**We are delighted to say that this post has been translated into Japanese by Yota Negishi, available here**

It is the early hours of the morning on the 8th September 2025 and I am in Tunis at Sidi Bou Said Port listening to the sounds of stress, solidarity, and the song of the sea…the Mediterranean Sea whose on whose rupturous surface the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) will set sail to break the siege on Gaza.  I am in the port documenting the first of two drone attacks on Global Sumud Flotilla vessels that will take place in a 24 hour period for the legal support unit adjacent to the GSF that I am serving from Tunis. The praxis undergirding the words ‘from the river to the sea’ feels tangible in its surreality as Sumud sets sail amidst tides where waves of words move in a sea of deeds, steadfast.^[1]

Less than a week after the drone attack morality figures indicate that Israel and its accomplices have murdered nearly 700,000 Palestinians in the course of the genocide in under two years since 2023, half a million of whom are children. This is a startling figure that might move beyond millions in the ghostly graveyards of those under the rubble and those indirectly assassinated, however construed. Of course, this morbid metric says little of the inadequacies of the calculus of fatality figures and the settler seduction of scale in the face of annihilation.  How many deaths will be too many deaths? How many hospitals bombed will be too many hospitals bombed? How many disabled children will be too many disabled children? How many women must be raped and murdered before too many women are raped and murdered? How many men must be shot finding flour before too many men are shot finding flour? 

In the week flanking the drone attacks in Tunisia, Israel bombarded more than 200 residential buildings in Gaza displacing, dispossessing, and killing hundreds of people with munitions manufactured in the colonial-conglomerate-cum-war-machine that is the genocidal West. International Criminal Court accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the people of Gaza to evacuate when it is clear there is nowhere to go.  This Machiavellian manoeuvre is in keeping with the logic of ethnic cleansing, fragmentation, dispossession, and deathmaking embedded in the Nakba – the catastrophe that has been ongoing since the 1940s – that is the very condition of possibility of the Israeli State. This is, then, the contemporary incarnation of the fatal hasbara campaign – or Zionist public relations for settler colonisation – which has sought to render Palestine as terra nullius. This is how militarism, memoricide, misinformation, and massacre merge to hold steady the Zionist mythology of Palestine as ‘a land with no people for a people with no land’. The mouthing of the mythos and the manifestation of the massacre entangle as they tamper with temporalities. 

As the fire reflects in the water in Tunis, Palestinians face the terror of the Nakba that never ended. 

It is this unspoken, unthought violence and the spectres of its ucriminalised unjuridifiable corpus – the Nakba,^[2]of colonialism, colonial genocide, crime against humanity (as if all humans constituted humanity, not merely the white and Western), apartheid^[3] (in its racial capitalist^[4] sense not in its deracinated liberal sense as manifest in the law) – that is evacuated from the archive of liberal international law in such ways as to render inchoate and complicit in precisely the genocidal actualities it purports to address.

The siege that the Global Sumud Flotilla sets sail to break has been in place since 2007, but has  intensified rapidly since Israel’s launch of a starvation campaign against Gaza on 8 October 2023. The siege is a regime of colonial caloric control. Under the Red Lines Policy, the Zionist regime has implemented the macabre metrics of massacre by malnutrition.  In the preamble to the biblical proportions of the current man-made famine, the Israeli regime deployed an algorithm designed for slow settlement by starvation. It has carefully monitored how many calories were allowed to enter the Gaza Strip, racially disaggregating per capita food allowed entry for Palestinians as a miniscule percentage of that provided to Israelis. 

This control over food has historically been a feature of colonial genocide which is the undergirding condition of modernity. In The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon notes, ‘under a colonial regime man’s relationship with the physical world and history is connected to food’.^[5] During the German colonial genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama people in Namibia, the deprivation of food was central to a German policy seeking settlement and submission by starvation. Similarly in the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, a regime of racially disaggregated calorie distribution was deployed by European Fascists directly mimetic with Israeli and culpable Euro-American Zionist colonialists in Gaza.

