Crumbling international order that gave Israel carte blanche
The post-1945 order promised institutions, justice and rights, and the UN enshrined the ‘responsibility to protect’. But the Gaza war has shown that all such claims are hollow.
Hunger: Palestinians queue for hot meals distributed by charity organisations, Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza, 17 May 2025
Mahmoud Issa · Anadolu · Getty
The period since 7 October 2023 marks the worst chapter yet in the Palestinian people’s long ordeal. Worse even than the Nakba – ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic – of 1948, referring to events which have subsequently been called ‘ethnic cleansing’. The current catastrophe is characterised, among other things, by genocide. Thus, a stronger Arabic term is necessary to describe the misery being visited upon Palestine: karitha. Israel is slaughtering a part of the Gazan population without giving up ethnic cleansing, both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. ‘Gaza will be totally destroyed,’ Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich announced at a conference on 6 May this year in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. Civilians will be ‘concentrated’ in the south, from where they ‘will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places’.
Donald Trump sensed an opportunity in the threat. He may seek to win his Arab allies over to an updated version of the ‘deal of the century’, which they roundly rejected in 2020. The plan proposed a rump ‘state of Palestine’ and, compared with the prospect of ethnic cleansing, now looks like the lesser of two evils. Saudi Arabia would join the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco – and before them Egypt and Jordan – in normalising relations with Israel. Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu would be handed a victory they could boast about, but fundamentally very little would be resolved. The future of the Middle East – and indeed international relations as a whole – seems bleak.
Israel would have refrained, as in the past, from launching a ground operation in Gaza had it not secured international legitimacy for harming Gazan civilians Yagil Levy
The deterioration of the international order did not begin with Trump’s return to the White House. As journalist Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, ‘Even before Trump took office, the “rules-based (…)
Full article: 2 173 words.
Gilbert Achcar
Gilbert Achcar is the author of The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective, Saqi, London/University of California Press, Berkely, 2025, from which this text has been adapted.