Between Anti-Colonial Resistance and Colonial Genocide: Gaza at the Limits of International Law

Abstract

Amid Israel's war of annihilation in Gaza, which began in 2023, this article interrogates the tension between anticolonial and colonial indistinction. By indistinction, I refer to the transgression of the civilian–combatant divide as posited in international law—the collapse of a boundary that structures dominant understandings of legitimate violence and protection. Engaging this question is fraught with risk, especially amid genocide, since Israel justifies its mass violence by claiming that Palestinian indistinction between combatants and civilians necessitates indiscriminate targeting. Yet refusing to engage this problem reaffirms the fiction that stateless, colonized peoples can achieve liberation only by adhering to statecentric and legalist prescriptions of civilian passivity. The article develops a decolonial critique of the dialectical relation between two forms of indistinction: first, the anticolonial indistinction enacted when liberation struggles dissolve the civilian–combatant divide; and second, the colonial indistinction through which empire rationalizes genocidal violence. Situating this inquiry within Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza, I analyze the emergent form of anticolonial indistinction that has developed there—what I call a subterranean people's war—and its entanglement with Israel's war of annihilation. I conclude that colonial genocide is not a reactive counterpart to anticolonial indistinction but a structural potential of colonial domination, while anticolonial indistinction represents a liberatory ethos challenging the colonial order of violence.