UNDER its own charter, the UN does not have the power to create new states or impose statehood on existing ones. Self-determination is one of its founding and fundamental principles.

When, in 1947, the US coerced the UN to pass Resolution 181 on the partition of Palestine, it was voting to legitimise something it had no provenance to do.

Providing an international birth certificate to an illegitimate Jewish state based on stolen Palestinian Arab-owned land was a blatant violation of the principle of self-determination. It wasn’t anything the people living in Palestine voted for or wanted, it was imposed externally by force.

As it was born, so Israel has continued to live — breaking every norm of international law in its relatively brief life. In doing so it has acted as a trailblazer and legitimiser for today’s US foreign policy. It is not that imperialist countries, dictators and despots have not been capable of thinking of violent means to achieve their objectives — what Israel has done, aided and abetted by the US, is to commit a never-ending list of breaches of international law while still claiming legitimacy as part of the “democracies of the free world.”

The framework of the UN was to create or maintain peace. Israel’s foreign policy has always been to use force. This is now the official US doctrine. In 2025 alone Israel has attacked six countries. In addition to Palestine it has launched military assaults on Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria and Yemen, not including violations of Tunisian, Maltese and Greek waters in pursuit of flotillas on peaceful missions to Gaza. This amounted to 10,631 attacks, the majority in Palestine, outdoing the 622 overseas bombings by the United States across seven countries.

The similarity is the self-belief that it is perfectly alright to bomb and kill innocent citizens of a country whose policies you dislike. A natural extension of this is to use targeted assassination or attacks on leaders and opponents wherever they happen to be. Israel has used assassination as a tactic from at least 1956, with hundreds of recorded attempts. More recently, Israel’s assault on Qatar and its assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024 eerily forebode the US attack on Venezuela and capture of its president, Nicolas Maduro.

Not surprisingly US and Israeli security forces work hand in glove, practising, trialling and sharing techniques and tactics. Israel has been at the forefront of drone technology — selling and exporting it on the basis of it having been tried and tested against the Palestinians during Operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge in 2008 and 2014 respectively. Now they are the go-to weapon of war — remote control death at no risk to the perpetrator.

The West complains about Russia’s occupation of Crimea and now eastern parts of Ukraine but remains effectively silent on Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since 1967. The US threat to Greenland is a real one, precedent exists — Palestine shouts it is okay to take and keep land by force if you are on “our side.” Challenges from your allies will be sadly lacking.

With Trump briefing his army that the future war and enemy is internal, ICE must surely be taking lessons from the IDF as to how one controls and intimidates a local population. The road checks, walls, settler violence and attacks, shootings, mass arrests and taking prisoners are a template that is being transferred to the US.

Regarding the local population as the enemy, defining them as terrorist is a well-worn tactic. In 1954, Israel passed A Prevention of Infiltration Law. Its effect was to criminalise those Palestinians who had been made refugees during the Nakba if they sought to return to their homes and land. Pass a law to make citizens aliens or define drug dealers and protesters as terrorists — then the normal rule of law does not apply. Indeed, there are no rules, anyone or anything can be defined as illegal. Just label it terrorist.

It is easy to take the parallels too far. In this neoliberal global war, the US does not need lessons in violence and aggression. It, too, is born on the back of settler colonialism and genocide, has a culture of guns and violence. But the strength of Israel as a 20th-century exemplar of what can be done without recrimination is evident.

This is not some historical precedent from before civilisation and enlightenment when everyone did abhorrent things. After the horrors of the second world war, “never again” was not just about the Holocaust, it was meant to bring about settling issues between states without recourse to war. Setting red lines of international law not to be crossed.

But Israel has crossed them time and again; relegitimised genocide, made it an acceptable tactic to kill tens of thousands of women and children deliberately, starve a population and create a famine, flatten a country and commit ecocide while destroying its health, education and water systems. No wonder Trump and Netanyahu get on most of the time — they are creating a new world order based on fascist means, morals and tactics.

It is not necessary to do historic comparisons. It is not the salutes they make nor the language they use — it is the ideology they share. Authoritarian, opposing equality, individual and collective rights while celebrating violence, embracing paramilitarism and seeking to expand territory using threats of armed conflict to underpin economic bullying. All classic traits of fascism in the making.

Since the latest alleged ceasefire there have been over 400 Palestinian deaths, Israel continues its daily destruction of Gaza. With the threats to Venezuela and Greenland and now Cuba, it is easy to be lost for words. But it is Israel — with US support, that has been the precursor, breaking the boundaries of impunity. Literally, nowhere, no-one is safe. A global war is taking place with the compliance of Western governments; none is standing up to be counted.

It is clear that we will not defeat Trump and his world without rules while Israel continues to act with total impunity. The British government and its ministers, many sponsored by Israel and its allies, have chosen the wrong side — supporting the oppressor and its crimes. As a consequence, they have lost the hearts and minds of many of those who supported or voted for it.

But there are more of us who’ve not lost all socialist principles, so let’s build our collective resistance. They rely on our inaction, they rely on us acting alone, not together.