THE US move to block Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian officials from this month’s meeting of the UN general assembly gives the middle finger to the independence of the United Nations.

A veto-wielding superpower, the US has always ignored global institutions and international law when it suits it to do so — its endless wars, worldwide drone assassinations and sanctions against countries without UN security council authorisation all show that. Under Donald Trump though it is increasingly antagonistic to the entire international system embodied by the UN, which it helped found but powerful parts of the US ruling class now reject.

The implications are serious, even if the “rules-based order” Western states have claimed to police was hypocritical.

It is possible both to condemn empty talk of a “two-state solution” by states facilitating Israel’s uninterrupted colonisation of Palestinian land, and to acknowledge that the shift under Trump to open endorsement of ethnic cleansing has emboldened Israel to kill on a staggering scale in Gaza and accelerate land theft in the West Bank.

So the US decision to revoke visas for Abbas and other Palestinians matters, whatever your view of the Palestinian Authority itself.

It matters for Palestine that their internationally recognised representatives are being refused access to the UN for seeking “the unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state” when a majority of UN member states already recognise that state.

It matters for the world that the United States is abusing the fact that the UN’s New York headquarters is on its territory to make a political decision on who can and cannot attend meetings: something prohibited by the UN Headquarters Agreement. In the past, the US has been sufficiently wary of undermining the UN that it has allowed its most prominent adversaries to address the general assembly: thunderous denunciations of its crimes have been delivered there by the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. If the rules are changing, the viability of the UN as an international forum comes into question.

For all its flaws and limitations, the collapse of UN authority leads nowhere good, short of the kind of worldwide socialist revolution that has not looked imminent for a century.

Just as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” project breaks with constitutional conventions in the US (such as through the deployment of federally controlled soldiers to police cities) it breaks with longstanding norms of international relations, not in a democratic direction but in undisguised bullying and dispossession of the weak by the strong.

We should reject the liberal delusion that this represents a fundamental break with previous practice — respect for international law has been undermined primarily by the way the US and its allies have launched repeated devastating wars in violation of the UN charter. But we should also be aware that Trump’s imperialism unmasked, shorn of diplomatic and legal niceties, implies an escalation of US aggression which is very bad news for the world.

On the same count we should oppose anything which attacks the internationally recognised status of Palestine and its position at the UN. It is part of an effort to erase Palestine as a nation, and the fury from Washington and Tel Aviv at new pledges to recognise a Palestinian state underlines that, even while we recognise these are grossly inadequate and will not end the genocide.

The fact that the United Nations has not been able to defend Palestinian sovereignty in practice does not make it unimportant as a forum in which the global majority’s support for Palestine can be expressed.

And questions over the practicality of a two-state solution after decades of Israeli land-grabs cannot mean indifference to measures clearly aimed at establishing a one-state solution on Tel Aviv’s terms: a “greater Israel” in which Palestinians have no place, no voice and no status among the nations of the world.