Above: A scene from the June 1945 signing of the U.N. Charter
For many decades now, Israel has acted as the tip of the spear for “White”, Western colonial domination of West Asia and much of North Africa. Through prodigious and focused efforts, Israel’s leaders so successfully meshed their military and technological elites with those of the United States that they achieved a large degree of control over U.S. actions in countries from Iran to Libya– including, of course, U.S. policy on the crucial Palestine Question.
The fully U.S.-backed genocide that Israel has pursued for the past two years in Gaza has echoed a lengthy string of similar actions that “White” colonial powers– including the United States–have enacted against Indigenous peoples on all continents for the past five centuries. In today’s largely post-colonial world, this genocide has thus provoked a tsunami of revulsion across (and beyond) the whole of the Global South. This has greatly reduced the appeal and “soft power” that, before October 2023, Washington was able to deploy in its conduct of world affairs. It has also thrust the 30-year-long, de-facto hegemony that Washington has exercised over the UN’s global-level decision-making into ever sharper question.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the international reaction to it are now seen by many as marking the beginning of the end of the lengthy domination that “White”, European-origined governments have exercised for many centuries over much of the Global South.
We should note, too, that during this genocide Israel’s leaders have harshly attacked not only the steps that various bodies of the now 80-year-old United Nations have taken to end or temper the genocide, but also the foundations of UN legitimacy itself. They have thus presented the post-1945 world system with the greatest challenge it has ever seen.
Last June saw the 80th anniversary of the signing in San Francisco of the UN Charter by the leaders of all 51 of the world’s then-recognized independent governments. (That was before the dismantling of the large, globe-girdling European empires. Today, the UN has 193 members.) This September will see the opening of the 80th annual session of the UN General Assembly (GA). At this year’s GA more questions than ever before will be raised about the dysfunctionality of the UN rule that has allowed Washington to repeatedly wield its veto in the UN Security Council to block the Council from acting to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or to end Israel’s many other gross violations of international law across West Asia.
The organization I head, Just World Educational, has been among many citizen groups around the world that have called for the GA to take the rarely-used step of passing a “Uniting for Peace” (UfP) resolution, which provides a politically powerful (though still only hortatory) way for the GA to confront the veto power that Washington has wielded in the Security Council on the Gaza issue. There is, however, nothing that even the smartest citizen-based groups can do to effect direct change in the GA. For that, we need to rely on visionary and committed governmental bodies.
Luckily for our brothers and sisters in Gaza– and for the integrity of our current international system– a number of governmental bodies have stepped forward. At the forefront has been the de-facto government in Yemen headed by the Ansarullah movement (the “Houthis”), which has acted to block all shipping heading to or from Israel from transiting the strategic Bab el-Mandeb straits, and also to launch sporadic long-distance missiles at military targets in Israel.
In addition, there is now also a growing coalition of other world governments committed to taking concrete action to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This is the Hague Group of 13 mid-size governments from the Global South. At a high-level gathering in Bogotá, Colombia last month, the Hague Group governments vowed to:
- ban the transfer of any military equipment from their countries or their ports to Israel;
- end any investments their national bodies might have in Israeli state-related funds; and
- take other (sadly, non-specific) steps to persuade the UN to help the people of Gaza.
Recently, Norway announced that its largest-in-the-world sovereign wealth fund would divest from 11 Israeli companies and review the investments it continues to hold in further 50 Israeli companies.
Elsewhere in Europe, the governments of France and Britain have announced moves towards granting a formal “recognition” to the “State of Palestine.” That step has almost zero practical weight, and is also (as I shall explain below) quite possibly harmful to the push for Palestinian rights. But the fact that even those veteran colonial powers in London and Paris have felt obliged to take it is another marker of how unpopular the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza has become worldwide.
The global momentum to take action to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza has clearly been growing in recent months. But it is still nowhere near enough. Back in July of 2024, remember, the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) stated in Art. 261 of a key advisory opinion (PDF here), that Israel’s entire, continued presence in the the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem was, quite simply, “unlawful” and needs to be ended.
Two notes on the current prospects for global action
A. Diplomatic victories alone are not enough
The GA has invoked the UfP mechanism a dozen times over the years. Most notably (and most successfully), in October 1956 U.S. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower invoked it to side-step the vetoes that Britain and France have always had in the Security Council, and to win effective UN action to reverse the aggression those two powers and Israel had just undertaken against Egypt.
But it was not simply the two-thirds majority that Eisenhower won for his project in the GA that ended that Tripartite Aggression. The stark threat that he also delivered to the French, British, and Israeli leaders that he would end U.S. support for their currencies and their economies if they did not comply with the UN’s order to withdraw from Egypt (and Gaza) in a timely way was, by all accounts, far more persuasive in forcing their withdrawal than the mere existence of the UN resolution itself.
