The United Nations is no friend of the Palestinians

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has made a mockery of international law. The Israeli military violates the supposed “rules of war” daily. Several articles and additional protocols in the Geneva Conventions give protection to children caught in armed conflict. Israel ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1951. Under international law, it is bound to “[e]stablish hospitals and safety zones for children under 15… ensure access to essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics for children in areas that are under siege”, among other measures.^[1]

Israel clearly has no concern for this. As of June, nearly 15,000 children are dead in Gaza, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. Another 21,000 children are missing. Nearly 300 aid workers have been killed since Israel began its genocide in Gaza, including at least 220 United Nations workers.

The United Nations has been rendered totally powerless. At the time of writing, Israel has just launched a war on Lebanon, an act of aggression justified by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent address to the United Nations. A non-binding General Assembly motion earlier in September demanding Israel end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within 12 months has meant nothing. The impotency of the UN in the face of humanitarian crisis has been made obvious. The UN has been reduced to making pleading media statements.

This has seen increased criticism of the UN. The sickening hypocrisy of the worthy rhetoric of human rights and justice espoused by Western imperialist powers as they stand with Israel has brought more criticism of the international “rules-based order”.

This is positive. Yet, much criticism of the UN still accepts the premise that the UN should and could play the role it claims for itself. Calls to reform the UN and make international law more stringent so it can live up to its professed values abound. These calls are at best utopian, but more generally can sow illusions in the UN or a different constellation of bourgeois states or international actors to intervene to save Palestine and punish Israel.

The UN’s charter claims that it exists to “develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace”.^[2] The structure and history of the UN and its intervention in Palestine prove the opposite.

International law and multilateral institutions like the UN are not checks and balances on imperialism. The UN is not a limited or flawed body striving for peace, but a political body, fundamentally constituted by imperialism and working in the interests of the dominant imperial powers. Calls to strengthen or reform the UN miss this vital point. It is part and parcel of the imperialist system responsible for Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Even when the UN or other international institutions denounce war crimes or try to pressure a state to avoid a certain course of action, they do so not from the vantage point of opposing the structures of imperialism, but in an attempt to manage the outcome of the instability produced by the dynamics of imperialism.

Imperialism and international law

The barbarity of Israel’s actions and the particular support given by the West leads many to understand imperialism as simply the actions of particularly powerful states, primarily the United States and its allies. This understanding of imperialism as the result of the actions of particular governments lends itself to holding illusions in international law and the UN. Perhaps international law can be used to curb the most violent impulses of the worst states and rein in warmongers.

For example, Stuart Rees, an academic and pro-Palestine writer, wrote in a November article:

That stance may offend the US and Israel, but international law and UN resolutions have universal application, they are not a pick and choose means of deciding that powerful nations can be judged exceptional, their brutalities ignored.

Bolstered by that principle, The Responsibility to Protect, UN inaction over Palestine can be replaced by authorising a peace force to be sent to Israel.^[3]

To the extent international law or the UN fails in this task, it is seen as a problem of efficacy. Some way of strengthening international law and its disciplining power should supposedly allow it to play the role it is meant to.

International law is incapable of taming the crimes of imperialism. This is because imperialism is not simply the product of the policy of particular governments and countries. It is, as Lenin termed it, “the latest phase of capitalism”, where economic competition has grown over into political and military competition between states and their blocs of national capital. Imperialism is continually produced and reproduced by competition in the world economy. It is baked into the very nature of global capitalism.

International law grew up and exists on the basis of capitalist imperialism. Like other forms of bourgeois law, international law is an expression of capitalist social relations, not something existing in opposition to it. The hypocrisies of international law – such as Israel’s and the West’s claim of the Israeli right to self-defence against the Palestinians – express the point of international law rather than its ineffectiveness. As the Marxist critic of international law China Miéville argues, it should be understood to be

an active part of conflictual international politics, used by states against each other. This is an international law which reflects and facilitates the interests of great powers in the international arena, rather than any autonomous legal sphere the careful application of which tends towards peace and justice.^[4]

International law espouses a formal equality of rights. The reality of global politics is, however, one of inequality. There are powerful imperialist countries and weak nations. What could possibly adjudicate between two equal claims to rights under international law, say between both Israeli and Palestinian claims to the internationally recognised right to self-defence? As Marx wrote, “between equal rights force decides”.^[5] This force is imperialism and its hierarchy of state power. International law should be understood as an effective force. Its inability to hold strong nations to account as it can the weak expresses the unequal violence of the imperialist system in which international law exists. “Rogue nations” cannot be held to account by international law when those states are powerful imperialist countries like Israel and America.

