalities reinforce the power imbalance, as Uyghurs are pushed into low-paying or precarious forms of employment, or else forced into labour programmes that further erode their autonomy and cultural integrity.⁶⁸ Under these conditions, economic development ceases to be neutral: it becomes a weapon of demographic and cultural engineering.

72. Since 11 September 2001 and the attacks on the World Trade Centre by al-Qaeda, the Chinese government has attempted to frame the disaffection that East Turkistani Uyghurs have with the Chinese government as being part of a campaign against terrorism. Despite the predominantly Sufi practice of the Uyghur population of Xinjiang – where the vast majority of the Uyghur population live – there have been constant efforts by China to frame their response within the language of the ‘global War on Terror’.⁶⁹ In 2013, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s justified their position by stating:

“The efforts are completely in line with the direction the international community has taken to combat terrorism, and are an important part of the global fight against terrorism.”⁷⁰

73. The US were willing to initially accept this due to their actions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were detaining Muslims without charge or trial, among whom were Uyghur detainees. The Chinese requested that these men be placed on the US Treasury’s Financial Sanctions List in September 2002, which the US complied with – seeking to reinforce the global nature of their concern around terrorism. Starting in 2006 with an initial set of releases to Albania, it was not until 2014, that determinations were made that all the Uyghur men who had been detained there had no associations to terrorism⁷¹, but their relocations were nearly always to countries where they did not speak the local languages or were familiar with local customs – thus often resulting in a form of social imprisonment.

74. With the ‘re-education through labour’ programme coming to an end in 2013, there emerged a focused emphasis on the re-education of Uyghur communities in particular, picking up pace by 2017 as 1 million Uyghur were detained in re-education camps (concentration camps), about one tenth of their population in Xinjiang.⁷² Those kept at the camps have admitted to international media organisations allowed into the euphemistically titled ‘re-education centres’, that they are there because they have made ‘mistakes’ or that they have been holding on to their Islamic beliefs of Uyghur cultural practices that are out of concordance with the Communist beliefs of the People’s Republic of China.⁷³ Much of this has been framed through riots that took place in Lhasa (2008) and Ürümqi (2009) and then later acts of political violence between 2013-2014. These incidents were largely based around Uyghur disaffection with the Chinese government, but was presented as examples of Uyghur terrorist ambitions, prompting an increased emphasis on assimilating Uyghurs into hegemonic Han cultural norms.⁷⁴

75. Those permitted to speak to outside journalists explain that they are present in the re-education centres voluntarily, after having been convinced by local police officers or courts that they suffered from ‘extremist beliefs’, a notion that appears to be amorphous at best. These accusations turn everyday life into potential moments of pathologising, as normal human behaviour can be seen as resulting in extremism. As Maj Stulam explained to one journalist:

“The people in the divorce court told me I was infected by extremist thoughts and said I was doing something illegal, and I realised my mistake after they told me those laws and regulations. So I voluntarily applied for a position in this vocational and training centre. I am very glad I did, and very grateful for this free education opportunity and chance to remove those extremist thoughts from my mind.”⁷⁵

76. It is details such as these that begin to provide a picture of the way in which Chinese attempts to forcefully assimilate the Uyghur has resulted in people being accused of ‘extremism’ as part of the mundanity of everyday life. Those with grudges against one another, policemen on a ‘power-trip’, locals who do not get their way, all are given the power and opportunity to denounce one another, as the system calls for both technological and human surveillance at all times.

77. Uyghurs who hail from East Turkestan have consistently asserted their rights to their autonomy, not only in their land, but also in their cultural and religious practice. The settler colonial policies of the Chinese state have consistently denied them such autonomy, but further systemically denied them the ability to assert their own culture – what is now being referred to as cultural genocide – a practice that is found to be consistent among colonial contexts.

9. FRENCH RESISTANCE AGAINST NAZI OCCUPATION AND COLLABORATION

78. The Vichy regime was inaugurated after the Third French Republic at the end of the ‘Phoney War’ in favour of the Germans. Refusing to sign the armistice Paul Reynaud’s government dissolved and on 22 June 1940 France finally signed their capitulation. However, this role was delegated by Marechal Petain head of the newly formed far-right French government. These negotiations between the Germans and Petain took place in the same carriage as the one in which the Germans had to sign the treaty – or what they call the ‘Diktat’ – at the end of the First World War. It is in that context of humiliation that the foundations of the Vichy Regime were established. From that moment onwards the Vichy Regime became an extension of the Nazi regime itself, expanding the antisemitic agenda to France, entrenching it into the domestic politics.

