By JAMES MARKIN

As the brutal violence has dragged on in Gaza, many around the world have looked toward the United Nations as a potential peacemaker to bring an end to the violence. As we have seen over the last months, the UN is wholly incapable of playing that role. This is only a confirmation of what socialists have long said about the United Nations, that its promise to enforce a peaceful world order is entirely fraudulent. The policy of the great ruling powers is, in fact, not motivated by a commitment to peace and human rights but instead for the benefit of their respective ruling classes.

In order to understand the failure of the UN, you have to understand its origins. Following the Second World War, the victorious group of imperialist countries, led by the United States, cobbled together a new “international forum,” which they dominated, to help stabilize capitalism and to bolster imperialist control worldwide.

For the record, however, the great powers proclaimed an end to mass killing and vowed to bring about a brighter and more just future through international cooperation and diplomacy. But every last word in this promise was a lie, as was demonstrated a few years later when the U.S., under the banner of the United Nations, undertook the murderous war in Korea in order to deny the reunification of the peninsula and the extension of the so-called “Communist bloc” of nations.

Even before that, in 1947, the false humanitarianism of the imperialist world was blown apart by the UN’s partition of Palestine, which led to the horrors of the Nakba. The UN had no moral authority to cede any of this land against the clearly expressed wishes of those who lived on it. Moreover, while the UN partition plan posed as being even handed, it in reality granted a disproportionate amount of land to the smaller Jewish population.

The borders that the UN drew were, from their outset, entirely unworkable; from the beginning, the new Arab states and the Zionist movement were well aware that the plan would not lead to two new states but rather to civil war. The great powers then watched as the Zionist movement forced Palestinians from their homes into crowded refugee camps in places like Gaza and Nablus. Since then, we have seen never-ending violence meted out by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people. Despite big words and lots of talk about the “peace process,” imperialism has still not been able to solve the crisis.

Now as then, Palestine remains an open wound on the skin of the world order. Following the daring and bloody offensive by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has begun a campaign of genocidal violence on a level not seen since the collapse of Yugoslavia and the brutal massacres at Srebrenica. Months after the butchery in Gaza began, after the failed truce and with Israel revoking their already broken promise of safety in southern Gaza, United Nations secretary General Antonio Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN charter in a last-ditch effort to bring an end to the killing. This rarely used power allowed Guterres to force the UN Security Council to consider a proposal for a ceasefire resolution by the UAE.

The next week, the UN General Assembly passed a similar resolution that called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” which was met with overwhelming support from the international community. However, a General Assembly resolution often means nothing unless the Security Council is willing to support it. This Friday, the Security Council finally passed a resolution, but only once all language calling for an end to hostilities had been stripped out. This was of course to placate the USA, which ultimately abstained from voting on the motion.

The whole saga of peace resolutions in the United Nations demonstrates two things. First, it shows that the U.S. is quickly losing the argument when it comes to Israel’s campaign of genocide. With no country of significant population besides the U.S. willing to oppose the general assembly resolution, and the lack of significant support for Biden’s latest military coalition against Yemen, it is apparent that even the powers that are normally subordinate to the United States are being forced to back away from Israel’s killing fields in Gaza.

The second thing that the UN votes demonstrate is the degree to which the UN is a meaningless façade for the real business of imperialist war. With the USA behind it, Israel is well aware that it can ignore any resolution from the United Nations. Once again, all the humanitarian promises of the current world order could not prevent the death of even a single Palestinian. The NGOs and Human Rights organizations stand helpless as Israel makes a mockery of the vow to “never again” allow genocide to take place.

Thus, the situation of Palestine, both in 1948 and 2024, reveal the lie that there is an “international community” of nations dedicated to peace and human prosperity. The reality is that, instead, the UN represents a club of capitalist governments dominated by a small clique of imperialist great powers—the USA, China, Great Britain, France, and Russia. The veto of any one of these permanent Security Council members is enough to shut down any initiative. This guarantees that the world’s great imperialist states have a free hand to carry out any kind of grotesque violence they want without interference from the United Nations. Since Israel is a client of Yankee imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean, it has a green light to carry out genocide as long as it has Washington’s support.

This is why a final end to the long war on Palestine will not come from the UN chambers in New York. The only force that has both the power and the desire to end the genocide of Palestinians is the Palestinian working class, backed up by the working masses of the Middle East. Through their desperate attempt to make the Abraham Accords work, the U.S. and Israel have shown that Israel’s continued existence requires the majority of the region to live under despotic dictatorships. This is because the sympathy of the Arab working class is totally with Palestine, and the establishment of a democratic government in any of the neighboring countries would essentially amount to war against the state of Israel.

If the Arab working class were to triumph over the currently existing imperialist-backed regimes, they would have the social force necessary to play the role of the reinforcements that the Palestinian working class needs to push on towards victory. It is our job as the working class abroad to do everything in our power to aid in both the Palestinian struggle and the broader Arab struggle for liberation.

Photo: Palestinians flee attack on their village by Zionist settlers in 1948, begin march to exile in Lebanon.