In fact, this is part of what makes international law and the institutions that maintain it useful for the dominant imperialist powers. The hypocrisy of international law allows it to act as an effective force in the service of imperialism. International law is used as a tool of imperialist hegemony, to justify actions by imperialist nations and attempt to punish states which act against their interests. Wars waged by powers at the peak of the world pecking order, such as the United States’ war and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, are noble actions upholding international law, while similar invasions and wars of occupation, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are condemned as criminal violations of international law. When international law cannot be used as a tool to sanctify imperialist actions, it can be freely ignored.

As Miéville writes, international law is “complicit in the worst of today’s social problems, and yet is fundamentally unreformable”.^[6]

Founding of the United Nations – a thieves kitchen

The UN itself, launched in 1945, is a creation of imperialism. Trotskyist Joseph Vanzler wrote at the time:

It is calculated to counteract and to destroy any and all insurgent movements of the European peoples, above all Germany. It is aimed to perpetuate the existing inequality among nations rather than to establish any genuine equality among them.^[7]

The UN was born as part of the jockeying for position between the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, each seeking to maximise their position in the post-World War Two world order. By the end of that war, the US was the new dominant power. It boasted the world’s largest military and economy. The US had aspirations for its industries, the most advanced and productive in the world, to penetrate the world economy through free trade.

For the Americans, the creation of the United Nations would have a number of uses.^[8] First, the UN, alongside other international bodies in which the US predominated, would allow the US to use its muscle to hold back plans for economic blocs resistant to American pressure. Second, the founding of the UN allowed the US to write the rules for the postwar “rules-based order”. Shaping and helping to construct the institutions of the postwar world served the US well. The UN was to be one such tool, alongside the IMF and the Bretton Woods exchange agreement. Initially, the UN was stacked with countries sympathetic to the US. A declaration of war on the Axis powers was required to join in 1945. By 1953, 800 resolutions had been passed in the General Assembly. The US got its way in 97 percent of these votes.^[9]

America did have to compromise with other powers, primarily Russia and Britain, but America dominated the negotiations to set up the UN. Britain and Russia each sought to maintain their spheres of influence but understood that it was better to be part of the establishment of the UN than left in the cold. For a declining power like Britain, the sun setting on its days of imperial prestige, there was little choice anyway.

The structure, as well as the frequent powerlessness of the UN, reflect its imperial origins. From the negotiations emerged the United Nations, dominated by the Security Council with five permanent members reflecting the postwar balance of power: the US, Russia, Britain, France and China. While other countries rotate through the Security Council, the five permanent members retain veto power, ensuring that the UN is powerless against the interests of the major imperialist powers. Just one of the five states has to use its veto power and the UN is rendered impotent. America has used its veto power 49 times since the 1970s to protect Israel. The Security Council, the core of the UN, is, as the US State Department has said, dominated by ‘‘power politics, pure and simple”.^[10]

Veto power and the way it structurally entrenches the interests of the US and dominant imperialist powers is a feature, not a bug of the UN. The idea of a veto was not new in 1945. It was carried over from the structure of the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN. Lenin called the League a “thieves’ kitchen”. When the major powers agreed on subjugating a weak country, the League, like the UN, acted to justify this. If they disagreed, its rules could be happily ignored. In the League, the Council sat above the Assembly. Consisting of four permanent members and later nine members elected every three years, each member of the council held veto power. The structure of any such international body necessarily reflects the pecking order of imperialism. It is impossible for there to be some institution sitting above the power of the strongest states and acting as a neutral arbiter. Lenin said of the League of Nations “that the alliance of the capitalist powers is sheer fraud, and that in actual fact it is an alliance of robbers, each trying to snatch something from the others”.^[11] This is equally true of the UN.

The UN General Assembly, for its part, is little more than a talk shop. As membership of the assembly increased throughout the twentieth century, more power was centralised in the hands of the Security Council. All UN military action has been authorised by the council since 1961. General Assembly resolutions are non-binding and symbolic, often just acting as rhetorical window dressing as the real games of imperial power happen elsewhere.

Powerlessness is not the problem – the history of UN and Palestine

A powerful United Nations, however, would not be a force for peace. Calls to strengthen the UN, or for it to “work”, often gloss over the real history of UN intervention. When the UN does act, it seeks to smooth out the fraying edges of the world system in the interests of the dominant imperialist nations, not as a genuine force for peace. Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of UN intervention in Palestine. When the UN “works” it has meant further disaster for the Palestinians.

