American Power versus Third Worldism: The Question of Palestine at the United Nations

Paper Abstract: This paper deploys the question of Palestine at the United Nations to explain the rise and fall of Third Worldism in international politics. The question of Palestine has been a focal point of Third Worldism at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) since the Arab-Israel War of 1967. However, unlike other Third Worldist issues such as decolonization and racial discrimination, the UNGA has been strikingly ineffective at shaping the trajectory of the question of Palestine. My paper argues that this ineffectiveness is a function of the deliberate exercise of U.S. imperial power at the end of the Cold War. At this time, the institutional marginalization of UNGA became a central policy aim of the U.S. My paper tracks this process through demonstrating how the U.S. exerted pressure on Third World states to rescind the controversial UNGA ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution (Resolution 3379) in 1991. I also demonstrate that the U.S. has nonetheless failed to exercise symbolic power over the Palestinian question, which continues to animate progressive transnational movements. Here, my paper draws on debates that occurred over Israel/Palestine and Zionism in UN-sponsored Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban in 2001 and the subsequent Durban Review Conference in 2009. My analysis thus points to the challenges – and possibilities – of maintaining Global South solidarities in the face of U.S. power.