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.

To insist that Palestinians need custodians is not only politically fraudulent. It is legally unsustainable. Gaza is not real estate waiting for a landlord. Gaza is not a geopolitical vacuum into which global powers can insert their “solutions.” Gaza is Palestinian land, and under international law, Palestinians alone have the right to determine its future.

Everything else – the Western reconstruction plans, the “security mechanisms,” the talk of Arab-led stabilisation, the proposal to outsource Gaza to a foreign administration – is, but a thin repackaging of the same old project, to deny Palestinians sovereignty under the guise of responsible management.

The UNSC vote and the myth of neutral guardianship

The West desperately sought a resolution that would legitimise its vision of Gaza’s “day after” – a vision that both Trump and Netanyahu have crudely articulated, namely that Gaza must be contained, fragmented, and directed by powers other than the people who live there. The resolution’s language attempted to smuggle in the idea that Gaza requires a carefully supervised transition, with “acceptable” Palestinian actors vetted by........

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