The partition of Palestine

One of the first acts of the United Nations was the partition of historic Palestine. In 1947, the UN turned over the question of Palestine to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP. Ignoring the demands of Palestinian representatives, this body rejected any notion that there could be a singular democratic state in Palestine. The carving up of Palestine so as to hand huge swathes of it to a minority Jewish population was practically taken for granted. UNSCOP was heavily influenced by the US and Russia. Both superpowers were strong supporters of the creation of a Zionist outpost in the Middle East. Each hoped that the new state would serve their interests in the postwar power struggle.

The UNSCOP report became the basis for General Assembly resolution 181, officially partitioning Palestine over the heads of the Palestinians themselves. How this sat alongside the principle of self-determination the UN rhetorically championed was never made clear. The resolution contained no means to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine writes:

It is clear that by accepting the Partition Resolution, the UN totally ignored the ethnic composition of the country’s population. Had the UN decided to make the territory the Jews had settled on in Palestine correspond with the size of their future state, they would have entitled them to no more than ten per cent of the land. But the UN accepted the nationalist claims the Zionist movement was making for Palestine and, furthermore, sought to compensate the Jews for the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.

As a result, the Zionist movement was “given” a state that stretched over more than half of the country.^[12]

Fifty-six percent of the land was given to a minority settler population. The partition plan was a historic crime that directly contributed to the savage war that Israel was to unleash on the Palestinian population. Pappé writes:

But the moment the die was cast and people learned that the UN had voted overwhelmingly in favour of partitioning Palestine, law and order collapsed and a sense of foreboding descended of the final showdown that partition spelled. The chaos that followed produced the first Arab-Israeli war: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians had started.^[13]

The first time the UN flexed its muscles, it greenlit a brewing genocide.
Australia and the Labor Party played a terrible role in this process. The Australian delegation to the UN in 1947, led by future Labor leader HV “Doc” Evatt, pushed to establish UNSCOP. Evatt even chaired the committee. In recognition of this dubious service, he became the chair of the UN General Assembly in 1948. Australia’s Labor government was the first to vote both in favour of partition and to recognise Israel.

The Nakba

There is no space here to recount in detail the horrors and destruction of Palestinian life Israel unleashed during the Nakba (catastrophe, in Arabic) of 1948. Over one million Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Three-quarters of the refugees became a diaspora across the Middle East, the rest became refugees within Israel. Over 500 villages were destroyed by Zionist militias. After the Nakba, Israel claimed 78 percent of historic Palestine.

None of this was a surprise to the United Nations. Future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made no secret of the expansionist plans of Zionism. In 1947, the Zionist negotiators with the UN produced a map which incorporated all the land Israel would occupy during the Nakba. Ben-Gurion stated that the borders of Israel “‘will be determined by force and not by the partition resolution”.^[14]

The partition plan, despite obvious intentions to ignore it, was beneficial to the Zionists. International recognition of the right to form a Jewish state in historic Palestine was immensely useful for the Zionist leadership. The UN gave diplomatic cover for their plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine.

Further, the UN was to oversee the process of partition after the British Mandate ended on 15 May 1948. The UN oversaw the expulsion of Palestinians. In Resolution 181, the UN said it would “prevent any attempt by either side to confiscate land that belonged to citizens of the other state, or the other national group”.^[15] UN forces took no such action. Initially, British Mandate authorities frustrated UN attempts to intervene, but after the British left the UN abandoned the Palestinians to their fate. UN forces merely watched and reported as Israel ethnically cleansed Palestine. To the degree UN forces intervened it was in favour of Israel. The first UN peacekeeping mission was launched during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in an attempt to help enforce the partition of Palestine. By 1949, the peacekeeping mission assisted the “Armistice Agreements” that Israel signed with the defeated Arab armies, which codified Israeli control over land taken during the Nakba.

In 1949, the General Assembly admitted Israel as a full member state while denying the same right to Palestine. In the aftermath, the UN shed some crocodile tears but reaffirmed a two-state solution – the same “solution” which provided a framework for Israel’s genocidal campaign in 1948. The United Nation Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) was established in 1950. This new body was created to avoid the involvement of the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). Pappé writes:

The IRO was the very same body that was assisting the Jewish refugees in Europe following the Second World War, and the Zionist organisations were keen to prevent anyone from making any possible association or even comparison between the two cases.^[16]

UNRWA was established on the basis of not affirming the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

The role of UN forces after the Nakba followed a similar pattern of inaction that ultimately served Israel and its imperialist backers like America. Following the Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, UN forces were stationed in the Sinai Peninsula to act as a deterrent to further aggression. These forces were withdrawn just before the 1967 war, allowing Israel to occupy the peninsula.

