Global Justice in the 21st Century

[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 4^th 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.   

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[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 4^th 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.   

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[Prefatory Note: Below is the text of my op-ed published on December 10, 2025 in Al Jazeera English.

The tragedy in Gaza lays bare the contradictions of a world order built to manage power, not deliver justice or enforce its legal commitments.

By Richard Falk

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Published On 10 Dec 202510 Dec 2025

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Internally displaced Palestinians walk among the ruins of destroyed buildings in the Al Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, Gaza Strip, 08 December 2025 [Mohammed Saber/.EPA]

The catastrophic violence in Gaza has unfolded within an international system that was never designed to restrain the geopolitical ambitions of powerful states. Understanding why the United Nations has proved so limited in responding to what many regard as a genocidal assault requires returning to the foundations of the post–World War II order and examining how its structure has long enabled impunity rather than accountability.

After World War II, the architecture for a new international order based on respect for the UN Charter and international law was agreed upon as the normative foundation of a peaceful future. Above all, it was intended to prevent a third world war. These commitments emerged from the carnage of global conflict, the debasement of human dignity through the Nazi Holocaust, and public anxieties about nuclear weaponry.

Yet, the political imperative to accommodate the victorious states compromised these arrangements from the outset. Tensions over priorities for world order were papered over by granting the Security Council exclusive decisional authority and further limiting UN autonomy. Five states were made permanent members, each with veto power: the United States, the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and China.

In practice, this left global security largely in the hands of these states, preserving their dominance. It meant removing the strategic interests of geopolitical actors from any obligatory respect for legal constraints, with a corresponding weakening of UN capability. The Soviet Union had some justification for defending itself against a West-dominated voting majority, yet it too used the veto pragmatically and displayed a dismissive approach to international law and human rights, as did the three liberal democracies.

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In 1945, these governments were understood as simply retaining the traditional freedoms of manoeuvre exercised by the so-called Great Powers. The UK and France, leading NATO members in a Euro-American alliance, interpreted the future through the lens of an emerging rivalry with the Soviet Union. China, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a civil war that continued until 1949.

Three aspects of this post-war arrangement shape our present understanding.

First, the historical aspect: Learning from the failures of the League of Nations, where the absence of influential states undermined the organisation’s relevance to questions of war and peace. In 1945, it was deemed better to acknowledge power differentials within the UN than to construct a global body based on democratic equality among sovereign states or population size.

Second, the ideological aspect: Political leaders of the more affluent and powerful states placed far greater trust in hard-power militarism than in soft-power legalism. Even nuclear weaponry was absorbed into the logic of deterrence rather than compliance with Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which required good-faith pursuit of disarmament. International law was set aside whenever it conflicted with geopolitical interests.

Third, the economistic aspect: The profitability of arms races and wars reinforced a pre–World War II pattern of lawless global politics, sustained by an alliance of geopolitical realism, corporate media, and private-sector militarism.

Why the UN could not protect Gaza

Against this background, it is unsurprising that the UN performed in a disappointing manner during the two-plus years of genocidal assault on Gaza.

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In many respects, the UN did what it was designed to do in the turmoil after October 7, and only fundamental reforms driven by the Global South and transnational civil society can alter this structural limitation. What makes these events so disturbing is the extremes of Israeli disregard for international law, the Charter, and even basic morality.

At the same time, the UN did act more constructively than is often acknowledged in exposing Israel’s flagrant violations of international law and human rights. Yet, it fell short of what was legally possible, particularly when the General Assembly failed to explore its potential self-empowerment through the Uniting for Peace resolution or the Responsibility to Protect norm.

Among the UN’s strongest contributions were the near-unanimous judicial outcomes at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on genocide and occupation. On genocide, the ICJ granted South Africa’s request for provisional measures concerning genocidal violence and the obstruction of humanitarian aid in Gaza. A final decision is expected after further arguments in 2026.

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On occupation, responding to a General Assembly request for clarification, the Court issued a historic advisory opinion on July 19, 2024, finding Israel in severe violation of its duties under international humanitarian law in administering Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. It ordered Israel’s withdrawal within a year. The General Assembly affirmed the opinion by a large majority.

Israel responded by repudiating or ignoring the Court’s authority, backed by the US government’s extraordinary claim that recourse to the ICJ lacked legal merit.

The UN also provided far more reliable coverage of the Gaza genocide than was available in corporate media, which tended to amplify Israeli rationalisations and suppress Palestinian perspectives. For those seeking a credible analysis of genocide allegations, the Human Rights Council offered the most convincing counter to pro-Israeli distortions. A Moon Will Arise from this Darkness: Reports on Genocide in Palestine, containing the publicly submitted reports of the special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, documents and strongly supports the genocide findings.