The logic of siege is the logic of Zionism itself. Arthur Balfour – the architect of the Nakba via the Balfour Declaration in whose wake the Zionist genocidal blockade lives and kills – was also a central architect of the blockade in Europe and the Middle East during the First World War in his role as British Prime Minister. In 1918 a year after the Balfour Declaration began its ravaging trajectory into the genocidal present, Balfour was entrenched in a series of discussions with his Allied interlocutors regarding the fate of German Chancellor Kaiser Wilhelm and the possibilities of a post-war individualised criminal justice mechanism. One of the factors deterring the Allies from insisting on German accountability in a more comprehensive Nuremberg style process for the First World War was their certainty that they had been complicit in criminality of a similar scale in the shape of the Allied blockade. Indeed, in parts of Europe and the Middle East, the Allies enforced the blockade long after the armistice to coerce submission by starvation. Balfour even called for a blockade to be enforced on the so-called neutral Netherlands to starve the State into extraditing the exiled Kaiser. Balfour was (pre)occupied with siege, and the siege is a site of spectral settlement in Palestine.

I read this centrality of Balfour in the history of blockade alongside and as through the epistemic epicentre of the work of Rabea Eghbaria above. As I read his work, it is not necessarily a call for further juridification, but an attendance to how the Nakba structure the law and its culpabilities and onto-epistemologies. Just as fragmentation is a key logic of the Nakba as it pertains to land, so too is it a central architecture of the epistemological undergirding of international law. Thus, reading the Balfour of the British blockade and the Balfour of the Nakba in continuity rather than as fragmented as the logic of the Nakba would have us do for land and people as much as for ideas, it is clear that there exists a continuity between the architects and logics of the contemporary blockade and those of Zionism. 

The blockade thus exists in a series of barbaric turns from Balfour to Bibi. 

Seen as such, the blockade cannot be divorced from the logics of settler colonialism, genocide, racial capitalism, imperialism, and war, as well of Zionism itself, living and dying as it does in the persistence of the ongoing Nakba. If this is the case, then eviscerating the settler siege is the bare minimum asked in a world increasingly mired by catastrophic connected holocausts. 

Having said this in many liberal Zionist and what one might read as ‘latte legalist’ discourses of the kind that evacuate the crimes of the colony discussed above, breaking the siege has become a maximum,  ways that are fatally cosmetic and haunted by unspoken holocausts and humanitarian hubris. Typically, these analyses function by critiquing the siege, and even advocating for it to be broken, while abstracting it from the settler colonial structure that sustains it and is sustained by it, as well as the genocide it compounds and is compounded by. These logics of liberalism and ‘latte legalism’ are culpable for the genocide, even, especially as they may critique it. 

The latte legalist is a term used borrowing from the predominantly white middle class associations with the caffeinated beverage of the basic and the legalism –in this instance – of fidelity to a notion of the supremacy of the rule of law regardless of its complicity in the violence it purports to surmount.  Such an assessment is indebted to the significant genealogy detailing the intimacies between liberalism and colonialism, racial capitalism, and fascism.^[6]

This type of analysis in the legal sphere has been a feature of culpable liberal commentary on colonialism, racial capitalism, Zionism, and other forms of oppression for as long as liberal violence, violent liberalism, and their relationships with liberal-fascist colonial racial capitalism have existed. One need look no further than the critique of King Leopold’s reign in Congo Free State.^[7] With the advent of the news media and the proliferation of documentary photography, news reached colonial shores of the brutality of the regime and what were regarded as the ‘excesses of empire’. While some strands of colonialist saw no problem with the barbaric imperial racial capitalism of King Leopold’s rule, the culpable liberal critics and latte legalists of their time espoused a cosmetic humanitarianism that is reminiscent of the response to the livestreamed genocide in Palestine.