UN forces stood idly by during the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In just a few months in 1979, Israel led 148 attacks within UN-overseen areas. UN forces simply observed and documented.^[17] In 1982, UN forces dissipated as Israel occupied Beirut and encouraged the fascistic Falange to butcher hundreds at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps.

The Oslo Accords

From Resolution 181 in 1947 to today, the United Nations has been unwaveringly committed to the so-called “two-state solution”. In reality, this “solution” is a smokescreen for Israel’s never-ending war on the Palestinians. As a demand, it is both hopelessly utopian and fundamentally unjust. Israel is an aggressive colonial state that is both expansionist and hostile to Palestinian self-determination. Israel will not let a genuine Palestinian state exist alongside it and has frustrated any possibility of one emerging. Yet the two-state solution is the framework from which the UN will not budge, the pattern set with the General Assembly’s capitulation to Western imperialism and Zionism during partition. It is particularly jarring to see this framework still bandied about in UN resolutions as Israel seeks to smash any basis for the existence of a Palestinian state and civil society. The two-state solution ignores the plight of Palestinians within the Israeli state facing apartheid and systemic discrimination – an important fact missed by the much-lauded ICJ ruling and recent General Assembly motion symbolically demanding that Israel leave the Occupied Territories.

The height of the two-state farce was the Oslo Accords. On 13 September 1993 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, the culmination of a “peace process” overseen by the US and the UN. The Oslo process had nothing to do with “peace” or with Palestinian rights. Israel had no interest in peace. The Accords were just the implementation of a modified Allon Plan, an Israeli plan to permanently incorporate the conquests of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War into Israel. It was the codification of more Israeli theft of historic Palestine:

The United Nations partition plan said to the Palestinians you are going to have 47 of the 100 per cent that was originally yours. The 1993 Oslo agreement said to the Palestinians: you are going to have 22 of the 100 per cent that was originally yours.^[18]

In return, the Palestinians were to receive a form of limited autonomy and self-governance, but not sovereignty. In essence, a Bantustan system. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) under Arafat’s leadership was allowed to set up the Palestinian Authority (PA) and became Israel’s subcontracted prison guards of the Palestinian masses. Oslo II in 1995 even retained 60 percent of the West Bank under Israeli control. As Perry Anderson writes:

The Palestinian Authority established in 1994, presented as a milestone in the struggle for national liberation, was in design a co-production of the West and of Israel, whose primary function was not to embody but to contain resistance to Zionism.^[19]

Israel did not hold up its meagre end of the bargain. Post-Oslo Israel has accelerated its seizing of land in the West Bank. In the 31 years since Oslo the settler population in the West Bank has increased by 332 percent. The fastest increase in settlements occurred between 1993, immediately after the Accords were signed, and 2000.^[20] Israel has only tightened the noose it has tied around the throat of Gaza since Oslo.

In return, Arafat and the PLO gave up nearly everything. Edward Said aptly described Oslo as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”.^[21] In a historic betrayal of the Palestinian national movement, Arafat renounced the claim of the Palestinian people to 80 percent of historic Palestine and accepted Israel’s right to a Jewish state within the 1967 borders. Negotiations over the other major demands of the Palestinians – from the status of Jerusalem to the right of return – were relegated to a later stage.

The other legacy of the Oslo “peace process” is the idea that Israel is a reasonable actor committed to peace and that the Palestinian organisations outside the pliant Fatah, the dominant faction in the PLO, are the threat to peace.

Once again, under the banner of “peace” the UN had facilitated a historic defeat and injustice for the Palestinians.

What of the UN umbrella organisations?

The United Nations is more than just its peacekeeping forces. The UN runs and oversees a number of umbrella organisations and programs that claim a humanitarian purpose, such as the UNHCR (The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). These agencies reinforce the illusions many hold in the United Nations. Criticisms of Israel or other imperialist powers by various bodies and agencies of the UN are often held up as steps in the direction of justice.

There are several problems with this idea. A focus on the seemingly more harmless UN agencies misses the point that many UN-overseen organisations are outright terrible. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are noxious imperialist bodies enforcing austerity and “structural adjustment” plans that keep Third World countries in cyclical debt crises. They do so in the service of the most powerful economies and their multinationals. The IMF and the WTO answer first and foremost to their most powerful participants, chiefly the US.

