On November 17, the United Nations Security Council voted for a brazenly colonial plan for Gaza. The vote crystallized a truth long evident to much of the Global South: the multilateral system, dominated by Western power, cannot restrain Western-backed impunity. For the past year, the Hague Group has begun to chart another path — one grounded not in geopolitical hierarchy but in collective action, legal principle, and political courage.

For decades, the dominant forces in the West have treated Israel as a frontier outpost on hostile terrain. After the Cold War, they wrapped their authority in the language of democracy and a rules-based order, even as they placed the Palestinian people beneath international law and the Israeli state above it. Like all forms of racism, this divide rests on hierarchical ideas about who counts as human — ideas that sustain Palestinian oppression and the global order that enables it.

There was a time when multilateral institutions could still act against the grain of this racial order. In 1978, the Security Council passed Resolution 435, building the framework for Namibia’s transition to independence and affirming the illegality of South Africa’s occupation. It demanded the withdrawal of apartheid forces and eventually established a UN-supervised process in which Namibians could freely elect their government.