This 2024 UN Resolution Should Be the Model for US Policy Toward Israel

With the US midterm elections drawing near, the growing support among the US public for the salvation and liberation of the Palestinian people is tremendously heartening and indicative that Israel’s 80-year war and lawless reign of terror and annihilation must and will come to an end. It is also encouraging that global Jewry writ large does not support the Israeli regime’s genocide and occupation of the Palestinians.

Dramatic evidence of global support for Palestinians came on September 16, 2026 when Emmy, Grammy, and MTV award-winning singer Ed Sheeran received tremendous backlash for kicking the singer Macklemore, champion of Palestinian rights, off his music tour. Sheeran said he did it under pressure from Boston Patriots football team and stadium owner Robert Kraft and other stadium owners. The situation escalated into a snowballing public relations disaster for Sheeran, with his entire tour lineup—including pop group Lukas Graham, singer Finneas, Aaron Rowe, and his own backing band Boega—withdrawing from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.

Attempting to reverse his losses, Sheeran then issued a tearful apology at his Philadelphia concert on Saturday, September 19, which many have criticized as turning attention to his own pain and shame, rather than that of the Palestinians.

Given the way in which the US and Israel easily bulldozed the world’s elites into accepting the Board of Peace, we turn to a way to pressure the US governments, and all governments, to do the right thing: boycott.

The massive pro-Palestinian energy demonstrated by the Sheeran incident, on top of the already pronounced movement of US and world sentiment toward Palestinians, suggests success for pro-Palestinian candidates in the US midterm elections, and possibly the edge that will shift the control of the US House and Senate to the Democratic Party.

However, even with a shift in Congress to the Democrats, we need not only an indefinite halt to the shipment of all US weapons to Israel; we must also have legislation that defines the conduct that the US demands of Israel as essential to restoring land and full rights to the Palestinian people.

Fortunately, a detailed description of the conduct that the US must demand of Israel with respect to the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is clearly laid out in United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24, overwhelmingly approved by the UN General Assembly on September 18, 2024. The Occupied Territory includes all of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Here are the basic requirements of Israel with respect to the Occupied Territory under Resolution 10/24:

• Withdraw all its military forces, including from air and maritime space;
• Immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank;
• Repeal all legislation and other measures discriminating against the Palestinian people;
• Return land and other immovable property as well as all assets seized from any natural or legal person since the occupation began in 1967 and return all cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions; and
• Allow all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their place of origin and make full reparation for the damage caused by its occupation.

This is what, at a minimum, must become US policy toward Israel.

Trump and Israel have attempted to bury Resolution 10/24 under a US-commandeered Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 17, 2025 (Russia and China abstained), that created a so-called “Board of Peace.” This entity has acted as a diplomatic-public relations shield for the continued Israel genocide against the Palestinian people, the occupation and bombardment of much of Lebanon, the surreptitious expansion of its illegal occupation of southwest Syria, and all the killing that goes with it. The board allows Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip to continue; no legitimate framework for Palestinian self-determination is provided.

Under cover of the Board of Peace, Israel continues to have control of what happens to Palestinians while it continues its brutal settler-colonial enterprise based on daily killing and abuse of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

It is important to understand that General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24 still stands as a recognized action of the UN General Assembly, instructive not only to the US but all UN Member States, regardless of its de facto cancellation by the US and Israel that resulted in the creation of the Frankenstein’s monster Board of Peace.

General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24 not only incorporates all previous UN General Assembly, Security Council, and Human Rights Council resolutions pertaining to Israel’s illegal occupation of the OPT, it incorporates the landmark opinion issued in July 2024 by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which said that Israel’s occupation violated international law and should end "as rapidly as possible” and set a deadline for September 18 2025. That deadline has come and gone, requiring that new measures be taken.

In this moment, it is necessary for the political and financial elites of UN Member States to muster the courage to enforce General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24’s terms by cutting trade, commercial, and diplomatic ties with Israel. However, given the way in which the US and Israel easily bulldozed the world’s elites into accepting the Board of Peace, we turn to a way to pressure the US governments, and all governments, to do the right thing: boycott.

Many have likened the boycott of Ed Sheeran to the broader and intensifying global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign launched in 2005 to put economic, cultural, and political pressure on Israel to conform to international law, as the culmination of a Kairos moment which could and should lead the United Nations to boycott Israel as it did South Africa.

In 1985, the United Nations led a decades-long campaign of General Assembly resolutions calling upon member states to boycott, sanction, and embargo South Africa to end the country's system of apartheid. This led, in 1994, to South Africa officially ending its system of apartheid with the election of Nelson Mandela as the nation’s first Black president in the country's first fully democratic, non-racial general election.

Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinian Buddhist peace activist, Columbia University graduate student, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s 2026-2027 Walter and June Wink Fellow, told us in an interview that the world is witnessing a pivotal moment as global civil society is coming together in ever-increasing numbers to demand that international law and human rights, including for Palestinians, be at the center and forefront of international actions.

“One important part of this,” he said, “is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, which has been criminalized and shut down” however unsuccessfully, as was attempted by kicking Macklemore off of the Ed Sheeran concert tour.

Mahdawi said further:

People all over the world are not waiting for governments to liberate Palestine. We know that love, not hate, and the need for justice can and will concur. Through BDS, we are witnessing and manifesting a nonviolent global transformation not only for Palestine but the whole world, as the liberation of all humanity is deeply interconnected and interdependent. Macklemore is encouraging this and has shown that people who defend Palestine will prevail.

Mahdawi is convinced that the liberation of Israelis from their own moral injury, spiritual damage, and violation of Judaism’s core moral and ethical teachings also will occur.

“Government and institutional change at all levels will take some time,” he said. “In the meantime, we exercise our First Amendment Right to Free Speech and through speaking our truth, we manifest collective empathy, which is part of our innate nature, and manifest change. This is stronger than all of the weapons and censorship that they have.”

Sahar Alsahlani, board member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York (CAIR-NY) and board member of the Parliament of World Religions, the oldest and largest interfaith organization in the world, concurs.

She said: "This is the moment for organizers for Palestine in the US to demand that requirements of UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/24 become the requirements of US policy toward Israel, and to back up this demand by dramatically increasing BDS mobilization."