[Prefatory Note; This essay in modified form was published on December 29, 2025 in CounterPunch. The January 3 acts of US aggression against Venezuela and kidnapping of its elected President followed by an indictment in US Federal Court on charges of narco-terrorism. Rationalized as a ‘law enforcement’ undertaking by apologists rather than viewed as ‘aggression’ by critics. It is a geopolitical expression of extra-legal prerogatives shielded from UN censure and sanctions by the veto power of the P5, and in that sense reflects the same mentality underlying the complicity with Gaza genocide. What the UN did by unanimously endorsing the Trump Plan is to lend an aura of legitimacy to the US earlier role that was alarmingly veto-free and a tacit acknowledgement that ‘peacemaking’ is also within the domain of geopolitical discretion, regardless of values at stake, including basic human rights. In the Venezuela context the UN is more responsive to the international law dimension because states regard their national economic interests and sovereignty endangered by US imperial disregard for borders, political independence, and sovereignty over natural resources. Israel in contrast is subconsciously perceived as falling within a non-spatially defined sphere of interests geopolitics, and less threatening as systemic challenge to the statist character of world order. ]
After October 7 Attack: Genocide as Retaliation
Throughout this period of challenging the adequacy of the UN in the face of genocide, there were reasons to redeem its reputation, including an awareness that the refusal of Israel and the liberal West to respect judgments of the leading international tribunals (International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court), which have exposed core deficiencies in the architecture of world order created in 1945. It needs to be better understood that when the UN was established 80 years ago the Charter design gave the last word on the management of global security to the five winning states in World War, and not to international law or the UN guardian of peace and justice as believed by the most ardent champions of a meta-state rule governed world order. In my judgment their disappointment was misdirected. Nor rule governed sense that Antony Blinken kept lecture his Chinese counterparts about during his time as Biden’s Secretary of State.
By clear intention despite the priority accorded war prevention in the Preamble to the Charter, the capabilities of the UN to act coercively against aggression, apartheid, and genocide were withheld from the Organization. Instead, the winners (that is, the five permanent members of the Security Council or P5) of the recently concluded war against fascism were also the recipient of a right of veto that amounted to a limitless entitlement of any one of the five in the only UN political organ with the authority to make binding decisions to block action. This provision meant not only an opting out of decisions contrary to their will but of preventing Security Council from acting even when the other 14 members were united in voting for a decision. In practice, the UN treated prospects for peace and security in major conflict situations as subject to the non-revoewable geopolitical calculations and alignments of these five most powerful and dangerous members of the new world organization supposedly entrusted with ultimate responsibility for peace, justice, human rights, and ecological stabbility, but not really.
During the Cold War, which prevailed globally between 1945-1991 the paralysis of the UN in relation to the management of global security was mainly due to the discretion given to the opposed alliances of the US-led NATO forces on the Western side of the ideological divide and strategic rivalry. On the other side was the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces. The UN contented itself with being a spectator with respect to geopolitical disregard of the UN Charter. It became at most the site of opposing propaganda denunciations during the years of the Vietnam War and Western covert actions, Moscow’s interventions in Eastern Europe, and other settings of violent conflict involving the strategic interests of the P5.
This was partly due to the constitutional framework of the UN, but it also reflected the unwillingness of many leading countries to dilute sovereignty when it came to their national security agendas. This refusal was most dramatically illustrated by the governmental rejections of nuclear disarmament proposals and the preferred reliance on discretionary doctrines deterrence, exhibiting the militarist orientations of foreign policy elites in leading governments, including all of the P5 states with the partial exception of China, a Great Power consensus augmented by others. This blends a militarized hard power version of global security and world history with P5 strategic ambitions focused on a reinvention of Western domination in a period of collapsing European colonialism. It is also reflected priorities attached to internal issues of policy urgency connected with development and national security. In effect, unless civil society becomes mobilized around the world, at least as prominently as in relation to European colonialism and South African racism, internationalism lacked the political will and clout by way of material capabilities to act effectively in relation to local (non-systemic) war prevention and even in response to the most severe encroachments on human rights, as illustrated by the tepid responses to the Gaza Genocide.
Against this background, the role of the UN while disappointing was not surprising to informed observers given the strong civilizational ties between the white West and Israel in this inter-civilizational encounter with a Muslim majority Palestine in the strategically important Middle East, considering the geopolitical regional priorities of the West and its allies. This lent the Israel/Palestine struggle an inter-civilizational dimension while also posing a potential challenge to Western hegemony in relation to energy reserves, arms sales, and more generally, trade and investment. Additionally it exhibited ‘a clash of civilizations’ in the sense meant by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War.
