A reading of the General Assembly speeches: Justice for Palestine and the decline of unipolarity

The General Assembly speeches reveal a dual crisis in the international system. The first concerns the absence of justice, manifested most clearly in Palestine; the second relates to a shift in the international balance of power, evident in the wars in Iran and Ukraine. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned of violence, displacement, settlement expansion and the spectre of ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, citing the Palestinian question as a stark example of the crisis of legitimacy and the selective application of international law. He spoke explicitly of the need to comply with the International Court of Justice’s legally binding provisional measures in the genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa and other states. Guterres described the shift in the balance of power as an “irreversible” movement towards a multipolar world. That transition is evident not only in US efforts to preserve the manifestations of its hegemony amid the rise of China and Russia, but also in the growing independence of the positions adopted by countries of the Global South and Europe’s attempts to strengthen its role. The Gulf crisis reveals regional powers seeking greater space to shape their own security, while the war in Ukraine demonstrates the impossibility of any single power monopolising the shaping of international settlements.

The opening of the General Assembly session also constitutes an annual occasion on which world leaders set out their countries’ positions and priorities on international issues, creating a public and official record of states’ positions. In parallel, bilateral and multilateral meetings and summits are held separately between states within the framework of their relations. The Palestinian question and the wars in Iran and Ukraine remain at the forefront of the international issues addressed in countries’ statements during this session. Guterres opened the general debate, after which statements by national leaders began. Brazil was the first country to speak, followed by the United States. The first day also featured addresses by the leaders of Türkiye, Qatar, Jordan and France, alongside those of a number of other countries. Today, President Mahmoud Abbas is due to deliver a pre-recorded address, after the United States denied him a visa to enter the country to attend the meetings of the General Assembly’s regular session. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also due to address the Assembly today.

The speeches addressing Palestine at the opening of the General Assembly’s General Debate appeared, despite the differing political and geographical positions of their speakers, to collectively construct an integrated argument: one that begins by diagnosing the crisis on the ground, proceeds to identify the nature of the institutional and legal failure to resolve it, and culminates in the question of the responsibility of the international community and its system to deliver justice.

Guterres established the legal framework for this approach when he stressed that peace means the “restraint of power by law” and recalled the “legally binding provisional measures” issued by the International Court of Justice, calling on all parties to “comply with international law and the Court’s orders”, while warning that “violence, displacement and settlement expansion” in the West Bank were “raising the spectre of ethnic cleansing”.

King Abdullah II’s address brought these elements together within a single framework, arguing that what is happening in the West Bank “is not a series of separate events”, but a set of interconnected practices encompassing home demolitions, land seizures, settlement expansion, settler violence, forced displacement and de facto annexation, and that Gaza and the West Bank are “two sides of the same Israeli strategy”: destruction in the former and de facto annexation in the latter, leading in both cases to the erasure of the Palestinian presence and making the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible.

The Amir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, reinforced this diagnosis by linking the weakening of the foundations of Palestinian survival and steadfastness on their own land to Israel’s ability to act with impunity, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan linked the Palestinian question to a crisis within the international system itself. He warned that international law is being “applied differently to the strong and the weak”, turning impunity into “the norm”.

This convergence over the Palestinian question and the position towards it was not confined to Arab, Islamic and Middle Eastern states, but extended to countries of the Global South. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva used the term “genocide” to describe what is happening in Gaza and linked settlement expansion to the undermining of the two-state solution.

International voting in the General Assembly on resolutions concerning the resolution of the Palestinian question demonstrates the broad majority in support of the Palestinians.

This diagnosis of the Palestinian question was not confined to Arab and Islamic positions or to countries of the Global South. The addresses delivered by Britain and France at the General Assembly reflected a growing shift in Western discourse towards Palestine, particularly regarding developments in the West Bank.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham stressed that condemning the 7 October attack and standing with Israel on security did not justify “the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza or the West Bank”. He singled out the E1 settlement project, warning that it would “threaten to put a viable Palestinian state beyond reach”. The British Prime Minister linked his country’s position to concrete measures it had taken: “banning trade in goods with illegal settlements”, sanctioning those involved in their construction, and recognising “that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful”.

French President Emmanuel Macron went further, linking the failure to halt what is happening in Gaza to the credibility of the international community itself. “What is our credibility worth if we remain inactive in the face of Gaza?” he asked, describing the situation in the Strip as “a spectacle that shames us all”. He went on to address the West Bank, warning that the continuing violations there were making the project founded on respect for the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to exist increasingly impossible.