Sometimes the UN and its constituent organisations criticise the actions of Western governments. Human rights lawyers, academics and the like are often posted to particular humanitarian positions, like Francesca P Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Albanese, in the face of a smear campaign by Israel and its supporters, has consistently told the truth about Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. In a speech to the National Press Club, she rightly criticised the Australian government’s “amnesia”, “myopia” and hypocrisy in its response to Israel’s assault on Gaza.^[22] The UN refused to sanction the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and declared the invasion “illegal” in the face of US pressure for the UN to endorse the invasion. On the other hand, in the 1990s, the UN was the instrument through which the Clinton and Bush administrations enforced brutal US-led sanctions on Iraq.

However statements against particular actions taken by major imperialist powers do not equate to the UN being a force that could compel states to act otherwise. In the case of Iraq, America simply organised a “coalition of the willing” to support its invasion. The invasion went ahead at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Francesca Albanese said of the UN’s response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza: “The UN [is] experiencing its most epic political and humanitarian failure since its creation”.^[23]

Such statements are not just impotent anti-imperialist gestures. The UN seeks to manage the outcomes of imperialism, not oppose imperialism itself. In this sense, it is similar to the way bourgeois states attempt to manage the instability produced by capitalism domestically.

Capitalism’s anarchic nature creates a multitude of tensions and contradictions. Various state mechanisms are required to manage these and help stabilise the system, even when this can clash with the particular interests of sections of capital. For instance, the legal system can make judgments against huge companies to safeguard overall conditions of accumulation, such as the recent US anti-trust finding against Alphabet. This is not an anti-corporate action, but a measure to manage capitalism in the interests of capitalism.

As Leon Trotsky noted:

Capitalism has transferred into the field of international relations the same methods applied by it in “regulating” the internal economic life of the nations. The path of competition is the path of systematically annihilating the small and medium-sized enterprises and of achieving the supremacy of big capital. World competition of the capitalist forces means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and greatest capitalist powers.^[24]

UN opposition to particular imperialist actions or denunciations of war crimes operate in the same way. It serves to smooth out the fraying edges of the world capitalist system in an attempt to stabilise it.

Stabilisation is not anti-imperialist, it simply reinforces imperialism rather than challenging it. Managing imperialist excess is in no way equivalent to opposing imperialism itself.

Similarly, peacekeeping missions that seek to restore “order” serve the interests of the capitalist system. Without revolution, order can only mean capitalist order. Stability is a conservative principle. It accepts the existing world order and guarantees it to those who benefit from it. In the power games of geopolitics, the UN’s stabilising role can only ever ultimately serve the interests of the most powerful states, not act as a neutral upholder of human rights. The rhetoric of UN humanitarianism obscures the reality of how intervention only exacerbates the problems of wherever the UN does intervene, while also legitimising imperialist meddling in poor countries.

UN in the West Bank post-Oslo

Even more purportedly benign UN bodies do not play a clearly positive role. Post-Oslo the UN and many of its umbrella institutions have become deeply enmeshed in the neoliberal functioning, or dysfunctioning, of the West Bank. UN agencies have been active in creating the situation in the West Bank, where a thin layer of Palestinian capitalists, along with the PA, have enriched themselves at the expense of the Palestinian masses.

This process is documented in Toufic Haddad’s book PALESTINE LTD: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory. During the nineties, the UN embraced the neoliberal model of “development” and “nation building”. In 1992, UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali talked of the shift beyond peacekeeping and into “questions of economic self-sufficiency”. This model assumed that incremental economic development would bring about peace and lessen the risk of future conflict. Economic growth driven by the private sector was to be the cure-all. The UN resolved to work more cooperatively with its economic agencies like the WTO. Boutros-Ghali’s successor as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated:

A fundamental shift has occurred in the UN-business relationship… The UN has developed a profound appreciation for the role of the private sector, its expertise, its motivated spirit, its unparalleled ability to create jobs and wealth… In a world of common challenges and common vulnerabilities, the UN and business are finding common ground.^[25]

It was, however, snake oil sold as a miracle cure. Post-Oslo development in the West Bank and the role of international aid is conditioned by what is acceptable to Israel. Haddad writes:

Instead of placing in Palestinian hands the tools of their own development, under conditions in which they could exercise these powers, the international community and Israel placed select powers and resources in select hands, and under select conditions that were intended to reap political and institutional results.^[26]

The political and institutional result was that economic “development” was used to reinforce the continued subordination of the Occupied Territories to Israel. The Israeli state still controls most aspects of Palestinian development and uses this to stifle serious independent economic development. Israel’s expansionism in the West Bank reveals a commitment to de-developing Palestine.