A further unheralded contribution came from UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, whose services were essential to a civilian population facing acute insecurity, devastation, starvation, disease, and cruel combat tactics. Some 281 staff members were killed while providing shelter, education, healthcare, and psychological support to beleaguered Palestinians during the course of Israel’s actions over the past two years.

UNRWA, instead of receiving deserved praise, was irresponsibly condemned by Israel and accused, without credible evidence, of allowing staff participation in the October 7 attack. Liberal democracies compounded this by cutting funding, while Israel barred international staff from entering Gaza. Nevertheless, UNRWA has sought to continue its relief work to the best of its ability and with great courage.

In light of these institutional shortcomings and partial successes, the implications for global governance become even more stark, setting the stage for a broader assessment of legitimacy and accountability.

The moral and political costs of UN paralysis

The foregoing needs to be read in light of the continuing Palestinian ordeal, which persists despite numerous Israeli violations, resulting in more than 350 Palestinian deaths since the ceasefire was agreed upon on October 10, 2025.

International law seems to have no direct impact on the behaviour of the main governmental actors, but it does influence perceptions of legitimacy. In this sense, the ICJ outcomes and the reports of the special rapporteur that take the international law dimensions seriously have the indirect effect of legitimising various forms of civil society activism in support of true and just peace, which presupposes the realisation of Palestinian basic rights – above all, the inalienable right of self-determination.

The exclusion of Palestinian participation in the US-imposed Trump Plan for shaping Gaza’s political future is a sign that liberal democracies stubbornly adhere to their unsupportable positions of complicity with Israel.

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Finally, the unanimous adoption of Security Council Resolution 2803 in unacceptably endorsing the Trump Plan aligns the UN fully with the US and Israel, a demoralising evasion and repudiation of its own truth-telling procedures. It also establishes a most unfortunate precedent for the enforcement of international law and the accountability of perpetrators of international crimes.

In doing so, it deepens the crisis of confidence in global governance and underscores the urgent need for meaningful UN reform if genuine peace and justice are ever to be realised.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

---

Richard Falk

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[Prefatory Note: On October 26 the Istanbul Statement issued on behalf of the Steering Committee was issued, and expressed the central concluding concern that although a ceasefire was formally agreed upon by Israel and Hamas, the genocide continued, including periodic resumptions of lethal violence by Israel killing many Palestinians. The struggle for a just peace continues, and includes the rejection of all efforts to exclude Palestinian rights and Palestinian authentic participation.]

Istanbul, 26 October 2025

 At conclusion of the Final Session of Gaza Tribunal this Istanbul Statement is made on behalf of the Steering Committee at a historic moment of darkness expressive of our continuing quest for the light of justice.

The Gaza Tribunal recognizes that the current genocide in Palestine, rooted in a century of colonization and oppression, represents a watershed moment in the history of our world. If the Israeli perpetrators and their western enablers are allowed to escape justice, and the Palestinian survivors are left without meaningful redress and, ultimately, their full liberation from the dehumanizing shackles of Zionism and colonialism, the world will have ratified one of the worst atrocities in history. The Tribunal notes that if colonialism, apartheid, and genocide are not moral redlines, then there are no redlines. And the world that presages will be a world of unprecedented horror. Every member of the human family has a stake in Palestinian justice.

Cognizant of this, the Gaza Tribunal was established in London in November 2024, as a people’s tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal that was established at the height of US aggression in Vietnam. It convened public hearings in Sarajevo in May 2025, adopting the historic Sarajevo Declaration as a statement of the principles of the Tribunal and of the global quest for justice in Palestine. Its work over the past year has consisted of the collection of information and analysis, the hearing of witnesses and survivors, the archiving of evidence, and the issuing of appeals to humanity for action to end the genocide and to secure justice for the Palestinian people. Its convening here in Istanbul has brought together members of the Tribunal, witnesses, survivors, experts, and an international Jury of Conscience to issue a moral judgement on the crimes of the Israeli regime and those complicit in their perpetration, and to set the course for the next phase of the quest for justice in Palestine.

The members of the Gaza Tribunal welcome the findings of the Jury of Conscience, applaud their moral clarity, and commit to the struggle to see their implementation in full.

