“Historic Betrayal”: UNSC Approves US Plan to Control Gaza as Russia, China Abstain
Interview with Craig Mokhiber
by Rachel Blevins / November 20th, 2025
The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803 this week, after permanent members Russia and China chose to abstain instead of using their veto power. In addition to giving a framework for Gaza that would put Israel and the U.S. in control, the language of the motion is extremely vague, and it gives no guarantee that there will be an end to the genocide.
Craig Mokhiber, an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations human rights official, noted that: “the ceasefire is a lie. The idea that there is a peace process is a lie. What we have here in this resolution is a betrayal of historic proportions.”
He also said that while Russia and China may be going off of the Palestinian Authority’s support for the resolution, we have to remember that the PA operates “under occupation,” and “under the thumb of of the Americans.” And when it comes to the language that was passed: “this resolution doesn’t even demand the unfettered flow of aid. All it does is use some rhetorical language that underscores the importance of humanitarian aid.”
The UNSC vote to gift Gaza to its enemies
by Paul Larudee / November 22nd, 2025
Why did the United Nations Security Council vote to give authority over Gaza to a genocidal demolition squad called the Board of Peace, headed by Donald Trump?
This question has several dimensions. The resolution itself was drafted by the US, and more specifically the Trump administration, in close consultation with the Netanyahu government in Israel. This explains why it is perfectly consistent with a continuing genocide and progressive elimination of the existing population of Gaza, totally Palestinian, but now estimated to be considerably less than two million, compared to 2.2-2.3 million two years ago. Up to half a million, almost entirely civilian and mostly women and children, have died, due to direct murder by Israeli forces as well as vast numbers of equally but differently murdered victims of starvation, malnutrition, disease, exposure and lack of medical resources, a result of the Israeli policy of denying the means of survival. A smaller minority have escaped despite their reluctance to leave and the unwillingness of most countries to accept them. The intention behind the plan is to replace the Palestinians with Zionist settlers and lucrative resorts, as well as to exploit the large oil and gas deposits off the coast for Israeli and western investors rather than for the benefit of the Palestinian population.
This explains the resolution, but not the votes that passed it, including Algeria and Pakistan, and the abstentions of Russia and China. Russia had in fact drafted an alternative resolution, but did not submit it, due to passage of the US version. Why did Algeria and Pakistan vote in favor? This can probably be attributed to intense inducements from the US, and the fact that governments generally put their own interests first. But then why did Russia and China not veto the US proposal and submit their own? Alon Mizrahi provides a very coherent explanation, amounting to having no Arab partners to support them – not even the UN representative of Palestine, which, as we know, serves at the pleasure of Israel. The loss of Syria is keenly felt at such times.
Is the United Nations a useful organization if it cannot uphold international law – or worse, if it passes resolutions that are in direct contradiction to international law? The fact is that the UN was designed to recognize and reflect the international power structure, not to alter it. This is why veto power exists in the Security Council. It is, in effect, a recognition that the most powerful countries have veto power over anything the UN might decide, whether the UN recognizes it or not. After WWII, the countries that signed the UN charter – especially the most powerful – also decided what constituted international law and agreed to abide by it. Although adherence has been inconsistent and violated many times, there has been general agreement on what constitutes this body of law.
Until now. We seem to have transitioned into the era of “rules-based order.” What is that? What are the rules? Where is the order? It is an empty phrase meaning no more than the arbitrary and sometimes contrary decision making of an absolute monarch. The UN was formed by a treaty whereby all the signers agreed to give up some small measure of sovereignty in order to establish a minimal degree of security and welfare for all concerned, even if some benefitted more than others.
In the era of the sole remaining superpower, such cooperation for mutual benefit appears to be withering away. But then, so does the superpower, as well as its Zionist appendage. It seems that we will have to be patient and steadfast, much like Palestinians, and to resist the abuses of those who rule us, also like the Palestinians.
Who Is Ready to Die for Trump’s Gaza Plan? So Far, Nobody
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 21st, 2025
The ISF will be tasked with securing the borders in a way that confines Palestinians, stabilizing Gaza’s security environment by suppressing resistance, demilitarizing Gaza while leaving the Israeli regime untouched, and training the Palestinian police to control the population. Yes, the force is also mandated to “protect civilians” and assist humanitarian aid. But under U.S. supervision, can anyone honestly expect it to restrain Israel when Israel simply refuses to comply—as we see with the current so-called “ceasefire”?
