By Rima Najjar
The U.S. proposal confirms that Palestinians have been trapped in a system intentionally designed to keep their rights suspended.
Author’s Note
For decades, the Palestinian struggle has been fought in the language of international law and rights. The failure of this approach, exposed by recent U.S. proposals, reveals a hard truth: only a fundamental shift in power can end colonial domination.
Introduction: The Failure of a Rights-Based System
For more than seven decades, the Palestinian struggle has been framed as a quest for rights — rights to self-determination, equality, return, and dignity. Yet every major effort to secure these rights, whether through diplomacy, negotiation, or international adjudication, has failed.
The failure was never due to ambiguity in the rights themselves. It stems from a deeper structural reality: the international system was not built to enforce rights when the violator is protected by a superpower.
The United States’ recent proposal at the UN, which openly substitutes a bespoke “parallel rules-based order” for established international law, is merely the latest and clearest proof. It is so flagrantly inconsistent with existing legal opinions — from the ICJ’s 2004 Advisory Opinion to the 2024 genocide proceedings — that it lays bare a system where law is aspirational, power is operative, and Palestinian rights exist only on paper.
What Palestinians confront today is a system functioning exactly as intended: one that elevates geopolitical interest over legal obligation and protects a century of engineered Israeli exceptionalism.
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A Century of Constructed Exceptionalism
The present crisis cannot be understood without tracing the century-long architecture that made Israel exempt from the rules governing every other colonial formation of the modern era. Unlike most cases of settler colonialism, Zionist settlement in Palestine was not a rogue enterprise. It was internationally sponsored from the beginning.
- 1917 — The Balfour Declaration: A colonial empire pledged a “Jewish national home” in a land where Jews constituted roughly 6% of the population, while explicitly denying political rights to the indigenous Christian and Moslem Arab majority.
- The Mandate Era: The League of Nations transformed this pledge into binding international policy, embedding an ethnonational project into the legal framework of the Mandate itself.
- 1948 and its Aftermath: As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled, Western powers fast-tracked Israel’s admission to the United Nations, while Palestinian refugees — whose dispossession was central to Israel’s creation — were left in political limbo.
- Post-1967: The United States consolidated this exceptionalism. Through military aid, diplomatic protection, and veto power at the Security Council, Washington created what can only be called a shield of structural impunity, ensuring Israel remained exempt from the constraints applied to every other occupying power.
Israel’s exceptionalism is not the byproduct of conflict. It is the outcome of uninterrupted external sponsorship — colonial, international, and then American — over the course of an entire century. This scaffolding has allowed Israel to operate outside the disciplinary mechanisms the international system applies elsewhere, from sanctions to accountability to basic compliance with humanitarian law.
Why Rights Fail Without Power
International law assumes something that has never existed in the Palestinian case: the ability to impose consequences on a state that violates it. Rights presuppose enforcement; without power behind them and with power against them, they become rhetorical.
Throughout the 20th century, rights-based liberation movements only prevailed when global and regional power shifted against the oppressor. The pattern is unmistakable:
- Algeria — International Isolation Made Occupation Costly
France’s war in Algeria became a global scandal as reports of torture, mass internment, and scorched-earth tactics circulated widely. The United Nations condemned the occupation repeatedly, and newly independent states across Africa and Asia rallied against France. By the early 1960s, the political and economic cost of holding Algeria exceeded its strategic value.
Algeria’s rights were recognized only once France’s power advantage collapsed under international and internal pressure.
- Kenya — Britain’s Detention Regime Became Unsustainable
The exposure of Britain’s detention camps — where tens of thousands of Kenyans were subjected to forced labor, starvation, and torture — provoked intense international criticism. Journalists, legal advocates, and international organizations made the abuses impossible to deny. As Britain’s global empire weakened and anti-colonial sentiment surged worldwide, maintaining the detention regime became politically toxic.
Kenyan rights were enforced only when Britain could no longer defend the cost of repression.
- South Africa — Sanctions Crippled the Apartheid State
Decades of popular resistance inside South Africa converged with a global movement that imposed real material penalties: arms embargoes, cultural and academic boycotts, divestment campaigns, and eventually coordinated state sanctions. The loss of access to financial markets and international legitimacy made apartheid unsustainable.
South Africans won not because apartheid was morally indefensible — though it was — but because global and economic pressure made it unviable.
In each of these cases, rights became enforceable only when power shifted against the colonial or racial regime. The oppressor changed course not because it was persuaded by legal principles, but because continuing to violate those principles became more costly than compliance.
Israel has never encountered this dynamic. For over half a century, the United States has systematically neutralized every form of potential pressure — diplomatic, legal, economic — ensuring that Israel faces none of the consequences that forced France, Britain, or South Africa to yield.
This is the essence of geopolitical immunity:
a condition in which a state can violate international law openly because its superpower sponsor guarantees that no meaningful enforcement will follow.
This is why a rights-based approach collapses in the Palestinian case. It relies on a form of leverage that Palestinians do not possess and that the international system refuses to deploy. Under such conditions, rights do not function as rights; they remain perpetually deferred promises, acknowledged in theory and denied in practice.
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The Palestinian Authority’s Lost Gamble
The Palestinian Authority (PA) spent the last decade pursuing one of the most comprehensive rights-based strategies in modern diplomatic history. It sought to transform the asymmetry of power into a battle of legal principles, believing that if it could codify Palestinian rights clearly enough, the international system would eventually enforce them.
It was an extraordinary effort:
- Accession to UN conventions and treaties, positioning Palestine as a state actor with standing in global institutions.
- Joining the International Criminal Court (ICC) to pursue accountability for Israeli war crimes and settlement expansion.
- Requesting ICJ advisory opinions to reaffirm the illegality of occupation and apartheid structures.
- Producing thousands of pages of legal documentation, mapping violations with meticulous precision.
The PA executed this strategy with rigor and discipline.
But it was a legal strategy operating in a system structurally unwilling to enforce the law when it comes to Israel.
The results speak for themselves:
- The ICJ declared Israel’s wall illegal in 2004; it still stands, expanded and fortified.
- The ICC opened investigations into war crimes; not a single Israeli official has been arrested, sanctioned, or restricted in travel.
- Dozens of UN resolutions affirmed Palestinian rights; none changed conditions on the ground.
The problem was not the PA’s legal work. It was the basic design of the international order: a system where the United States vetoes enforcement, shields Israel from consequences, and converts Palestinian legal gains into symbolic victories with no material effect.
Having exhausted this path, the PA is now moving toward something even more damaging: alignment with U.S. proposals that explicitly undermine the very rights it fought to enshrine.
This shift signals not only exhaustion but a profound misreading of the moment. Instead of exposing the system’s hypocrisy, the PA is validating it — allowing the United States to present its parallel “rules-based order” as a legitimate alternative to international law, even as it guts Palestinian collective rights.
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The Spectacle of Surrender: Aligning with the Oppressor
Having exhausted the rights-based track it spent three decades defending, the PA is now drifting toward something even more damaging: alignment with U.S. proposals that explicitly undermine the very rights it once fought to enshrine.
This turn reflects not strategy but structural exhaustion. With no diplomatic victories to show, shrinking domestic legitimacy, and the collapse of Oslo’s political horizon, the PA is clinging to any process — however hollow — that signals continued relevance.
Yet this move is also the product of deep institutional dependency: U.S. security financing, diplomatic protection, and regional pressure have created a system in which the PA’s very survival is contingent on compliance with Washington’s agenda. In this architecture, refusal becomes almost unthinkable.
The result is a third and even more consequential failure: a profound misreading of the moment. At a time when U.S. double standards are more exposed than ever — legally, morally, and geopolitically — the PA is validating them, allowing Washington to present its parallel “rules-based order” as a legitimate alternative to international law even as it guts Palestinian collective rights. Far from challenging the system’s hypocrisy, the PA is now helping to stabilize it.
Worse, the PA’s acquiescence has triggered a familiar regional cascade. Arab governments, long seeking a pretext to deepen security and economic ties with Israel, now point to the PA’s position as political cover. What follows is a choreography the Arab world has witnessed repeatedly: Arab normalization at Palestinian expense.
This pattern is not new. It is woven into the political history of the region.
- Egypt at Camp David (1978):
Egypt — militarily the strongest Arab state — secured the return of Sinai but shattered Arab diplomatic unity. By removing Egypt from the military balance, Camp David allowed Israel to act with greater impunity in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Result: Palestine was sidelined so Egypt could recover territory and consolidate its alliance with Washington.
- Jordan at Wadi Araba (1994):
Jordan formalized a peace that already existed de facto, gaining economic aid and security coordination. But in the treaty, Amman recognized Israeli water allocations and border arrangements while leaving the Palestinian question unresolved.
Result: Jordan’s normalization strengthened its state interests while Palestinian issues were deferred.
- The Arab Peace Initiative (2002):
A sweeping collective offer of normalization in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal. But the API was non-binding and lacked enforcement mechanisms, reducing it to a diplomatic gesture. Israel rejected it without consequence and continued expanding settlements.
Result: Arab leverage was surrendered rhetorically with no cost imposed on Israel.
- The Abraham Accords (2020):
The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalized relations with Israel absent any progress on Palestinian rights. It was the first time Arab states openly abandoned the principle that peace depended on ending occupation.
Result: Israel realized it could acquire regional legitimacy while deepening apartheid.
The same structure underlies each case: authoritarian regimes trading the Palestinian cause for state interests, U.S. favor, and internal regime security — while Israel accumulates legitimacy without conceding anything.
Today’s alignment with the new U.S. proposal is simply the latest iteration. The difference is that it occurs during a moment of immense Palestinian suffering and unprecedented global mobilization. Instead of harnessing this shift in international consciousness, the PA and its Arab allies are reinforcing a system designed to contain, not resolve, the Palestinian question.
What emerges is a political theater of surrender — a tableau in which the actors with the least democratic legitimacy endorse the plan most damaging to Palestinian national aspirations.
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The U.S. Vision: Permanent Subjugation, Not Sovereignty
For Palestinians, the content of the U.S. proposal is devastatingly clear. It does not offer sovereignty, equality, or decolonization. It does not even gesture toward ending occupation. Instead, it creates the blueprint for a permanent political suspension — a system that resembles civilian administration on the surface but functions as an extension of military rule.
The design has familiar components:
- Foreign oversight with Israeli veto power:
Any Palestinian governing body would be conditional, monitored, and subject to Israeli approval. Sovereignty becomes an administrative privilege, not a right.
- An endless “transition period”:
A permanent waiting room where Palestinians are told they must prove their readiness for freedoms already guaranteed under international law.
- Deepened securitization of Palestinian identity:
Political expression is recast as extremism; collective memory is treated as a security threat; the national cause is reframed as a “governance problem.”
Under this arrangement, even the most basic acts of identity become suspect.
Waving a flag is treated as provocation.
Memorializing the Nakba is labeled incitement.
Demands for equality are framed as existential threats to “stability.”
The logic is unmistakable: to redefine Palestinian political life as a pathology — something to be managed, reformed, corrected — rather than as a legitimate struggle for freedom.
This bureaucratic vocabulary of “capacity-building,” “reform,” and “security coordination” functions as a substitute for justice. It trains Palestinians to administer their own subordination while presenting the arrangement to the world as technocratic reform.
And it is not new. What the Trump proposal formalizes is merely the latest iteration of a logic built into Oslo itself — a framework premised on the deferral of Palestinian rights. Oslo postponed all core questions of sovereignty — Jerusalem, refugees, borders, settlements — for an initial five-year “interim period,” a period that was then extended, reinterpreted, and ultimately transformed into a permanent political holding cell.
What Trump is doing is not original; it is the completion and hardening of a structure designed, from the beginning, to prevent final resolution.
The U.S. vision does not resolve the conflict.
It institutionalizes non-sovereignty, keeping Palestinians politically suspended precisely because their true representatives — those rooted in popular struggle — remain structurally excluded from the diplomatic arena.
Because those resisting Israeli domination have no recognized international channel through which to articulate Palestinian national demands, their exclusion is misread as consent.
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A Decolonial Horizon: Equality as a Historical Imperative
At this stage of the conflict, it is misleading to speak of “Palestinian demands.” There is no unified national body capable of articulating them, and those who represent the living core of resistance — popular committees, youth networks, prisoners’ movements, diaspora organizations — are excluded from diplomacy by design.
Yet the absence of a formal representative does not mean the absence of a political horizon. The direction of history is legible even when its agents are fragmented: the unavoidable movement toward a single, decolonized political order in the space between the river and the sea.
As Hegel argued, contradiction is the engine of historical transformation — conflict and incompatible claims do not stall progress; they drive it. The reality in Palestine/Israel is doing just that: propelling all actors, willingly or not, toward a single conclusion.
Two states are no longer viable — not politically, not demographically, not territorially, not morally.
The structure on the ground has already become a single polity; the only question is whether this polity will remain an apartheid state or transform into a secular democratic one.
This is the logical trajectory of a situation in which:
- the land is irreversibly integrated,
- populations are interdependent,
- sovereignty has been hollowed out by occupation,
- and the global legitimacy of ethnonational rule is collapsing.
Historical precedents follow the same arc: once a territory is unified by force — Algeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, Namibia — the eventual outcome is either permanent domination or the emergence of a shared political framework grounded in equality.
Palestine/Israel is no exception.
The apartheid model cannot stabilize itself without escalating repression indefinitely. The partition model cannot be resurrected without reversing 700,000 settlers and decades of annexation. The autonomous bantustan model offered by the U.S. cannot produce legitimacy or lasting order.
That leaves only one configuration that meets both the moral requirements of justice and the material conditions already in place: a single, democratic state with equal citizenship for all its people.
This vision is not an ideological blueprint.
It is the endpoint toward which the contradictions of the present system push all parties — even those resisting it.
It is a historical imperative shaped not by programmatic demands but by the internal logic of the conflict itself.
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Conclusion: From Arguing Rights to Building Power
If the last century has shown anything, it is that arguments — even correct ones — do not liberate the oppressed. Rights do not enforce themselves, and law does not constrain those shielded by superior force. A rights-based approach failed not because Palestinians lacked legal clarity, but because the international system withheld the only thing that ever makes rights real: power.
Every anti-colonial movement that succeeded did so by shifting the balance of forces — through mass mobilization, international realignment, economic pressure, and the erosion of the oppressor’s capacity to maintain domination. In each case, law followed power, not the reverse.
The same dynamic governs Palestine today.
Palestinians already possess important sources of latent power:
a mass civil society, global solidarity unprecedented in scope, demographic centrality within the land, and a moral legitimacy reinforced — not weakened — by decades of systematic denial. What they lack is not rights or resolve, but a unified political structure capable of converting moral force into political agency.
This absence has allowed the world to treat Palestinian rights as optional and Palestinian demands as quietist or nonexistent. Meanwhile, the deeper logic of history continues to unfold. Just as Hegel argued that contradiction forces political evolution, the contradictions of the present — one land, two legal systems; sovereignty without territory; negotiations without negotiators — propel the conflict toward its only rational endpoint: a single political community based on equality.
This is not a blueprint, nor a factional platform.
It is the conclusion toward which the material and moral conditions of the conflict push all actors, regardless of intention. The question is not whether Palestinians “demand” this trajectory — formal institutions are too contained for such demands — but whether the world will continue upholding a system designed to make Palestinian rights permanently unenforceable.
That choice lies not only with states but with peoples.
And Palestinians, despite dispossession, siege, fragmentation, and abandonment, have never ceased to constitute themselves as a political people — never ceased to resist, to organize, to remember, and to imagine freedom.
To expect them to abandon that now is not only unrealistic.
It is ahistorical.
Power — not law — will bring that horizon into being.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
18 November 2025
Source: countercurrents.org