The accelerated genocide of the past two years had shocked the conscience of humanity. The images of its audacious cruelty are forever seared in the minds of decent people everywhere, and the echoes of the cries of its victims will forever ring in our ears. We will forget none of it. The brutal attacks on an imprisoned civilian population, the intentional infliction of hunger, thirst, and disease as weapons of genocide, the targeting of bullets and bombs and drones at innocents, the mass arrests and imprisonment in notorious dungeons, the systematic beatings, and torture, and sexual violence of the genocidal perpetrators, the sniping of toddlers for sport, the systematic destruction of  hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, homes, refugee shelters, aid facilities, agricultural fields, food stores, even cemeteries, and the deliberate targeting of civilian truth tellers, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other protected persons. So too will we remember the arrogant genocidal threats and declarations of the perpetrators, and their cruel laughter and public celebration of their crimes, all recorded forever in a catalogue of shame.

We warn the world today that the genocide in Palestine has not ended. The Israeli regime continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza with its Western-supplied bullets and bombs.  It continues to obstruct the delivery of food and medicine to the survivors. It continues to impose its unlawful siege on the survivors. Its two-year systematic imposition of hunger, disease, injury, the plaguing of all of Gaza with toxic chemicals and explosive ordinance, its destruction of most shelter as well as the infliction of mass mental disorder and impaired developmental capacities for surviving civilians, will all continue to claim victims of the genocide for years to come. Even as Gaza continues to bleed, the Israeli regime has extended the annihilation phase of the genocide to the West Bank, where land, and livelihoods, and lives are claimed every day in the ethnic cleansing and racist assaults of the Israeli army and its violent settlers.

Nor do the colonial maneuvers reflected in the so-called Trump Plan, or in the New York plan, offer any hope for end to the genocide, or for freedom or justice for Palestine. Even as we welcome any ceasefire, we note that the Israeli regime has continued to violate with impunity the current declared cessation with daily killings of Palestinians and the continued obstruction of humanitarian aid. We reject the provisions of both plans that would violate fundamental Palestinian rights of self-determination, the essential elements of which are agency, sovereignty, authentic representation and unified leadership. The proposed Plans presuppose impunity for Israeli genocide and apartheid, normalize the Israeli regime, ignore the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and impose proxy occupation and colonial control over the victims of genocide, while doing nothing to reign in the perpetrators of genocide. Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must be held responsible for all reparations.

We demand accountability for the perpetrators and their complicit enablers, redress for the victims and survivors, action to address the root causes of Zionist colonization, occupation, and apartheid, rejection of all efforts to normalize the perpetrator regime and its criminal acts, and freedom for Palestine. In sum, we demand justice.

To these ends, we call on people of conscience everywhere to intensify their efforts to secure justice for the Palestinian people, through increased and coordinated efforts to isolate the Israeli regime, reject its normalization, and to hold it to account through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, military embargoes, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators and complicit actors, civil actions against those benefitting from harms, education of our neighbors, public protest and civil disobedience, and the amplification of calls for a free Palestine.

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[Prefatory Remark: I post today the historic outcome of Gaza People’s Tribunal Final Session in Istanbul, May 23-26. The Jury composed of persons of diverse backgrounds, but joined by lives vividly committed to a lives of engaged citizenship, progressive political consciousness, with actions guided by the deep roots of conscience. The GPT was designed to honor these same features with a particular emphasis on serving as an instrument of truth-telling with respect to the Palestinian ordeal resulting from the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. To expose the truth that emerges from respecting reality and evidence is necessary because of state propaganda and a filtered, biased media that either hides or slants the truth, even to the extent of punitive and lethal action against independent journalists and dismissing as irrelevant the rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Its formation inspired by the Russell Tribunal of 1966-67 that reacted to US crimes in the Vietnam War that were not resisted, or even exposed by the organized international community as embodied in the UN. When institutions fail to implement international law in extreme situation people of conscience must act. Israel has become a rogue or pariah state becuase the peoples of the world have reacted, but it is not enough. Palestinian rights must be realized, and future of peace must be shaped by the victims of criminality, not by the perpetrators.]

FINAL STATEMENT OF THE GAZA TRIBUNAL JURY OF CONSCIENCE

Istanbul, October 26, 2025

We, the undersigned members of the Jury of Conscience, hereby deliver this Statement of Findings and Moral Judgment

at the final session of the Gaza Tribunal. The Jury, guided by conscience and informed by international law, does not speak

with the authority of states, but when law is silenced by power, conscience must become the final tribunal.

The Tribunal is not a court of law so does not purport to determine guilt or liability of any person, organization or state. It is a

civil society response to the continuing lack of accountability for the commission by Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip. We

believe that genocide must be named and documented and that impunity feeds continuing violence throughout the globe.

Genocide in Gaza is the concern of all humanity. When states are silent civil society can and must speak out.

