When Peace Without Sovereignty Is Not Peace: Resistance as Assertion of Peace in the Age of Siege

When Peace Without Sovereignty Is Not Peace:

Resistance as Assertion of Peace in the Age of Siege

By Kat Ulrike

Introduction: The Line Between Survival and Surrender

In the unfolding tragedy of Gaza, the very architecture of life is being unmade. This is not merely the destruction of buildings or infrastructure—it is the systematic dismantling of a people’s capacity to exist with dignity. Brick by brick, meal by meal, breath by breath, the material and psychological basis for Palestinian life is being eroded through blockade, bombardment, displacement, and calculated deprivation.

Gaza today is not a battlefield—it is a siege zone. Food convoys are shot at. Hospitals are bombed. Water and electricity are used as bargaining chips. The civilian is not spared by mistake, but targeted by policy. Under these conditions, to speak of “negotiation” without acknowledging the structural asymmetry involved is to engage in political fiction. Dialogue requires the presumption of equality; occupation nullifies that possibility by design.

The international community, for its part, has perfected the art of procedural sympathy. Statements are issued, resolutions are drafted, and “humanitarian pauses” are negotiated, all while the basic conditions of oppression are left intact. Temporary truces, framed as progress, often function as recalibrations of control. “Humanitarian corridors” become containment zones, where aid is distributed only under surveillance, and life is permitted only on the condition that it not resist.

As George Habash once warned:

“We do not want peace. We want justice. And there can be no peace without justice.”

In this context, the binary of war versus peace is no longer meaningful. What is at stake is not the cessation of hostilities, but the terms of existence. The real opposition is between survival with dignity and surrender under erasure. To accept the current international consensus is to accept one’s own political nullification—to be fed, perhaps, but never heard; to be moved, but never to return.

Resistance—yes, even armed—is not a deviation. It is the final expression of life in a space designed to extinguish it. It is not rooted in hatred, but in memory. Not in nihilism, but in continuity. Leila Khaled once said:

“Our struggle is not for revenge. It is for the return, for the right to live in our land, to breathe its air, to touch its trees, and to raise our children there in freedom.”

Such resistance must not be romanticized—but neither can it be reduced to criminality. It is born not from ideology alone, but from the collapse of all other avenues. When the right to protest is banned, when international courts are deferred, when solidarity movements are criminalized—what remains?

Yasser Arafat addressed the United Nations in 1974 with both clarity and forewarning:

“Today, I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

That branch has fallen many times—by no fault of those who carried it.

To ask a people to lay down arms while they are denied even the right to stand is not peacebuilding; it is capitulation by another name. And when that demand is enforced by drones and sieges, it becomes clear that what is being negotiated is not peace—but obedience.

The persistence of resistance in Gaza, then, is not a mystery. It is the logic of survival under a regime that would prefer their disappearance. It is the voice that remains when all microphones have been shut off. And it is the political presence of a people who refuse to become a humanitarian file.

In the end, the question is not why resistance continues. The question is how long the world will expect a besieged nation to go silently into erasure. 

The Siege as a System: Starvation in Place of Sovereignty

Since May 2025, Gaza has undergone not only the destruction of its basic infrastructure but a systematic subjugation of two million people through siege warfare imposed with bureaucratic precision. The blockade has turned essential needs—food, water, medicine—into political instruments. The result is not incidental suffering, but the engineered erosion of sovereignty.

According to a recent United Nations report confirms that 798 Palestinians have been killed along aid-distribution routes and at food hubs since late May—615 near sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and 183 along other convoy routes. These were not combatants or demonstrators, but civilians attempting to feed themselves and their children, often targeted by gunfire. According to the U.N. spokesman Ravina Shamdasani:

“Most of the injuries are gunshot injuries… We’ve raised concerns about atrocity crimes having been committed where people are lining up for essential supplies such as food.”

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini described Gaza as “a graveyard of children and starving people,” stating that Palestinians were faced with “two deaths: starvation or being shot at” when attempting to reach aid.

