Breaking from most members of the UN Security Council on Tuesday, the United States declined to condemn illegal Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank and opposed briefings on Resolution 2334 — the legal instrument affirming the illegality of Israel’s settlement project under international law. This was not an episodic diplomatic choice or a lapse in judgment. It was a routine assertion of power by a state that treats international law not as a binding framework, but as an instrument to be activated or suspended depending on strategic need.

What is at stake here goes far beyond moral inconsistency. It concerns the material architecture of global power — the way law, military force, capital, and political legitimacy are organised to preserve a deeply unequal world order. The United Nations, and particularly the Security Council, was never designed to dismantle empire. It was constructed to stabilise it, offering procedural legitimacy to a system in which domination could continue under the language of rules, resolutions, and managed dissent. When that architecture is tested — when legality threatens to impose real costs on an allied colonial project — the response is not enforcement, but obstruction.

Resolution 2334, adopted in 2016, clearly affirms that Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of international law. It did not introduce new norms; it merely restated principles long embedded in international humanitarian law. Yet even this minimal reaffirmation has become intolerable. Washington’s refusal to allow briefings on the resolution signals a deeper truth: when law risks disrupting a settler-colonial project aligned with imperial interests, the law itself becomes politically inadmissible. Silence is manufactured, procedure is weaponised, and accountability is indefinitely deferred.

Israeli settlements are not the product of religious zealotry alone, nor are they spontaneous acts of extremism. They are a........

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