In Act 1, Israel got away with genocide...

Most govts have betrayed the Palestinians, but it's not as if they're serving their own people, either. Gaza showed Gen Z the moral rot at the core of the global system. They won't stand for it

Image posted at People’s Dispatch

Israel has gotten away with genocide, thanks to the United States and a supporting cast of Western and Arab partners. That much was clear from last week’s U.N. Security Council endorsement of the Trump peace plan. Far from being held accountable, Israel’s brutal colonization of Palestinians has been koshered by the “international community” (in violation of the very laws that bind that “community”) reducing the U.N. to a geopolitical equivalent of FIFA -- a sink of moral turpitude and cynical servility to the whims of the rich and powerful.

UNSC 2803 represents the Palestinians being thrown to the wolves by the global system of nation-states. It reestablishes the core principle of the colonial-era British Mandate — that the Palestinians cannot rule themselves, they must be ruled by others — via the imposition of U.S. trusteeship (in an extra-legal) “Board of Peace”. (Hey, at least it’s a better name than Coalition Provisional Authority…)

Particularly sobering is what the Gaza genocide has revealed about the existing world order: Western powers have displayed an enabling tolerance for savage violence against brown-skinned civilians not seen since the colonial era. And it’s the threat of further Israeli savagery, unrestrained by any law or post-WW2 norm, that has cowed the states of the region and beyond into granting a patina of UNSC legality onto the diktats of the U.S.-Israel tag team.

As the New York Times reported, “seven diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the talks, said that the United States came with a take-it-or-leave-it message to the council. They said Michael Waltz, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, told diplomats from countries on the Security Council that the alternative to wholesale adoption of the Trump plan was to watch the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas give way to a return to war.”

To clarify the moral stakes here, the U.S. would not be among those simply “watching” a renewed acceleration of Israel’s genocidal bombardment; it’s been an active accomplice to that criminal campaign by providing arms and political cover. Any renewal of Israel’s frenzied bombardment is entirely dependent on U.S. approval. So, the U.S. essentially extorted the Security Council with a very credible threat that the idling genocide engine it has fueled will once again rev up.

That Israel’s U.S.-enabled military actions in Gaza have prompted war crimes charges by the ICC and ICJ, and that Israel’s very presence in Gaza as the occupying power is illegal, sound like quaint codas of a bygone era. In today’s might-is-right world order, lawless mass-casualty state violence, corruption and brigandry are all sanctified by armories and war chests of the perpetrators. Last week’s Security Council vote made plain that seven decades of U.N. rulings and the fundamentals of international law have about as much validity in the real-world exercise of power as the Soviet Constitution’s extensive human rights provisions had on the lives of its citizens.

Regional pushback and the myth of the “Axis of Resistance”

The Palestinian Authority’s service as Vichy Regime to Israel’s occupation is well established, and no one ought have been surprised by the failure of its decrepit Marshal Petain to use the diplomatic leverage available to it in this instance to block the U.N.’s affirmation of colonial oversight of Gaza.

But what of the vaunted “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran to counter U.S. influence and deter Israeli aggression? Well, the Assad regime is gone and its replacement is compelled to refrain from challenging even Israel’s occupation of huge swathes of Syrian territory; Hezbollah has been decapitated and humbled; even Iran has had to absorb painful, enfeebling military strikes by Israel and the U.S. Hamas’ ability to strike inside Israel appears to have been significantly weakened. Only the Houthis in Yemen appear to have retained that capacity, and the spirit to engage it.

Clearly, a number of stakeholders failed to see how the post-Pax Americana has rewritten geopolitical assumptions regarding the limits on Israel’s freedom of action. And the technological revolution has transformed the calculation of military balances of power away from “boots on the ground” in every sense.

But the assumption that “Axis of Resistance” members would sacrifice their own interests in the name of solidarity with suffering allies, also, was always a naïve one: Nation states — even those professing commitment to struggles elsewhere — usually have core interests that limit their willingness to absorb risk for ideological projects.

Stalin’s Soviet Union remains the 20^th century’s prime example of the fallacy that nation-states, no matter how revolutionary their posture and branding, will ever risk vital interests of state (first-and-foremost, survival of their regimes) to export revolution. They may loquaciously endorse the revolutionary goals and principles of allies abroad, yet are rarely inclined to translate that symbolic support into action that might threaten their own survival — except when more robust support in the form of military intervention or the arming of an ally forms part of a proxy strategy against an existing foe, in which case that support can be turned on or off in response to developments in the sponsor’s conflict with a more powerful foe.

Outside of Cuba’s selfless interventions in Africa that saved Angola from South African control and decolonized Namibia, for most of the socialist countries “proletarian internationalism” was largely limited to low-risk actions, or those which directly expressed regime interests of state.

Now, consider the Axis of Resistance: Had Syria ever risked anything to support the Palestinian struggle? Obviously not. Rhetoric aside, its organizing principle was always the status-quo survival of its regime. And the adoption of more and more state-like features, with the attendant visible bureaucratic, military and welfare assets, may have made Hezbollah more vulnerable. Thus the conundrum identified by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha: “Hezbollah and, following in its footsteps, Hamas erected quasi-states in Lebanon and Gaza, both with cumbersome civilian responsibilities and quasi-regular armies. [They] saw these achievements as indices of potency, overlooked how vulnerable these feats had made them, how weakness sprang from apparent strength.”

