From Eurozine
Under the Netanyahu government, Israel has aligned itself with an autocratic international whose goal is to transform sovereignty into state impunity. The war on Gaza inaugurates a global era in which consensus itself has lost legitimacy.
Future historians looking back upon the Israel-Gaza conflict may see that it stands at the nodal point of three developments that together have fundamentally reshaped the coordinates of the international institutions established in the wake of WWII.
The first development is the end of neoliberal globalization and the emergence of protectionism and mercantilism among the major powers USA, China and Russia. These economic shifts bring with them a geopolitics whose dominant feature is the aim to build new spheres of influence by brazenly annexing territory and/or threatening to do so. Russia considers Ukraine an integral part of its ancestral lands (Ruskiy mir), while the US revives claims upon the Panama Canal and Greenland, and even proposes to annex Canada. China, for its part, raises sovereignty claims on Taiwan against the clear wishes of the Taiwanese people. Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank fits into this pattern. By fragmenting Palestinian territories and appropriating land, water and mineral wealth, Israel entrenches a permanent imbalance of sovereignty under the guise of security.
Though different in scale and context, these moves have the same consequence: they erode the most fundamental norm of the post–World War II international order, namely the prohibition on the use of force to acquire territory. Enshrined in Article 2(4) of UN Charter, this prohibition was the cornerstone of an international system designed to prevent a return to the destructive logics of conquest and aggression that had devastated the first half of the twentieth century. Although today’s powers frame their claims in the languages of security, sovereignty, or economic necessity, the underlying rationale is disturbingly similar: the normalization of expansionist policies that treat conquest as a legitimate path to strength in a competitive world order.
The rise of this new geopolitics has, secondly, severely damaged the multilateral human rights conventions in defence of universal civil and political, social, economic and cultural rights. The trend is towards bilateral agreements rather than multilateral conventions. One of the most important post-WWII documents, the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 is being shredded not only by the racist and xenophobic regimes of this world, but also by liberal democracies busy compromising principles of refugee protection in order to accommodate the rise of domestic ethno-national populism.
Seyla Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School.
This text, published by Eurozine, is an authorized and revised English version of the article published in German in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 10/2025. An extended English version was first published in Völkerrechtsblog on 16.09.2025.
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