The resolution is not only a possible violation of UN rules, it also makes the administration directly responsible for Palestinian oppression.
US Army personnel, IDF personnel, and other international officials monitor screens displaying maps and imagery of the Gaza Strip inside the Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat, Israel.(Amir Levy / Getty Images)
The United Nations Security Council resolution passed on November 17 may be in complete violation of the UN’s own rules. And it may do as much damage to the Palestinian struggle for justice and freedom as the Oslo accords did more than 30 years ago.
The resolution is extraordinarily powerful—and profoundly dangerous. It puts the United Nations on record denying the Palestinian right of self-determination, while doing nothing to stop the Israeli assault, imposed famine, and ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. (The daily killing of Palestinians continues, with an average of two children killed every day since the ceasefire, according to UNICEF.) It also said not a word about accountability for Israel’s crimes, or about the urgency of stopping arms transfers to Israel—arms that come overwhelmingly from the United States.
And the resolution is dangerous in a bunch of other ways, too. The near-unanimous vote did not just provide a thick layer of blue-washed UN credibility to the US plan to take over colonization of Gaza, and give a UN imprimatur to Trump’s entire 20-point “peace” plan. It did not just authorize a US-commanded international “stabilization” force (not a UN protection force) to occupy Gaza potentially in perpetuity. It did not just approve a Trump- and Tony Blair–run entity to control all aspects of life—and death—in Gaza, including reconstruction (if any), humanitarian aid (if any), funding (if any), and entry and exit from the Gaza Strip. Nor did its passage merely violate key tenets of international law, treaties, and UN resolutions, including the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and recent decisions of the International Court of Justice. Or set in motion the possibility of everything the Trump administration has announced as its goals, designed to turn Gaza’s devastation into a Trump-profiting “Riviera on the Mediterranean,” with or without its people.
It did all of this in a text that leaves out the key components required for Security Council approval of the most serious act the UN Charter allows it to take: the use of armed force. That authorization can be claimed only under Chapter VII of the Charter: “Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.” Security Council Resolution 2803 never invokes Chapter VII; indeed, it never mentions it. It says and does nothing that might provide UN or any other kind of oversight of the unlimited power it handed to Trump to create an institution to govern Gaza (the “Peace Board”) and to establish and deploy a military occupation corps (International Stabilization Force) in “close consultation and cooperation” with Israel and Egypt—but not with any Palestinians.
The result is a terrible arrangement for Palestinians and a staggeringly dangerous precedent for the rest of the world. Disregarding long-standing UN rules of operation, there was no public or even private debate or careful drafting of proposals designed to reflect the requirements of the UN Charter. Instead, in just a few days, the Security Council turned its most formidable power—the right to create, deploy, and use military force—over to the president of one country, which happens to be an enabling partner in the assault underway. Trump is now empowered by the United Nations to make all decisions regarding the lives and deaths of an occupied people who have faced more than two years of genocide. He holds the UN-granted authority to decide whether, how, when, and toward what end the ravaged Gaza Strip might begin to be reconstructed.
Something like this has happened before. In 1991, the United States relied on bribes, threats, and punishments to coerce Security Council members to support resolutions authorizing a coalition of states to use military force against Iraq’s military occupation of neighboring Kuwait. But even then, Resolution 678, which called for the use of force against Iraq, specifically referenced Chapter VII. And while it was understood that the UN-authorized “coalition” would be under US control, it was not based on a preexisting personal plan created by then-President George H.W. Bush and designed to enrich him and his family.
It took months for US diplomats to orchestrate the arrangements that enabled the Security Council vote authorizing a US war against Iraq. Economic perks were offered to Colombia, Ethiopia, and Zaire, along with military aid to Ethiopia and Colombia; there were diplomatic upgrades and access to World Bank loans for China. Yemen’s “no” vote led to an immediate cutoff of all US economic assistance to the impoverished nation. Soviet support was crucial—and since the collapse of the Soviet Union was less than a month away, its vote was a given. The final vote was 12 in favor, two opposed (Cuba and Yemen), and one abstention (China). It was close enough that Washington could call it a near-unanimous vote. Bush senior went on to command a US war (with some international forces joining in) against Iraq with official authorization from the United Nations.
