Palestine and the Future of Multilateralism and the UN One year of Genocide in Palestine

Israel’s campaign of genocide and starvation against the people of Palestine has already ground on for over a year. The ongoing, live-streamed bombings and ground invasions have resulted in over 41,000 deaths (the majority being women and children), 96,000 injured, an estimated 10,000 missing and more than 2 million people forcibly displaced. By now, the entire population of Gaza lives under conditions of famine due to Israel’s blockade on aid entering Gaza alongside the total destruction of over 70% of all infrastructure. All essential infrastructure to sustain and enrich life has been targeted, including hospitals, health care professionals and civil defense teams, schools and universities, places of worship, homes, farms, cultural heritage sites, water and sanitation infrastructure as well as energy infrastructure.  

This Israeli campaign of genocide has been done in systematic and flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. Despite the hundreds of UN resolutions on Palestine at the General Assembly and Security Council since 1947, including the most recent General Assembly resolution voted adopted in September 2024  demanding that Israel end the occupation within 12 months, Israel continues to act with impunity against the Palestinian people and the wider region. All this with the material support of the US and Europe.

The world’s powerful states - in particular, the United States, the United Kingdom, the majority of EU member states, and allied governments, have ignored the January 2024 interim ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (in the case of South Africa v. Israel), the votes of the  UN General Assembly isolating the perpetrators of crimes and their accomplices, the special rapporteurs’ outcomes, and the works of the Human Rights Council that provides arguments, legitimacy and justice for the oppressed people of Palestine. This serves as a stark indication of the hollowing out of multilateralism and international law in the face of the US-led imperialist and colonial settler strategy in the Middle East- a gradual weakening that has long been pursued in the interests of the powerful states of the Global North.

In a recent address to the UN General Assembly on 26 September 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the UN serves as a "home court" for Palestinians, asserting that resolutions condemning Israel outnumber those against the rest of the world combined. This false rhetoric contradicts the reality of historical and continued suppression, repression, occupation, dispossession and siege imposed on the Palestinian people, who have been confronting Israel’s settler colonial practices, apartheid and occupation for over 76 years, reaffirming their right to self-determination.

The broader and growing trend of ignoring and side-stepping internationally agreed UN Conventions and Treaties, and the shredding of the multilateral system by some seemingly ‘untouchable’ states, demonstrates the accelerating erosion of the authority of the UN and the multilateral system as a whole.

While they serve as legal arguments and important documentation of Israel’s violations of international law and the will of UN member states, UN Resolutions have had no actual impact on the ground. They serve only to expose how the architecture of the UN, especially the Security Council with the veto system of the Big Five, allows Western imperialism to prevail and renders the UN and the majority of UN member states impotent.  The US has consistently used its power to block resolutions that call for ceasefire or condemn actions by Israel, even where it is clear the majority of the world’s states back this.  In this way, the UN is undermined in having an effective role in multilateral conflict resolution.

The US, Britain and other European states’ guarantees of financial support, military aid and sustained political backing for Israel have allowed ongoing violations of international law to persist unchecked. The active complicity of the Global North in perpetuating this cannot be overstated.

The consequences of a weakened UN are dire, particularly in situations of conflict, occupation, and war, as experienced by Palestine, and other nations globally. As powerful nations challenge the UN’s raison d’etre and allow Israel to operate above international law, the effectiveness, trust, and credibility in the institution continues to erode. They demonstrate the broader instrumentalization of a multilateral system where imperialist and corporate interests are allowed to take precedence over saving human lives and upholding human rights.

The capture of the UN is apparent not only with respect to matters of peace and security, but across the spectrum of global governance where the core agendas for humanity and the planet have been ceded to corporate interests.

The genocide in Palestine demonstrates with utter clarity that a new architecture of multilateralism has to be built. The current system is rooted in the post-WW II global order, when a third of the world’s people still lived under colonial rule, and it later came to serve neoliberal globalization. Now there are efforts to redesign the multilateral system to give more decision making power to transnational corporations under the guise of ‘multistakeholderism’, further eroding any pretense at being a democratic, intergovernmental system.

This is why, the Social Movements Encounter in New York – organised parallel to the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024 – called for the building of a global anti-corporate front determined to construct a new, just multilateralism-from- below. 

We are living through a pivotal shift in global geopolitics, and the genocide of the people of Palestine is a dramatic example of the impotence of the UN to protect people and provide pathways to peace. Just as during the Covid pandemic, the inter-governmental system was unable to force governments of the Global North to concede even a temporary waiver of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime. Instead, the interests of Big Pharma were allowed to prevail over saving the lives of thousands of people who had no access to vaccines, particularly in the Global South.

The General Assembly Resolution adopted last September 18, as well as the ICJ opinion on the illegality of apartheid, occupation and its call for an arms embargo can certainly play a key role in stopping the genocide, but only if they are used to motivate a global mobilization. They are signs of systemic dissent emerging, with the consistent leadership of significant Global South states, defending international law and challenging the 'status quo' of business as usual dominated by the US led alliance of imperial interests. While as yet these moves have not resulted in changing the conditions of genocide on the ground or preventing the escalation of the Israel's war in the region, they open a breach which can be expanded by a new phase of global campaigning in support of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination.

The global Call to Stop the Genocide has echoed across the world, and has many linkages with other struggles and with the demands for system change that will end this era of injustice and the subjugation of the world’s peoples. The crisis of the UN and the multilateral system as a whole has its roots in its colonial origin and historic failures, but it also provides an historic opportunity to rebuild a system of democratic, global government fit for the 21stcentury and beyond.

This is a call to action we cannot avoid!

The Call to Action is initiated by the following organisations:

IT for Change, International Peace Bureau, Justiça Ambiental JA!, Friends of the Earth International (FOEI), World March of Women, Peoples Health Movement, Corporate Accountability, Focus on the Global South, Transnational Institute (TNI), FIAN International, Daraja Press, President of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).