As Israel blows up electronic devices, killing or maiming thousands throughout Lebanon, and continues its rampage in Gaza and the West Bank, the international community has come together to try to stop Israel’s violence. On September 18, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Israel to end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within one year, including “withdrawing all its military forces,” and “evacuating all settlers” from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The resolution also calls on other countries to cease providing weapons “where there are reasonable grounds to suspect that they may be used in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The resolution passed by an overwhelming vote of 124 to 14, with 43 abstentions.
This resolution comes in response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”
The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The General Assembly resolution incorporated most of the specifics of the ICJ ruling, and its passage by a two-thirds majority of U.N. members is a small but important step toward holding Israel accountable.
If Israel fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and the United States then vetoes, or threatens to veto, a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly can take further steps. These could include calling for a complete arms embargo, an economic boycott, or other U.N. sanctions against Israel—or even calling for action against the United States.
In explaining their votes for or against the resolution, some of the countries that voted against the resolution or abstained maintained that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could only be settled through negotiation between the two parties, and that it was counterproductive to simply make demands on Israel that it would not willingly agree to.
But a panel of U.N. experts led by Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, had submitted a statement to the General Assembly before the vote, in which they explained that the ICJ ruling had in fact addressed the claim that a settlement should be reached between Israel and Palestine.
“The Court has reaffirmed that the realization of self-determination cannot be left to bilateral negotiations among two unequal and asymmetrical parties—the occupier and the occupied,” the panel wrote. “It called for Israel to immediately cease its illegal settlement activities and withdraw from these areas as swiftly as possible.”
While Israel used its hotly disputed account of the October 7 events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too.
Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have killed at least 700 people, including 158 children. The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that the U.S. and Western governments have felt obliged to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations.
The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted more than 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israel’s actions could be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre ends soon.
President Joe Biden is exercising the worst kind of international leadership in this crisis. The United States has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of the remaining hostages or an end to the genocide.
By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the slaughter will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want.
This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while in fact remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the most critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.
Even as the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, since 1967 it has vetoed forty-six U.N. Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.
In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire in Gaza, the United States has also injected itself into debates over Gaza’s future, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.
China has taken a more constructive approach, inviting Hamas, Fatah, and twelve other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and hold an election to seat a more permanent government.
Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.”
Of the United Nations’s 193 member nations, 145 have recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements, and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights.
In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S. military alliance with Israel involves the United States directly in the crime of genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and flattening Gaza.
The United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, like its F-35 warplanes.
The supply chain for the U.S. arsenal of genocide criss-crosses the country, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds a massive airlift of weapons to military bases in Israel, from where endless tons of American steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh, and bones.
The role of the United States is greater than complicity—it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas.
And it is precisely because of the essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to stop it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by decisively ending its own instrumental part in it.
Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on the government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions, and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end this genocide.
The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of support for the rule of international law is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity, and peace to our world. With this decisive vote in the U.N. General Assembly, the world has taken a step toward a more peaceful and more hopeful future.