Building Power for Palestine and for a New World Order

A coalition of cross-regional states met in Bogotá, Colombia in mid-July to discuss measures to disrupt Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. The subsequent commitments by some of those governments to end all material support to Israel and to uphold international law is an important development not just to end the genocide, but to counter the relentless miltarism and profiteering of Western states. People power is the strength behind these commitments, and is what will lead to their implementation.

Action to end complicity

From 15–16 July 2025, thirty states met in Bogotá, Colombia at an Emergency Conference on Palestine, which was convened jointly by Colombia and South Africa as co-chairs of the Hague Group. The Hague Group, which began organizing in January 2025, formed as a bloc of countries to coordinate legal and diplomatic measures in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The Hague Group is compromised of Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, and South Africa.

The Bogotá conference in July brought together additional countries from across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In response to Israel’s continuing and intensified genocide of Palestinians, conference participants unanimously agreed “that the era of impunity must end—and that international law must be enforced without fear or favour through immediate domestic policies and legislation.”

Twelve of the participating states—Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and South Africa—committed to implementing six measures to end their complicity with Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. These include:

*Preventing the provision of weapons, military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel, including ending the transit of any such materials through their territories or transport on any ships bearing their countries’ flags;

*Preventing public institutions and funds from supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine;

*Ensuring accountability for crimes under international law, through independent investigations and prosecutions at national or international levels; and

*Supporting universal jurisdiction mandates to ensure justice for victims of international crimes committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The 12 states are encouraging other countries to join them in similar commitments, urging them to do so by 20 September 2025, the start of the next UN General Assembly. They also called on all states to take effective action to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law, including by imposing sanctions on Israel.

The spirit of Bandung

The Bogotá conference is a bold demonstration of multilaterialism in action, through which states are supporting each other in upholding their commitments under international law. With the most heavily militarized governments in the world engaging in mass violence, it’s imperative that other countries form new coalitions of power to oppose them and them to account.

Seventy years ago, in April 1955, twenty-nine Asian and African states convened in Bandung, Indonesia in opposition to “colonialism in all its manifestations.” They adopted a ten-point Declaration on the Promotion of World Peace and Cooperation, incorporating principles of the UN Charter, human rights, racial equality, territorial sovereignty, and non-interference.

Drawing on the principles established at the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formed in 1961 by the leaders of then-Yugoslavia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, and the United Arab Republic. The NAM was intended as a counterweight to the US and Soviet blocs of the Cold War. It rejected colonialism, imperialism, and all forms of foreign aggression and domination.

Today, the NAM still exists. But shifting political, economic, and military dynamics over the ensuing decades have diminished its power as an alternative to the military gamesmanship of the West and Russia. Rather than standing up against colonialism, some of its founding members, like India, support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Two of its members, India and Pakistan, possess nuclear weapons. Some NAM states have formed new alliances with Russia or the West. Many are economically compromised by the West or China through structural adjustment programs or “development aid” packages.

These relationships have prevented many NAM states from taking meaningful action in the face of genocide. Even as many offer rhetorical condemnations of Israel’s actions, their complicity continues under economic or political pressure.

Thus, the need for a meaningful alternative to the so-called “great power” rivalries and their rampant imperialism and war profiteering is as imperative as ever. The Hague Group offers one possible configuration that could build power; other configurations are also possible and necessary. The key will be to figure out how these countries can protect each other from the economic, political, and military might of the West, Russia, and China, who see formations like this as threats to their dominance.

Settler colonial weapons

The US government has already accused the Hague Group of trying to “weaponize international law as a tool to advance radical anti-Western agendas.” This comment is instructive, as it positions compliance with international law to prevent genocide as anti-Western. This makes sense when one understands Israel’s genocide of Palestinians as the latest in a long history of Western colonial genocide and present-day imperialist projects.

As Nick Estes, Melanie K. Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, and David Correia write in Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, settler colonial societies require sustained violence against Indigenous populations in order to sustain settler life. A settler state cannot exist without dominating the Native world that was there before it; thus, the “homicidal settler worldview” is “constructed through cultural, legal, and political norms of extermination and genocide.”

Most of the states profiting from Israel’s genocide are colonizers—from the European countries that ravaged other continents for resources and labour, stealing wealth and destroying Indigenous life, to the settler colonial states of so-called Australia, Canada, and the United States, which conducted their own genocides to eliminate, incarcerate, and dominate Indigenous populations. The assertion that trying to uphold the Genocide Convention is an anti-Western agenda is only legible in light of the brutal history and ongoing practice of colonialism by the West.

Genocide is necessary to settler colonialim; Israel’s settler colonialism is necessary for Western war profiteering and attempts to control energy resources in the region. The United States uses Israel as a military base to exert power in the Middle East to benefit a wealthy few, particularly military contractors and oil executives. It also sends billions in weapons and other material support to Israel, as do the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, and others.

The “weaponization of international law” does not stem from countries trying to uphold it. it comes from those who claim to support the so-called “rules-based international order” while aggressively violating it to serve their own economc and political interests. From the Genocide Conventions to the Arms Trade Treaty to the rules of international humanitarian law, international human rights law and beyond, Israel is in violation of every rule, standard, and principle that has been set since the end of World War II.

In the interest of ensuring “Never Again” after the Holocaust and the slaugter of WWII, the world’s governments agreed to codes of conduct that Israel, with full support of its Western backers, has shredded along with the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. They are the ones who have weaponized international law, effectively carving out Palestine as a “state of exception” where Palestininans are not protected by law but instead are dehumanized, bombed, shot, tortured, raped, and starved.

People power for Palestine

The countries coming together to form new alliances to challenge this “state of exception,” to hold Israel and its Western protectors accountable, and to end the genocide could potentially help forge a new world order. If others join them, creating a large group of non-aligned states in the spirit of Bandung to stand up to Western (as well as Russian and Chinese) military and economic force, then international law might not die in the rubble of Gaza.

The Bogotá conference “marks a turning point—not just for Palestine, but for the future of the international system,” said Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, Executive Secretary of the Hague Group. “For decades, states—particularly in the Global South—have borne the cost of a broken international system. In Bogotá, they came together to reclaim it—not with words, but with actions.”

More states need to have the courage to join the Bogotá commitments, and to start building the networks of soliarity and support that will necessary to overcome pressure from the Western warmongers, as well as from Russian and Chinese imperial interests.

However, it’s also important to acknowledge that states have not, in the bigger picture, stood for people. Most often, they work to protect their own interests—their power, privilege, and profit—even at the expense of their people. While the commitments made at the Bogotá conference are essential, they can only be implemented and embodied through people power.

The blockades at ports, the protests at weapon manufacturing sites, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, the refusal of people globally to participate in genocide and to hold their own governments accountable are absolutely vital not just to ending the horrific suffering of Palestinians now, but building a new international system based on solidarity and justice for us all.

Building transnational networks of mutual aid, collaborative campaigns, and political education are going to be a key part of building a new world order that actually works for us all. We are up against global authoritarian horrors, far-right resurgence, and devastating violence in all its myriad forms. But there more of us that suffer from the current “world order” than profit from it. Finding our way out and creating something new can only happen together.

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