Hamas and other factions in Gaza have issued a joint statement that unequivocally rejects Trump’s plan and the Security Council resolution, saying it “will turn into a type of imposed guardianship or administration – reproducing a reality that restricts the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and to managing their own affairs.”
As for the foreign military force, the Hamas statement says, “Assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip, including disarming the resistance, strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of the occupation.”
The joint statement reserves its strongest condemnation for the Arab rulers who support Trump’s plan, calling their support “a form of deep international partnership in the war of extermination waged by the occupation against our people.”
Trump has claimed that all sides agreed to his peace plan, but Hamas only agreed to the first stage of it, which involved returning the remaining Israeli prisoners in Gaza to Israel under a permanent ceasefire and resumption of humanitarian aid that Israel has still not complied with.
Hamas always said clearly that it has no authority to negotiate over other parts of Trump’s plan, since they involve the future government of all of Palestine and require the input of many different groups in Gaza and the other occupied territories. Hamas said it would only disarm once a Palestinian state is fully established, at which time it will hand over its weapons to the new armed forces of the state of Palestine.
In October, a number of countries told U.S. officials that they would consider sending their troops to participate in the proposed International Stabilization Force in Gaza. They included Egypt, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Malaysia, and Pakistan, as well as Australia, Canada, and Cyprus.
On the other hand, Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have all rejected sending troops to join the ISF. Azerbaijan has said it could only send troops once all fighting has ended, and Egypt has flip-flopped on taking part. As it became clear that Trump and his “peace board” might order the ISF to use force to disarm Hamas fighters, the UAE said its forces would not take part either.
In fact, not a single country has so far committed to join the force, while Israel has said it would not allow Turkish forces to enter Gaza, and claims the right to approve or refuse any country’s participation. Israel has also been escalating its ceasefire violations since the Security Council resolution was passed, a sure way to deter countries from joining the ISF.
Hamas and the resistance groups are not alone in rejecting Trump’s plan. Al Jazeera asked people in Gaza City for comments, and they were just as critical. “I completely reject this decision,” said Moamen Abdul-Malek. “Our people … are able to rule ourselves. We don’t need forces from Arab or foreign countries to rule us. We are the people of this country, and we will bear responsibility for it.”
Another man in Gaza City told Al Jazeera that the plan violates the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance. “It would strip the resistance of its weapons,” said Mohammed Hamdan, “despite the fact that resistance is a legitimate right of peoples under occupation.”
And Sanaa Mahmoud Kaheel said she doesn’t trust Trump, who previously threatened to ethnically cleanse Gaza and steal its land to build a U.S.-Israeli beach resort. “Things will be unclear with the international forces, and we do not know what might happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow with them being in Gaza,” she said. “This could help Trump tighten his grip on Gaza and work towards establishing a ‘riviera’ there, as he himself said before. Nothing is guaranteed.”
The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), based in Al-Bireh in the West Bank, rejects the false choice that the United States has presented to the world: “either accept their plan with all its flaws and non-guarantees, or accept going back to a live-streamed genocide.”
Instead, PIPD and the global Palestinian solidarity movement are working to end the Israeli occupation and the impunity that sustains it, and to hold Israel accountable for its illegal occupation and crimes against humanity. On its Global Accountability Map, PIPD charts the progress of “concrete and approved actions by governments, local authorities, civil society, the private sector, courts and academia to hold Israeli colonial entities and interests accountable.”
More and more of the world is supporting the Palestinian struggle and the movement to hold Israel accountable for its decades of illegal occupation and ever-escalating international crimes. While the U.S. uses its veto to corrupt the UN Security Council, people and governments have come together to hold Israel accountable in the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Instead of passively accepting subservience to the Security Council, the General Assembly asked the ICJ to rule on the legality of the Israeli occupation and its legal consequences, and the ICJ ruled in 2024 that the occupation is illegal and must therefore be ended as quickly as possible.
Instead of making further demands on the occupation’s long-suffering victims, as the U.S.-controlled Security Council does in its Trump plan resolution, the ICJ and the General Assembly have flipped the U.S. script to make demands on the perpetrator, Israel, including the demand, in September 2024, that Israel must end the occupation within a year.
The ICJ issued a new ruling on October 22, 2025, that Israel must allow all humanitarian aid into Gaza and allow UNRWA (UN Relief & Works Agency) to reenter Gaza and do its work there without obstruction.
