Why “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” Advocates Cling to Genocide Denial

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SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Mar 20 2025 (IPS) – Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.

In a New York Times interview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put deep moral evasion on display. Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”

Schumer is wrong.

The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent — underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers. Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”

Those statements “by people with command authority — state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers — and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”

Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza — using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians — has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.

On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”

It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.

A growing number of congressional Democrats — still way too few — have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election. Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.

This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.

For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish. On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.”

But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.

That’s where genocide denial comes in.

For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.

While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”

J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.

It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

IPS UN Bureau

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Musk is Wrong. Empathy is Not a Weakness

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BANGKOK, Thailand, Mar 19 2025 (IPS) – “The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”

As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.

Credit: U.S. Air Force / Trevor Cokley

And as (let us acknowledge it) the Trump revolution is currently popular with at least large parts of the US electorate, and some overseas too, what Musk said summarises also the worldview of a social-cultural moment and movement on the march.

Core to the argument against empathy is the claim that ethical and practical considerations run counter to each other. The guardrails of rules and norms about caring for others, it argues, don’t only hold us back, they tie our hands behind our back.

Morality is for losers, it suggests, and who wants to lose? Only when we cut ourselves free of the burden of looking after and looking out for others, it posits, can we soar. The practical applications of this worldview are all encompassing.

They include the ripping up of international cooperation, the gutting of life-saving programmes for people in poverty abroad and at home, and the violating of due process for protestors, prisoners, migrants, minorities and anyone (who can be made to be) unpopular. That’s not how it ends, that’s how it starts.

A collapse of empathy would be an existential threat to the world. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her witness to, and escape from, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, concluded “the death of empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” The stakes are too high for us to fail.

So how can we respond to the argument against empathy?

One way would be to stick only to ethics, arguing, simply, “it is our duty to sacrifice for others, and failing to do so is just wrong!” This has driven what has come to be known as the charity narrative.

This approach seems like a flawed strategy because by refusing to engage in the practicality conversation, it concedes it to the cynics and nihilists, accepting the framing of morality as a kind of self-immolation that brings only noble suffering and that cares only about stances, not consequences.

Another way would be to give up on ethics, and make only the most selfish arguments for doing good, like “we should not show ourselves to be unreliable because that would get us knocked off the top perch by our rivals when we must be Number One!” This too seems like a flawed strategy because it reinforces variations of dog-eat-dog as the only frames for success.

What both of those approaches get wrong is that they accept the frame that ethics and practicality are separate. Older wisdoms have long understood them as inseparable. What can in current debates seem like a rivalrous relationship between “what is good?” and “what is smart?”, or “what is moral?” and “what is wise?”, we often find when we look more deeply is not.

That often, the way in which societies developed moral principles was that they are ways to abstract what people have learnt from experience works. When, for example, people say in the African principle of Ubuntu “I am because you are”, that is not just a moral or theological point, it is literally true.

It is what public health teaches us: that I am healthy because my neighbour is healthy. (Even Musk was forced to concede to public pressure on this with his partial admission that “with USAID, one of the things we cancelled, accidentally, was Ebola prevention, and I think we all want Ebola prevention.”

Fearful of the reaction to his initial cancellation of Ebola prevention, he even claimed, falsely, to have fixed that “mistake” straight away, but what matters here is that the case against Ebola prevention collapsed so fast because interdependence was so quickly understood.)

So too, history has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbour is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbour thrives. Perhaps, for oligarchs, a ruthless, rule-less, world can work. (Perhaps not, however, when the fall-out comes between the “two bros”.)

But for the 99.9% of us, as John Donne wrote, “no man is an island”. We are interdependent and inseparable. Alone we are weak but together we are strong. Or, as the brilliant bleak joke of old ascribed to Benjamin Franklin put it, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”

The mutual interest argument, which highlights to people “we each have a stake in the well-being of all, looking out for others is not losing,” does not take us away from values, it reinforces them.

“There is an interrelated structure of reality. We are all tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” That was Revd Martin Luther King in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and yet he was making an argument that you could say is the argument of mutual interest.

Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.” Interdependence, as a practical frame, reflects on the situation of that person, and comes through that reflection to understand that “I need to connect, as that could next time be me.”

Morality and wisdom guide us in the same direction; and as the fastest way there is empathy, that makes empathy not humanity’s weakness but our superpower.

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality.

IPS UN Bureau

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Is UN in Danger of Losing its Battle for Gender Equality?

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Credit: Inclusion Hub

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 14 2025 (IPS) – The Trump administration’s decision to abandon DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion— which was aimed at promoting fair treatment in the work place, is having its repercussions at the United Nations.