79. Initially, from June 1940 this crystalised into the use of judicial means to inaugurate the antisemitic agenda⁷⁶:

“during the first few months of the occupation, judicial repression of everything considered dangerous for the security of the occupying power, or harmful to the Wehrmacht’s image, became stricter step by step.”⁷⁷

80. Beginning with the repression of any opposition party, the Vichy regime targeted communists as they were deemed to be hostile to the government. They proceeded to pass anti-Jewish legislation. German penal law was applicable in the occupied French territory according to Gaël Eismann as stated in article 161 of the German Military Code:

“Article 161 of the German Military Code [specified] that any act harmful to the security of the occupying troops, as well as any violation of a decree from the Führer or his representative, [was] a reprehensible act which [had to] be punished just as though it had been committed on the territory of the Reich.”⁷⁸

81. Such laws enabled an effective occupation and legal colonisation of France, effectively permitting the atrocities perpetuated in Germany to happen in all the occupied territories, encouraging violence against Jews, Communists and all those who engaged in resistance. The violence carried out under the Vichy Regime, however, was predominantly targeted against the Jews of France. A cogent example would be the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup orchestrated by the French police on 16-17 July 1942. It was the most consequential French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust.⁷⁹ They were transported to and detained in an indoor sports arena called the ‘Velodrome D’Hiver’ – as the name of this atrocity suggests – and were left to survive in atrocious conditions, deprived of their basic rights and needs such as food, water and hygiene. 6,000 of these people were sent to the Drancy Camp that was the point of transit, meaning it was only temporary; worse awaited them once they were sent to a concentration camp. Such roundups, murders and general conditions of oppression created the conditions for resistance.

82. Those who did not comply with the Vichy Regime, by extension Nazi Germany, became a target. Those who conspired to protect the lives of Jews who were persecuted based on a mere conspiracy on the “impurity” of their “race” were punished. Even something as banal as standing by the principle of fundamental human rights, made a person a ‘legitimate’ target.

83. Under the Nazi German occupation of France, the lives of the French were not lives of thriving human beings. They lived with lack of heat, electricity and the food they would eat would be rationed. A climate of fear and uncertainty roamed in the country as a constant reminder of the state of war as the sound of war planes weighed heavily on civilians. In Josette Maddison’s memoir, a survivor of this period, she recalls the day of liberation where she had candy for the first time since French children had been deprived, living off the bare minimum. They lived in a climate of pure and utter scarcity. Josette Maddison recalled “Rationing is fine and dandy, but often… you would get to the places you were supposed to pick up the rations and there was nothing. Because they (the Germans) fed themselves first.”⁸⁰. German occupying forces considered themselves as having the legitimacy to undermine the humanity of any person who they did not see as their equal, any person who did not comply with their ideology. In this case, as the French were under German occupation the hierarchy was already settled. These conditions bread resistance.

84. The French Resistance during the Second World War engaged in a wide array of activities to undermine the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime. While their primary focus was on military sabotage, intelligence gathering, and aiding Allied forces, there were instances where civilian targets were attacked. These targets were typically individuals or entities perceived as collaborators or direct supporters of the occupiers. One of the most prominent instances was the assassination of Philippe Henriot on 28 June 1944. Henriot was the Vichy regime’s Secretary of State for Information and Propaganda and was infamous for his daily radio broadcasts that vehemently supported German policies and denigrated the Resistance. Members of the Resistance infiltrated his residence in the Ministry of Information in Paris and assassinated him in his bedroom.⁸¹ This operation was a strategic move to silence a key propagandist and to send a clear message to other collaborators.

85. Members of the Milice Française, a paramilitary force established by the Vichy regime to combat the Resistance and suppress dissent, were also common targets. On 24 April 1944, Resistance fighters ambushed and killed Venant Courcier, a notorious Milice officer responsible for brutal crackdowns in the Rhône-Alpes region.⁸² This attack aimed to weaken the operational capacity of the Milice and to deter others from participating in oppressive actions against French citizens.

86. Sabotage efforts sometimes extended to economic targets that, while civilian in nature, contributed to the German war effort. Factories producing goods for the Nazis were sabotaged to disrupt supply chains. A notable example is the attack on the Peugeot factory in Sochaux on 5 November 1943. The Resistance orchestrated an explosion that halted production, impacting both the German military supply and the local workforce.⁸³ While the primary intent was to damage the occupiers’ resources, such actions inevitably affected civilian employees.