This line of interpretation was accenratuated by the anti-Western religiously oriented Hamas, a non-state entity that was (mis)characterized in Western media and state propaganda as nothing other than a terrorist organization. Such a posture ignored the 2006 political victory in Gaza of Hamas in an internationally monitored election, its role as the center of legally grounded Palestinian resistance to an Israeli occupation that consistently violated international humanitarian legal standards as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 governing ‘belligerent occupation,’ while Israel showed no signs of withdrawing as expected to its 1967 borders, which were themselves far in excess of the partition arrangement proposed in 1947 by the UN in GA Resolution 181. Several UN members complicit with Israel overtly supported the genocide in Gaza for two years, finally stepping back publicly from support in reaction to the rise of civil society protest activity in their countries as it became evident that Israel was defiantly exceeding all constraints of law and morality by persisting with its extremist genocidal campaign. As well, many other states, including among Muslim majority countries while opposing Israel’s conduct in Gaza rhetorically, continued quietly to maintain and even pursue mutually favorable economic relationships vital for sustaining Israel’s genocidal campaign.
It needs to be appreciated that the ICJ by a near unanimous vote on July 19, 2024 declared continuing Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and even East Jerusalem) to be unlawful, decreeing its timely withdrawal, an outcome that the General Assembly formally supported while Israel and its support group ignored or dismissed. It is important to appreciate that the ICJ, the judicial arm of the UN, performed professionally, upholding international law, although failing to secure Israeli compliance or the material and diplomatic backing of its support group of enabler countries.Such a pattern underscored an interpretation of the failure of the UN as not attributable to international law as such, but to the design of an Organization that vested enforcement authority in the Security Council, and residually in the General Assembly. In that regard the SC was paralyzed by the veto, and the GA by the weakness of its political will, and by its primary regard for a pragmatic pursuit of national interests
This political agenda explains the six ceasefire initiatives that were vetoed in the Security Council combined with the failure of complicit states, above all, the United States, to use its soft power leverage to induce Israel to stop its assault on Gaza and satisfy the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. Such an exercise of responsible statecraft is inhibited by adhering to the political realism of the pre-nuclear age and the special interests of the arms industries and a long militarized governmental bureaucracy. There was a further distinctive feature of the Israeli reality that drew upon the lingering guilt of the liberal West as a consequence of its feeble response to Nazi antisemitism and the Holocaust. In effect, Israel enjoyed a positive status by being situated within a unique Western sphere of influenced, reinforced further by the global network of Zionist influence dedicated to ensuring a pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy (well analyzed by John J. Mersheimer & Stephen M. Walt in their book on the Israel lobby in the United States, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007).]
The Disgraceful UN Response to the Trump Plan
Against this background, the 15 members of the Security Council, disgracefully voted unanimously in favor of the US draft resolution, adopted as SC Resolution 2803 on November 17, 2025, endorsing the Trump Plan for the stabilization of Gaza. The plan emerged with the approval and substantive inputs of Israel, significantly unveiled during a Netanyahu visit to the White House at a joint press conference. The core feature of the plan was to reward the perpetrator and chief enabler of prolonged genocide. This was further aggravated and preceded in occupied Palestine by apartheid and by combat tactics designed to make a total wasteland of Gaza. Shockingly, there are no references in the resolution to Israel’s defiance of rulings of the International Court of Justice, resolutions of the General Assembly, or the incriminating assessments of independent genocide scholars and international law experts. Neither Israel nor the United States, nor the other complicit states were obliged, or even encouraged, to pay reparations for the unlawful devastation caused in Gaza. Instead, the payment of the immense costs of reconstruction were left to be sorted out by the combined forces of vulture capitalism operating freely as if Gaza reconstruction should be treated as a juicy real estate profit-and-loss venture with the monetary contributions, more accurately viewed as business opportunities, expected to be made available by wealthy Arab governments.
In this process, not only was an alien diplomatic framework imposed on the Palestinians, but the US was outrageously accepted, without even a whimper of protest, as the legitimate ‘peacemaker’ although overtly collaborating with Israel throughout the genocide and in drafting the plan that pointedly excluding Palestinian participation, thereby suppressing the bedrock Palestinian right of self-determination. Indeed, the US Government went so far as to deny visas to any Palestinian Authority delegate who sought to attend the 2025 General Assembly meeting of the UN or to otherwise take part in UN and other proceedings shaping Palestine as a political entity. What makes the resolution a step backward if the objective had been what it should have been, arrangements for a peaceful and just future crafted with the participation of Palestinian representation as determined by an open and internationally monitored referendum with a presumed goal of dedication to a just and durable peace as agreed upon by legitimate representative of the two peoples and moderated by a neutral intermediary.
