17 November 2025, on which the UN Security Council adopted the US-Israeli resolution, will go down in the history of the UN as a day of shame. “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. Yet, at the grassroots and civil society levels, apartheid Israel is more isolated than ever worldwide, thanks to the meaningful solidarity of millions, mainly expressed through the inspiring growth of the BDS movement and its global impact. 

The Trump-Netanyahu genocidal plan for Gaza, now partially endorsed by this UNSC resolution, is designed to break Israel’s isolation and rehabilitate its regime of apartheid and genocide, mainly through the normalization of relations with Arab and Muslim-majority states, some of which reportedly thwarted a possible veto by China and Russia at the UNSC yesterday. This patently illegal plan aims to engineer an international support structure for Israel’s less visible yet still livestreamed genocide and underlying regime of apartheid and illegal occupation. The Palestinian BDS National Committee, the largest Palestinian civil society coalition, calls for broad popular pressure to confront the US-Israeli genocidal axis and defeat their coercive scheme that is imposed through force, and that violates international law and the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. 

By restoring traditional western colonialism, this US-Israeli plan poses a threat to people across the globe. South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, Malaysia’s president Anwar Ibrahim and Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro came together in March this year to warn about an earlier version of the current plan. They said “The recent proposal by US President Donald Trump to ‘take over’ Gaza […] strikes at the very foundations of international law, which the global community has a duty to defend.” As early as October 2023, days into Israel’s genocidal attack in Gaza, Colombian President Gustavo Petro raised the alarm about the “unprecedented rise of fascism, and therefore, to the death of democracy and freedom.” “Gaza,” he alerted, “is just the first experiment in considering us all disposable” and in bringing in a might-makes-right era. Giving us a taste of this, the US has been projecting its imperial power in the Caribbean and elsewhere, committing serious violations of international law. 

The US plan for Gaza, imposed on behalf of Israel’s fascist government, inherently entrenches Israel’s illegal occupation and the denial of Palestinian rights, particularly the right to self determination, the right of return and reparation for refugees, and the right of the entire Indigenous people of Palestine to live in freedom, justice and equality, without occupation or apartheid. 

The plan seeks, among other things, to create a so-called “Board of Peace” and an “International Stabilization Force” (ISF), effectively setting up a colonial protectorate to safeguard Israel’s illegal occupation and ensure most of Gaza remains uninhabitable. Falsely claiming that “the parties have accepted” Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan” (Para. 1, UNSC Res. 2803), and thereby ignoring the overwhelming Palestinian consensus in rejecting the authority of any US-Israeli controlled foreign government in Gaza, the UNSC resolution seeks to legitimize a US-Israeli puppet government. This is in stark violation of the prohibition on the use of force under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as well as of the Palestinian right to self-determination, sovereignty, and territorial integrity under Articles 1(2), 2(4), and 55 of the UN Charter. 

The US-Israeli plan is also in evident breach of the Genocide Convention, the Apartheid convention, and the Geneva Conventions. All of these international instruments confer stringent legal obligations for all States vis-a-vis Palestine by virtue of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Provisional Measures Order of 26 January 2024, ICJ Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024, UNGA Resolution of 18 September 2024. The Security Council’s adoption of major parts of this colonial plan therefore further erodes its already-declining credibility and feeds into the US-Israeli led demolition of international law to which other colonial powers, such as the UK and Germany, have contributed. 

The U.S and Israel hope to achieve through this plan what their genocide has so far failed to induce–the ethnic cleansing of most Palestinians from Gaza. It also explicitly seeks to suppress all forms of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s colonial regime, creating concentration camps controlled by the ISF and Israel.

The same way UNSC Resolution 1483 failed to confer legitimacy upon the 2003-2004 US-puppet government in Iraq, the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority, the recent UNSC resolution on Gaza must and will be deemed invalid under international law—without any legal effect whatsoever—and will not affect the inherent, inviolable and UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.

The impunity this plan grants Israel allows it to continue its starvation, wanton killing, forced displacement, and suffocating siege against our people in Gaza, most of whom are refugees of the 1948 Nakba. At the same time, it entrenches Israel’s apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, allows for its escalated aggression against our fraternal Arab peoples in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Qatar, and deepens its complicity in genocide in Sudan. 

The BDS movement calls for pressure on all states to:

• Mobilize opposition in the UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council and all other UN bodies to oppose the illegal Trump-Netanyahu plan and act to prevent its implementation.  
• Uphold international law, particularly the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, and act on their legal obligations to prevent, end, abstain from any recognition of or aid or assistance to Israel’s atrocity crimes and illegal acts against the Indigenous Palestinian people. 
• Hold Israel and its accomplices accountable for the genocide and underlying regime of illegal military occupation and apartheid through lawful, targeted sanctions – starting with comprehensive military, energy and trade embargoes.
• Join and strengthen The Hague Group and all other initiatives aimed at upholding international law.

We call on all people to escalate BDS campaigns, to redouble the pressure for lawful, targeted sanctions globally, and to intensify grassroots pressure to confront Palestinian and Arab normalization as a central pillar in burying the colonial Trump-Netanyahu plan as many colonial projects have been defeated before.

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