87. Collaborationist media outlets disseminating Nazi propaganda were not exempt from Resistance actions. In August 1943, the offices of the newspaper Je Suis Partout in Paris were bombed by Resistance members. The publication was notorious for its anti-Semitic content and support of Nazi ideology. The attack intended to stifle propaganda and diminish the influence of pro-German sentiments among the French populace.⁸⁴

88. Madeleine Riffaud’s role in resistance efforts was catalysed by a relatively minor event. In 1941 the young French daughter of teachers was kicked up her bottom by a Nazi soldier as she was going to her parent’s house in Amiens. She recalls feeling absolutely humiliated. Living under German Nazi occupation in that instant forced her decision that she would not let this go on any further. That one moment fuelled her fight as a resistance fighter to the occupation:

“He kicked me in the butt. He sent me flying two meters. I fell on my nose. And, lying on the ground, I thought to myself, 'That's it, enough.'”⁸⁵

89. In 1944 she witnessed the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane a village where she had spent a part of her childhood – causing her to turn to violence. Madeleine consequently decided to lead a unit of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), a group of young communists resisting German occupation and the “military arm of the communist party”.⁸⁶ She was an agent enabling the flow of weaponry, messages, and transportation. For Riffaud, this group’s goal was to liberate Paris from the German occupation – the order was systematic: “everyone get a German”. As a result, at 19 years of age she shot a German soldier in broad daylight on the bridge of Solferino.

“I had taken up the weapons of pain, as Paul Éluard might have said. I was hurting deeply inside, I shot him almost point-blank, and he fell like a sack of wheat.”

90. She was chased, apprehended and tortured at the Nazi secret police headquarters. The torture she was subject to was motivated by the need to gain her contact list, evidently to stop any other communists or members of resistance carrying out similar attacks. Riffaud did not crack under the pressure; resulting in the Nazis proceeding to torture people in front of her eyes in atrocious ways. The Germans broke a woman’s legs and arms with an iron bar. They also made a young teenage boy bleed from his face in front of her. All this was done to maintain the “upper hand” the occupying forces needed to maintain the visage of control. Later, Riffaud was to be executed but the Germans changed their minds at the last moment. She had also been thrown on a train to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück famously known to be the “death camp for women”. She survived once again because she managed to escape thanks to other women that wanted to save her as she was the “young one”.

91. After liberation finally came, Riffaud continued to fight against injustice as she started to write for the journal l’Humanité as she was covering the atrocities in Algeria and in Vietnam.⁸⁷ Writing four years prior to the beginning of the Battle of Algiers, she wrote for La Vie ouvriére in 1952 on the torture of Algerians inside France, in the very place she had been tortured by the Nazis:

“The Algerians were being tortured on the Rue des Saussaies, in the very place that I had been! For me it was unbearable to find that my own country was doing that.”⁸⁸

92. Later she entered Algeria clandestinely and was one of the first people to denounce the torture that was being perpetrated by the French government on the Algerians under the nom-de-guerre ‘Rainer’. The name was inspired by the German poet Rainer Maria Rikle to signify that she was “not at war against the German population but against the nazis”. Ten years later, in Algeria, the French far-right organisation Armée Secrète (a group of paramilitary settlers) unmasked Rainer, leading to her being attacked by a truck smashing directly into her car. Riffaud suffered multiple fractures and a crushed hand, leading to her being snuck into a hospital and eventually snuck out of Algeria to safety.⁸⁹ The attack on her was only a single moment in a much longer history of settler colonial violence by France in Algeria.

10. THE FLN RESISTANCE AGAINST FRANCE’S SETTLER COLONISATION OF ALGERIA

93. The French colonisation of Algeria, initiated in 1830, was marked by a series of brutal strategies aimed at subjugating the local population and installing French control. These methods included scorched-earth policies, mass killings, forced displacements, and systematic use of torture, all of which had devastating effects on Algerian society. By 1834, under direction of Louis-Phillipe, Algeria was formally colonised and came under the jurisdiction of the governor-general Betrand Clauzel who created a new category of the ‘European Algerian’ – dispossessing three million native Algerians and placing them under the régime du sabre (the regime of the sword).⁹⁰ Citing Alexis de Toqueville, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson shows how even the most liberal elements of French society were entirely committed to the subsequent horrors perpetrated against the Algerians as part the violent regime:

“Tocqueville explained that this view, held by “men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree,” proposed that it was “wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children.” For Tocqueville, such categorical opposition to these measures was naively humanitarian because it failed to realize that they were “unfortunate necessities…to which any people that wants to wage war on the Arabs is obliged to submit.””⁹¹

