In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Mohsen al Attar

02 Oct

With contributions from Mohsen al Attar, Brendan Ciarán Browne, Shahd Hammouri, Nawal Hend, Ata Hindi, and Ali Osman Karaoğlu The Gaza Riviera: Colonial Fantasy Masquerading as Peace Both the American president, Donald Trump, and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, caught the headlines this week, with much of mainstream media publicising the offering of a “peace plan” to the Palestinians. The European...

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23 Sep

From Liberation in Algiers to Pacification in Brussels More than most disciplines, international law has found it difficult to escape the stability of its canon, a series of venerated doctrines and texts that circumscribe legal imagination within the confines of Western thought. Indeed, international law has long stood as an essential feature of the structuring logic of imperial domination—including the doctrine...

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11 Aug

This post is the conclusion of a three-part series: What Will Gaza Become After Genocide? Using the Counterfactual Method to Evaluate Three Post-Genocidal Futures. You may access Part 1 here, where I argued that the genocide Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians is central to the zionist ethos which, like other settler-colonial movements, seeks to remove the native from coveted...

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28 Jul

This post is a continuation of What Will Gaza Become After Genocide? Using the Counterfactual Method to Evaluate Three Post-Genocidal Futures (24 July 2025). You may access Part 1 here, where I argued that the genocide Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians is central to the zionist ethos which, like other settler-colonial movements, seeks to remove the native from coveted...

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24 Jul

“What will Gaza become after genocide?” Nour Jaddah asked this lamentable question, and it is the one I tackle today. I do so for two reasons. First, nearly two years ago, Antonio Guterres bemoaned that Gaza had become a graveyard for children. Little did he know that the graveyard would morph into a killing field, with official death tolls topping...

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20 Jan

Israel's consolidated interpretation of ceasefires: "you cease, I fire" (cit.).Francesca Albanese Israel recently stopped bombing Gaza, sort of, offering a moment of respite for Palestinians. This is a welcome development, to be sure. Having brutalised the enclave for nearly 18 months, collapsed the delivery of aid, obliterated health, education, and housing infrastructures, slaughtered tens of thousands, maimed tens of thousands more,...

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16 Dec

Every juristic tradition has at least one point in common: they seek to distinguish between lawful and unlawful behaviours, usually extrapolating a normative parallel between right and wrong or, with ecclesiastical fervour, between good and bad. Tied up with this narrative are notions of accountability (for wrongdoers) and restoration (for those wronged). Of course, morality almost always morphs into moralisation,...

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07 Oct

[Mohsen al Attar is Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as well as a Contributing Editor to Opinio Juris] Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza—a fifth since its false disengagement in 2006—has once again exposed the catastrophic failures of international law in protecting the world’s most vulnerable from militarism and settler-colonialism. While purportedly targeting resistance, a dubious goal...

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03 Oct

In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said paints a portrait of the public intellectual. Part description and part aspiration (and maybe a little autobiography as well), he represents the intellectual as an outsider, a subversive whose role is to challenge the status quo by “speaking truth to power.” While this statement was probably never intended as more than a catchy...

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29 Jul

[Mohsen al Attar is Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as well as a Contributing Editor to Opinio Juris. Nciko wa Nciko is an Amnesty International Climate Justice Advisor in East and Southern Africa and its lead advisor on human rights in Madagascar.] African peoples and states have long stood in solidarity with the liberation struggle of Palestinians....

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07 May

A forthcoming symposium coordinated by Mohsen al Attar and Nciko wa Nciko African peoples and states have long stood in solidarity with the liberation struggle of Palestinians. Following each proclamation of independence across the continent, African leaders demanded the same for Palestine, a place that encapsulated anti-colonial resistance to Western (racial) imperialism. As Nelson Mandela powerfully declared: ‘our freedom is incomplete...

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05 Apr

“I can’t stand [Netanyahu]. He’s a liar.” “You’re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.”Sarkozy and Obama in conversation about the Israeli prime minister Justice hinges on the voices heard, whether in courts or across media platforms. It also depends on the credibility afforded to these same speakers. In legal systems, we presume truthfulness, believing...

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