Symposium on the Global Sumud Flotilla: A Sea of Struggle – Re-imagining Legal Resistance in a Violent Order

The following post is based on a keynote lecture I delivered at the Global Sumud Flotilla conference. Uniquely, the conference took place at Muğla University the weekend the flotilla launched from Marmaris and was attended by a blend of activists and scholars, more activists than scholars. The context is relevant for the tone of my remarks. While the essence of the lecture remains the same, I’ve expanded on areas that required greater elaboration when presented in text. This is the first post in a small symposium that brings together scholars and practitioners to think through the promise and limits of international law in the face of persistent Israeli belligerence.

When activists prepared to confront the Israeli blockade, they did so knowing that Israel has killed people for doing exactly this. Sixteen years may have passed since the Mavi Marmara was attacked but the memory of the martyrs remains strong. What also remains is the blockade, with Palestinians inhabiting a veritable concentration camp with thousands still buried under the rubble. Perhaps the only thing that has changed in the intervening period is an intensification of Israeli impunity, captured most gallingly by its genocidal campaign over the past three years.

I should be forthright at the outset: I have not always supported this form of action, and I remain uncertain about it as a tactic. But uncertainty about tactics is not the same as uncertainty about principles. When institutional channels prove ineffective, when the European Union looks away (or provides diplomatic cover), and when the dominant politics is one of annihilation, we no longer look for the perfect form of resistance. Rather, the strategy becomes one of multiplication across every available front, with the aim of making the costs of Israel’s behaviour self-defeating.

This is what I am thinking through today: how do we imagine resistance when the order we expect to support the Palestinians’ self-determination — not to mention their survival — is the same order that enables their brutalisation?

Mare Liberum: The Freedom of Empire

Across human societies, the sea has played many roles. From a geopolitical angle, it is perhaps the single most important factor in the rise — and fall — of empires. Recognising the sea’s potential, Huig de Groot (Hugo Grotius) developed the doctrine of Mare Liberum as a natural law principle to facilitate the expansion of the Dutch empire. Employed by the Dutch East India Company at the time it was trying to wrest trade routes from the Portuguese, de Groot did not advance freedom of the seas as a universal humanitarian principle. Rather, it was a convenient legal argument that would bolster the specific commercial and strategic interests of a colonial enterprise seeking command over markets, resources, and the bodies that would produce them.

In the emergent colonial order, the sea was the pathway to domination. The Dutch used their now-codified freedom to transport troops entrusted with the subordination of populations, the enslavement and commodification of peoples, and the establishment of an enterprise of extraction to the benefit of its metropolitan core. Ironically, freedom of the seas was necessary for the subjugation of societies. Imperial violence is thus better understood as a maritime project underwritten by legal doctrines that transformed the sea into a space of commerce and inter-imperial rivalry and that ultimately laid the groundwork for the violent racial hierarchy that characterises the modern era and that created the conditions for the Israeli settler-colonial project.

Blockade as Legal Strategy

Israel’s blockade of Gaza is consistent with the history of the law of the sea. What we have witnessed for nearly two decades is a precise weaponisation of maritime control to entrench conditions of subjugation: Israel controls what enters and exits Gaza by land, air, and sea — determining what Palestinians eat, which medicines they access, what materials they may use to rebuild what Israel destroys. The blockade is strategically designed to produce dependency, destitution, and despair, conditions that inevitably provoke resistance, which it then uses as justification for the catastrophic violence it inflicts against a trapped population.

As Nicola Perugini explains in a recent article, the blockade forces a deliberate commingling of civilians and combatants. When combined with the density of Gaza, no clean strike is ever possible, for no matter the efforts they undertake, the resistance will always find itself in proximity to civilians. In violation of the basic requirements of distinction and proportionality, Israel uses even the nominal presence of resistance anywhere to justify the wholesale annihilation of civilian infrastructure. The act of severing access to the sea is precisely to force the resistance to fight in built-up areas and justify the apartment bombing campaigns that follow.

While blockades are not exclusive to Israel — its ally, the United States, recently ended one against Iran — Israel’s conduct is analytically distinctive because of its sophisticated instrumentalisation of international law. Israel has long invested in the development of international law in a manner that advances its strategy of dispossession, of occupation, and now of elimination. It does so not by inculcating a commitment toward compliance but toward juridical innovation that manufactures ambiguity. It treats international humanitarian law — specifically the concepts of proportionality, distinction, and military necessity — as blank canvases that it can paint with retrospective legal justification and interpretive nuance, engineering the very conditions that make non-compliance defensible. Israel appreciates international law precisely because the slowness of international legal process, combined with the structural bias of international institutions toward powerful states, means that international legal adjudication works in its favour. Via this legal strategy, Gaza ceases to be a home and is converted into a permanent conflict zone.