A matrix of Western, UN and private-sector donor funding further controls the purse strings of the West Bank. Claiming a technocratic economic neutrality, such funding occurs on the basis of accepting Palestinian subordination. This is not a surprise considering much of the funding comes from Israel’s Western allies. UN institutions simply give structure to this process. This is no small “contribution”. Haddad notes that in 2012 the UN had 22 active bodies in the Occupied Territories and 412 projects listed as “underway” or “planned”.^[27] Little has changed over the past decade. Academic Anne Le More said of this process: “the US decides, the World Bank leads, the EU pays, the UN feeds”.^[28]

Even if funding came from elsewhere, the neoliberal model of development means nothing much would change. Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians is primarily political and military, and no amount of economic development could change that. Palestinian decision-making is forced to exist within this narrow framework.

Haddad names this system “Palestine Ltd.” He writes:

Palestine Ltd. becomes neoliberalism’s Janus-faced version of the former Palestine, emptied of any emancipatory liberationist content, and replaced with the economic and political strictures which enforce and deepen the state of oppression and fragmentation which Palestinians sought to overcome in the first place through their national liberation movement.^[29]

Even aid services that can be a vital lifeline for Palestinians, like UNRWA, do precisely nothing to challenge the siege or Israeli state power. UNRWA, despite the ludicrous claims of the Israeli government, cannot be part of a political challenge to the Israeli state lest it lose funding from its major donors like the US, or is stopped from providing aid, as Israel is currently attempting to do. Repeated attacks on UNRWA and international aid bodies during Israel’s campaign in Gaza do not change this logic.

This is a general problem with the international aid that the UN engages in. For it to be effective for its stated purpose of immediate relief, aid provision must not challenge the governments and institutions often responsible for humanitarian crises, lest the aid be blocked. UN international aid often acts to lessen the pressures on states to provide basic services and entrench the power of imperialists and foreign actors to control the affairs of small countries.

Can the UN be reformed?

The UN and similar international institutions are unreformable. Hypothetical plans for reform ignore the vital point that under capitalism, no international body like the United Nations can be formed against the interests of major imperialist powers. No other formation could be constructed that would not be a product of imperialism in every sense. Who would set up such a body, and how would it have any power?

Many argue that the central problem of the UN is the power of veto. However, calls to reform veto power or the size of the Security Council can often just reflect the growing ambitions of regional and sub-imperialist powers. For instance, Türkiye under Erdoğan has become a critic of the power of veto and make-up of the Security Council. In A Fairer World is Possible, Erdoğan opines:

[The UN] has evolved into an institution that looks out for the interests of powerful nations instead of the entire world… Think of Palestine, which has been a bleeding wound for so many years. Can there be room for a mindset in the global conscience that aims to deprive the people of their native lands?^[30]

Beyond the glaring hypocrisy of his denial of the rights of the Kurds to their native lands, Erdoğan’s real wish is for his somewhat powerful nation to become even more so. Similarly, the G4 countries (Brazil, Germany, India and Japan) propose themselves to become permanent members of the Security Council. There is nothing intrinsically progressive about proposals to rejig the makeup of the Security Council and veto power.

Nor is the problem with the United Nations just the influence of the West. The world is dominated by imperialism, but imperialism does not impose one order. Imperialism is governed by power rivalries between multiple ruling classes, each as self-serving and murderous as each other. This competition is refracted through the UN.

China is one of five states with veto power. In 2017 China used this power, alongside Russia, to defend the Assad government from investigation over the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian revolution. In 1972, even when China was not a major imperialist power, it vetoed a resolution to admit the newly independent Bangladesh to the UN. The Maoist policy of “peaceful co-existence” meant accommodation to neighbouring countries like Pakistan, no matter the crimes they committed against their own people.

Today, most of the UN peacekeeping forces are from formerly colonised countries. UN forces in Lebanon are primarily from Indonesia, India, Ghana, and Nepal.^[31] Currently, hundreds of Kenyan police are stationed in Haiti as part of yet another UN intervention into the country. The Kenyan police have long been a force of violent oppression against the people of Kenya. Just this year the police killed scores of protesters during the #RejectFinanceBill movement. The withdrawal of Kenyan police from Haiti was a demand of the movement.

