The article investigates international law as a legal system that is decentralised, has been co-opted by colonial powers but it now sheds the co-optation institutions and rhetoric, because the resistance in Palestine and their allies followed the structure of this law in order to be enforced. The article uses basic law theory to explain how a legal system without established enforcement works and why the failure of the UN’s system to prevent the genocide in Palestine was an in-built characteristic of the organisation but not of the legal system. The study focuses on resistance and its function in international law and how the rules concerning resistance not only provide pathways for success to the oppressed but also support the legal rules to be truly implemented. Resistance in the Eastern Mediterranean separated the legal system from its co-opted representations and offered a material chance of restoring it.