Members of the UN Security Council raise their hands to vote in favour of a draft resolution to authorise an international stabilisation force in Gaza, on November 17, 2025 at UN headquarters in New York City [AFP]
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.
Up until the UNSC vote, these international instruments and provisions conferred stringent legal obligations for all States vis-à-vis Palestine.
In July 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that “Israel’s entire presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was unlawful, constituted apartheid, and must be brought to an end. States, it said, have an urgent legal obligation to neither recognize nor support this illegal regime, to end their complicity with it, and to act to dismantle it, as subsequently affirmed by the UNGA Resolution on 19 Sep 2024, as was done to South Africa’s apartheid regime.”
Yet, instead of dismantling apartheid and adhering to international law, the UNSC resolution placed the entire United Nations on the side of apartheid, colonialism, and state terror.
The Comments from the Russian and Chinese representatives during the debate on the UNSC made it clear that the UNSC resolution would strip away the protections and basis for international legal support for Palestine and turn the Palestinian people over to their racist, fascist tormentors in Israel and the U.S.
Yet, “Not a single member of the Council had the courage, principle, or respect for international law to vote against this US-Israel colonial outrage,” said former senior UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber.
People(s)-Centered Struggles for Human Rights Must Be Counter to Fascist Takeover of International Institutions
The UNSC revealed two important elements. It stripped away the veneer of respectability and obscurantism that obfuscated the post-war agenda of the U.S. to rehabilitate the Western colonial project, but under the hegemony of the U.S. and secondly, it dramatically revealed the political corruption and inherent limitations of a legal and moral order structured by states representing a colonial/capitalist order born out of state violence, systematic oppression sustained by capitalist oligarchical totalitarian rule posing as democracy since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.
But what this vote also reaffirms, with the open abandonment of the pretense of any commitment to liberalism, the rule of law and the equal value of human beings, is that the U.S. and Israel are in the forefront of escorting the world into a new era of global fascism.
Fascism was always a normalized practice of white supremacist colonial and neo-colonial governance in the colonized global South. In those spaces, degradation and dehumanization of the colonized peoples were commonplace and drove the extractivist objectives of the colonial practices. However, as a form of colonial/capitalist bourgeois rule, fascism ended up being transferred back to the Northern metropoles as a structural reform movement in response to the capitalist crisis, first in the 1930s by Mussolini in Italy and the German Nazis and today as a bipartisan, intra-bourgeois political movement in the U.S. that has taken on a global character.
The depth of the current crisis that began in 2007-8 has intensified over the last few years, resulting in a number of political changes. Those include the complete abandonment of any commitment to the ideas and values of liberalism and the liberal global structures produced by the U.S. at the conclusion of the second imperialist war that ended in 1945.
Neofascism has consolidated its grip on most of the post-war international institutions, with the takeover of the Security Council being the latest and probably most significant. The agenda of war, state terrorism, dominance and degradation of peoples, nations and the planet that is at the center of the Western fascist project led by the U.S. has emerged as hegemonic, despite the desperate belief in an emerging multipolarity and still non-existent opposition from the BRICS+ + process. Instead, we have officially entered a new era that can only end with the destruction of this order, OR the further enslavement of global humanity by an arrogant “West” under the hegemony of the U.S. and blind to the contradictory character of policies.
The battle for Palestine in many ways represents the end of the old colonial/capitalist order and the potential beginning of a new era of human liberation. The direction that history will go depends on the will, vision, and confidence of the “peoples” still in formation globally.
Palestine will be free, but only if we are able in the process of liberating Palestine, to liberate ourselves from the collective nightmare of 1492.
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
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