Meanwhile, in Rafah, Defense Minister Israel Katz has proposed a “humanitarian city” to house displaced Palestinians—an enclave that critics warn resembles a modern concentration camp. Under this plan, hundreds of thousands—including upward of 600,000 initially—would be confined to a monitored zone, screened at entry and barred from exit, while Israeli military control remains intact. Legal experts label it a “blueprint for crimes against humanity”.

UNRWA has explicitly warned that such a plan would create “massive concentration camps,” urging that any forced displacement be immediately halted, and that aid deliveries be restored.

The current aid system—centered on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation rather than the U.N.—has been militarized. The GHF’s four distribution hubs are heavily guarded, fenced, and operate under IDF oversight, often near active military operations. Within weeks of its launch in late May, more than 600 people were reported killed at GHF-affiliated sites alone, spurring calls from over 170 humanitarian organizations for a return to U.N. coordination.

The IDF announced new “lessons learned” protocols—adding signage, fences, and new routes—but stopped short of withdrawing military personnel from aid zones.

This is not a breakdown of humanitarian logistics—it is a deliberate strategy of control. The blockade—operating since late 2023—has reduced electricity, water, and medical supply access to critical thresholds: 90 % drop in power, closure of 27 of 35 hospitals, and acute malnutrition surging among children, who are now 146% more likely to suffer severe malnutrition compared to February levels.

Meanwhile, humanitarian pauses and ceasefire proposals—widely touted as progress—function defensively. They suspend aid access only ro maintain the blockade’s overall structure, leaving Gazans to wait in areas under direct military oversight.

Collectively, these dynamics demonstrate that Gaza is not undergoing a temporary crisis—it is the site of an active, administratively enforced siege designed to suppress political and existential sovereignty. Starvation has become policy; silence has become condition; survival now demands resistance.

In this environment, compromise does not signal peace—it signals extinction. When food becomes a weapon, water becomes a bargaining chip, and displacement becomes containment, armed resistance is not an eruption of violence but a predictably rational, if tragic, assertion of political being. 

Historical and Legal Legitimacy of Armed Resistance

The claim that armed resistance in Gaza is “unlawful” cannot be separated from the broader context of occupation and international jurisprudence. International law—in both practice and precedent—recognizes the right of peoples under foreign occupation to resist, including through armed actions.

1. ICJ Advisory Opinion on Occupation (July 19, 2024)
   
   
   On 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a formal advisory opinion declaring Israel’s continued presence in the Palestinian territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza) unlawful under international law. The Court stated that Israel “is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence”, must cease settlement activity, and must provide full reparations to affected Palestinians.
   
   
   This set clear legal parameters: occupation as a temporary legal status cannot transform into permanent annexation. 
   
   
2. Obligations of Third-Party States
   
   
   The ICJ also held that all states and international bodies are legally bound not to recognize the illegal occupation as lawful, and must neither provide aid nor assistance that contributes to its persistence.
   
   
   This places legal responsibility not only on Israel, but also on its geopolitical supporters and institutional enablers. 
   
   
3. Right to Armed Resistance under Self-Determination
   
   
   International legal instruments explicitly uphold armed struggle in the context of decolonization and occupation:
   
   
   • UN General Assembly Resolution 38/17 (1983) affirms the legitimacy of liberation struggles “by all available means, including armed struggle”.
   
   
   • Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions recognizes “wars of national liberation” as part of the laws of war, and defines armed resistance against foreign occupation as lawful under customary international law. 
   
   
4. China’s ICJ Statement: Inalienable Right to Armed Struggle
   
   
   On 22 February 2024, Ma Xinmin, on behalf of China’s delegation to the ICJ, declared:
   “Palestinian people’s use of force to resist foreign oppression and complete the establishment of an independent state is an inalienable right… including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression… should not be considered terror acts.”
   
   
   This was reaffirmed by other Chinese representatives, stating that the right of self-defence lies more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis under ongoing occupation.
   