And it was hard to imagine Iran’s leadership putting the survival of their regime at risk to challenge Israel or the U.S. Anyone remember the “Grand Bargain” Ayatollah Khamenei offered to and spurned by the U.S. in 2003 for normalizing relations between Tehran and Washington? It included accepting what Iranian leaders called a “Malaysian profile” on Israel. As Trita Parsi explains: “Iran would not recognize Israel but would limit its criticism of Israel to the plight of the Palestinian population, and would avoid getting itself entangled in activities against the Jewish state. The two rivals would also recognize each other’s respective spheres and disengage from further hostilities.”

Iran’s leader offered an end to anything challenging U.S.-Israeli power; just as Stalin had done with his Yalta partners. So, it’s fanciful to assume that the fate of the Palestinians would ever have been a priority for which Iran’s system would take existential risks.

Nor was it only the “Axis” components who would ultimately feel they had no choice but to abandon the Palestinians to their fate. None of the Arab regimes has ever put its survival or vital state interests at risk to protect Palestinians from Israel. To imagine they would is fanciful, missing the point of the modern state system created across the region by the Western powers after World War 1 – the West’s goals in the creation of Middle East nation states on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and sustaining it ever since, has been to create polities to be ruled by local elites allied to the interests of the Western imperial powers. And nation-states have, perhaps by nature of the global system, tended to be status-quo entities rather than vehicles for revolution.

So, as my friend Galip Dalay wrote last week, all of the region’s West-leaning states have, in the course of the genocide and Israel’s expansive aggressions, doubled down on the USA as guarantor of their security, seeing it “as the sole power that can constrain Israel”. This despite their prudent diversification of their economic ties away from the U.S. and skepticism about the credibility of U.S. security guarantees “because their security partnerships with Washington are partly tied to the state of their relations with Israel.”

These developments are catastrophic for any prospect of regional support for Palestinians. (Of course, the energy and possibility that Palestinian liberation struggles represent to disgruntled citizens across the region have never been unambiguously welcomed in most Arab capitals.) But a cursory glance at U.S. plans for Gaza suggests those who signed up for it have concluded that there was no alternative means of protecting themselves from Israeli aggression, even if the effect might be to sacrifice Palestinian rights in exchange for uncertain U.S. support.

The “peace plan” relies heavily on trusting Trump to do right by the Palestinians. And the evidence underscoring just how much of a leap of faith that requires mounts daily. Over 300 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the truce went into effect; most aid still remains blocked; the U.S. is planning to divide Gaza in two and still allows Israel to determine what happens there; it will deploy mercenaries and local gangs to keep “order” when it becomes clear (as it already has) to designated participants in the plan’s “International Stabilization Force” that they would be ordered by the U.S. to fight the Palestinian resistance on behalf of Israel; it allows Israel’s daily pogroms against West Bank villages to proceed unchecked and settlement expansion to continue apace; and imposes no apparent restraints on Israel continuing to bomb Lebanon and Syria, etc.

Of course, the horrors that continue to be inflicted on Palestinians after more than two years of genocide has brought them unprecedented levels of support in global civil society, and a legal consensus among the juridical custodians of international law that Israel is systematically engaged in crimes against humanity.

But which of the governments that rule, in the West and beyond, are democratic to the extent the choices of their own citizens determine their foreign policy? And what difference has international law made to the fate of Palestine in the face of America’s flagrant contempt for such law, and the willingness of its satraps to fall in line?

It’s not news to Palestinians that they will not be saved from ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide by the workings of the existing system of nation states. That much was as true a century ago when the Western imperial powers at the League of Nations put Britain in charge of Palestine’s fate as it was last week when Washington effectively extorted the U.N. Security Council into putting President Trump in charge of Palestine’s fate.

Against this betrayal by the nation states stand the Palestinians themselves, who have demonstrated throughout the past century that they will not passively accept regimes of oppression, degradation and humiliation no matter what international endorsements those regimes carry. And also the tens of millions of people across the Arab region and the wider world, who see in elite indifference to the Palestinian plight an expression of how the current world order is ruled, have been inspired to act for justice and accountability, despite (and often against) the choices of their own governments. Palestine has come to symbolize not only of itself, but also of a wider rebellion against a world order that tolerated and enabled the Gaza genocide.

Those tens of millions will not be any more pacified than the Palestinians themselves will be by the enduring humiliation they are expected to suffer by the system of nation states. The ongoing rape of Palestine has shown the grotesque moral rot at the heart of the Western-dominated global system, a rot that explains so much else – and which is proving intolerable to tens, even hundreds of millions of people around the world. Gaza has made clear what those in power stand for — and why they can’t be trusted to build a better world.

Uncomfortable at the global rage stirred by Israel’s actions, they have sought to declare “the war” over. Move on, nothing to see here. But the many millions stirred to action over the past two years cannot unsee what they have seen, nor will what unfolds under the “peace plan” convince them that world leaders have achieved a decent outcome. The struggle to free Palestine — and the wider social justice struggle of which it is a core part — has become central to the identity of a new global generation unimpressed (to say the least) with how their world is ruled. Gaza has awoken them to the realities of power. And it’s precisely the inability of the global system to deliver justice, dignity and hope to most of humanity that makes it more than likely that the struggle will continue, regardless of what those in power declare.