The American Mandate

A Reflection on UN Security Council Resolution 2803

UN - by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

Once again, we are asked to believe that the US is the neutral arbiter that will oversee the “pathway” to Palestinian self-determination. This is the premise of Resolution 2803, passed by the Security Council on November 17, 2025. It asks us to accept that the country that has, for the duration of this genocide, supplied Israel with the bombs that have killed over seventy thousand Palestinians, shielded Israel from every attempt at international accountability, and sanctioned the ICC for issuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials will now preside over a “Board of Peace,” chaired by Donald Trump himself, to decide Gaza’s future.

No one is celebrating. No one, so far as I can tell, believes in this pathway. That it proceeds anyway shows we have arrived at a form of politics so debased that even the pretense of credibility has been abandoned. What remains is naked power, arranging the facts on the ground, while the vocabulary of peace provides its cover.

The language of the resolution is revealing in what it includes and what it deliberately omits. Nowhere does it reference Resolution 242 or 338, the foundational texts that established the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force. Nowhere does it mention the illegality of Israeli settlements, the annexation of Jerusalem, or the systematic dispossession that created the refugee population in the first place. The ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion—which affirmed in unambiguous terms that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Territories is unlawful and must end immediately—is passed over in silence, as though it had never been issued. Israel is required to do nothing. No timeline for withdrawal, no end to its assassinations, no halt to settlement expansion on the very land the resolution claims to reserve for Palestinian self-determination.

Instead, we have a resolution that “welcomes the constructive role” of the US, demands the disarmament of Palestinian resistance, and establishes an International Stabilization Force whose purpose, stripped of its euphemisms, is to ensure that Palestinians cannot resist while Israel’s occupation continues. And while this resolution is an admission that two years of relentless violence failed to accomplish the occupation’s war objectives, its architects now hope to achieve them through the quieter mechanisms of administration. This is a new mandate over Gaza—a two-year American trusteeship that continues the logic of the British Mandate under which Palestine was first fragmented and Israel was created.

The resolution represents the same colonial logic—administering Palestinians on behalf of those who dispossess them, presuming they require foreign supervision rather than the self-governance guaranteed by international law. This is the familiar pattern in which administration claims to serve the colonized while, in fact, serving the colonizer. Every scheme devised by outside powers invokes the welfare of the natives while ensuring that the natives themselves have no say in their own political future.

And still the Palestinian Authority—which claims to represent the Palestinian people—has welcomed this resolution with the predictable mixture of exhaustion and misplaced hope that has characterized its posture for three decades now. The drafting, the negotiations, the final text: all of it proceeded without meaningful Palestinian participation. What does it mean to welcome a document that was written about you, without you?

Nor is the PA alone in its accommodation. The arc of imperial policy has long been to secure Arab compliance with a regional order in which Zionist colonization is treated as legitimate and permanent. What is perhaps most dispiriting is the eagerness with which Arab and Islamic states have embraced this arrangement. Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey—all of them signatories to a joint statement urging the resolution’s “swift adoption.” These are states that have watched the destruction of Gaza for over two years, that have witnessed what even the most cautious legal scholars now describe as genocide; their response is to urge swift adoption of a resolution that rewards the perpetrators with continued control over their victims.

Such complicity requires the right branding. A “Board of Peace” sounds benevolent, even hopeful. An “International Stabilization Force” carries connotations of order restored, of chaos contained. A “pathway to statehood” suggests movement, progress, a destination that might one day be reached if only we demonstrate sufficient patience and good behavior. But these are names designed to disguise rather than describe. The Board of Peace will not bring peace; it will administer a territory whose population has endured two years of siege and slaughter, whose infrastructure has been systematically destroyed, whose children—those who survived—will grow up under the authority of the very powers that enabled their suffering. Palestinians are treated as incapable of self-rule, while figures such as Donald Trump and Tony Blair are presented as the administrators equipped to supervise and discipline them.

