On November 17, 2025, the UN Security Council voted to effectively endorse US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. This plan, far from providing a meaningful path to Palestinian self-determination, effectively separates Gaza from the rest of the Palestinian territories and places it under an indefinite quasi-colonial mandate. As Palestinians in Gaza remain displaced or return to homes reduced to rubble, under the shadow of a fragile ceasefire and an ongoing blockade, it is impossible to ignore the fact that several states that historically stood for Palestinian self-determination, including Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and the UAE, have all urged the Security Council to accept the plan. India has separately also welcomed the Trump plan. Russia and China despite noting their stringent objections to the plan did not use the veto to block it. While the Global South’s abandonment of Palestine is unsurprising, it raises important questions: why are states in the Global South that once came together to end apartheid in South Africa no longer willing to play the same role in the world, and what does this mean for the future of international institutions?Genocide as a collective crimeOn September 16, 2025, a United Nations (UN) Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces have committed genocide in Gaza. Both Navi Pillay, the UN Human Rights commissioner who chaired the commission, as well as Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have since reminded states of their obligations under international law to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. They have both urged states to look at the example of apartheid South Africa to shape international collective action to end the genocide and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. Yet, two years into the genocide in Gaza, there is little, apart from nostalgic hope, to suggest that any such meaningful collective action is likely. While much has been written about the India-Israel relationship, the abandonment of Palestine extends across the Global South. On October 20, Albanese released a report (which is worth reading in full) terming the ongoing genocide in Gaza a “collective crime”. Both India and China find mention as suppliers of weapons to Israel during the genocide. Egypt, apart from signing a 35-billion-dollar energy deal with an Israeli company during the genocide, continues to maintain significant security relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are reported to have helped Israel bypass the Houthi blockade by road; 12% of Israeli weapons exports, per the report, go to Arab countries under the Abraham Accords and a further 23% go to countries in the Asia Pacific. UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco have all increased their trade with Israel during the genocide. The more progressive Global South states, represented by the Hague Group have also limited themselves to sanctions that fall short of the sanctions once imposed on apartheid South Africa. Only Belize, Bolivia, Columbia and Nicaragua have fully suspended diplomatic relations with Israel since 2023. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, after an initial burst of promise, also seems to have been put on the back-burner. Both Brazil and South Africa have continued to supply Israel with essential raw materials (including coal) for energy production, even though Israel’s electricity grid does not differentiate between the lands within the 1948 border and the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. South Africa, Apartheid, and the Global SouthThis stands in sharp contrast to what the Global South once accomplished on apartheid. Concerns about racial discrimination in South Africa were first raised at the UN in 1946 by undivided India. By 1948, apartheid was state policy in South Africa and the newly independent states of the Global South faced significant diplomatic difficulties in their attempt to aid South Africans living under it. First, they had to convince the rest of the world that apartheid, as a particularly egregious violation of human rights, was a threat to global peace and security, and not merely a domestic South African affair. This was independent of the expansion of the policy into Namibia. Second, they had to build effective collective action, despite the UN Security Council being stacked with allies of the apartheid regime (the US, UK and France concurrently vetoed 10 draft resolutions recommending measures against the regime in South Africa). This required the Global South to craft an anti-imperialist diplomatic framework from scratch. Esmat Elhalaby, in a recent book, argues that the commitment to anti-imperialism in early Indian and West Asian foreign policy was about more than just opposition to colonisation – it was rooted in the shared political principles of socialism, secularism and nonalignment. This is evident in the positions of the Global South on apartheid South Africa and Palestine, which were, for a long time, seen as parts of the same struggle (best reflected in Resolution 3379 passed by the UN General Assembly that recognised Zionism as a form a racism and racial discrimination). On November 6, 1962, the UN General Assembly recommended a set of five sanctions against South Africa to its members, including the boycott of all South African goods, refraining from exporting all goods (including arms and ammunition) to South Africa, severing diplomatic relations, closing ports to all South African vessels and not sending vessels to South African ports, and refusing landing rights to South African aircraft. While the General Assembly did not have the power to compel members to adopt these sanctions, most of the Global South, together with the Soviet bloc, voluntarily broke off diplomatic and economic relations with South Africa pursuant to this resolution. The 1962 resolution also created the UN Special Committee on Apartheid, that would keep South Africa’s policies under review on an ongoing basis. In 1966, the General Assembly first termed apartheid a “crime against humanity”, and in 1973 the General Assembly approved the text of the Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which came into force in 1976, with 20 signatories.Though the West maintained cordial relations with the apartheid regime during this period, and continued to block Security Council action against them, the Global South had succeeded in its first object – ensuring that apartheid was recognized as an international concern. Diplomacy was also used creatively to circumvent the limitations of the UN. While the expulsion of any country from the UN technically falls under the domain of the Security Council, under the Presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the General Assembly refused to accept the credentials of the South African delegation, effectively barring them from participating. In 1973, the General Assembly voted to recognise the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress as the only legitimate representatives of the people of South Africa. As serious economic pressure could only be built with the participation of South Africa’s major trading partners in the West, the UN Special Committee on Apartheid also decided to directly target Western public opinion through segments that were sympathetic to the cause, including sections of the media, student organisations and trade unions. A UN trust fund was set up for such publicity, to which member states could make voluntary contributions. While this tactic prompted hostility from the Western states, the internal pressure it created, together with the pressure on the Western states placed by the Cold War to claim the moral high ground, eventually forced them