by AJAMU BARAKA
By approving a U.S. “peace plan” that legitimizes genocide and ends the right to resist, the United Nations Security Council has not just failed Palestine—it has actively consolidated a new era of global fascism.
A Day That Will Live in Infamy
A few days into the massive revenge attack by Israel on the Palestinian population in Gaza after the October 7th military action of the Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, the Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned that the Israeli-led and U.S.-supported genocidal attack on Gaza represented the global rise of fascism. “Gaza,” he alerted, “is just the first experiment in considering us all disposable” and in bringing in a “might-makes-right era.”
Two years later, the morally obscene and legally dubious vote by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on November 18 approved the Trump Administration’s pseudo-peace plan that effectively transfers the administration and occupation responsibilities of colonized and occupied Palestine to the U.S. and Israel, can only be understood as a corruption of the United Nations Charter and the concrete manifestation of the successful consolidation of U.S. led fascist power internationally.
On a vote of thirteen in favor with two abstentions from China and Russia, the UNSC continued the fiction that the so-called Trump peace plan advanced by the U.S., a nation that at minimum is guilty of complicity with genocide, represented a serious and credible attempt to bring about a resolution of the Palestinian national question.
In reality, however, the UNSC resolution firmly places the UN on the side of the Israeli/U.S. colonial project, violating all preceding resolutions, actions and legal interpretations that delegitimized colonialism in general but also specifically supported the legitimate right of Palestinians to resist colonization, including with arms.
The right to engage in anti-colonial struggle and for national self-determination are theoretically prescribed rights under international law, and various United Nations resolutions from both the General Assembly and the Security Council. Those rights are not negotiable and cannot be redefined or surrendered as a result of a vote by the UNSC. Yet, that is precisely what happened.
The plan requires that Palestinians in Gaza surrender their right to resist colonial domination and self-determination. Objectively, it amounts to a declaration of war on Palestinian nationhood and a physical war against the Palestinian resistance. But even more ominously for the peoples of the global South, the resolution legitimizes and normalizes genocide as an acceptable response to anti-colonial resistance.
According to this “peace plan,” two million Palestinians are supposed to submit to living in concentration camps on less than half the land mass they were originally confined to in Gaza before the Israeli attack. Moreover, they are also supposed to submit to the indignity of a foreign-imposed occupation force with the Orwellian nomenclature of an “International Stabilization Force” under the joint domination of the white supremacist U.S. and Israel settler-colonial states.
Compounding the moral and legal outrageousness of this “peace plan” is the fact that it was advanced by the U.S., which is clearly complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Despite the claim by the U.S. president that his plan is supposed to bring peace and eventually a Palestinian state, the reality is that the intercession of the UNSC resolution legitimizing the UN’s alignment with the continuation of the oppression and colonial occupation of Palestine and its people, only re-normalized colonial genocidal practices. These same practices created all the white supremacist settler states and the European colonial projects in general.
The historical analogy of this vote would be if the UNSC had come down on the side of the white colonialist Afrikaners in South Africa, legitimized an interventionist force to suppress the Africans, and conferred a colonial mandate to rule over the colonized African indigenous majority.
So, is it really hyperbole to argue that the US-Israeli plan has nullified the Genocide Convention, the Apartheid Convention, the Geneva Conventions, opinions of the International Court of Justice and all the UN resolutions on Palestine? I don’t think so.
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