Helena Cobban – Globalities

As the UN crumbles, what?

Helena CobbanNovember 21, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global governance, U.S. policy, Uncategorized, United Nations

As someone born in the early 1950s, I have never known a world without the United Nations. But by adopting Security Council Resolution 2803 (text) on November 17, the 15 states that sit on the UN’s most authoritative body, the Security Council, have now knowingly given a green light to the genocidal American-Israeli assault on Gaza, in clear violation of all the norms and values on which the UN was founded.

Thirteen of those states (including four Muslim-majority nations) voted for the U.S.-presented resolution. China and Russia, either of which could have blocked it by wielding a veto, chose not to do so. It seems that all those 15 states are prepared to rip up the entire international “system” of which the UN is the linchpin, and to let the world crumble into a stew of “might-makes-right” anarchy.

Craig Mokhiber, the 30-year veteran of the UN’s human-rights system who resigned his post in late October 2023 when he accused the UN of having failed to prevent Israel’s already-underway genocide in Gaza, published a powerful and well-documented piece on Resolution 2803 on Mondoweiss November 19. It clearly laid out the many ways in which Resolution 2803 violated longstanding UN norms, including those enshrined in its 1945 Charter.

In a discussion with Ali Abunimah on the EI Livestream yesterday, Mokhiber developed his critique even further. He noted that Resn. 2803 gives Pres. Trump the sole authority, via his position as head of the grotesquely mis-named “Board of Peace”, to do anything he wants regarding the administration of Gaza. Mokhiber’s comment: “It’s not even colonial, it’s King Leopold-esque.” (That recalled the fact that during the grossly genocidal period of “Belgian” rule over the Congo, 1885-1908, that whole vast territory was being administered as the personal property of Belgium’s King Leopold II.)

How to deal with resisting Natives: The Kushner plan for Gaza

Helena CobbanNovember 14, 2025November 14, 2025Gaza, Settler colonialism, White empire

Suspected Mau Mau sympathizers rounded up by British in Kenya, 1952

Imagine that, in any century from the 15th century of the Common Era through the present, you’ve made all the plans for a long-distance settler-colonial project. (Bear with me a short while here…) You’ve done a lot of prep work. You’ve pulled together the means of financing this venture and sharing the risks involved, your mode of long-distance transportation, your teams of settlers and the means of protecting their armed encroachment onto a distant land… Finally, you’re ready. You embark your well-armed teams onto your boats and go to the distant land where you want to establish your colony. Ideally you’ve landed in a place with plenty of valuable natural resources, and upon arrival you immediately set out to establish your physical control over as much of the land and resources as you can.

Then, darn it, you discover: There were people in this land before you! They’ve been here for generations. They know all the ways of this ecosystem. They know how to optimize use of its resources, its waterways, and its other means of communication. They have long-established communities with good means of communicating, traveling, and trading across far distances. They have believed for many generations that this land and its resources belong to them. And as soon as they realize that your goal is not simply to trade with them but to seize control of the land and resources, they start to resist.

Very often, their resistance is dogged, fierce, and smart. So now, like any one of the scores of European organizers of long-distance settler-colonial projects before you, you have the dilemma of “What on earth shall we do with these Natives?”

Zionism (& other settler colonialisms) in world-historical perspective

Helena CobbanOctober 24, 2025December 5, 2025Israel, Palestine, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy3 Comments

It’s been a long time since I read either Fayez Sayegh’s seminal Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965) or Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973.) In the intervening decades, a lot has happened…

Sayegh was one of the intellectual fathers of the famous “Zionism is Racism” resolution that UN General Assembly adopted in 1975, and rescinded, under super-heavy American pressure, 16 years later. He died in 1980…

Rodinson was a brilliant French Marxist and an early and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. (His use of the question-mark in his book’s title I emulated in my 2004 book Amnesty After Atrocity?; in both cases, it was a way of indicating that we had heard and engaged with the arguments of the critics of our main thesis.) Rodinson died in 2004…

Other things that have happened since I read those two books were:

The status and meaning of Trump’s Gaza ceasefire deal

Helena CobbanOctober 14, 2025October 14, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, U.S. policy

On October 10, the devastating bombings and other attacks that the Israeli military has undertaken against Gaza nearly continuously for the past two years finally came a halt. (Or nearly so, see below.) The Israeli military’s massive tanks and bulldozers began to lumber their way out of some– but far from all– of the parts of Gaza they had devastated over those 24 months. Some aid trucks started to roll in. Hundreds of thousands of the Palestinians who’d been forced, under withering Israeli fire, to evacuate south from Gaza City started to trudge back north to their former– very often completely pulverized– homes.

