The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) voted Monday by 13 votes to 0 to approve would-be US dictator Donald Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza, including the creation of a colonial-style “board of peace” to oversee the territory. The overwhelming support given to the plan, which tramples on the democratic rights and the very right of the Palestinians to exist, came as Israel continues to bombard targets in Gaza and Lebanon with impunity.
The resolution was introduced by the United States, Israel’s key supplier of weapons and political support during its two-year-long genocide against the Palestinians. The document embraced Trump, hailing his proposal as a “historic” deal that represented a “new course in the Middle East for Israelis and Palestinians and all the people of the region alike.”
Moreover, the UNSC authorised the creation of an “international stability force” to police Gaza on behalf of the imperialist powers and gave UN approval for the creation of Trump’s unelected “board of peace” (BoP) to dictate Gaza’s future. Trump will chair this body, which will also include among its members the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair. The international stability force will be accountable to no internationally recognised institution, but placed under Trump’s direct oversight, with the resolution declaring that military force would “deploy under unified command acceptable to the BoP.”
As if this wasn’t enough of an outrage, the resolution also praised “the constructive role of the United States of America” for “having facilitated the ceasefire.”
The fact of the matter is that American imperialism facilitated the genocide of the Palestinians. The Biden and Trump administrations supplied the Zionist regime with tens of billions of dollars in high-powered weaponry since Israel launched its onslaught on Gaza in October 2023. Authorities in the US and all of its imperialist allies viciously cracked down on anti-genocide protests and sought to smear them as “antisemites.” Trump held numerous meetings with the war criminal and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to oversee the ongoing genocide, while ensuring that the outstanding arrest warrant for Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court has yet to be carried out. And all of this came after decades in which Washington was instrumental to Israel’s relentless persecution and dispossession of the Palestinians.
Underlining the UNSC’s support for all of these crimes, and the continued attacks on and starvation of the Palestinians by Israel, the resolution included in its entirety Trump’s “peace plan” in an annex.
The absurdity of describing the Trump administration’s plan as a peace agreement was underscored in the days following Monday’s UN vote. On Wednesday alone, Israel killed at least 25 people across the enclave in a series of air strikes, which the Zionist regime asserted were launched after gunshots were fired at soldiers, causing no injuries. Since the Trump plan went into force last month, Israel has killed some 280 Palestinians in Gaza and continued to back rampant far-right settler violence to annex land in the West Bank.
Israel persists in systematically blocking aid into Gaza, which is still falling well short of the 600 truckloads a day promised when the ceasefire began. It also arbitrarily seizes on alleged “violations” to carry out bloody murders of Palestinian civilians, including when they cross new lines of control unilaterally drawn by the US in consultation with Israel that allow the Israel Defense Force to maintain a substantial presence in Gaza.
Israel’s fascist government led by Netanyahu also launched air strikes on a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon Tuesday night, killing 13 people. After Israel slaughtered some 4,000 people in Lebanon during last year’s air bombardment and ground incursion into the country’s south, it has continued almost daily air strikes on supposed Hezbollah targets since a ceasefire was struck in late November 2024. The UN has verified 100 civilian casualties in Lebanon during this period of supposed “peace.”
Monday’s UN vote provides yet another devastating exposure of the dead end of the perspective of protest politics that has guided the leaderships of the anti-genocide demonstrations around the world since 2023. The anger of millions of people was misdirected behind making bankrupt appeals to the UN and the consciences of politicians to reconsider their support for Israel’s imperialist-backed extermination of the Palestinians and pursue a different policy.
But the unanimity with which Trump’s “peace plan” has been adopted underscores that what is involved here is not merely a policy choice, but the pursuit of definite geostrategic and economic interests by all of the imperialist powers. They view the consolidation of a US-dominated Middle East as the best way to sideline rivals like China and Russia, while at the same time they seek to ruthlessly advance their interests in a bitter conflict among themselves over how to divide up the spoils.
As for the capitalist regimes in Moscow and Beijing, they chose to let Trump’s resolution pass by abstaining in the vote, which either of them could have blocked with a veto. Part of their motivation for this course was the despicable role played by all of the despotic Arab regimes, who have swung behind Trump’s plan but also serve as important trading partners and sources of investment for Russia and China. However, the more fundamental reason is that both the Putin and Xi regimes represent the interests of oligarchies that want nothing more than an accommodation with imperialism to secure a share of the spoils in a new redivision of the world and the “right” to continue brutally exploiting their own working class.
The UNSC vote confirms once more the continued relevance of Lenin’s description of the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, as a “thieves kitchen” of imperialism. Over the past two years, the UN has published a series of damning reports and statements exposing the barbarism of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians. Figures like UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albenese, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, and even to some extent Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, have denounced the Zionist regime for its indiscriminate killing of civilians, its use of starvation as a weapon of war, the forcible expulsion of millions of Palestinians, and the intentional destruction of hospitals and other social infrastructure. Netanyahu and his fascist ministers routinely attacked the institution as an agency of “Hamas” and denied many officials the right to enter the country. But when all is said and done, the UN, as it did in the destruction of Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya and other targets of imperialist war, has rubber-stamped the Gaza genocide.
The urgent lesson for workers and young people who participated in anti-genocide protests to draw from the UN vote and the entire experience of two years of genocide is that the international working class is the only social force capable of leading a successful struggle against capitalist barbarism. The Gaza genocide is an expression of the barbaric methods the imperialist powers and their attack dogs will deploy in the struggle to redivide the world. Rooted in the crisis-ridden capitalist system, genocide and war cannot be stopped through moral appeals to the politicians guilty of perpetrating these crimes, but only through the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by workers’ power and socialism.
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution has never been as relevant as it is today, both for the Palestinians and the working class in the imperialist centres. The co-leader of the Russian Revolution with Lenin insisted that all outstanding democratic and social aspirations in the oppressed countries could be realised only under the leadership of the working class fighting for socialism. In connection with the Middle East, this entails the fight for the political independence of the workers and rural poor from all factions of the bourgeoisie, and the development of the closest fighting alliance with the working class in the imperialist centres of North America and Europe. Only on this basis can the Palestinian masses secure their rights in the struggle for the United Socialist States of the Middle East, a programme that depends upon the victory of the working class against imperialism throughout the world and the socialist transformation of society.