The result is a form of ethnic cleansing conducted through law; not in spite of legal frameworks but through their strategic exploitation. Famine is attributed to logistical challenges rather than a blockade. Forced displacement is managed through a humanitarian narrative that conceals the aims behind it. Strikes are preceded by warnings that are then reported as evidence of legal compliance — they are not — allowing Israel to disavow the consequences of its own strategy. Each killing is divorced from the structure that makes death inevitable.

Those who gaze wistfully at international law hoping it presents some promise must look squarely at what reliance has produced: analyses, extensions, and investigations, all designed to preoccupy the scholarly class as the dispossession carries on.

The Sea as Site of Sumud (صمود)

Enter the Global Sumud Flotilla.

Sumud is a Palestinian concept. While a precise translation is difficult, we might describe sumud as steadfastness or endurance in the face of dispossession. Sumud is the active, deliberate, and communal refusal to accept the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. It is a posture against domination that sits between accommodation and rebellion. Drawing on the Black political philosopher Vincent Lloyd, sumud is the act of living in a world that has marked you for death: to cultivate, to read, to parent, to mourn, to build, and to imagine in conditions designed to make all of these banal acts punishing, if not impossible.

Sumud must be considered alongside the Palestinian intifadas (الانتفاضة). The latter are more captivating, to be sure, meant to represent a rebellion: collective mobilisation designed to provoke a rupture in the day-to-day of occupation and apartheid. We might think of sumud as the essential (existential) resistance that happens between uprisings, enabling survival across generations without reducing being to spectacles of revolt.

The flotilla channels the spirit of sumud. Its ships are populated by activists, of all ages, by trade unionists, of all sectors, and by provisions, for all humanitarian purposes (medicines and baby formula occupy a lot of cargo space). The flotilla rejects Israel’s siege of a civilian population just as it mobilises against Israel’s politics of elimination. Ultimately, it seeks to repurpose the sea from a site of violence to a space of solidarity and struggle.

The flotilla is a legal act: using international waters as mare liberum, a global commons accessible to all, rather than a weapon of genocide available to the few. The flotilla is a political act: a message to Palestinians that they will not struggle alone. And the flotilla is a humanitarian act: drawing global attention to the siege Israel has deployed to starve and brutalise a civilian population.

Perhaps most important of all, the flotilla represents a counter legal narrative. It does not rely on the EU discovering a backbone; it does not request an audience before the Human Rights Council; and it does not await an ICJ ruling that verifies that Palestinian lives matter. Rather, the participants assume courage and risk and pursue the strategy that Israel deplores the most: direct action.

This is what re-imagining legal resistance means. Not the abandonment of legal and institutional channels, but the refusal to treat those channels as the only or even the primary site of struggle. Those who rely on international law alone, in light of zionism’s present death throes, have already conceded too much.

The Politics of Proliferation

Ultimately, the situation in Gaza and in Palestine more broadly — not to mention Lebanon and Iran — has persisted not because of insufficient international law but because of the political conditions that insulate Israel from the consequences of its conduct. The support of the United States, the complicity of much of Europe, and the power of permanent Security Council members means that legal mechanisms are easily manipulated, taking us into repeated cul-de-sacs.

In these conditions, what is required is a politics of proliferation: forcing a genocidal state and its backers to contest the struggle on every front simultaneously — legal, diplomatic, economic, political, and physical. Not because any single front will be decisive, but because the multiplication of costs disrupts the calculus of impunity. To Yasiin Bey (Mos Def):

Why did one straw break the camel’s back?
Here’s the secret
The million straws underneath it
It’s all mathematics

Yasiin Bey

The question the flotilla asks is not whether it will break the blockade; rather, it asks whether principled resistance will outlast reckless violence. I draw solace from the history of anti-colonial struggle in believe it will.

I do not know whether the flotilla is the right tactic. But during a genocide, uncertainty about tactics is a luxury we cannot afford. Those who set sail did so with the knowledge that what they were doing mattered. The sea that has organised violence against colonised peoples for five centuries is now a site of sumud. Every act of struggle against the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians is, in the end, a struggle against zionism’s logic of extermination — that same logic that has guided colonial domination from its origins and that international law has often actively served.

Direct action is another essential register.