94. One of the primary tactics employed by the French military was the scorched-earth policy. This involved the deliberate destruction of crops, villages, and food supplies to starve the local population and undermine resistance. Governor General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, who led the French forces in the 1840s, was a key proponent of this strategy. He believed that “war in Africa is a science” and advocated for the burning of harvests and the destruction of villages to force submission.⁹² Mass killings were another grim aspect of the French conquest. Notably, the massacre of the El Oufia tribe, where approximately 500 men, women, and children were killed in a single night, exemplifies the extreme measures taken to quell resistance.⁹³ These excesses were largely encouraged due to the first ‘European Algerians’ committing crimes from robbery to murder as the “Christians that they galleys and prisons of Europe have vomited up upon this country since its conquest by the French.”⁹⁴

95. Similarly, during the siege of Laghouat in 1852, French forces employed chemical agents, leading to the deaths of a significant portion of the town’s population. This event is referred to by locals as the Year of the Khalya, meaning emptiness, due to the massive loss of life and the emptying of the town in an extreme act of dispossession by the French.⁹⁵ Forced displacement and deportation were also integral to French colonial policy. Entire tribes deemed troublesome were expelled from their lands. Many sought refuge in neighbouring countries such as Tunisia and Morocco, while others were deported to distant French territories like New Caledonia and Guyana.⁹⁶ These actions aimed to disrupt the social fabric of Algerian society and facilitate French settlement.

96. It was Bugeaud who created a new tactic that the native Algerians had never experienced before, what Andrew Hussey describes as “a new genocidal tactic” – les enfumades (smoking-out):

“The first enfumade was ordered by General Cavaignac, whose men had pursued a group of Arab fighters, as well as women and children, into mountain caves. Cavaignac ordered his men to wall up the caves and set fire to the entrances. After a day or so, as people died of asphyxiation and bodies began to pile up, the fighters emerged to ask for pardon. Cavaignac refused and continued with his plan to turn the area into ‘a vast cemetery’.”⁹⁷

97. The cumulative effect of these brutal methods was catastrophic for the Algerian population. Historians estimate that between 500,000 to 1 million Algerians died as a result of war, famine, and disease during the first three decades of French rule, out of an estimated population of 3 million. Over the course of the next 100 years, the French carried out the colonisation of Algeria – resulting in the region becoming a French possession – legally an extension of France itself. Except, the period of the Third Republic, Algerians were systemically denied social and political equality as well as basic civil rights – a form of class and racial apartheid having been established by the French.

98. From the mid-1800s through the 1945 there was a series of legislative violence carried out against Algerian natives, most famously in Napolean’s introduction of the sénatus-consulte of 1865, which permitted to Algerians to be governed by Islamic law, but if they wanted full rights as French citizens, they would be required to renounce any claim to be governed by Islamic law – in effect giving them a choice between legal rights and apostasy – something the Algerians could not countenance.⁹⁸ This dispossession of rights within their land resulted in the native population organising a protest in the eastern city of Sétif on 8 May 1945. French police fired on the protestors, leading to riots that resulted in the killing of 103 French settlers. The French attacked the towns of Setif, Guelma and Kherrata in the aftermath of the riots – leading to tens of thousands of Algerian families being left bereaved after bodies were dumped into mass graves.⁹⁹ The events of the day led to an escalation of violence by the French authorities, bringing about the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), as they sought Algerian independence “by any means necessary.”¹⁰⁰

99. The suppression of the non-violent attempts to create the conditions for independence resulted in the first major attack by the FLN to announce their existence on 1 November 1954, killing eight people after attacking military and civilian settler targets – what the French government referred to as les événements d’Algérie (the Algerian situation). Acts of systematic political violence by the FLN against French military colonial targets resulted in General Jacques Massu bringing his counter-insurgency tactics from French-Indochina to Algeria – where they were deployed with increasingly brutal effect. The entirety of Algeria’s native population was turned into a suspect community as French occupation forces detained and tortured thousands of men, women and children. The escalating violence resulted in the apogee of the Algerian Revolution, known as the Battle of Algiers 1956 – 1957.