   
5. Comparison with Anti-Colonial Precedent
   
   
   These legal foundations place Palestinian resistance within a broader lineage:
   
   
   • The struggle for Algerian independence, Vietnam’s liberation movement, and South Africa’s anti-apartheid mobilization were all initially labeled “terrorist” before gaining international legal recognition.
   • By the same logic, armed resistance against occupation retains legal validity so long as it remains targeted and proportional. 
   
   
6. Criminalization of Resistance vs. Tolerance of Occupation
   
   
   To criminalize resistance while upholding occupation is a stark inversion of justice.
   
   
   International law condemns both the use of force against protected civilians and the ongoing policies of occupation, expropriation, and structural oppression. When one is enforced and the other is denied legal consequence, neutrality becomes complicity.   

To criminalize Palestinian resistance while excusing occupation is not balance; it is the enforcement of power under legal veneer. That international law explicitly affirms both the illegality of the occupation and the legitimacy of resistance underlines that the latter is neither extremist nor unlawful—but entirely consistent with the historical and legal trajectory of decolonization.

Resistance When All Else Is Broken

What is left to a people when every political avenue is sealed off, every voice is silenced, and every act of nonviolent resistance is met with force or criminalization? The answer, throughout history and across continents, has been the same: resistance does not emerge from ideology alone—it arises when all other doors have been shut.

Palestinians have participated in nearly every form of protest available within international norms: peaceful demonstrations, labor strikes, hunger strikes, legal appeals, and mass civil disobedience. They have testified before the United Nations, signed onto international treaties, participated in elections, and built civil society institutions under siege. And still, they are told that they must wait—wait for the occupier to change, wait for donor states to act, wait for justice that never comes.

Over the past year, the erosion of political space has accelerated. University student sit-ins and encampments in North America, Europe, and even the Global South have faced mass arrests, funding threats, and disciplinary sanctions for expressing solidarity with Palestine. Peaceful protesters are doxxed, fired, banned from travel, and labeled antisemites or extremists. Activist organizations have had their bank accounts frozen, their visas revoked, their gatherings surveilled.

In the United Kingdom and Germany, pro-Palestine rallies have been banned under vague charges of “glorifying terrorism.” In France, police forcibly dismantled Gaza solidarity protests under emergency powers, while in the U.S., numerous governors have threatened to defund universities for allowing such protests at all.

These measures do not merely repress dissent—they delegitimize the very idea of nonviolent solidarity.

The repression extends to institutions that should be impartial. UN Special Rapporteurs on Palestine, including Michael Lynk and Francesca Albanese, have faced immense political pressure, including travel restrictions, funding threats, and media vilification. When Albanese described Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “a starvation campaign” and warned of genocide in late 2024, several Western states moved to censure or isolate her work. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even Doctors Without Borders have been accused of bias and penalized for reporting what is plainly visible on the ground.

This is the architecture of enforced silence: a system that represses not only resistance itself, but the description of resistance. A system where speech, advocacy, and humanitarianism are criminalized if they fail to align with dominant geopolitical narratives.

In this context, the emergence of armed resistance is not a celebration of violence—it is the inevitable result of exhaustion. It is the last language spoken when all others have been rendered mute.

The liberal international order offers resistance only one legitimate form: nonviolence under supervision. But nonviolence without an ear to hear it is not peace—it is containment. And when containment is reinforced by hunger, fences, and drones, the demand for nonviolence becomes not an ethical stance, but a disciplinary measure.

To ask the occupied to always choose restraint, when the occupier is never restrained, is not a moral demand—it is an imperial one.

What is rarely acknowledged is that the status quo is already saturated with violence. The denial of food, the bulldozing of homes, the jailing of children, the banning of books and flags—these are acts of aggression as decisive as any armed confrontation. They are quieter, slower, more procedural—but no less lethal.

When rockets are condemned but blockades are not, when resistance is criminalized but occupation is tolerated, the moral center collapses. To speak of “both sides” is to equate the act of breaking free with the act of caging.