In the UN General Assembly, the leaders of postcolonial and smaller nations sometimes utter denunciations of the crimes of the imperialist powers. Beyond their powerlessness, such speeches are more geared towards domestic consumption. Often they are just the political theatre of rulers desperate for some positive PR. In a recent session of the Assembly, Jordan’s King Abdullah II condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as “unprecedented atrocities” that cannot be justified.^[32] He failed to mention Jordan’s long history of collaboration with Israel.

Even if the great powers at the top of the Security Council could be replaced, the records of smaller nations inspire no hope. Multilateral institutions of local groups of ruling classes have proved just as terrible and useless as the United Nations. The role of the Arab League is emblematic of this. The Arab League remains steadfastly inactive in the face of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. An “extraordinary gathering” of the Arab League and the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation in November decided to do nothing. They might as well not have met. Almost a third of League members have already, or have been in the process of normalising ties with Israel. Assad, the butcher of the Syrian revolution, was readmitted to the League last year.

The Arab ruling classes, or any ruling class for that matter, oppress and exploit the people within their own borders – how can they be expected to stand up for justice in Palestine or elsewhere?

The ICJ and the ICC

South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with genocide in Gaza was greeted with hope and praise by the majority of Palestine supporters and the left. It is often argued that the court’s finding, that Palestinians had “plausible rights to protection from genocide” at the hands of Israel, opens up more space for the Palestine movement. Both the exhaustive presentation of the scale and barbarity of Israel’s crimes and the ICJ ruling are pointed to as serious ideological blows to Israel and its backers.

There is a grain of truth to this, but the impact of the ruling is almost always overstated. While it is the case that the hallowed halls of the Hague refusing to let Israel off the hook has ideological value, this is not the first occasion an ICJ ruling has gone against Israel. In 2004, the ICJ published an advisory opinion that the construction of Israel’s apartheid wall dividing the West Bank was illegal and “tantamount to de facto annexation”.^[33] Like the 2023 ruling, this was described as a moral victory. But it had little to no impact on broader Palestine sentiment, despite the legal defeat for Israel.

The latest ICJ ruling has been quickly forgotten for the most part. At best, the ruling confirmed and somewhat extended the mass sentiment that has been expressed and driven forward by the Palestine movement. At the same time, the ICJ acted in a manner to take just enough of a stance to maintain its legitimacy.

The 2004 ruling did not stop the construction of the border wall, nor did the 2023 ruling stop Israel’s genocide. On the day of the ICJ interim ruling, Israel reportedly killed 174 people in Gaza. There was no call for a ceasefire, despite the ICJ ruling that the Israeli state must take “immediate and effective measures” to prevent genocidal acts. The court did not make a ruling on South Africa’s first request for the ICJ to instruct Israel to “immediately suspend its military operation in and against Gaza”. How is this seriously different from the line taken by the United States, Australia and other supporters of Israel, of hollow rhetoric without any actions to make Israel stop? The fact that Israel would have ignored the order is little excuse. As the Gazan journalist Bisan Owda said, the ICJ “forgot to demand a ceasefire”.^[34] She posted on Instagram: “The ICJ is a lie!! There is no justice in the World!!” The ruling was another example of the toothless “humanitarianism” of UN institutions and international law.

The ICJ has a long history of ignoring the crimes of the US and other major powers. Right after its founding in 1946, the ICJ declined to test the legality of the UN partition plan for Palestine. The demands of Palestinian representatives and the Arab delegations were ignored. American violations of international law are very rarely brought before the ICJ. The US’s crimes in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on have never been brought to the Hague.

When the court does criticise the major imperialist powers, the latter just ignore it. The ICJ found that the US support for the Contras against the Sandinista regime and mining of Nicaragua’s harbours was illegal in 1986. The decision was dismissed by the US government, which refused to recognise ICJ jurisdiction. Two Security Council motions about the decisions were vetoed by the US. The ICJ has no ability to independently enforce its positions. This is by design. The ICJ, created as the UN’s judicial arm, mirrors the problems with the UN itself. The ability to enforce decisions against major imperialist states would have made it a worthless tool for the imperialist interests that dominated it, and the broader UN’s creation.

The ICJ, like the UN, exists on the basis of imperialism and its hierarchies. There can be no supra-imperialist body that can sit above geopolitics and adjudicate. The impotence of the ICJ in the face of Israel and its imperialist backers reflects this. It is not a flaw in the ICJ, but rather the body working as intended – issuing legal rulings which can be used to discipline smaller nations via the Security Council yet will never discipline powerful nations.

