Prior to the passing of the resolution, it was only the Russian Federation that raised concern over the American proposal in a statement reported by TASS on 15 November, 2025. The statement read in part:
It is a UNSC decision that is at the core of our current discussion. Since the UNSC is the main body responsible for maintaining international peace and security, it should be given a rightful role and the necessary tools to ensure accountability and control. In addition, UNSC resolutions are supposed to reflect the universally recognised international legal framework and reaffirm fundamental decisions and principles, first and foremost the two-State solution for the Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
Unfortunately, these provisions were not given due regard in the U.S. draft. In this context, the Russian Federation felt obliged to propose an alternative draft UNSC resolution on achieving sustainable peace in the Gaza Strip (TASS, 2025).
Although Trump had triumphantly stated that “Together, we have achieved what everybody said was impossible. At long last, we have peace in the Middle East… a lasting peace will be one in which both Palestinians and Israelis can prosper with their fundamental human rights protected, their security guaranteed, and their dignity upheld. (Kekatos, 2025). The Trump Plan looks more like a colonial project, with an uncertain future that allows long-term exploitation of the colony. This is because ‘Project Israel’ has taken on more of an economic substance, which the Trump Plan has managed to gloss over.
According to UNCTAD (2019), the Levant Basin Province encompasses approximately 83,000 km² of the Eastern Mediterranean, bounded by the Levant Transform Zone, the Tartus Fault, the Eratosthenes Seamount, the Nile Delta Cone Province, and the limit of compressional structures in the Sinai. The Levant Basin holds oil and natural gas estimated at 122 trillion cubic feet with a net value of $453 billion (at 2017 prices), and 1.7 billion barrels of oil with a net value of $71 billion, totaling about $524 billion. This is a price that requires mutual beneficiation among the different parties, Israel, Palestinians and multinationals, and could well stoke the ongoing crisis.
Conclusion: Honourable disengagement or a zero-sum endgame
Whereas a civic state is possible in Palestine, so much blood has been spilt to realise this vision of Palestine as an enclave for common citizenship for both Palestinians and the Israelis. The European powers that created the problem in the first place have travelled back in time to 1947, the partition plan, and have come to recognise the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own.
At the last count, the State of Palestine has been recognised as a sovereign nation by 157 of the 193 UN member states. Infact, the United Kingdom was quick to acknowledge its historical role in creating the problem. Back in July 2025, David Lemmy, then the UK’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, had noted that “Britain bears a special burden of responsibility to support the two-state solution… because of its role in the creation of the Israeli state in Palestine” (Farley, H. & Rawnsley, J. 2025).
Therefore, the time has come for Israelis, especially the Zionists, to allow a Palestinian State to be. The Israelis should heed the advice of Abba Eban, doyen of Israeli diplomacy, in his lecture delivered at the David Davis Memorial Institute of International Studies on 26 October 1988. Eban reflected on the prospects for peace in the Middle East within the context of Israeli experience: politics of creation and survival, the goodwill of the international community that guaranteed its survival, its fear, its military preponderance, and its subjugation of the Palestinians and its counterproductive nature, and above all, the folly of an absolutist claim to the whole of Palestine. He then concluded thus:
The first to fall victim to hundred percent’s were not Israelis, but Palestine Arabs who claimed one hundred percent of the territory and one hundred percent of the sovereignty. They said that they and they alone had claim to all of everything. But by claiming one hundred percent they have fallen into tragedy and weakness. In diplomatic history, those who ask for all or nothing are more likely to get nothing than to get all.
And just as Palestinian nationalism claimed , and some of it still does, one hundred percent territory and sovereignty and fell into disaster, so I believe that a claim to hundred percent on behalf of a new radical interpretation of Zionism would bring its authors similar frustration and disappointment. This is the first conclusion and there can be no peace without sharing (Eban, 1988, p. 7).
Eban’s (1988) prescription can be accorded an economic substantiation by agreeing with Mahmoud Elkhafif, Coordinator, Assistance to the Palestinian People Unit, UNCTAD, who notes that: a lasting end to conflict between Israel and Palestine will not be possible without long-term investment in Palestine’s economic and human development, running into billions of dollars per year.
An overlooked means of generating these revenues would be to allocate Palestine its fair share of benefits of oil and natural gas reserves in the occupied territories and the Eastern Mediterranean, which are currently being exploited only by Israel.
Akhaine is a Professor in the Department of Political Science, Lagos State University (LASU). He delivered this Lecture (excerpts) at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs on December 2, 2025, as part of the Institute’s Foreign Policy Lecture Series.
