The Greater Isolation of Lesser Israel

Delegates walk out as Netanyahu begins his speech at UN -- image via news video screenshot

By Vijay Prashad

When Benjamin Netanyahu rose to address the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, the rows of empty seats spoke before he did. Diplomats walked out, while others stayed away from the outset. News reports citing an Israeli tally put the number of delegations absent or departing at 77. This was not a recorded UN vote, nor did all 77 stage a coordinated walkout. Yet the image of an Israeli prime minister speaking to a depleted chamber captured a real political fact: the destruction of Gaza and the consolidation of occupation have made Israel increasingly isolated across much of the world.

The diplomats who stayed away or who walked out were overwhelmingly drawn from Africa, Asia, the Arab world and Latin America, although European states including Spain and Ireland boycotted the address. Brazil and South Africa did not show up, while Indonesia, Pakistan, Senegal, Sudan, and Türkiye stayed away. The empty seats did not mean that each of these countries stayed away for the same reason. However, it is essential to point out that for many of them Palestine is not a distant diplomatic file but a liberation project akin to their own struggles against colonial rule and for sovereignty. They refused to listen to Netanyahu as the occupation, apartheid, genocide, and expropriation were happening in plain sight.

The rebuke came at the correct time. In his address, Netanyahu rejected all genocide allegations. However, in June 2026, a UN independent commission said that Israeli authorities and forces continued to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes, specifically in their treatment of Palestinian children. This commission had previously concluded in 2025 that Israel was committing a genocide. These are findings of a UN investigative body, not a final judgment in the genocide case before the International Court of Justice. The difference between a commission’s findings and a court’s eventual ruling matters legally, but it does not make the evidence of Israeli violence and Palestinian suffering disappear.

Permanent Genocide

The 10 October 2025 ceasefire did not bring an end to the genocide or the suffering. UN humanitarian reporting in September 2026 describes continuing deaths, restricted access to essential supplies, mass displacement and a landscape of shattered homes and public services. Just before the report was published, in Tal al-Hawa on 16 September, a building damaged by the Israeli attacks collapsed and killed at least twenty-one people, including eight children. ‘Israeli airstrikes, shelling, drone attacks, and ground operations have continued’, the UN investigators write, ‘and Palestinian casualties continue to mount.

Around two-thirds of Gaza remains inaccessible or subject to severe access restrictions, leaving Palestinian civilians confined to overcrowded and insecure areas’. Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme’s special representative in Gaza, told Seham Tantesh, ‘The estimate of the total rubble in Gaza is 61 million tonnes. It is approximately twenty times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last eighteen years’.

The global outrage at the genocide is not only retrospective, directed at the devastation of the years before the ceasefire. It responds to a present in which Palestinians remain exposed to violence, deprivation, and political subjugation.

Gaza is only one of three parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the other two parts being East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice held in an advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the OPT was unlawful and that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the seizures of buildings and land in East Jerusalem violated international law. Drawing on this opinion, the UN General Assembly demanded that Israel end its unlawful presence within a year. As if to snub the UN, in April 2025 Israel established a new enforcement unit within its Land Authority to identify ‘illegal’ Palestinian construction in the West Bank with the intent of demolishing them and building more illegal settlements. The UN’s Secretary General published his report in September 2025, which showed that nothing had changed a year after the UN General Assembly’s deadline passed. The gap between international legal principle and the facts imposed on the ground has become impossible to disguise with appeals to an indefinitely postponed peace process.

Profits from Apartheid

On September 25, the UN Human Rights Office updated its database of businesses engaged in specific activities connected to Israel’s illegal settlements. Its latest report, A/HRC/63/20, lists 214 enterprises based in 11 countries, compared with 158 in the 2025 edition. The UN says the list is limited to activities identified under its Human Rights Council mandate, and so it is not a catalogue of every company with commercial links to Israel, nor a judicial finding that each listed firm has committed a crime. Its purpose is to make the economic machinery of the settlements visible, which had been done in 2025 in the report by Francesca Albanese in From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.

These reports show that the settler machinery reaches well beyond the settler movement itself to companies that provide construction, finance, telecommunications, services, and markets. Through the work of these companies the ‘temporary’ nature of the settlements is made permanent. The database supplies a practical and concrete list for tracing the relationships between settlers and these companies and asks governments and investors what they will do about these relationships.

Most listed enterprises are Israeli, but foreign firms included businesses that are mostly headquartered in the United States and several European countries. These governments that invoke a ‘rules-based order’ cannot treat their own companies’ participation in such a blatantly unlawful settlement economy as an incidental commercial matter. The facts established in the list should now put additional pressure on states (in particular, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom) whose public opposition to settlements is contradicted by the continuation of their firms in the settlement economy.

The UN database does not automatically prescribe sanctions against named companies, but it does make indifference harder to defend. Governments can investigate listed activities, exclude settlement products and services from preferential treatment, examine public contracts and require firms to end involvement that sustains occupation. These measures would connect the principles proclaimed at the UN to the economic system that keeps settlements viable.

Incomplete Isolation

Israel’s diplomatic isolation is substantial but incomplete. Empty seats did not halt the violence or dismantle a single settlement, while strong statements in New York can coexist with trade, arms transfers, and investments that sustain the status quo. The United States and other powerful partners still possess the means to shield Israel from consequences, even as opposition grows in the UN General Assembly. For Palestinians, symbolic rejection is meaningful only if it develops into sustained pressure for protection, accountability, an end to unlawful occupation, and the exercise of self-determination.

The scene at the General Assembly and the publication of the business database belong in the same story. One revealed a loss of political consent, while the other mapped some of the economic relationships that allow it to survive. The overwhelming presence of Global South countries among those absent or departing reflects a widening refusal to accept mass Palestinian suffering as the price of geopolitical alliance. The task now is to give that refusal material force. A world that turns its back on Netanyahu’s defence of the occupation must also withdraw the contracts, investments, and diplomatic cover through which occupation is made to endure.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

This article was produced by Globetrotter.