into the sanctions regime.Changing politics within the Global SouthBy the 1970s, domestic politics across the Global South was changing. Popular support for both socialism and secularism were waning. The death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1971 and the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, pushed Egypt into greater reconciliation with Israel under Anwar Sadat, which in turn created right-wing pushback against Sadat. In Syria and Iraq, the rise of Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, respectively, meant that Arab socialism devolved into authoritarian family run regimes. In India, the war with China and the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, both in 1964, shook public faith in nonalignment as a doctrine. The next decade in India would see multiple wars and acute shortages that heightened economic distress. Indira Gandhi’s populism, and her war on the left was to culminate in the Emergency and its large-scale suppression of civil and political liberty and, eventually, the resurgence of communal politics. These developments meant that anti-imperialism in the Global South became increasingly disjointed from its original underlying principles and limited to on-paper declarations of support. More immediately concerned with quelling separatism within their own borders, support for self-determination in these countries also became somewhat qualified. While the anti-apartheid movement took on a momentum of its own by the late 1970s, the discourse on Palestinian liberation in global diplomacy became limited to a series of ad-hoc responses to Israeli aggression including the annexation of East Jerusalem, the bombing and invasion of Lebanon and the suppression of the First Intifada that began within the occupied territories in 1987. While some of these responses were forcefully articulated, like General Assembly Resolution 37/43 passed on December 3, 1982, that reaffirmed the right of people under colonial and foreign domination and occupation to resist by “all available means, including armed struggle”, they remained on paper, and no longer reflected the same shared material commitment to anti-imperialism that had characterised previous decades. The end of the Cold War and the Oslo Peace ProcessThe end of the Cold War took away the perceived need for the last pillar of the Global South’s anti-imperialism – nonalignment. Economic liberalisation and globalisation created shared capitalist interests across national (and erstwhile ideological) boundaries, which began to dominate foreign policy. The post liberalisation capitalist elite that emerged in the Global South saw relations with the West as critical to economic growth. Even in countries that were not dependent on foreign aid, the generation of foreign investment became a measure of government efficiency in the public discourse. This meant that foreign policy discourse in this period also shifted from being based on principles to being transactional, and economically increasingly Westward looking. Also read: ‘Collective Crime’: Francesca Albanese’s New Report Shows How Third States Aid Israel’s Genocide in GazaIn the decade that followed, states like India, made significant progress in their relationship with Israel, often at the cost of their support for the Palestinian cause. This resulted in the dismantling of some of the theoretical frameworks around which international support for Palestine (and South Africa) had rested. For example, on December 16, 1991, the General Assembly voted with an overwhelming majority to revoke resolution 3379 that had termed Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Oslo peace process offered many states in the Global South a face-saving way to turn away from their historical commitments to the decolonisation of Palestine, which no longer held the same sway on their populations. The war on terror and hegemonic international lawThe “global” war on terror was never global in any meaningful sense. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US sought to create a hegemonic system where the US became the arbiter of what constituted terrorism, and what actions were permissible against it. This system selectively expanded the right of self-defense against non-state actors on foreign soil, shrank the applicability of international humanitarian law to such conflicts and used the Security Council’s anti-terrorism committee to effectively export domestic US laws on terror funding into international law. While the hegemonic nature of this emerging legal order was clear from the outset, the US received overwhelming support for its creation. This was driven by multiple factors. Many states in the Global South found the discursive framings of the “war on terror” to be useful in side-stepping conversations around humanitarian and human rights law in their own internal conflicts. On Palestine, this meant that countries in the Global South increasingly began to hyphenate their support for Palestinian self-determination with references to Israel’s security concerns. Foreign policy cannot be built on nostalgia While nations often engage in historical nostalgia, there is little room for it in international relations. Foreign policy does not derive from abstract principles of international law, or precedent. It must necessarily engage with politics in the present because consent for foreign policy is built in the context of current domestic politics. While on-paper assertions of support for decolonisation cost nothing, material steps like sanctions require a domestic population willing to bear the cost. Leaving aside India (where the rise of Hindu nationalism has made further support for Palestine next to impossible) a dominant public discourse rooted in individualism, economic liberalisation and globalisation (that is now prevalent across much of the Global South) has been unable to generate or sustain material support for anti-imperialism. The most prominent casualty of this has been Palestine. Albanese in her report on state complicity in the Gaza genocide notes an “unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments”. While this is in reference to the relative lack of impact the large-scale Palestine protests across the globe have had in shaping state policy, it also touches one of the reasons why international institutions failed so badly in Gaza. The international order which once put together action against apartheid South Africa relied disproportionately on the Global South to act collectively, and disinterestedly, to further the interests of the marginalised, both within and beyond their national boundaries. As states in the Global South ceased to identify with or play this role in the world, the ability of international institutions to protect the marginalised significantly diminished. It is therefore not enough to invoke memories of collective action against apartheid. To make international law work against imperialism, the moral force that was once provided by the Global South, will have to be found elsewhere.The Global South today faces a multitude of challenges. As issues like climate change and resource scarcity spark conflict, a world where genocide can be committed without repercussions will be fundamentally unsafe for the most vulnerable populations in it. And many of these populations are resident in the Global South. On the face of it, this should be enough incentive to act against the normalisation of genocide. And yet, as we have seen at the Security Council, this is unlikely to happen if states within the Global South continue to design their foreign policy around the interests of a narrow elite, while ignoring the concerns of their most marginalised populations.Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.