Phases of withdrawal in Trump’s plan. Source. Click to enlarge.

U.S. Pres. Trump was the one who successfully forced the Israeli government to sign onto that ceasefire agreement. (He could, at any moment since his inauguration back in January, have used Washington’s near-complete sway over Israel’s military decisionmaking to force that same outcome… And so, at any point in the preceding 15 months, could his predecessor in the White House. How many thousands of lives and destinies would have been saved?)

On October 13, as the reciprocal captive-exchange portions of the October 10 agreement were completed, Trump organized two large, splashy public events– one in Israel, one in Egypt– at which with his now horribly familiar braggadocio he took his victory laps for the ceasefire.

Hamas in negotiations– and on the ground

Helena CobbanOctober 10, 2025October 10, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Qatar, U.S. policy1 Comment

Text of Oct. 9 agreement. Click to enlarge.

The clock started ticking at Noon Palestine Time today on implementation of the 6-step ceasefire + captive-release agreement negotiated in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, by Pres. Trump and his three Muslim-state mediation partners. Those talks were held on a “proximity” basis with, presumably, the Israeli negotiators in one room, the Palestinian resistance alliance led by veteran Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya in another, and various groups of mediators shuttling between them.

(That’s Khalil Al-Hayya, above.)

The negotiators in Sharm had reached agreement on their 6-step plan on Thursday, but per Step 2 therein, implementation awaited the approval of the Israeli government. That was achieved this morning.

The prescribed ceasefire and many signs of an Israeli military pullback started at Noon today (local.) By that time, thousands of Palestinians whom the Israelis had previously expelled south from Northern Gaza under fire were already streaming back toward their homes in the north.

On ‘Condemning Hamas’

Helena CobbanOctober 1, 2025October 2, 2025Diplomacy, Discourse suppression, Gaza, Israel, U.S. policy

I was at an in-person event here in Washington yesterday, and I raised the matter of Hamas, noting that the title of Rami Khouri’s and my recent book Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters is still very relevant. One of the speakers was the Egyptian-American Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid. He responded by making a few fairly smart observations– but then he loudly repeated the injunction that has been his watchword throughout the past two years: “We must condemn Hamas!”

I guess that is the price Hamid feels he must pay to have access to the pages of Jeff Bezos’s failing, but still influential, rag here in the U.S. capital. Maybe he even believes it. But why? What does it actually mean to “condemn” an entire movement– and one, moreover, with which our national government has been negotiating, with varying degrees of intensity, for more than 18 months now?

A movement, therefore, whose inner workings and worldview it would presumably be very useful for both government officials and informed citizens to understand as well as possible…

A Jewish State in Palestine: The UN’s Original Sin?

Helena CobbanSeptember 26, 2025September 27, 2025Diplomacy, Global balance, Global governance, Israel, Palestine, United Nations2 Comments

On a day when an indicted war criminal and the author and Kommandant of an ongoing genocide gets to speak from the rostrum of the world’s most august and authoritative governance body… We should ask whether this tradition of coddling and endlessly appeasing the leaders of a brutal settler-colonial project in Palestine dates back, indeed, to the founding years of the United Nations and the decision an earlier UN General Assembly took in November 1947 to partition historic Palestine and assign to that small proportion of its residents who were participants in the Zionist settler project, their own independent ethno-state state and to allocate to it, moreover, a wildly disproportionate amount of Palestine’s fertile land and other resources.

Today, at a time when Israel’s government and military continue their genocide in Gaza– and their ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank… and their continuing aggressions against Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and even a small unarmed flotilla of humanitarian activists– we should ask whether this two-year-long orgy of Israeli violence is now bringing down not just the global power of its main backer in world affairs (whose own foundation as a “nation” lay also, lest we forget, in a settler-extremist rebellion against the metropole), but also the United Nations itself.

