by Ranjan Solomon

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

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 Israel and the United States.

Russia and China abstained not out of indifference but to signal the obvious: this resolution was never about Palestinian self-determination. It was about manufacturing consent for externally designed governance structures. By withholding their support, Moscow and Beijing made clear that the West’s attempt to codify a custodial order over Gaza lacked legitimacy.

But more importantly, Palestinian society itself has rendered such proposals obsolete. Across Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora, the message is unmistakable: no more trustees, no more guardians, no more caretakers of the Palestinian will.

International law is unambiguous: Gaza is not yours to govern

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the core principles of the UN Charter, the right of a people under occupation is not to be administered by third parties but to exercise national self-determination. Every “transitional authority” imposed by foreign powers – no matter how humanitarian its vocabulary – violates this principle.

Gaza’s status is not ambiguous.

• Israel is the occupying power.
• The occupation is illegal.
• The siege is collective punishment.
• And the right to self-government rests solely with Palestinians not with international coalitions claiming to act on their behalf.

The West’s repeated attempts to design the administrative architecture of Gaza are not proposals; they are breaches of law dressed in diplomatic language. Even the insistence that Gaza must be governed by “reformed” Palestinian institutions vetted by Western capitals is a violation of the basic principle of self-determination. The political configuration of Palestinian governance is the exclusive domain of Palestinians. Not Tel Aviv. Not Washington. Not Brussels. And certainly not former colonial powers still struggling to reconcile with the fact that their era is over.

READ: EU welcomes UN Security Council resolution as ‘important step to end Gaza conflict’

Gaza is not real estate: it is history, identity, and national continuity

The West continues to speak of Gaza as if it were a property problem. A place to be rebuilt, administered, secured, fenced, or leased. A space to be redesigned through “development packages” and “security compacts.” But Gaza is not a zone of crisis management – it is one of the oldest, most continuous communities of the Palestinian people. Gaza is, in poin5t of fact, an ancient historical entity with a continuous history of habitation spanning over 4,000 years, functioning as a vital trade hub and a crossroads of civilizations between Egypt and the Levant. 

For the West, real estate thinking comes naturally. Land is property. Property is power. And power belongs to those who can enforce it. It is a capitalist notion of tenure and tenants. 

For Palestinians, the paradigm is in stark contrast. Land is memory, belonging, and the right to exist as a people. Gaza contains the living history of displacement: families rooted in villages across what is now Israel, carrying the trauma of the Nakba, holding keys to homes they were violently expelled from. Gaza is not an administrative unit. It is the beating heart of Palestinian nationhood.

This is why every attempt to partition, rehabilitate, internationalise, or reassign Gaza collapses. Because Palestine is not a managerial problem – it is a national question. The West keeps trying to govern land, while Palestinians insist on governing themselves.

Why the West cannot govern Gaza – not even “for its own good”

The West’s failure is not merely moral. It is structural. Its record in the Middle East is a catalogue of disasters rooted in the same patronising assumption: that Arabs and Muslims require guidance, supervision, and discipline from “civilised” powers.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Lebanon, foreign custodianship destroyed far more than it built. But Gaza is an even more glaring case. For decades, Western states funded the siege, shielded Israel from accountability, armed the occupation, and vilified Palestinian political expression. These are not neutral actors. They are co-architects of the catastrophe.

A custodian cannot simultaneously be the enabler of oppression. Western claims to benevolent governance are incompatible with their decades-long support for Israel’s domination of Palestinian life. If the West truly wanted Gaza to be free, safe, and stable, it would stop arming the state that bombs its people, destroys its hospitals, starves its children, and flattens its neighbourhoods. Instead, it offers proposals for “responsible administration” that Palestinians are expected to accept with gratitude.

No occupied people in history have ever accepted such terms – and Palestinians will not be the first.

In the final analysis, Palestinian self-rule is not an aspiration; it is an inevitability. The West, in its sophisticated crudity, continues to behave as though Palestinian sovereignty is a privilege that may be granted once Palestinians mature into acceptable political actors. This worldview is a relic of colonial paternalism. It is the same logic the British used in Mandate Palestine, arguing that Palestinians were not yet capable of governing the land they had inhabited for centuries.

But history keeps asserting itself. Every uprising, every wave of resistance, every assertion of national identity is a reminder that Palestinians do not seek permission to exist as a people. They claim it by right. The UNSC vote may not deliver liberation, but it revealed a deeper truth: the world is no longer convinced by Western narratives of Palestinian incapacity. A growing global consensus recognises that Gaza cannot be governed by external powers because the external powers bear responsibility for the devastation. From trusteeship to liberation: the shift is already underway

The world is changing. Younger generations across continents are rejecting the old colonial storylines. South Africa’s leadership, Latin American states, African blocs, Asian alliances – all increasingly speak in a language the West hoped would disappear: the language of anti-colonial justice.

Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis to be managed. It is a liberation struggle to be recognised. This is why the Trump–Netanyahu vision for Gaza’s future – a patchwork of controlled zones, demilitarised enclaves, and externally appointed governors – is already dead-on arrival. Only those who misunderstand the moment believe that Palestinians will accept such an arrangement.

The vote at the UNSC did not resolve the struggle. But it exposed the limits of Western custodianship and the persistence of Palestinian determination. The imperial toolbox is empty. Whatever may remain of it is valueless and obsolete. The language of trusteeship has lost legitimacy. And Palestinians are making it clear that the future of Gaza will not be negotiated over their heads – it will be shaped by their own hands.

No more guardians. No more intermediaries. No more custodians

The world cannot govern Gaza. The West cannot stabilise Gaza. Israel cannot redesign Gaza. And no international coalition can administer Gaza without becoming part of the machinery that denies Palestinians their sovereignty.

Gaza’s future belongs to Palestinians – not as a concession, but as a right rooted in history, law, and the unbreakable continuity of a people who refuse to be erased. No more custodians. No more trustees. No more guardians.

Palestinians will rule Gaza – because Gaza is Palestine, and Palestine belongs to its people.

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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.