Their concern was less about empire itself, but rather, about how it was operating in excess, where the imperial project at the time was predicated on a more genteel mission civilisatrice (civilisational mission). The animus guiding their culpable critique then, was to make the empire more marketable than King Leopold was able to do to facilitate its continuation. Unsurprisingly, the end of Leopold’s reign was not the end of empire, but a forced sale of sovereignty.^[8] Today, the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a central node of connected colonial holocausts and crimes against humanity, where the terms themselves find their first recorded use.  It is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that the same complicit supply chains critical minerals that fund the colonial genocide in Palestine are mined in the shafts of the anti-Black imperialism, genocide, and ecocidal extracivism.

As I read it, then, the function of latte legalist cum culpable liberal criticism is not to dismantle the structures that make possible the violence being critiqued but to extend them by lending a kinder colonial cladding to their excesses. At the risk of overindulging the annihilatory affective sensibilities of the culpable liberal and the latte legalist, his role is to critique the peripheries of the violence in such a way that assuages his guilt. It soothes the pseudo-silenced very vocally silencing settler sensibilities of the liberal. The culpable liberal and latte legalist is thus able to self-genuflect before genocide as a silent partner in the siege itself, while profiting from the performance of culpable critique.

The stakes of such violence extend beyond the universe of guilt of the culpable liberal. The stakes are the production of forms of differentiation between good and bad protesters often along the delineated racialised and racialising Islamophobic lines made possible by the ‘War on Terror’ and the genocides in Palestine and elsewhere in colonial theatres of war and annihilation. The stakes are the proliferation of a world of extended but more palatable genocide, of a form of ethnic cleansing that is allowed to continue because a crumb or two of aid supplies are let in. The stakes are the provision of makeover for massacre, and a reform of regimes of settler colonial domination. The stakes could not be higher.

In the face of this culpable liberalism of the latte legalist, the question which arises for  me is one asked by Gaza-based writer Shaimaa Eid who writes, ‘[w]hat law in the world permits starving over 2 million people? Under what legal or moral code is this crime committed on top of the crime of genocide?’.^[9] While there are many tributaries in the turning tide through which one may answer this stark question which refuses the vanity of legal abstraction, to my mind, the law that permits this is one which evacuates the ongoing character of (settler) colonialism, the Nakba, genocide, and racial capitalist imperialism as systemic structuring conditions of colonial modernity, which inhabits the spatio-temporal false fixities of the lexicon of the law. In this sense, the siege – which must, which surely will be eviscerated in a future soon but to be a present – cannot be divorced from the settler colonial inter-nationalist politic it sustains and is sustained by as the latte legalist is wont to do. 

And so, I come back to the argument of legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah in Towards the Nakba as a Legal Concept. The article – which saw draconian Zionist aggressive attempts at suppression including the shutting down of the host journal website – makes the case that the absenting of the Nakba from the corpus of international law profoundly undermines our understandings of the ways in which the political, juridical and onto-epistemic governing international law are shaped by the Nakba’s deathly functions, logics and structures of –among others –Zionism, racism, settlement, and fragmentation. 

In a similar fashion to the constitutive silence on the Nakba as a legal concept, the excision of colonial domination as a recognised crime from the final Rome Statute of the ICC and its drafting history haunts the ICC and its ability to hold all states and empires accountable as it absolves those with a long history of colonial domination and placates those who still colonise. It fails to hold accountable those who subvert aggression and defense, and obscures as it minimises the narrative and juridical responsibility of the so-called international community to those fighting against colonial domination, in tacit violation of an accepted international legal principle encapsulated in the Right to Resistance to occupation, a right that is enshrined in international law, undergirds international criminal law, while it exceeds the bracketed grammars of rights and law. That is the actuality of the legal archive we have. 