In 1956, Washington’s economic power was at its peak. Britain, France, and Israel were all deeply dependent on U.S. economic support. Today, if the Hague Group or any other group of anti-genocide governments succeed in winning a UfP-derived resolution that demands an end to the Gaza genocide (or, more broadly, the speedy implementation of the whole of the ICJ’s July 2024 ruling), then that diplomatic victory would have zero effect unless it is backed up by concerted action in other spheres, including the economic. It is true that the U.S. power in the world economy is considerably smaller today than it was in 1956, and that the many governments against whom Washington has deployed tough economic measures have developed increasingly effective and powerful ways to work around Washington’s power within the world economic system. Nonetheless, it is still hard to conclude that the governments representing the Global Majority of nations are yet ready to use against Washington the same degree of economic steadfastness with which Eisenhower confronted London and Paris back in 1956.
B. The political underpinnings of any diplomatic action are crucial
Several of the citizen initiatives calling for UN action to end the genocide in Gaza call for the UN to deploy an “armed protection force” in Gaza, tasked with pushing back Israel’s occupation forces from zones in part or all of Gaza sufficient to allow the distribution of aid to the population there. But in locations like Haiti, the deployment of an “armed UN protection force” in the absence of any clearly stated plan for the post-conflict governance of that country has proved disastrous.
In any future UN challenge to Israel’s occupation rule in Gaza, the global stakes would be many times higher than they have been regarding the UN’s chronic governance failures in Haiti. Therefore, if a UN force is to be deployed to Gaza, similar to how a UN force was deployed to Suez and Sinai in 1956-57 to replace the Tripartite occupiers in those areas, the political/governance horizon within which this force operates needs to be clearly stated in the UN’s authorizing resolution. The ICJ’s July 2024 ruling provides one necessary, but still far from sufficient, basis for such a horizon: namely, the urgent need, as stated in that ruling, to completely end Israel’s illegal occupation rule over Gaza (and also, at some point soon thereafter, the West Bank.)
Another key dimension of any effective UN action to end Israel’s genocide and occupation in Gaza that needs to be successfully resolved is the intra-Palestinian political dimension. It is in this arena that the focus that some Western governments have recently placed on “recognizing the State of Palestine” poses a potentially dangerous distraction. Back in 1988, the Palestinians’ then-widely recognized liberation coalition the PLO won UN recognition as a (still only aspirational) entity called the State of Palestine. Five years later, though, that same PLO entered into a very damaging interim arrangement, concluded directly with the State of Israel, under which a new body called the Palestinian Interim Self-Governance Authority (PA) would have limited powers of civil self-rule in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Over the decades since 1993, the PA and also the PLO have increasingly come to function as Quisling forces under Israeli-US control, including by acting alongside Israeli forces to suppress and oppress those Palestinian movements that remain committed to resisting Israel’s illegal rule of the West Bank and Gaza.
In that context, international moves to strengthen the hand of a “State of Palestine” that today represents only a small, and clearly Israel-allied, portion of the Palestinian movement can be seen as very dangerous. What is needed, instead, are effective moves to bring about a reconciliation of all the Palestinian factions on the basis of an unequivocal commitment to national liberation. Algeria and China are among the states that have worked hard to achieve this, but the needed intra-Palestinian reconciliation has not yet been won.
What is to be done?
In light of the above, here are the actions that supporters of Palestinian rights everywhere could most effectively be undertaking:
- Work to broaden and deepen the important campaign of the Hague Group. Broaden, in terms of working to win support for the Hague Group’s campaign from additional governments, and also to publicize it in areas in which little is known about it. Deepen, by working with Hague Group members to persuade them to pursue plans for completely ending Israel’s occupation rule of Gaza, in addition to their present commitments.
- Advocacy that clearly links the goal of ending the Israeli-US genocide in Gaza with that of ending the Israeli-US occupation of Gaza in its entirety, on the basis of international law and the ICJ’s July 2024 ruling. After such a genocide, how can the Israeli-US axis ever again be trusted to rule over Gaza (or indeed, over the West Bank?)
- Calling on national governments to push the UN– using the UfP mechanism as necessary– to despatch to Gaza an armed force capable of rolling back the Israeli-US occupation on the basis of international law, with the goals not just of protecting the delivery of humanitarian aid but also of supporting the Strip’s residents and their Palestinian compatriots everywhere in their long-denied exercise of sovereignty over this portion of their homeland.
- Work to support all efforts to reconcile internal differences among the Palestinian movements on the basis of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Document of 2006, which specified the entry of Hamas and its allies into the PLO on a mutually agreed basis.
- Continuing political work to reveal the hegemony that Washington has exercised over Arab-Israeli diplomacy since the 1970s, most often in close linkage with Israel’s colonial plans; to understand the many arenas and ways in which that hegemony has inflicted harm on the peoples of West Asia; and to challenge that hegemony at every level.
End the genocide! End Israel’s illegal occupation! Palestinian survival and Palestinian rights now!
