This session offers a critical analysis of Palestine, grounded in the understanding that ongoing practices constitute genocide under international law. Drawing on recent legal and political analyses, it situates current mass violence within longer histories of colonial dispossession and examines its economic dimensions, including the global networks of profit and complicity that sustain it.
The session will explore Gaza not only as a site of extreme violence, but as a turning point that exposes a broader crisis in the global moral and legal order. In this context, participants will examine the limits of international law and the structural impunity reflected in institutions' inability or unwillingness to respond effectively.
Centering Palestinian voices and experiences, the session will critically assess international law as both a tool for accountability and a system shaped by power asymmetries and selective enforcement. It will also examine the role of states, corporations, and financial systems in sustaining conditions of dispossession and control.
Participants will engage with a wider landscape of legal and economic mechanisms, including sanctions regimes, financial restrictions, banking exclusions, and military supply chains, as well as more informal or indirect forms of coercion that shape everyday life and constrain political agency.
At the same time, the session will highlight the strategies Palestinians have developed to survive and sustain life under these conditions, including informal systems of mutual aid, access to resources, and financial circulation.
Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
Analyze Palestine through the lens of genocide and colonial dispossession
Examine the broader implications for international law and global governance
Assess patterns of impunity and the limits of existing legal frameworks
Understand the role of economic and financial systems in sustaining dispossession
Draw connections to other contexts of violence, extraction, and territorial control
Identify possibilities for solidarity, accompaniment, and collective action
Engage with Palestinian experiences of survival, resilience, and resistance