The Stabilization Force will not stabilize; it will suppress. And the pathway to statehood leads nowhere, because it is not a pathway at all but a holding pattern, a mechanism for deferring indefinitely the question of Palestinian sovereignty while maintaining the fiction that sovereignty remains possible. Before this “pathway” can even be considered, the PA must reform itself to satisfaction: rewrite school curricula to adopt the Israeli narrative, recognize Israel as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital, renounce the right of return, and end support for families of prisoners and martyrs—in short, erase Palestinian history and rights as the price of discussing Palestinian statehood. External administration will continue until Palestinians prove themselves worthy of self-governance to the satisfaction of their overseers—ensuring the Board’s control remains indefinite, contingent on Palestinian performance as judged by those intent on dispossessing them.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, has warned that this resolution “runs counter to the Palestinian right to self-determination” and “consolidates Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” She is correct, and her critique deserves wide attention. But warnings, however principled, change nothing. The international system has issued warnings, passed resolutions, affirmed rights, and expressed concern for seventy-seven years, and the Palestinian people remain stateless, occupied, and in Gaza, two years into a genocide. We have always known that the international system was designed not to liberate the colonized, but to domesticate.

And still we are told that this resolution is the best that could be achieved under the circumstances, that the alternative was worse, that we must be “pragmatic” and “realistic.” These are the same arguments that were made in defense of the Oslo Accords, and we have seen where that pragmatism led. To the entrenchment of settlements, the fragmentation of Palestinian territory, the transformation of the PA into a subcontractor for Israeli security, and, inevitably, to the Abraham Accords. Pragmatism without principles is simply capitulation in installments.

What would a genuine resolution look like? It would begin by affirming, without equivocation, that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end—not at some unspecified future date, not contingent on Palestinian “reforms” or “good behavior,” but immediately, as the ICJ has demanded. It would demand an end to the killing, the reconstruction of Gaza, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

It would recognize that Palestinian self-determination is unconditional—an inherent right that does not depend on readiness, compliance, or humanitarian need, and cannot be subject to the approval of the occupying power or its allies. It would establish mechanisms for accountability—for the destruction of Gaza, for the decades of dispossession, for the systematic violations of international law that have been documented by every credible human rights organization on Earth. And it would ensure that Palestinians themselves are the primary agents of their own future, not the objects of decisions made in Washington, Tel Aviv, and the capitals of states whose primary concern is regional hegemony rather than justice.

None of this will happen through Resolution 2803. It will not happen through the Board of Peace or the International Stabilization Force or the conditional “pathway” to a statehood that Israel’s leaders have already declared they will never accept. It will happen, if it happens at all, through the sustained refusal of Palestinians and their allies to accept arrangements that perpetuate injustice in the name of peace. It will happen through the insistence that international law means something, that the rules that govern the behavior of states cannot be selectively applied to protect the powerful while abandoning the weak. It will happen through the cultivation of a political consciousness that sees through the euphemisms and recognizes that a peace built on the denial of rights is not peace but a more sophisticated form of domination.

In the meantime, we are left with this resolution—this “historic breakthrough” that changes nothing fundamental while providing diplomatic cover for the continuation of the status quo. The ceremonies will be held, the statements will be issued, and the world will move on to other concerns. And in Gaza, amid the rubble and the grief, a population will awaken each morning to discover that the “pathway” to their freedom has been paved with their own dispossession, that the “peace” on offer is the peace of the exhausted, the defeated, the subjugated.

Under the British Mandate, ceasefires were used not to end violence but to redistribute power—disarming Palestinians while granting Zionist forces freedom of movement under the guise of restoring order. Since the ceasefire began, Israel has expanded restricted zones, obliterated entire families, blocked aid, and denied the wounded evacuation through Rafah. Each violation met with silence, each act demonstrating what the resolution was designed to permit: total Palestinian compliance while granting Israel complete freedom to evade its commitments. The goal has never been peace. It has always been to make Gaza uninhabitable, to force Palestinians into exile, to complete through trusteeship what military pressure could not.

This is not the end of anything. It is, as the representative of South Korea noted with unintentional accuracy, “not the end, but a new beginning”—a new beginning of the same old story, told in the same old way. But the ending is not yet written, and it will not be written by them.

High Rise Sunrise - by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

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