But even that horrific precedent followed months of public debate, drafting and redrafting by sets of diplomats and UN staff, relying on a set of earlier resolutions all explicitly taken under Chapter VII, demanding specific actions and imposing a variety of sanctions before they ever got to using force. This time, the lack of adherence to the UN Charter’s requirements and even the lack of diplomatic language indicates clearly that the text was drafted by Trump’s team, with little or no input from anyone else. It takes language directly from Trump’s own 20-point plan issued unilaterally months before. (The Gaza proposal also contains linguistic parallels to another infamous text; anyone over 45 will likely hear echoes of the “Coalition Provisional Authority” imposed by George W. Bush on Iraq in 2003 in the newly authorized “International Transitional Authority” set to govern Gaza under Trump’s control.)
The Security Council vote has turned the United Nations into a direct instrument of the Trump administration and broader US financial, political, and strategic interests.
On top of all that, what has become clear is that this resolution cannot be simply ignored as one more UN action that doesn’t help very much. It stands to pull off something even greater than what the “Oslo process” accomplished in the last 30-plus years, and probably much faster. It threatens to seriously undermine, potentially even reverse, what Palestinian freedom activists and US and global solidarity movements have achieved, especially in the last two years: the overwhelming public and escalating diplomatic isolation of Israel in recognition of its status as an apartheid state committing genocide against an occupied people, setting the stage, for the first time, for real accountability.
Indeed, Resolution 2803 provides a too-easy excuse for every nervous, vacillating, or tariff-fearing government. One can just imagine the relief in royal palaces and parliaments when they realize they can conveniently point to the recent Security Council vote as a substitute for what their people are demanding their governments do.
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So, what comes next? There are things that can be done, including by other agencies of the UN system. The General Assembly can request another Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice, asking whether the Security Council resolution is even legal since it was not taken under Chapter VII, and violated earlier specific rulings of the ICJ on such things as Palestinians’ right to self-determination, the illegality of any US military presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and more.
But ICJ advisory opinions, while powerful statements of international law, are not officially binding. While we continue building BDS campaigns, flotillas, protests, we also need to redefine what enforcement of international law looks like. That means less reliance on the agencies of the UN or other parts of the multilateral governance systems and more reliance on people—specifically on social movements around the world—to force governments to comply with international law.
Here in the United States, we need to continue pressure Congress to stop the massive shipments of weapons to Israel that enable the genocide to continue, official ceasefire or not. Our work is shaped not only by international law but also by US domestic laws—the Leahy Act, the Arms Export Control Act, and more—that make providing arms to Israel for use against Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank illegal. Increasing the current 57 cosponsors of the Block the Bombs bill in the House of Representatives is an important move. Supporting every effort at sending Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to stop every specific arms shipment is key. And the work of changing public and media discourse—work that has already convinced 75 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents to oppose all further military aid to Israel—must continue.
For Palestinian solidarity movements around the world, UN agencies and other parts of the international system of multilateral governance have issued clear determinations of what individual governments must do to end Israel’s genocide and apartheid practices. ICJ rulings in the genocide case and its Advisory Opinion of July 2024 identified a whole range of Israeli violations, and a list of what states should do to end them. The General Assembly in September 2024 passed a powerful resolution under the Uniting for Peace precedent, calling on individual governments to implement the ICJ’s list of sanctions, and added more, including calls for mechanisms to hold Israel accountable for its violations, and for preventing arms, military equipment, fuel and more from going to Israel. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The vote in the Security Council was by 15 countries—some of whom clearly voted out of fear of US punishment rather than agreement with the text. There are 179 other countries in the United Nations. If many of those governments, perhaps facing massive protests at home, decide to ignore the terms of the Security Council’s latest resolution and instead implement arms embargoes and other actions already called for by international institutions and Palestinian and global civil society, Israel would soon be unable to continue its genocidal apartheid policies.
Phyllis BennisPhyllis Bennis is director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her new book is Understanding Palestine and Israel.