Gaza, and the UN at 80

Helena CobbanAugust 20, 2025August 22, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global economy, Global governance, United Nations

Above: A scene from the June 1945 signing of the U.N. Charter

For many decades now, Israel has acted as the tip of the spear for “White”, Western colonial domination of West Asia and much of North Africa. Through prodigious and focused efforts, Israel’s leaders so successfully meshed their military and technological elites with those of the United States that they achieved a large degree of control over U.S. actions in countries from Iran to Libya– including, of course, U.S. policy on the crucial Palestine Question.

The fully U.S.-backed genocide that Israel has pursued for the past two years in Gaza has echoed a lengthy string of similar actions that “White” colonial powers– including the United States–have enacted against Indigenous peoples on all continents for the past five centuries. In today’s largely post-colonial world, this genocide has thus provoked a tsunami of revulsion across (and beyond) the whole of the Global South. This has greatly reduced the appeal and “soft power” that, before October 2023, Washington was able to deploy in its conduct of world affairs. It has also thrust the 30-year-long, de-facto hegemony that Washington has exercised over the UN’s global-level decision-making into ever sharper question.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the international reaction to it are now seen by many as marking the beginning of the end of the lengthy domination that “White”, European-origined governments have exercised for many centuries over much of the Global South.

We should note, too, that during this genocide Israel’s leaders have harshly attacked not only the steps that various bodies of the now 80-year-old United Nations have taken to end or temper the genocide, but also the foundations of UN legitimacy itself. They have thus presented the post-1945 world system with the greatest challenge it has ever seen.

Last June saw the 80th anniversary of the signing in San Francisco of the UN Charter by the leaders of all 51 of the world’s then-recognized independent governments. (That was before the dismantling of the large, globe-girdling European empires. Today, the UN has 193 members.) This September will see the opening of the 80th annual session of the UN General Assembly (GA). At this year’s GA more questions than ever before will be raised about the dysfunctionality of the UN rule that has allowed Washington to repeatedly wield its veto in the UN Security Council to block the Council from acting to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or to end Israel’s many other gross violations of international law across West Asia.

Palestinian statehood and international legitimacy

Helena CobbanAugust 3, 2025August 3, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, Palestine, Settler colonialism, United Nations

The recent announcements by the governments of France and the U.K. that they have some (limited) readiness to “recognize” a Palestinian state change nothing– either regarding the genocide in Gaza or in the diplomacy over the Palestine Question more broadly. What they do do, however, is highlight once again the debate that has long simmered within the Palestinian-rights movement over whether the goal of the Palestinian movement should be a fully democratic one-state situation (‘solution’) or a two-state situation in which Palestinian and majority-Jewish Israeli states co-exist side-by-side in the land of historic (Mandate-era) Palestine.

But maybe now is a good time to re-examine another formula that’s been on the table for nearly 80 years now: that of, effectively, the three-state situation prescribed by the Partition Plan for Palestine as defined in the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 181 of November 1947?

That 1947 Partition Plan is, after all, the only authoritative and geographically delineated plan for governance in historic Palestine that carries the imprimatur of the UN and thereby its certificate of international legitimacy. And we should all care about international legitimacy, right?

Extent of the US-Israeli backfire in their June war on Iran

Helena CobbanJuly 12, 2025July 12, 2025Global balance, Iran, Israel, Nuclear terror, U.S. military

On July 1, Sina Toossi published an important piece in Foreign Policy mag in which he argued that the “12-day war” that the US-Israeli alliance launched against Iran on June 13 had backfired, primarily in terms of its nuclear-nonproliferation goals. He wrote:

There is no question that Israel achieved notable tactical successes, inflicting serious damage on Iran’s military command and scientific infrastructure. But … based on available evidence, Netanyahu’s core goals—undermining Iran’s deterrence and meaningfully rolling back the elements of its nuclear program that pose the greatest proliferation risk—remain unmet.

One of the most significant failures lies in the nuclear file…While Trump administration officials have insisted that the strikes set Iran’s program back by years, early U.S. and European intelligence assessments suggest otherwise.

On July 8, Israeli military/intel analyst Moty Kanias followed up with this analysis, along similar but notably broader lines. Here were his heading and subhead: