A world body like the United Nations should have the power to enforce its resolutions and impose sanctions on the offending countries regardless of how powerful they are. No country should be allowed to continue committing crimes against humanity with impunity. The world should unite and act quickly to stop such aggression. The simple majority decision is all that it should take to isolate and punish the criminal country. This ability is woefully lacking in the current United Nations. It is for that reason that we continue to witness the pulverization of weaker nations by the much stronger states. For just one example, the genocide in Gaza could have been stopped just a week after it started on October 7, 2023, had the U.S. not vetoed the Security Council’s resolution. The U.S. went on to veto four more U.N. ceasefire resolutions and is thus shares full responsibility with Israel for the deaths of over 48,000 Palestinians and complete destruction of Gaza. The U.S. government vetoed four more ceasefire resolutions without any logical and valid reason for its action.
The U.N. At Present
The way the United Nations is currently structured, five member countries hold the veto power. If one of those five countries decides to go against the Security Council’s resolutions, it can use its veto power to kill the resolution. The U.S. has used its veto power more often than any other country, nearly fifty times just to protect Israel’s violations of international law. Holding the 193 U.N. member states captive to one veto-holding country makes no sense and is the cause of most of the world’s explosive problems.
Proposed Reform
According to the UN Charter, the five veto-holding countries have to agree to end their veto power. Speaking for the international community, the UN Secretary General should request those five members to surrender their veto power to make the world body democratic. In case of non-cooperation from those countries, the remaining 188 countries should form a new world body without the veto power. The headquarters of the new UN could be anywhere in the world. If the current veto-holding countries wish to join this new world organization, they should be allowed to do so.
Why The Proposed Reform Is Urgently Needed
Without getting rid of the veto, problems like the current slaughter of human beings in Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine will never stop. The details of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinian are better known to the world because they have been livestreamed for the world to see. After fifteen months of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza, in which it killed more than 48,000 Palestinians and destroyed Gaza, a three-phase ceasefire was arranged to have Israel’s hostages and some of Palestinian prisoners released and move toward an internationally agreed-upon two-state solution. On March 18, 2025, without warning, Israel broke the ceasefire, killing over 400 Palestinians (more than 174 children). Israel carried out that attack at 3 a.m. with U.S. government’s consent.
This sudden ceasefire violation seems to be motivated by Netanyahu’s desperate attempt to stay in power and avoid the trial for corruption charges against him and to kill the Egyptian-Arab plan to rebuild Gaza without massive displacement of the already many times displaced Gazans. According to Muhammad Shehada, an analyst from Gaza and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, “there was a crisis about his [Netanyahu’s] corruption trial testimony that was scheduled yesterday.” This is the worst attack on Palestinians in a year. Moreover, in violation of the ceasefire agreement, Israel continues to block the required amount of food, aid, and fuel into Gaza.
During the ceasefire, Israel continued its attacks and killed over 700 Palestinians without a single retaliatory action by Hamas or other resistance groups. Israel did not come to the negotiating table to start the second phase of the ceasefire, during which Hamas was to lay down arms and start working toward the two-state solution. Israel’s aggression has proved yet one more time that it does not want a negotiated settlement and wants total elimination of Palestinians from Palestine. In three days since Israel violated the ceasefire, it has killed lover 700 Palestinians. It continues bombing Gaza by land, air, and sea. At the United Nations, the U.S. supported Israel’s step, thus making it useless for the Security Council to draft a resolution that U.S. would veto. Once again, the U.S. government is preventing a resolution of the crisis by using its veto power, and the world continues to watch as passive spectators, with big powers like Russia, United Kingdom, and France condemning Israel’s ceasefire violation but taking no practical steps to stop this genocide.
At the time of my finishing this book on March 20, 2025, the fate of the people of Gaza continues to hang in the balance and the American people’s struggle for justice continues unabated despite the Trump Administration’s punitive measures, harassment, and detention of anti-genocide, peaceful activists, as in the case of the Palestinian American Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who is a permanent resident of the United States.
Israel’s U.S.-backed Plan about Palestinians Vies with Hitler’s “Final Solution” of the Jewish
Problem
The Israeli plan is to drive out all Palestinians from Gaza and kill those whom no country will take in. President Trump is fully behind this plan. He asked Egypt and Jordan to take in the over two million Gazans and threatened to end the ceasefire if they did not cooperate. He warned that Gazans would be subjected to more deaths and destructions. Both Egypt and Jordan have refused to take in Gazans because such a step would be in violation of Palestinians’ right to their land and against the internationally agreed-upon two-state solution. Egypt and other Arab countries have devised a practical 5-year plan to rebuild Gaza. Trump agreed to the plan with some reservations. Under the guise of rebuilding Gaza into a Middle Eastern riviera, Trump is fully behind Israel’s plan of removal and slaughter of all Gazans. After occupying Gaza, Israel intends to drive out Palestinians from the West Bank and slaughter those who have no place to go to. If the veto is not ended, the U.S. will continue to use its veto power at the UN to enable this destruction of nearly six million Palestinians.
The question is whether the world community is going to allow this genocide and continue to be held hostage to U.S-Israel plan to exterminate nearly six million Palestinians from Palestine. Apparently, there is no other choice but to end the veto at the UN or form a new world body that is egalitarian and democratic.
Abdul Jabbar, Ph.D. Emeritus Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies, City College of San Francisco, California