In such a moral void, resistance by force is not excess—it is remainder. It is the political residue of a people who have been stripped of representation but not of will. It is the cry of a nation that has exhausted every other channel of speech.

As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth:

“The colonized man is an envious man… The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people… But the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.”

Today, in Gaza, resistance—armed or otherwise—is precisely that leap: an act of invention in a world that has tried to erase it.

In the vacuum left by the failure of diplomacy, the destruction of civil society, and the criminalization of peaceful resistance, the turn to arms is not triumph—it is tragedy. But it is also clarity. It reflects the simple truth that no people, anywhere, will accept eternal silence as their final inheritance.

And so, when every other method is denied, when every protest is vilified, and when every act of truth-telling is sanctioned—the only remaining communicative act becomes one that cannot be ignored.

Resistance. 

The Question of Moral Equivalence

Dominant Western discourse frequently employs moral equivalence—a rhetorical device that treats all violence as equally wrong, regardless of context, intent, or power asymmetry. This framing masks structural violence with superficial symmetry. As Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) underscored:

“Media coverage … misrepresented events … by suggesting that Israel is acting defensively, presenting a false equivalency between occupier and occupied”.

Rockets launched from Gaza are promptly labeled “terrorism,” while mass killings at food queues serve as mere “security enforcement.” This selective moral lens refuses to ask why violence erupts in the first place, erasing the conditions under which resistance becomes conceivable.

To quote Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz:

“Occupation breeds rebellion; rebellion breeds terrorism … Anyone who truly opposes this unfolding tragedy … must recognize this: the only way to avert disaster is through the complete and unconditional end of the occupation”.

This statement underlines that moral clarity requires acknowledging causality—occupation and structural violence give rise to resistance. Yet, mainstream narratives often reduce the moral argument to single violent acts, abstracted from decades of dispossession.

Sam Harris, commenting on the moral hierarchy of violent acts, noted:

“Counting dead bodies is not a way of judging the moral balance here. Intentions matter.”

But condemnation of Palestinian violence rarely considers intentions or broader context. It remains fixated on the act itself, ignoring the structural framework within which it occurs.

This moral flattening also masks domination. The sustained violence of a nuclear-armed state—the destruction of hospitals, blockade-induced famine, targeted killing—is internalized as policy rather than aggression. As historian Omer Bartov lamented:

“There was actually a systematic attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable… This is a total moral, ethical failure by the very countries that claim to be the main protectors of civil rights … around the world.”

In this discursive framework, resistance is treated as the seed of violence, while occupation is naturalized. But moral scrutiny isn’t symmetrical. The Western moral objection to Palestinian rockets contrasts sharply with the indifference to structural erasure. The Guardian observed:

Western reaction “revealed underlying biases in how violence against Palestinians versus Israelis is perceived.”

What is described as a “conflict” is, in truth, a system: a one-sided apparatus of control, periodically disrupted by resistance. Those disruptions—whether armed or symbolic—are costly and tragic, but they never occur absent provocation.

Moral clarity therefore demands a shift: not just condemning violence, but interrogating who wields structural power. Who controls land, resources, mobility, and institutions? Whose actions create the conditions that precipitate resistance?

Until this inversion is corrected, the discourse of “both sides” will continue to legitimize domination. True justice requires more than moral equivalence—it requires asymmetric accountability.

Resistance as a Form of Peace‑Building

Armed resistance cannot be reduced to the antithesis of peace. Instead, it represents a stark reminder: peace must embody real substance—sovereignty, rights, dignity—not merely the absence of immediate conflict. Without these elements, calls for peace risk becoming calls for submission.

In circumstances where negotiation has been replaced by extermination, arms serve as a demand for genuine dialogue on equitable terms. Historical resistance movements have not simply rejected violence; they rejected erasure.

1. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943)
   
   
   This uprising was not a formal military campaign. It was a deliberate, dignified act of refusal. As survivor Sonia Klein recalled:
   “When you are drowning and you see a straw, you hang onto the straw… it may not save you, but the touch of hope may.”
   