The UN General Assembly can and should respond to Israel’s failure to comply with any of these rulings and resolutions by meeting in an Emergency Special Session to organize a UN-backed arms embargo, trade boycott, and other steps to enforce them, until Israel ends its illegal occupation and starts complying with international law and UN resolutions.
More and more countries are cutting trade and military ties with Israel, and 157 countries now recognize Palestine as an independent nation with the same rights as others. People in many countries are rising up to protest Israel’s genocide and occupation, and to boycott Israeli products and companies that are complicit in its crimes.
The Israeli and U.S. governments are feeling the pinch. If the world were passively accepting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump would not have felt compelled to conjure up his fake peace plan. It is a victory for people of conscience everywhere that he felt he had to try to change the narrative. So this is not the time to give up on the real solutions to this crisis: justice and freedom for Palestine, and accountability for Israel.
We shall see in the coming days whether the corrupt governments that hope to profit from the genocide in Gaza will send their own troops to fight the Palestinian Resistance and perpetuate the Israeli occupation. Are they really ready to sacrifice their own young people’s blood to mix with the blood of innocent Palestinians in the rubble of Gaza?
We hope that they will instead make common cause with the people of Gaza and insist that Israel must comply with the demands of the ICJ and the UN General Assembly and immediately end its obscene, decades-long, illegal occupation of Palestine.
The Genesis of Israeli Ultra-apartheid
by Dan Steinbock | Nov 21, 2025 | ANTI-WAR.COM
On November 10, the Israeli parliament passed the first reading of a bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners convicted of killing Israeli individuals, with 39 votes in favor and 16 against out of 120 members.
The bill would make it mandatory for Israeli courts to impose death penalty against individuals convicted of killing an Israeli “either intentionally or recklessly” if the act is motivated by “racism or hostility towards the public” and “committed with the objective of harming the state of Israel or the rebirth of the Jewish people.”
The controversial and murky bill has been widely condemned by international and Palestinian human rights organizations and prisoners’ groups. As Amnesty International put it, “The shift towards requiring courts to impose the death penalty against Palestinians is a dangerous and dramatic step backwards and a product of ongoing impunity for Israel’s system of apartheid and its genocide in Gaza.”
However, as I have argued (here and here), such shift would be consistent with the Israeli far-right’s redemptionist dreams of Jewish supremacy and Greater Israel, which the Netanyahu cabinet has effectively condoned. It would also codify the move beyond classic apartheid.
Institutionalization of apartheid
In South Africa, racial discrimination against black people began with large-scale colonization over four centuries ago. By the early 19th century, British settlers began to colonize the frontier regions. As takeoffs accelerated in in the late 19th century Europe, South Africa industrialized on the back of mining and infrastructure investment. But the Mineral Revolution was a revolution by, of and for the white colonial settlers.
Following the European powers’ scramble for Africa, the Anglo-Zulu War and two Boer Wars, the Boer republics were incorporated into the British Empire. Meanwhile, South Africa began to introduce more segregationist policies towards non-whites. The goals were reflected by the Afrikaans term apartheid (“separateness,” or “apart-hood”).
After the 1948 all-white elections, the National Party enforced white supremacy and racial separation. When the South African republic was established in 1961, it withdrew from the British Commonwealth.
International counter-reaction, black resistance
A year later, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 1761, which requested member states to break off diplomatic relations and cease trading with South Africa and to deny passage to South African ships and aircraft.
A special committee was set up calling for a boycott of South Africa. Though initially ignored, it found allies in the West, including the UK-based Anti-Apartheid Movement.
By 1973, the UN General Assembly agreed on the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. In the process, “apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa.”
Popular uprisings ensued in black and colored townships in 1976 and 1985. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the last vestiges of apartheid were abolished, and a new constitution was promulgated into law: one person, one vote.
South Africa and Israel as “apartheid states”
The apartheid association between South Africa and Israel is not something new. After the UN vote against the South African apartheid in the early 1960s, the country’s prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was particularly annoyed by Israel’s vote against South Africa’s segregation.
“Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude,” Verwoerd lamented. “They took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”
In effect, martial law had been imposed on the Arab citizens of Israel from 1948 to 1966, and it continues to be intermittently enforced to the present.
Effectively, the Israeli government imposed various restrictions on Palestinians, including on their mobility, with security checkpoints set up to enforce these permits allowing entry. Meanwhile, requests for government services for Arab Israelis were directed to military courts instead of civil courts. These measures were subsequently adopted in the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank.
