Comment | Dispossession resistance is a natural law right of the Palestinian people

By Asim Qureshi

Credit: Libertinus (licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)

As part of the team convened by the solicitor Fahad Ansari of Riverway Law to apply for the deproscription of Hamas to the UK Home Secretary, I was tasked by the lawyers to gather expert reports that would form the evidentiary basis of our application.

We were fortunate that there was little hesitancy on the part of the experts once we approached them – having the former ad hoc judge to the ICJ, John Dugard, as well as Oxford professor Avi Shlaim among the many luminaries to lend their name in support of our submissions. While much has been written on Palestine, and indeed the expert reports covered ground that had been written before, it was important that our legal arguments were based on a body of evidence that supported the intended goals of the application – rather than merely a pastiche of previously published work.

For the last twenty-two years of my life, I have studied political violence in a range of contexts around the world, finding that the violence of non-state actors is nearly always the by-product of aggressive colonial, neo-colonial and repressive state forces. In many ways, Palestine stands as one of the most longstanding examples of how a people will continue to resist by any means necessary, when subject to constant state-led violations and oppression.

With that in mind, I made my own contributions to the bundle of expert reports. One report focused on the root causes of anti-colonial violence, by centring six case studies including:

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.

In all the above cases, it was the context of colonial violence that produced resistance movements, ones which were forced to engage in acts of violence that would seek to disrupt illusion of security maintained by colonial regimes.

Whether it was the Bride of Haifa, Hanadi Jaradat, carrying out a martyrdom operation at the restaurant Maxim during the Second Intifada, or the Algerian revolutionary Zohra Drif, planting a bomb in the Milk Bar Café during the Battle of Algiers, or even the juramentado attacks by Moro Muslims in the Philippines, during the US occupation in the early 1900s – the violence of resistance movements (organised or random) can always be traced and rooted in the extreme violence of occupying and colonial forces.

In the specific context of Palestinian dispossession, my other report seeks to understand how that dispossession presents itself as a grave moral wrong, one that will inevitably produce a violent response due to a natural law right to recover what has been stolen. The report seeks to enter into the taxonomy of violence the notion of dispossession resistance, a form of violence that flows directly from the loss of land and property. I show how nearly all ancient religious traditions contain severe sanctions against those who seek to deprive others of their land and property, centring the right of those who have lost what they once owned. The Palestinian struggle is very much one of the theft of land, and the choice of a people to not give up on that land and maintain their moral authority over it.

While the dispossession has material effects on the Palestinian people, for faith-based movements, such as Hamas, there is also a spiritual dimension to dispossession resistance that must be acknowledged – for their relationship to the land and its recovery is derived from their relationship to God. In my expert report, I highlight the specific element of how dispossession resistance is presented in the Qur’an, outside of the schema of what is traditionally referred to as the conduct of hostilities within jihad.

This resistance is self-executing. It derives its moral legitimacy from the material reality of dispossession and the loss of what was once owned. Verses in the Qur’an from the chapters al-Baqarah, al-Hajj and al-Shurah, all strongly set out that not only is there a moral right and imperative to recover what was stolen through violent resistance, but that the upper limit of what is permitted in terms of that resistance, is any act of violence that the enemy has used against you. Such Qur’anic allowances exist outside of the traditional confines of jihad, which regulates military behaviour far more restrictively.

With the loss of land and property, my work is forced to contend with the role played by settlers and settlements since 1948. The story I share of Henrick and Genya Kowalski is instructive, as a Jewish couple who survived the crematoriums of the Nazis, only to arrive in Palestine to be offered the stolen home of a Palestinian family by the Jewish Agency. The Kowalskis were not able to full enter the house they had been given. Instead, they broke down in tears, recognising that they were being asked to do, what the Nazis had done to them. The Israeli anthropologist and scholar Jeff Halper, refers to this dispossession as summarised in the Hebraic word ‘nishul’:

“After the ethnic cleansing which accompanied the establishment of an expanded Israel, nishul took the form of removing Palestinians from vast tracts of the country and concentrating them in small, disconnected, and densely packed enclaves or cantons. To be sure, policies to induce emigration remained in place, targeting in particular the Palestinian middle classes, but the thrust of dispossession and de-Arabization shifted from expulsion to confinement.” (p.125)

This confinement is exemplified in the concentration camp that is the Gaza strip – a piece of land that is densely populated and cut off from the rest of the world. Its isolation from the Zionists on one side and reinforced by its other jailer, Egypt, on the other. Settlers and settlements exist as a reminder of not only what the Palestinians have had stolen from them, but explicitly as part of the machinery of Zionist violence – the ‘frontier settlements’ or nahal being what Eyal Weizman explains, the military units that establish those settlements. These settlements are in the very DNA of Zionism, as explained by David Ben Gurion, that they:

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

If we understand that settlements are a form of dispossession violence themselves, then the Palestinians have every right, in the recovering of their land, to dismantle the settlements by any and all means available to them.

Their right to resistance is not limited by the existence settlements and settlers. On the contrary, to understand Palestinian resistance, is to acknowledge that until the entirety of the Zionist colonial entity and all its settlements are dismantled, the Palestinians will be entitled to exercise their natural law right to resist their dispossession and recover what was unlawfully stolen.

Asim Qureshi graduated in Law (LLB Hons, LLM), specialising in International Law. He completed his Ph.D. in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent. He is the Research Director at the advocacy group CAGE International, and since 2003 has specialised in investigating the impact of counterterrorism practices worldwide. He has published a wide range of NGO reports, academic journals and articles. He has written the books Rules of the Game: Detention, Deportation, Disappearance (Hurst, 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). Since 2009, he has been advising legal teams involved in defending terrorism trials in the US and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.