   
   Marek Edelman, commander of the Ghetto resistance, emphasized:
   “Dying with arms was more beautiful than without arms. … It was the logical outcome of four years of resistance… a final blow struck at the barbarism and on behalf of the preservation of dignity.”
   
   
   Or, as a ghetto wall proclamation declared:
   “If we are to survive, then we shall only survive as free people, and if this is not possible, then we shall die as free people.”
   
   
   Here, resistance was not about winning a war—it was a confirmation of human existence, refusing to die like animals. The ethical power of that statement transcended military defeat.
   
   
2.  African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa
   
   
   During apartheid, the ANC’s shift to armed struggle marked a similar institutional refusal to accept the false moral frameworks imposed by the oppressor. Nelson Mandela, in his “I Am Prepared to Die” speech (1964), argued:
   “I did not plan [violent actions]… because I have any love for violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment … after many years of tyranny… The government which uses force to support its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it.”
   
   
   Indeed, the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, emerged only when legal, nonviolent dissent was met with repression, such as the Sharpeville massacre. Mandela explained:
   “The time comes … when there remain only two choices – submit or fight. … We chose to defy the law.”
   
   
   Despite being branded terrorist by the apartheid state, the ANC eventually became the governing party—not as extremists, but as national liberators.

These historic cases illustrate a consistent pattern: liberation movements are cast as threats until power shifts. The Warsaw fighters were condemned before they became symbols of dignity. The ANC was once vilified, until apartheid collapsed and they became stewards of freedom. In Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, and elsewhere, movements labeled “terrorist” became pillars of post-colonial sovereignty.

Gaza stands within this lineage. Armed resistance there echoes the demands of those who resisted entrenched power structures. It is not an alternative to peace—but a necessary condition for the emergence of meaningful dialogue.

Armed resistance is not final. It is a threshold—a last resort to affirm existence when erasure is the alternative. It signals that peace without structural justice is empty. When a people are told to disarm before defeat, they are told to disappear.

Only when their rights are recognized—political, territorial, human—can arms be laid down without fear of re-erasure. Until then, resistance remains the voice of a people refusing to vanish from history.

Conditions for De-escalation: A Practical Program

Calls for de-escalation, if they are to be more than rhetorical gestures, must begin not with demands placed upon the occupied, but with the dismantling of the structural conditions that produced the conflict. Violence in Gaza does not emerge in a vacuum—it is generated by siege, perpetuated by occupation, and licensed by a global order that has normalized permanent exception for the Palestinian people.

If the question posed is: “How do we stop the violence?”, then the answer cannot lie in asymmetrical truces, demilitarized corridors under military watch, or externally dictated “peace plans” that ignore the source of the conflict. The answer must begin with structural reversal, not superficial appeasement.

A viable political horizon for de-escalation must include, at minimum, the following core pillars:

• The immediate and unconditional lifting of the siege on Gaza:
  Including restoration of free movement, unimpeded humanitarian access, and reconstruction under Palestinian civil control—not under the supervision of occupying or proxy authorities.
  
  
•  Full withdrawal of Israeli military forces and the dismantling of all instruments of extraterritorial control:
  This includes remote-controlled watchtowers, drone surveillance networks, the targeting algorithms used in strike operations, and the naval blockade off the Gaza coast.
  
  
• The right of return for all displaced Palestinians:
  This is not a historical footnote but a living right, recognized under UN Resolution 194, and reaffirmed in international law. Refugees cannot be expected to accept peace without homecoming.
  
  
• The release of all political prisoners and civilian hostages on all sides:
  Including Palestinian detainees held under administrative detention without charge, as well as all civilians captured during military operations. Human dignity must not be traded as bargaining leverage.
  
  
• Binding international legal accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity:
  Including collective punishment, targeted civilian killings, starvation as a weapon of war, and the use of disproportionate force. The International Criminal Court must be permitted full jurisdiction to prosecute without political obstruction.