The Gaza Tribunal has brought together a wealth of material in a valuable archive, the existence of which provides lasting

evidence of the truth of the genocide against the Palestinian people. The Jury expresses solidarity with the rallies, the

marches, the encampments, the flotillas, the strikes and other actions that protest the genocide and states’ unwillingness

to hold Israel to account. And it offers a counter-narrative to the security narrative Israel and its allies persistently broadcast

and to the labelling of Palestinian suffering as a humanitarian disaster. It is not. It is the deliberate commission of the gravest

of crimes, imposed with dire humanitarian consequences.

We have heard extensive evidence of the crimes committed by Israel, of the causes of the genocide, of the collusion by and

complicity of other actors, of courageous resistance and resilience by Palestinians and by global civil society. We have heard

moving personal testimonies of the physical and mental harms wrought by these crimes and the suffering of the Palestinian

people.

This concluding statement presents our findings based upon this evidence and the legal standards of the Genocide

Convention, the human rights treaties, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the moral imperatives of

natural justice. Yet above all, this decision is grounded in the unyielding belief that every human life has equal worth, and that

no state or ideology has the right to destroy an entire people.

Our decision builds upon the testimonies, oral and written, the expert evidence and the research and analytical papers

carried out by many people over the past months. It reiterates and endorses the Sarajevo Declaration adopted in May 2025.

Israel’s Crimes

The Jury condemns the ongoing genocide and crimes listed below. We believe these crimes and their impact on the Palestinian

people should be separately named to understand the holistic nature of the genocide, its dehumanisation of the people,

its sadistic character and its temporality. These crimes did not commence in October 2023 and they will not end with the

ceasefire; deaths and severe physical harm will continue. The physical and psychological trauma of the surviving population

will be transmitted through the generations.

The Jury condemns the commission of the following additional crimes:

Starvation and famine through the deliberate denial of food, water and systematic destruction of the entire food system.

Domicide is more than the intentional mass destruction of residential properties and their infrastructure – electricity,

water and sanitation. A home is about love, life, a repository of memories, hopes and aspiration. Its destruction causes

displacement, trauma, the disintegration of communities and profound cultural loss.

Ecocide describes a particular kind of warfare based on ruination of land fertility, air quality, sources of food and water:

catastrophic environmental damage that destroys the capacity to survive after the bombing ceases.

Deliberate destruction and targeting of the healthcare infrastructure, equipment and personnel have been

systematic for decades and has become almost total. The most important issue for physical and mental health is the

Israeli occupation and the dehumanisation of the population.

Reprocide is the intentional and systematic targeting of Palestinian reproductive care through prevention of births,

eliminating future lives and the ability to reproduce safely.

Scholasticide is the genocide of knowledge, the destruction of Palestine’s intellectual future through the killing, silencing

and displacing a generation of students and teachers, obliteration of schools and universities, destroying dreams andaspirations.

Attacks on journalists. ‘Genocide documentation’ is carried out by Palestinian journalists and they and their families

are targeted. Silencing these journalists is instrumental to the concealment of the genocide and more journalists have

been killed than in any other conflict.

Torture, sexual violence, disappearances, gender-based violence in detention, at checkpoints, in house searches, in

displacement and elsewhere.

Politicide is the targeted assassination and kidnapping of political and cultural leaders, representatives, activists, and

destruction of civic institutions.

The Jury finds a coherent and consistent pattern of exterminatory violence in the intentional and targeted destruction of

homes, water supplies, schools, hospitals, clinics, universities, cultural and religious institutions, agricultural land, and natural

ecosystems. The weaponization of hunger, denial of medical care, and forced displacement are not collateral damages of

war—they are instruments of collective punishment of the entire population and of genocide. They are not justified by any

claim of military objectives.

Complicity and Collusion

The Jury finds Western governments, particularly the United States, and others complicit in, in some cases colluding with,

Israel’s commission of genocide through provision of diplomatic cover, weapons, weapon parts, intelligence, military

assistance and training, and continuing economic relations. Such actions constitute moral failure and breach of their legal

duty to prevent genocide and to cooperate to end a violation of a peremptory norm of international law – genocide and the

Palestinian right to self-determination. Silence and inaction in the face of genocide are not an option and are other forms of

complicity.

The Jury finds a range of non-state actors to be complicit in genocide. Biased media reporting in the west on Palestine and

under-reporting of Israeli crimes conform to the economic and political interest of the ruling elites and their allied interests.

Academic institutions through their investments support Israel; staff and student endorsements of Palestine are silenced

or disciplined.

