What is at stake here goes far beyond moral inconsistency. It concerns the material architecture of global power — the way law, military force, capital, and political legitimacy are organised to preserve a deeply unequal world order. The United Nations, and particularly the Security Council, was never designed to dismantle empire. It was constructed to stabilise it, offering procedural legitimacy to a system in which domination could continue under the language of rules, resolutions, and managed dissent. When that architecture is tested — when legality threatens to impose real costs on an allied colonial project — the response is not enforcement, but obstruction.
Resolution 2334, adopted in 2016, clearly affirms that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law. It did not introduce new norms; it merely restated principles long embedded in international humanitarian law. Yet even this minimal reaffirmation has become intolerable. Washington’s refusal to allow briefings on the resolution signals a deeper truth: when law risks disrupting a settler-colonial project aligned with imperial interests, the law itself becomes politically inadmissible. Silence is manufactured, procedure is weaponised, and accountability is indefinitely deferred.
Israeli settlements are not the product of religious zealotry alone, nor are they spontaneous acts of extremism. They are a systematic material process — a political economy of accumulation organised through dispossession. Land is confiscated, movement is controlled, water is monopolised, and Palestinian labour is disciplined or rendered redundant. Entire communities are fractured into isolated enclaves, engineered to be economically dependent, politically fragmented, and permanently insecure. Violence by settlers operates within this system as a functional tool: it terrorises, clears land, and accelerates territorial consolidation while allowing the formal state to maintain a posture of deniability.
Settler violence is therefore not peripheral to Israeli state policy; it is integral to it. It functions as a para-state mechanism — an outsourced form of coercion that advances state objectives without requiring explicit state accountability. This structure allows the Israeli government to present itself internationally as both sovereign authority and helpless bystander, condemning violence rhetorically while materially benefiting from its effects on the ground.
The United States’ refusal to condemn this violence must be understood within this structural relationship. Israel is not merely an ally; it is a strategic node within a wider imperial system. It anchors US military power in West Asia, hosts advanced surveillance infrastructure, tests weapons systems, and secures regional interests in a volatile geopolitical terrain. Military aid, arms transfers, intelligence cooperation, and diplomatic shielding bind the two states into a single security economy. To seriously challenge settler violence would be to question the legitimacy of this entire architecture — something Washington has no intention of doing.
This dynamic was starkly visible in the intervention by the US envoy, who chose not to address settler attacks or settlement expansion but instead redirected attention toward allegations against the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. By framing UNRWA as a security problem rather than a humanitarian necessity, the United States reproduced a familiar imperial tactic: shift the locus of violence away from the occupying power and onto institutions that alleviate its consequences. Structural oppression is rendered invisible, while relief itself is recast as threat.
UNRWA’s role is not merely humanitarian; it is politically disruptive. It provides education, healthcare, and basic services to a population that occupation has deliberately impoverished and marginalised. In doing so, it interrupts — however modestly — the logic of abandonment upon which settler colonialism depends. By sustaining Palestinian life, memory, and social continuity, UNRWA obstructs the fantasy of final dispossession. Its existence insists that refugees are not a temporary inconvenience but a permanent indictment of an unresolved crime.
The campaign to delegitimise UNRWA is therefore not about accountability or reform. It is about erasure. Refugees, by their very presence, contest the finality of conquest. Their continued recognition prevents stolen land from being fully normalised, commodified, and absorbed into a global economy of tourism, real estate, and investment. To dismantle UNRWA is to attempt to close the historical ledger — to convert an open wound into a settled fact.
What emerges from this Security Council episode is not contradiction but coherence. International law is invoked when it disciplines adversaries and neutralised when it constrains allies. The so-called “rules-based order” functions less as a universal moral framework than as an ideological cover for power — a language that legitimises hierarchy while pretending to transcend it. For some states, law is an instrument of discipline; for others, it is endlessly negotiable.
For Palestinians, legality is always conditional and perpetually postponed. Their rights are acknowledged abstractly but denied materially. Their suffering is recognised rhetorically but insulated from consequence. The United States’ actions make clear that the Security Council is not a space where justice is weighed evenly, but one where power decides which injustices may be named and which must be silenced.
This moment exposes the class character of global governance. International institutions do not stand above material power relations; they are embedded within them. When legal accountability threatens a project of territorial expansion sustained by military force, capital flows, and geopolitical utility, the law is hollowed out through vetoes, procedural blockage, and narrative displacement.
In refusing to condemn settler violence and blocking engagement with Resolution 2334, the United States is not merely defending Israel. It is defending a system in which colonial domination, racialised dispossession, and militarised accumulation remain acceptable so long as they serve imperial stability. The Palestinian question, long misrepresented as a conflict between two equal sides, is in reality a confrontation between a colonised people and an international order designed to manage — rather than dismantle — their dispossession.
Until that order itself is confronted, appeals to legality will continue to collide with the brute realities of power. And the Security Council will remain what it has increasingly become: not a forum of justice, but a theatre in which impunity is produced, rehearsed, and normalised.
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