What, then, are the conditions of possibility for this archive? And what is, to paraphrase Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish,^[10] archived for forgetting? What is demanded of those of us who frequent the latte legalist cafes and dabble in their lexicons in the face of the culpability of the law and its lawyers? How might those who inhabit and are inhabited by the law contribute with humility and curiousity to the groundswell of work already underway to eviscerate the siege, end the genocide and abolish the settler colony with the urgency that is demanded? What can the law do in the face of the Nakba? The colony? The concentration camp? How must we refigure our legal lexicons to take seriously the questions of colonial modernity, land, Zionism and other forms of racial liberal-fascist violence? What of the law of Man must die for the human to live?^[11]

In the face of the fallibilities of the legal regimes we have to resist the violence they create in the context of colonial genocide in Palestine, I return, as I often do to the Palestinain spirit of Sumud – or steadfastness intangibly translated. Rifka Eid describes Sumud as ‘a daily, quiet, and powerful form of resistance, refusing to give up despite decades of occupation, displacement, and violence. Whether it’s rebuilding a demolished home, harvesting olives under threat, or simply staying rooted in place, Sumud is how Palestinians turn survival into resistance. It is not just endurance. It is resistance through presence’.^[12]

If resistance is through presence and quotidian quietude as Eid so beautifully reminds us, I ask, what justice jetsam is present in the fragments of the law adrift between the river and the sea?

Another world is possible. It always has been. And in the face of all we face, it must be so.

Jo Bluen is an academic, writer, and activist currently working between Tunis and Johannesburg as part of a legal support unit adjacent to the Global Sumud Flotilla. Jo  recently submitted a PhD to the London School of Economics on a socio-legal history of the present of the norm of colonial impunity from Nuremberg to The Hague. Jo organises with  South African Jews for a Free Palestine, Energy Embargo for Palestine, South Africa, and various anti-oppressive, feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-extractivist movements and collectives. 

^[1] I am indebted, in this construction to Sylvia Wynter, who, drawing on Aime Cesaire writes that, ‘human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities…And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms’.

^[2]  See, importantly, Eghbariah, Rabea. “Toward Nakba as a legal concept.” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (2024): 887-992.

^[3] Sitze, Adam. “The crime of apartheid: genealogy of a successful failure.” London Review of International Law 7, no. 2 (2019): 181-214.

^[4] For a discussion, see, Clarno, Andy, and Salim Vally. “The context of struggle: racial capitalism and political praxis in South Africa.” Ethnic and Racial Studies46, no. 16 (2023): 3425-3447. 

^[5] Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. Penguin Modern Classics. London, England: Penguin Classics.

^[6] See indicatively, but in no way comprehensively: Lowe, Lisa. The intimacies of four continents. Duke University Press, 2015; Grovogui, Siba N’Zatioula. Sovereigns, quasi sovereigns, and Africans: Race and self-determination in international law. Vol. 3. U of Minnesota Press, 1996; Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law. Vol. 37. Cambridge University Press, 2007; Shilliam, Robbie. The black Pacific: Anti-colonial struggles and oceanic connections. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015; McKittrick, Katherine. “Dear science and other stories.” In Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press, 2020; Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. WW Norton & Company, 2022; Biko, Steve. “I write what I like.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 11, no. 1 (1981).

^[7] Jones, Jeannette Eileen. “” The Land of Our Fathers”: Black Internationalist Thought and the Congo Free State.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 11, no. 2 (2022): 26-50.

^[8] Blocher, Joseph, and Mitu Gulati. “Transferable Sovereignty: Lessons from the History of the Congo Free State.” Duke LJ 69 (2019): 1219.

^[9] Eid, Shaimaa, ‘When I Slept Hungry’: My Testimony on the Exhausting Hunger in Gaza’, Palestine Chronicle, 18 July, 2025. Available at: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/when-i-slept-hungry-my-testimony-on-the-exhausting-hunger-in-gaza/ [accessed: 10 September 2025].

^[10] Darwish, Mahmoud. Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982. Univ of California Press, 2013.

^[11] Sylvia Wynter argues that the challenge of colonial modernity is that Man is ‘overrepresented as if it were the human itself’. See: Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The new centennial review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257-337.

^[12] Eid, Rifka. ‘Sumud’, republished (with permission) on Instagram by Global March to Gaza South Africa, Palestine Solidarity Alliance, and Palestine Solidary Committee, Gauteng, 14 September 2025, available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOik3zxDGry/ [accessed: 14 September, 2025]