Israel survives through militarisation; global supply chains sustain the genocide through weapons, banks, technology,

transportation, and other multinational corporations. The hi-technology sector sustains the machinery of genocide by

manipulating contents through algorithms, and allowing Israel to watch and plan every airstrike and assassination. Companies

that sell cloud capacity to Israel provide the computer power for genocide. The Jury considers that the political economy of

genocide is the highest form of hyper imperialism of the 21st century.

The Jury finds the current global order, structured by power hierarchies and economic dependencies, to have revealed its

incapacity to prevent or punish atrocity crimes when committed by the powerful or their allies. The United Nations, paralyzed

by the veto and political selectivity, has abdicated its foundational responsibility “to save succeeding generations from the

scourge of war.”

The Jury however commends the UNHRC special procedures, including the Commission of Inquiry and especially the

steadfastness of the special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, for their affirmation of

genocide.

Conclusions

The Jury affirms that Israel is perpetrating an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, within—and enabled

by—a broader settler-colonial apartheid regime rooted in the supremacist ideology of Zionism. This campaign is inseparable

from over a century-long project targeting Palestinians across all of Palestine and in exile. The root causes of genocide lie in

a racist, supremacist ideology—Zionism—that underpins a system aiming to dispossess, dominate, and erase Palestinians,

supported by an oppressive neo-colonial power structure led by the United States and its allies, and shielded by international

complicity, including from many Arab and Muslim governments.

The Jury considers the genocide in Gaza to have several exceptional characteristics. It is perpetuated on a captive population

in a tiny, closed territory where Israel controls all entries and exits. It is systematic and carried out with the most advanced

technology. Despite Israel’s attempts to prevent reporting, it is highly visible in real time. There has been resort to international

judicial bodies, the International Court of Justice by South Africa and the request for an Advisory Opinion by the UN GeneralAssembly with respect to UNRWA and the arrest warrants issued by the ICC, yet these have been ignored with impunity by

Israel and other states have made little real protest and minimal sanctions have been imposed. Indeed, it is the ICC personnel

and NGOs assisting the Court that have been sanctioned by the United States.

Recommendations

Ending Impunity and Ensuring Accountability

To hold all those responsible, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically, perpetrators, supporters, enablers,

and complicit parties fully accountable by every lawful means and to the fullest extent of the law.

To suspend Israel from international organizations and institutions, particularly the United Nations and its affiliates.

To activate UN General Assembly Resolution 377 A(V) (Uniting for Peace) so the UNGA can adopt collective measures

to mandate a protective force for the Palestinian territories and stop the genocide in Gaza, given the UNSC’s failure to

act due to successive U.S. vetoes.

Resisting and Dismantling Oppressive Structures

The Jury reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to choose their modes of resistance to achieve

liberation, freedom, and independence.

The Jury endorses a global, rights-based strategy to dismantle Zionist structures: identify and map the Zionist regime’s

sources of power and enabling pillars.

The Jury calls for building a worldwide movement that weakens, isolates, and dismantles each source through coordinated

political, legal, economic, academic, cultural, technological, and social action.

To achieve this objective, two main tasks are paramount:

1.  Steadfastness and non-displacement. Palestinians—in Gaza, the West Bank including Jerusalem, Palestinian

communities inside the 1948 lines, must remain rooted in their land. There must be no further forced displacement of

Palestinians in exile, particularly refugees across the region. Preventing displacement and sustaining steadfastness are

essential to maintain the struggle.

2.  Comprehensive global confrontation. Confront the Zionist movement and regime globally in every sphere—political

and diplomatic; legal and human rights; economic and commercial; media, cultural, intellectual, academic, and

educational; industrial, technological, and scientific; arts, tourism, and sports. This mobilization centers peoples,

movements, parties, unions, civil-society organizations, and individuals so that solidarity becomes power, normalization

is resisted, and the Zionist project is besieged on all fronts.

The Jury affirms that the struggle is with Zionism as a racist, supremacist, settler-colonial enterprise—not with Jews or

Judaism. The strategic horizon is a single rights-based political order grounded in equality, decolonization, restitution, and

the unfettered right of return. Only this course can end the ongoing genocide and open a path to a just and durable peace

for all who live in Palestine and beyond.

We issue this statement in the name of justice, dignity, and peace, and in remembrance of all those who have perished in

Gaza and throughout Palestine.

Silence is not neutral; silence is complicity; neutrality is surrender to evil.

In solidarity with the people of Gaza and in memory of all victims of genocide,

The Jury of Conscience (alphabetically)

Prof. Sami Al-Arian

Prof. Christine Chinkin

Dr. Ghada Karmi

Author Kenize Mourad

Prof. Chandra Muzaffar

Prof. Biljana Vankovska

Tags: Gaza, genocide, Israel, Palestine, Politics