Calling for a United Nations peacekeeping force to deliver aid to Gaza and end the conflict in Palestine is a practical and political dead end. Bob Sparks explains.
Calls are growing within the Palestine solidarity movement and beyond for the United Nations to step in militarily to deliver aid and enforce a ceasefire in Gaza.
While the impulse is understandable, the outcome would be disastrous. Appealing to the UN to send in troops is a dead end – both practically and politically. Further, it risks diverting the movement into illusions in the very institutions that uphold the global order of imperialism.
Former senior UN human rights official Craig Mokhiber has called for the UN to invoke the Uniting for Peace resolution. Under the banner of Lifeline for Palestine, a range of civil society groups including a number of nationwide US Muslim societies, the anti-war organisation Code Pink and the Green Party of California have added their names to this call.
Last week, in his speech to the UN General Assembly, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro called for an emergency UN armed protection force for Gaza to be agreed while the UN General Assembly meets.
We need a powerful army of the countries that do not accept genocide. That is why I invite nations of the world and their peoples more than anything, as an integral part of humanity, to bring together weapons and armies. We must liberate Palestine. I invite the armies of Asia, the great Slavic people who defeated Hitler with great heroism and the Latin American armies of Bolivar.
President Gustavo Petro of Colombia
This is nothing short of a call for a world war between Europe and Latin America on one hand and the United States and Israel on the other over ‘plucky’ and embattled Palestine.
In Australia, Labor Friends of Palestine NSW, which has done tireless and principled work campaigning for a ceasefire and meaningful sanctions against Israel, has added its voice to these calls, urging the Australian government to push for a UN peacekeeping force under the Uniting for Peace Resolution. As friends and comrades, we ask them to seriously reconsider this dangerous position.
LFOP is now the main source of opposition in the NSW ALP to pro-Zionist NSW Labor leader Chris Minns and his right-wing “Centre Unity” faction. Almost two years of persistent work by LFOP has led to the group’s co-convenor Peter Moss being elected to the party’s National Policy Forum on an explicitly pro-Palestine, anti-AUKUS platform.
Figures in the broader peace movement have also rallied behind this line, including Ian Lowe and Kellie Tranter, both patrons of the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN). No doubt more will follow from those with a ‘touching faith’ in the United Nations. The growing chorus reflects the urgency felt across the world as Israel’s onslaught continues, but it is a hopeless project.
This path is either a fantasy, dangerous, or both. It is a fantasy as the United States will never allow it, even if UN member states seek to circumvent the UN Security Council by invoking the Uniting for Peace Resolution 377A.
And it is dangerous, because if pursued, any military intervention would immediately lead to a war between whichever powers front the UN force against Israel and the US.
It is politically dangerous, too, as it creates illusions in the UN, a roadblock to human progress, not its harbinger. With the global workers’ movement at a political nadir, looking for other forces to solve global problems might seem a short cut, but it simply will not work and could create further misery.
‘Uniting for Peace’ an initiative of US imperialism
The UN system was created after the Second World War as a balancing mechanism between the major powers, cementing US dominance alongside a declining British Empire and a Soviet Union seeking ‘peaceful coexistence’ in order to entrench its buffer zone in Eastern Europe.
Writing in New Left Review at the time of the Iraq War in 2003, the late Peter Gowan wrote, the UN was “from the beginning, a project of the United States, devised by the State Department, expertly guided by two hands-on Presidents, and propelled by US power”. Far from representing global democracy, the UN was built to police the world in the interests of the great powers.
This is no abstract point. Resolutions of the General Assembly are not legally binding. Any binding resolution must go through the Security Council, where the US has wielded its veto more than 50 times to shield Israel since 1970 – including six times in the last two years alone to block calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Even if the Uniting for Peace resolution were invoked, history shows it is no path forward for Palestine.
Consider its origins. The resolution was crafted by the US in 1950 to circumvent possible Soviet vetoes preventing ‘legal’ US intervention in the Korean civil war. Ultimately, with the USSR boycotting the UN Security Council to protest the exclusion of the newly established People’s Republic of China, the Uniting for Peace mechanism was not needed.
When used in the Suez Crisis of 1956, it was Washington’s instrument to humble its imperial rivals Britain and France, not a genuine step toward peace. Since then, it has been used sparingly – 13 times in 75 years – and never once to the benefit of the Palestinian people. Three attempts to apply it against Israel have produced nothing but decades-long “emergency sessions” that change nothing on the ground.
To imagine today that this mechanism will suddenly be wielded against US imperialism and its client state is fantasy. To enforce such a mandate would require military confrontation with Israel, and thus with the United States.
Which states are supposed to send troops into Gaza to face off against the IDF and the Pentagon’s arsenal? South Africa? Colombia? Australia? This is not international solidarity – it is a recipe for inter-imperialist war, a murderous trap for the working class.
We must also be clear: the UN’s record on peacekeeping is one of serving imperialism, not resisting it. In Congo in 1960, UN troops assisted in overthrowing Patrice Lumumba, the radical nationalist who threatened Western mining interests. In Afghanistan, Hungary, and elsewhere, Uniting for Peace resolutions condemned Soviet interventions but were utterly ineffective. When the UN has acted decisively, it has almost always been at Washington’s behest.
Those who point to UN sanctions on apartheid South Africa forget that it was not UN resolutions that brought the racist regime down, but the combined force of an insurgent mass movement at home, workers’ boycotts abroad, and the growing untenability of the system itself.
The lesson is clear: liberation was won through struggle, not by outsourcing the fight to international institutions controlled by the class enemy.
The Palestine solidarity movement must resist the temptation to call for salvation from the very structures that sustain oppression. The first line of the UN Charter proclaims the goal “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Yet the record since 1945 is one of endless war, occupation and imperial domination. As Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin said of the League of Nations a century ago, it is nothing more than “a den of thieves”. The UN is its direct successor.
Our global future cannot lie in a federation of capitalist states, sometimes at war, sometimes at peace, supposedly balanced by the UN. Our future lies in the working class, across borders, coming to power and resolving one of the central contradictions of capitalism: an international economy and emerging human social culture organised around capitalist nation-states.
The hope for Palestine will come not from UN blue helmets, but from the solidarity of workers in the region and across the world – with strikes, sanctions, boycotts. More importantly it will come from political struggle against our own ruling classes and the political struggle of the Arab masses to establish a democratic socialism in the Middle East.
Calling on the UN to deploy troops in Gaza may sound bold, but it is in fact a retreat into dangerous illusions.
With Marcus Strom