These are not maximalist demands. They are the foundational steps required to create a framework where peace is not merely the absence of resistance, but the presence of justice. Only under such conditions can armed resistance transition from a survival imperative to a historical memory.

Until then, to demand the renunciation of arms without dismantling the conditions that necessitate them is to ask a people to renounce their right to live.

Conclusion: Resistance Is Not a Crime

In an era where state violence has become routinized, where occupation is shrouded in diplomatic euphemism, and where starvation is repackaged as a form of “security policy,” resistance is not the breakdown of order—it is the final defense of human dignity against the architecture of annihilation.

This is not rhetorical flourish. It is the daily, embodied reality for millions who live under siege. In Gaza, bread is no longer a right—it is a battleground. Medical treatment is no longer a social service—it is a question of permission slips from military bureaucracy. The mere act of drawing water, charging a phone, or retrieving a body from rubble becomes an act of defiance. Under such conditions, resistance is not merely justified—it is inevitable.

And yet, the dominant global discourse continues to criminalize resistance while institutionalizing occupation. Entire populations are rendered suspect. Resistance fighters are branded as terrorists, while the occupying army that bombs refugee camps is rationalized as “defensive.” This inversion of justice is neither accidental nor novel—it is the strategic language of power preserving itself.

The right to resist—particularly against colonialism and foreign domination—is enshrined in international law. Article 1(4) of the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions affirms that peoples “fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation” have the status of combatants and enjoy the protections of international humanitarian law. UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 (1982) reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples under colonial and foreign domination and racist regimes… by all available means, including armed struggle.” These are not theoretical luxuries. They are codifications of what oppressed peoples have always known in practice: that liberation cannot be requested—it must be asserted.

This assertion is not new. It is part of a continuum that stretches across continents and centuries. From the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto who refused to be herded silently to their deaths, to the rice paddies of Vietnam where the colonized defeated a global superpower, to the jungles of Angola, to the prison cells of Robben Island—resistance has been the grammar of survival when speech was outlawed.

To equate the violence of the colonizer with the counterviolence of the colonized is to strip history of memory, law of substance, and morality of meaning. It is to pretend that a drone strike on a hospital and a homemade rocket are born of the same logic, when in fact they emerge from opposite poles of power. One seeks to preserve domination; the other demands its end.

The Palestinian resistance belongs to this lineage. It is not a pathology—it is a response. It is not a rejection of peace—it is a rejection of subjugation masquerading as peace. As Frantz Fanon observed:

“When the colonized man takes up arms… he is affirming that he is not an object to be acted upon. He is declaring that he, too, makes history.”

This declaration echoes in the words of those who came before:

George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, wrote:

“When the masses lose everything, they lose fear. And when they lose fear, they resist.”

Leila Khaled, whose image has been both vilified and iconized, made it clear:

“We are not lovers of death… we are lovers of life. But we are forced to fight for the life of our people.”

And Yasser Arafat, speaking to the Palestinian National Council in 1970, asserted not just a right but an inevitability:

“Our revolution is not merely a cry against injustice; it is the forging of a new reality… We do not fight to die, we fight so that our people may live in dignity.”

These are not calls to nihilism. They are calls to recognition. They are not celebrations of violence. They are acknowledgments that peace without justice is not peace at all—it is a lull in domination, a managed quiet that conceals the ongoing machinery of subjugation.

The world must reckon with this truth: that resistance, when born of total disenfranchisement, is not the crime. The crime is the condition that makes it necessary. The crime is not the improvised weapon, but the system that has denied the tools of peace.

Until justice walks instead of tanks—until the right of return is honored not delayed, until sovereignty replaces rationed survival—resistance will persist. It will persist not as a choice, but as a verdict: that a world which denies one people their freedom can never claim to be secure in its own.

Because peace without justice is not peace.

Because silence under occupation is not order—it is erasure.

And because resistance, in the face of extinction, is not terrorism.

It is the last form of memory that refuses to be deleted.