The recent vote in the UN Security Council on Gaza – with Russia and China pointedly abstaining and the West once again attempting to choreograph the outcome – marked a moment that history may one day identify as a subtle but decisive shift. Not because the resolution itself alters the facts on the ground. It doesn’t. Gaza remains in ruins, Palestinians remain under the boot of an unrestrained occupying power, and Washington still acts as the global custodian of Israeli impunity.
Rather, this vote matters because it revealed something the West has long tried to conceal: that Palestinians no longer accept, and the world no longer believes in, the idea that Gaza is a space to be managed, administered, “stabilised,” or reconstructed by external custodians – feigning benevolence. Not by the United States. Not by Europe. Not by a Trump–Netanyahu blueprint dressed up in humanitarian language. Not even by international institutions that imagine themselves neutral while enabling the status quo.
The era when Great Powers could simply appoint themselves guardians of Palestine, deciding who governs Gaza and how, is culminating. The vote exposed the exhaustion of this imperial pretence. Gaza is not a Protectorate. It is not a failed territory awaiting trusteeship. It is not a strategic sandbox for Western experiments in “post-conflict governance.” Gaza is an occupied land belonging to a people who demand – and are entitled to complete self-rule.