International law plays an important ideological role for imperialism too. ICJ rulings bolster the illusion that the destructive anarchy of the world system could be rationalised and serve human rights. Legality under international law is often mistaken for morality. As China Miéville notes:

There is a danger that basing “progressive” critique on international law might, to a jurist’s potential horror, precisely legitimate those actions for which powerful states are able to garner overwhelming or authoritative legal support.^[35]

When states marshal international law behind their imperialist designs, the socialist approach to a conflict should not change. Any war must be judged on its class and political content, not whether a majority of international legal opinion thinks it is justified. Legality is not a barometer of political content.

The same is true of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its chief prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes. Hamas leaders were also named in the application despite the massive and incomparable difference between the crimes of Israel and the actions of Hamas. The false equivalence is jarring. Further, the application remains caught in legal limbo, with the arrest warrants yet to be issued. Even if they are, what state could force Israel or its allies to arrest Netanyahu?

The ICC itself was a product of years of international discussion and negotiation organised through the United Nations. It followed a similar pattern of empty rhetoric and hypocritical toothlessness against the major powers. Ad hoc tribunals established by the Security Council in the early 1990s in response to genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda gave impetus to a push to set up a permanent court, resulting in the 1998 Rome Statute. The ICC was founded four years later.

America played a central role in negotiations, attempting to make sure it was not subject to ICC jurisdiction. This failed initially. The Rome Statute allowed the court to prosecute members of non-signatory states, therefore including the US. In response, the US voted against the Rome Statute in 1998. The other six countries that voted against the treaty included Israel and China. Israel objected to the inclusion of “transferring population into occupied territory” as a war crime.^[36]

US President Bill Clinton signed onto the Rome Statute on his way out of office in 2000 but it was all for show. He refused to submit his decision to the Senate for ratification. Under George Bush, America refused to join the ICC or to ratify the Rome Statute. The US concluded over a hundred agreements with different countries removing US military personnel from such risk. America even passed The Hague Invasion Act, giving itself the right to authorise military force to “liberate” any American or citizen of a US-allied country being held by the ICC. The US also warned participants in the ICC that they risked losing all US military assistance unless they pledged to protect Americans serving in their countries from any ICC prosecutions. Perry Anderson notes:

Naturally enough, the ICC – staffed by pliable personnel – declined to investigate any US or European actions whatever in Iraq or Afghanistan, concentrating its zeal entirely on countries in Africa, according to the unspoken maxim: one law for the rich, another for the poor.^[37]

The history of the ICC is a demonstration of the ability of the US to bend institutions of international law to its will. Even if multilateral deals, like the Rome statute, or particular court decisions are annoyances to the US, they mean little. They are “annoyances” in the same way a fly annoys a bull but means little to it.

Conclusion

Israel’s impunity to commit genocide and war crimes, with ironclad support from the West, breeds a temptation to search for glimmers of hope in UN resolutions and ICJ rulings. Surely these forces could do something? A deep source of the illusions in such forces is a sense of powerlessness in the face of Israeli barbarism that continues to escalate.

In the struggle for Palestine and against imperialism, it is vital to be rid of illusions. Appeals to the United Nations and international law are counterproductive. Both are barriers in the anti-imperialist struggle, not even fair-weather friends. Both serve imperialism rather than challenge it. The UN and bodies like the ICJ cannot be part of a strategy for Palestinian liberation – you cannot use a fork to eat soup. Reliance on international law often just deflects attention from mass action and towards institutions like the ICJ, the ICC and the UN that are dominated by the imperialist aims of the US and its allies.

The core of imperialism is not international bodies and diplomacy, but the hard power of economic and military might. It is this that has to be challenged and ultimately defeated. Arguments to look to the UN are coloured by a deep pessimism about the potential of working-class struggle. Yet it is precisely this force, the working class, which holds the power to challenge imperialism and capitalism.

The fact that working-class struggle is at a low ebb does not mean we should lower our political horizons and standards. Rosa Luxemburg wrote of how the laws and pacts of capitalist diplomacy can not only never bring peace, but are an obstacle to anti-war struggle:

The bourgeois friends of peace are endeavouring – and from their point of view this is perfectly logical and explicable – to invent all sorts of “practical” projects for gradually restraining militarism, are naturally inclined…to take every expression of the ruling diplomacy in this vein at its word. … [Socialists, however,] must consider it their duty…to expose the bourgeois attempts to restrain militarism as pitiful half measures, …and to oppose the bourgeois claims and pretences with the ruthless analysis of capitalist reality.^[38]

The temptation to look to various bourgeois actors to substitute for class struggle and mass movements needs to be resisted.

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