100. What the French effectively set up was a large open air concentration camp according to the FLN leader Saâdi Yacef. The French presented their counter-insurgency tactics as being a response to the FLN’s act of political violence, however as Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson explains, the opposite is closer to the truth, that the acts of the Algerian resistance were a consequence of ‘peacetime’ occupation:

“the discourses and practices of Algerian combatants suggest that rather than understanding colonial violence as a mimesis of frontist violence, we should reach the opposite conclusion. The methods of armed resistance were responsive to and determined by the techniques of peace enforcement implemented by the colonial army. However, these tactics were integrated into an understanding of the conflict not in terms of internal order but as an episode of war, which the French had begun in 1830. Hence, the frontists understood terrorism as both polemic and strategic. It was polemic insofar as terrorism was not a historically new kind of war but the classic form of insurrectional war. It was strategic to the extent that terrorism was a particular tactic that characterized this type of warfare. This alternative mode of understanding the conflict resulted in practices of resistance that subverted the French deployment of terrorism as a nexus of knowledge, power, and subjugation by opposing it with a modified set of rules of veridiction, norms of behavior, and modes of being a subject.”¹⁰¹

101. Among those who eventually join the ranks of the FLN as a fighter, was Zohra Drif, born in 1934 in Tissemsilt. She was born to an upper-class traditional Algerian family. Her father, a well-established lawyer, attained the status of qadi (judge), and her grandfather served as an imam. This familial background provided her with a unique perspective on both Islamic jurisprudence and colonial legal structures. She spent her formative years in Vialar, a town in the Tiaret province, where she was raised in the countryside. In her memoir Inside the Battle of Algiers, Drif recounts how the dispossession of the Algerian people was something that was not simply forgotten, but transmitted to her in the everyday happenings of life:

“I also knew early on that my land was occupied, seized for no purpose other than rape and theft, and that the roumi — the Roman, that foreigner from the north—was both the rapist and the thief. I lived every moment with such an acute awareness of this fact that it became like my skin, my blood, or the beating of my heart, and was frequently revived by events around me. As a child, when I accompanied my mother and my aunts, traipsing together across vast fields to visit the tomb of a wali salah — a local patron saint — the women explained to me that in truth these lands belonged to such-and-such tribe, which had been dispossessed in favor of such-and-such colonist. In doing so, they transmitted to us the history, sociology, and true map of our country.”¹⁰²

102. Demonstrating academic prowess, Drif attended the elite Lycée Fromentin in Algiers, one of the few Algerian students in a predominantly European institution. In 1954, she commenced her law studies at the University of Algiers. It was during her time at Lycée Fromentin that she met her close friend and future FLN member, Samia Lakhdari. Drif’s educational journey exposed her to the stark disparities between colonial rhetoric and the lived realities of Algerians. The French colonial system, while espousing principles of liberty and equality, systematically marginalised the indigenous population. This contradiction deeply influenced Drif, leading her to develop anti-colonial ideals, resulting in her and Lakhdari joining the ranks of the FLN. When questioned by a fellow classmate about her ‘extremist’ views on abolishing the system of French control in Algeria, Drif and Lakhdar responded with call for armed struggle:

“Ask your friend Camus how his country, France, was freed from Nazi occupation. It was ‘extremists,’ the resistance and the Americans, who liberated France, not any calls for a civil truce. Why didn’t Camus and his friends propose a civil truce to the Germans to resolve their country’s occupation? And as for Camus’s reports in Alger Republican, we have read them. In his eyes, our problem is poverty due to unemployment and illiteracy, while for us, the misery is only a consequence of our true problem, which is called French colonization. For him, systemic reforms are sufficient, while for us, the solution lies in the death of the system that he is part of.”¹⁰³

103. The outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954 marked a turning point for Drif. Alongside Lakhdari, she sought avenues to contribute to the liberation struggle. Initially, their involvement was limited to delivering packages and supporting the movement from a distance. However, the arrest and torture of key FLN figures in 1956 galvanised Drif’s commitment, prompting her to take on more active roles within the movement. Drif’s participation in the FLN was multifaceted. She collaborated closely with prominent figures such as Ali La Pointe, Hassiba Ben Bouali, and Yacef Saâdi, the head of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers. Her fluency in French and familiarity with European customs enabled her to navigate colonial spaces with relative ease, a strategic advantage she utilised in covert operations.