Nor do the British and French positions appear detached from a broader Western context. Ahead of the General Assembly, the two countries joined Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Belgium in rejecting the E1 project on the grounds that it would divide the West Bank and undermine the territorial contiguity of the Palestinian territories. They also joined a group of European and other Western countries that announced their intention to impose or support restrictions on trade in goods from illegal settlements.

The Western shift is no longer confined to condemning settlement activity; it has gradually begun to move from describing its illegality towards the use of economic and punitive measures to confront it, although the scope and actual impact of these measures remain to be tested as a means of deterring the occupation’s policies towards the Palestinians.

In these speeches, the Palestinian question was no longer presented merely as an enumeration of violations, but as an interconnected system: widespread destruction in Gaza; displacement, settlement expansion and de facto annexation in the West Bank; and the gradual undermining of the material and political viability of a Palestinian state, amid the selective application of international law and impunity. From there, the argument moved from diagnosis to a demand for action. Guterres called for compliance with international law and an end to the fighting; Erdoğan stressed the need to end double standards in its application; Britain warned that talk of a two-state solution would lose its meaning if it were not backed by action; while King Abdullah II distilled the dilemma into a single question: “Will we act?” He stressed that the tools of sanctions, asset freezes, bans and diplomatic isolation exist and have been used in other crises, and that allowing decisions concerning Israel to remain “ink on paper” is not the result of an absence of tools, but a political choice that exposes the inability of the existing international system to enforce the rules it has itself established.

Against this broad international convergence in diagnosing what is happening in Palestine, US President Donald Trump’s address to the General Assembly stood out as markedly different. In discussing Gaza, Trump focused on the settlement brokered by his administration, presenting it as an achievement of the American approach, while his speech contained no criticism of Israeli practices towards the Palestinians in either Gaza or the West Bank. The contrast becomes even clearer when viewed in light of the United States’ own role: Washington is not merely an external mediator, but the principal international power sponsoring the ceasefire arrangements in Gaza and the actor with the greatest leverage to ensure their implementation and press the parties to comply with them.

Trump’s speech revealed a clear gap between Washington’s vision for resolving the Palestinian question and that of countries around the world, raising questions about the extent of the United States’ willingness and intention to resolve the Palestinian question, and about its role as a mediator.

Guterres stressed in his address to the General Assembly that “we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world” and that “that movement is irreversible”, as “new centres of economic, political and technological influence have emerged”, while institutions and systems of global governance continue to reflect “the power realities and interests of a largely bygone era”. At the same time, however, he warned that multipolarity does not necessarily lead to stability, as it could produce “a world of fragmentation and transactionalism”, marked by “rising tensions and deepening mistrust”. In contrast, he proposed what he called “networked multipolarity”, built on partnerships, multilateral institutions and international law, so that no single power determines the rules of the international system and the major powers do not divide into rival blocs.

The American approach presented by Trump towards Iran, the Gulf region and its states appears closer to the other face of multipolarity against which Guterres warned. Trump presented American power as the principal instrument for managing threats, declaring that his country was “stronger today than ever before”. The US president portrayed the war against Iran as a confrontation with a threat that the international community had allowed to escalate, presenting the choice as either reaching an agreement or destroying the Islamic Republic, and calling on the countries of the world to isolate Iran economically.

In his address, the Amir of Qatar emphasised the need for “a regional system of collective security” that “respects the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of states”, and promotes “the peaceful settlement of disputes” and “non-interference in the internal affairs of states”, amid the declining ability of unipolarity to produce sustainable stability.

In the war in Ukraine, while the international system remains unable to bring the conflict to an end, Trump presents the dispute in terms of the ability of American leadership to resolve it on its own. Macron, by contrast, advances the idea of a “Coalition of the Willing”, formed under the leadership of France, Britain and Germany, to address the crisis through the United Nations system, and called for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. The British Prime Minister explicitly linked a resolution of the war in Ukraine to “upholding the UN Charter and the rule of law”.

This raises two questions. The first concerns the extent to which the United States, or the hegemonic power, can produce a sustainable settlement in Palestine when its definition of the problem diverges from that of the majority of the world’s countries. The second concerns the limits of the effectiveness of the US strategy in dealing with the war in Iran and the Russia–Ukraine war: a strategy that relies on force to impose the outcome of the war in Iran, while tending towards unilateral control over the decision-making involved in managing or ending the latter conflict. The answer emerges in Guterres’s address, as well as in those of other leaders who aspire to a networked, institutional multipolar order capable of delivering the justice and stability that today’s international system, with its various institutions, including the United Nations, remains unable to achieve.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.