Instead, SC Resolution 2803 if considered as a whole, indirectly exonerates the culprits for their past behavior carrying impunity to an extreme, perverse UN validation. Beyond this 2803 openly acknowledges and gives its approval to US total control of recent diplomatic efforts to replace unrestrained Israeli violence with a ceasefire that Israel freely ignores and is comforted by steadfast US indulgence. The bloody result has been hundreds of lethal violations of the ceasefire killing up to now of hundreds of Palestinians by estimates of the Gaza Health Ministry, without Israel even being reprimanded by Washington for so abusing a ceasefire deal. Why Hamas accepts this Israeli practice of accepting ceasefire arrangements while Israel simultaneously persists in carrying out its genocide campaign, although at a decelerated intensity, This latest phase of ‘ceasefire genocide’ is causing widespread severe suffering among the entire Gazan population of an estimated two million Palestinian survivors previously traumatized and homeless after two plus years of genocidal assault.
As to the future, 2803 endorses a colonialist transitional arrangement given operational reality by a Board of Peace, to be chaired by none other than Donald Trump and given stability in Gaza by the formation of an International Stabilization Force to be formed UN members endorsing the plan and making military personnel available. The US has brazenly acknowledged its own transactional goals by pledging $112 billion to rebuild Gaza with the goal of establishing a global hub for trade, investment, and tourism. Governance in Gaza is left in part to Israel that seems to be claiming a permanent, unilaterally enlarged security presence in northern Gaza above and beyond the original yellow line.
Given this highly dubious manner of recovering from the Gaza catastrophe at this late stage, how can we explain this show of widespread international support along with the disappearance of opposition in the Security Council? The five SC members from the Global South (Algeria, Somalia, Guyana, Sierra Leone, and Panama), made some critical comments about 2803 during the formal discussion that preceded the vote, centering on its vagueness as to crucial details and dared even to mentions the one-sidedness of the Trump Plan, yet all ended up voting in its favor. Did such a vote reflect genuine agreement, or more likely, was it a vote that willingly deferred to geopolitical primacy when it came to the management of global security? And why would Indonesia and Pakistan, Muslim majority countries, even if not members of SC, go out of their way to express approval of the 2803 path to the future? More predictably, yet nevertheless disappointing, was the approval expressed by the European Union. Such a diplomatic display served as a cynical reminder that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is best understood as a part of Judeo-Christian civilizational long game of sustaining Middle Eastern hegemony.
As troubling was the gratuitous endorsement of 2803 given by the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who not only welcomed the resolution but expressed the hope that its momentum would be converted into “concrete action.”Thankfully, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, expressed “serious concern with the Security Council’s adoption of resolution 2803, warning that it runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination, consolidates Israël’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including ongoing unlawful policies and practices, and therefore risks legitimating ongoing mass violence.” Revealingly, Albanese spoke these words of truth to power, after herself enduring punitive sanctions imposed on July 9 in reaction to her courageous willingness to bear official witness to what was becoming all too clear to the eyes and ears of the peoples of the world. It is ironic that the UN’s response to 2803 was somewhat rescued from taints of complicity by an unpaid appointee not subject to UN discipline. Her words are congruent with those of Craig Mokhiber who resigned from a senior position at the UN because of its failure to deal responsibly with Palestinian grievances. Mokhiber in the last couple of years has emerged as the most informed and lucid critic of the UN approach, reinforcing Albanese’s forthrightness on behalf of law and justice with respect to Palestinian grievances and rights, but the Organization’s own transactional approach privileged geopolitical imperatives over compliance with the UN Charter.
It additionally seems strange and cynical that Russia and China, although voicing some criticisms during the discussion prior to the vote on the resolutiona, did not use their right of veto to block passage of 2803, especially given the frequent use of the veto on Israel’s behalf by the US and considering the principles at stake. It is likely that these two geopolitical rivals of the US were impressed by Hamas’ acceptance of the overall approach and did not want to be seen as spoilers held responsible for a breakdown of the Trump Plan that would have undoubtedly have produced produce a total breakdown of the already tarnished ceasefire. Additionally, China and Russia both seem to believe that global stability is best preserved by extending a degree of geopolitical reciprocity to their trilateral relations. In this limited sense, Trump seems more in accord with how cooperative relations with these two countries would bring stability and transactional gains than did the Biden approach of fighting Russia by way of Ukraine to preserve US post-Cold War global dominance, a path that irresponsibly increased the risk of a third world war fought with nuclear weapons, and leading to a lengthening of the Ukraine War with heave casualties on both sides. Trump’s approach, although itself fragile because of his mercurial style, stressed geopolitical stability, including an acceptance of spheres of influence as compromising the sovereignty and wellbeing of smaller states and even, as here, at the cost of overlooking genocide.