Subsequently, the UN adopted the (non-binding) Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, sponsored mainly by the Arab League, the Soviet bloc and many new African states.
After the 1967 Six-Day-War and the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian resistance intensified, domestically and internationally.
The debate on Israeli segregation
Following the Yom Kippur War, the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 3236 recognized the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, inviting the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to participate in international diplomacy.
The oil crisis in 1975 paved the way to resolution 3379, which stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In the UN, Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog, the future president of Israel, stated the decision was “devoid of any moral or legal value.” Then, he tore the resolution in half.
At the end of the Cold War, Resolution 3379 was revoked by the UN Resolution 46/86, introduced by U.S. President George H. W. Bush. It contributed to Israel’s sense of impunity and the rise of its Messianic far-right. But Bush’s UN address wasn’t just about Zionism and racism. It was about wheeling and dealing. The revocation was Israel’s precondition for participation in the Madrid Conference of 1991, which paved the way to the Oslo Accords – which the Netanyahu cabinets have shunned ever since then.
In 2021, Isaac Herzog, the son of Chaim Herzog, became Israel’s president. When South Africa launched its genocide case against Israel, he declared it a “blood libel” against Jews. Later he shredded the UN Charter in protest of the UN General Assembly vote to boost the status of the Palestinian mission.
And yet it was in 2021 that Human Rights Watch warned that Israel had crossed the apartheid threshold. Many Israeli leaders agreed. A year later, Israel’s former attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, said that “my country has sunk to such political and moral depths that it is now an apartheid regime.”
Two years later, he was seconded by the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg. A month before the October 7 offensive, Mossad’s ex-chief Tamir Pardo concurred: “There is an apartheid state here,” since “two people are judged under two legal systems.”
In the case of South African apartheid, international restrictions fostered domestic opposition. But in the case of Israel, those measures proved soft. It was the ineptitude of the international community that reinforced the marginalization of the Israeli anti-apartheid opposition and the rise of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet in late 2022.
Apartheid and ultra-apartheid
In South Africa and Israel, apartheid rule has sought to crush all opposition by fragmenting territories, restricting mobility, forcing inequality and imposing segregation. Under the Likud and Netanyahu governments, Israel has been morphing into an apartheid state and its occupied territories into Palestinian Bantustans.
Yet, there are major differences with classic apartheid as enforced in South Africa and its Israeli version in the occupied territories. Apartheid policies can be formal and legal as in South African apartheid, or informal and semi-legal as in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
In apartheid South Africa, a white minority dominated a black majority, whereas in Israel a Jewish majority discriminates against a Palestinian minority, keeping the Palestinians under military occupation.
Third, in South Africa, the objective of apartheid was to sustain a system of racial segregation in which one group is deprived of political and civil rights, and exploited as low-cost labor. During apartheid rule, the per capita income of South African blacks relative to the whites climbed from 8.6 to 13.5 percent. The Palestinians’ starting point relative to the Israelis was almost twice as high in percentage terms. But even before October 7, 2023, it had plunged to a lower level than that of South Africa’s blacks at the end of apartheid rule.
But the ultimate difference between South African apartheid and Israel’s ultra-apartheid is ethnic cleansing – as a prelude to worse.
The ultimate difference
Unlike classic apartheid and its territorial fragmentation, degree of formality and labor exploitation, Israeli apartheid aims further. Since the UN Partition Plan, its ultimate purpose has been the Judaization of Arab Palestine and the drastic expansion of Israeli borders. Apartheid is an instrument to that goal.
Apartheid South Africa was willing to live with segregated, exploited and underprivileged black people. By contrast, since the late 1970s, the Israeli system has sought to use segregation as an interim instrument to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories through Palestinian displacement, dispossession and, if necessary, abject devastation.
In this sense, Israeli apartheid differs from South African apartheid. It is ultra-apartheid. In Latin, ultra means “beyond”, or “on the far side of.” Going beyond the norm, ultra-apartheid officially shuns classic apartheid, yet benefits from the low-cost labor while ultimately seeking its obliteration.
Today, ultra-apartheid is the inspiration of settler violence in the West Bank and the “judicial reforms” by the Netanyahu cabinet, to accelerate the transformation of the secular and democratic Jewish state into a religious and autocratic regime.
The original version was published by Informed Comment (US) on November 18, 2025.
Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
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