104. This ability was particularly evident during the Milk Bar Café bombing on 30 September 1956, where Drif, along with two other female revolutionaries, planted bombs in European establishments in Algiers. These actions were in retaliation for French aggression against the local population after the French military and settler paramilitary ultras who carried out a series of bombings against Algerian civilian targets. Drif explained her reasons for choosing the Milk Bar:

“After meticulous observation, I chose the Milk Bar on Rue d’Isly and Samia opted for the Cafeteria on Rue Michelet, across from the university. The Milk Bar symbolized colonial modernity in the service of the Europeans, their offensive carefree attitudes, their shameful indifference to our woes, and the arrogance of the colonial regime—especially since the cafe-bar abutted Place Bugeaud, named for the sinister exterminator of our people. As for the Cafeteria, it was the trendiest meeting spot for the European jeunesse doree, especially the ultras students.”¹⁰⁴

105. Zohra Drif walked away from her bombing, not raising any suspicion due to her European looks, but on her walk she could hear the racist invective of the French settlers who called out for the exterminations of the Algerian people – promising revenge. Later, a victim of the bombings Danielle Michel-Chich accused Drif of being a war criminal responsible for the deaths of her children. Drif replied:

The French army waged total war against the Algerian people. The clear objective was to terrorize the Algerian people to make it lose confidence in the capacity of the FLN to fight and protect them. It is not me you have to hold responsible for this bomb, but the French powers who have enslaved the Algerian people since 1830 by using the most barbarous methods. Of what were the millions of Algerians guilty who have died since 1830? Of what were the "napalmed" villagers [les villageois “napalmes”] guilty? Of what were the victims of total war guilty, which had been waged in the small villages with the means of the fourth largest army in the world and the support of NATO? I was not born to kill, I got no personal pleasure from throwing that bomb, but we were in a state of war, a war that had been imposed on us since 1830.¹⁰⁵

106. According to Erlenbusch-Anderson, what Drif does is to reset the timeline of violence to one that begins in 1830 with the French colonisation and occupation of Algeria. The occupiers attempted to translate their violence as self defence, but as the FLN leader Saâdi Yacef said of the “ultracolonial terrorism” of the French – the FLN’s violence was the counter-terrorism of the violence of their colonisers. She quotes the Martiniquais psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon who, writing on the Algerian Revolution, recognised the conditions that made ‘terrorist’ tactics necessary as part of the tools against their colonisers:

I conclude by briefly returning to Fanon’s conceptualization of terrorism as a last resort of the colonized against the French colonial state…for Fanon, frontist terrorism could not be understood unless it was properly situated within a context of French colonialism. On Fanon’s view, terrorism was a legitimate form of counterattack against colonial war governed by the very norms that regulated French military action rather than an illegitimate use of force that was outside all norms. It was, in short, a response in kind to the actions of the colonial state. Fanon further criticized the disingenuousness of France’s demonization of frontist violence by arguing that strategies of terrorism were taken straight from the playbook of the French resistance against Nazi Germany. It was clear to him that the intentions driving these violent actions were the same in both cases, namely, resistance against an illegitimate occupation.¹⁰⁶

K. CONCLUSION

107. Over the course of this report, six case studies were presented from a variety of historical and geographic contexts to assess the nature of settler colonial violence and occupation, and the inevitable resistance that emerges from such violence. States often classify anti-colonial violence as ‘terrorism’ for the specific purpose of delegitimising any attempt to claim moral authority over unlawful settler colonies or alien occupation. As evidenced by the work of Professors Marc Sageman and Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, the classification of ‘terrorism’ provides little help to adequately understand the root causes of anti-colonial violence – on the contrary – it acts as a form of violence to mask those very root causes. If we refer to Fanon again, we must acknowledge that decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon – that in the exercise of ending the such colonial violence, there is a certain inevitability to anti-colonial violence due to the system of repression and oppression.

108. What emerges from the above six case studies is that resistance to dispossession in the context of colonial occupation will always resort to unconventional and asymmetric tactics to gain restitution, particularly where forced displacement and settlement have become features of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The cause of the Palestinians bears similar hallmarks to the motivating causes behind the dispossession resistance of the Caucasians to Russian domination, or the French to German and Vichy occupation, or the over 100 years of settler colonisation of Algeria by France. One could point to the violence of the US in the Philippines during the early 1900s, or the settler colonisation of East Turkestan by the Chinese government, as populations are replaced too, as examples of how anti-colonial violence forms a normal response to the presence of foreign occupiers and settlers.

109. By choosing to classify Hamas as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, the British government are wilfully choosing to remove the context of the Zionist state’s settler colonial project, and one hundred years of dispossessing Palestinians of their land. The violence of Palestinian groups is rooted in the right to reclaim what they have lost, in the vein of other anti-colonial movements. The British government should recognise the moral right of the Palestinians to exercise their right to self-determination by deproscribing Hamas and recognising its right to resist the Zionist settler colonial regime.

L. 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

28 November 2024