For these reasons the rejection of 2803’s endorsement of the Trump Plan by Hamas was no surprise. It does not entirely explain why Hamas ever accepted the Trump diplomacy at its outset except for its ceasefire and IDF withdrawal prospects. Hamas’ acceptance extended to the whole of the Trump plan, but with this stand against 2803 and its announced refusal to disarm it may now be either the basis of a better compromise or at least a stalemate as to further implementation. Hamas, and Iran, the other vocal critic of the SC resolution, also undoubtedly are reacting to the absence on Israel’s part of any willingness to show signs of embracing a politics of reconciliation, even to the extent of conscientiously upholding the early ceasefire, partial withdrawal, and an end to the rigid constraints on humanitarian aid. For Israel to have show no mercy to a population living without heat, secure shelter, and adequate food and medical supplies is to send the chilling message that Israel has not even considered abandoning its expansionist ambitions that include further ethnic cleansing in Gaza and a surge of settlement growth on the West Bank leading to de facto annexation probably serving as a prelude to formal annexation and incorporation of the West Bank into sovereign Israel in the course of fulfilling the Greater Israel endgame. From its inception more than a century ago, the Zionist Movement has employed ‘salami tactics’ to obtain what was politically possible at a given moment, and waiting to satisfy other goals until the political climate made it feasible.
The US representative in the SC, Amb. Mike Waltz, insisted that “[a] vote against this resolution is a vote to return to war” was part of the ‘take it or leave it’ Trump approach. Nor is it surprising that Netanyahu hailed the endorsement of 2803 by declaring “that President Trump’s plan will lead to peace and prosperity because it insists upon full demilitarization, disarmament, and the deradicalization of Gaza.”[15] Or that France and the UK sugarcoated their endorsements of the Trump Plan by verbal statements of conditional support for eventual Palestinian statehood as affirmed in its sponsorship of the New York Declaration, envisioning future Palestinian representation under the authority of a reconstituted Palestinian Authority (PA), itself a creature of US/Israel dominated diplomacy that has circumvented Palestinian self-determination. Under present conditioned the PA is being repurposed to implement the Trump Plan. The PA announced its support for 2803 in a move calculated to convince Israel and the US that it can be counted upon to go along with their stabilization scenario despite its rejection of Palestinian grievances and denial of Palestine’s right of self-determination. Such a PA position, undoubtedly motivated by cynical opportunism, should be treated as discrediting the PA from representing the interests of the Palestinian people, but one wonders. Offering such ‘breadcrumb’ rewards to the PA, while disqualifying Hamas from any role in representing the Palestinian people is emblematic of the next phase of the Zionist end game intent on achieving a political surrender of Palestine and the elimination of Hamas and Palestinian resistance, limiting ambitions for ‘playing nice’ to nominal statehood masking an Israeli/US protectorate.
Concluding Remarks
The maneuvers of states, following their interests rather than supposedly shared values associated with the UN Charter and the international rule of law, is to be expected given the history of international relations and the political realist orientation of most foreign policy elites. Nevertheless, it is regrettable, given the gross disregard of justice and rights, which pervades the Trump Plan and the diplomatic and hard power muscle at the disposal of the US. It does not augur well for meeting other world order challenges including climate change, migratory flows, ecological stability, less inequitable distributions of wealth and income to individuals, states, and regions, as well as a more robust commitment to peaceful modes of conflict resolution.
This saga of 2803 is particularly unfortunate because it shows that the geopolitical management of global security extends beyond the veto power of the P5. For the sake of stability, the UN venue implicitly swallows the Israeli genocide to an unseemly extent of unanimously endorsing a neo-colonialist future for Gaza and impunity plus for Israel and its complicit supporters. Symbolic of this unseemly submission by the UN and its membership is the endorsement of 2803 by the UN leader, Antonio Guterres, an individual declared persona non grata by Israel more than a year ago. Israel’s insulting dismissal of the UN as ‘a cesspool of antisemitism’ and the like should have at least led the Organization’s Secretary General to respond with stony silence to 2803 rather than cynically kneel in submission. sending a shameful message to the world that from the perspective of the UN that genocide does not disqualify a state from receiving diplomatic and territorial rewards as long as the geopolitical actors or P5 remain on board or at least silent. In effect, the dynamics of power politics is still making history, despite the disastrous consequences. One takeaway from this 2803 experience is a realization that the Global South is not sufficiently ready to seek geopolitical symmetry in what is often interpreted as the hopeful interpretation of the emergence of a multipolar world order. By geopolitical symmetry is meant an historic embrace of polycentric balance that increasingly challenges the P5 asymmetry that has dominated the UN for the past 80 years.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 