The US has been exerting pressure on UN agencies to drop DEI largely protecting minority groups, and women in particular, who have been historically underrepresented or subject to discrimination.

At least one UN agency has dropped an entire section on DEI following U.S. interventions. And there are reports that some UN agencies are also scrubbing their websites of all references to DEI.

Faced with threats of either US withdrawal or funding cuts, some of the UN agencies are bending over backwards to appease the Trump administration.

The US has already decided to withdraw from the Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization (WHO), while two other UN agencies are under “renewed scrutiny”—the” UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The United States has cut $377 million worth of funding to the UNFPA, it was confirmed last week, leading to potentially “devastating impacts”, on women and girls.

The threat against the UN has been reinforced following a move by several Republican lawmakers who have submitted a bill on the U.S. exit from the U.N., claiming that the organization does not align with the Trump administration’s “America First” agenda.

Speaking at a side event during the annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), March 13, Jonathan Shrier, Acting U.S. Representative to the Economic and Social Council said: “At the United Nations, the United States continues to advocate for women’s empowerment, while firmly opposing attempts to redefine womanhood in ways that undermine the real and meaningful progress women have made.”

“We are committed to promoting policies that support women and families in a way that recognizes and celebrates the biological and social differences that make us who we are. In New York, we have engaged in tough negotiations in a wide variety of UN resolutions, fighting against gender ideology, and calling votes, if necessary, to advance President Trump’s America First foreign policy.”

According to UN Dispatch March 13, even before the CSW began, “the U.S. sought to throw a wrench in the entire event by objecting to otherwise anodyne references to gender equality in a conference document, under the premise that such language directly contradicts Trump’s executive orders against DEI”. In other words, Trump tried to block references to gender equality in a conference dedicated to gender equality.

And according to an Executive Order from the White House last January, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), “shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/

Joseph Chamie, a consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division, told IPS the Trump administration’s domestic decision to abandon DEI has serious implications for the United Nations, especially with US threats of withdrawal and funding cuts.

In particular, the US administration’s decision to abandon DEI, he said, aims to not only reshape US-UN relations but also reshape practices and policies of the United Nations and its various agencies and programs. Diversity and meritocracy concerns vary across country populations and differ considerably globally.

Similar to America, however, countries worldwide are struggling with the issue of how best to balance diversity and meritocracy across disparate ethnic, racial, caste, linguistic and religious subgroups in their populations.

“How best to balance diversity and meritocracy remains a major challenge for countries and the United Nations. That challenge has become more difficult for many countries as a result of the prejudicial use of racial, ethnic, linguistic, ancestry and origin categories.”, said Chamie

In a growing number of areas, including politics, employment, careers, education, armed forces, immigration, the judicial system, entertainment and sports, countries are making far-reaching decisions regarding when to strive for diversity and when to stress meritocracy.

Many countries with domestic concerns about DEI are likely to welcome the Trump administration’s attempt to diminish or do away with DEI initiatives at the United Nations, he pointed out.

Given a growing world population of more than 8 billion people, the shifting demographic landscapes of national populations and the fundamental need to ensure human rights for all, the challenge of balancing diversity and meritocracy can be expected to become even more critical and consequential for countries as well as for the United Nations in the years ahead, declared Chamie.

According to PassBlue, the US delegation has been telling some UN entities they must excise language on DEI, from their work. The US remarks have been repeated in one form or another to the boards of UN Women, UNICEF and World Food Program. (The latter two are run by Americans.)

Dr. Purnima Mane, President and CEO of Pathfinder International and former Deputy Executive Director (Programme) and UN Assistant-Secretary-General (ASG) at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS it is indeed unfortunate that the US government’s decision to move away from diversity, equity and inclusion is creating ripple effects among other entities especially those who benefit from US support and contributions.

Early evidence, she pointed out, suggests that some UN agencies are beginning to display increased caution regarding DEI, especially its positioning and language. Ironically this caution is occurring around the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (16-21 March 2025).

“The initial reactions of caution around DEI which we are witnessing from all organizations and entities which the US works with or is a part of (whether it is the UN, the non-profit organizations, major donors, other governments) are inevitable”.

The US, she said, has played a key role in the formation, development and evolution of the UN and of course continues to provide key support to it.

“It is therefore not surprising that the UN to which the US contributes in many significant ways, is sensitive to the evolution in US views but this should not result in the UN shirking away from the main principles on which it was created.”

DEI, she noted, is an acronym that has come to mean different things to different people and countries but its core philosophy and principles are at the root of the UN and can and need to be protected even if the language of DEI is altered.

“Within the UN there needs to be a healthy, constructive debate and discussion among Member States on how resistance to DEI could threaten the philosophy and principles for which the UN stands and to which the governments collectively signed on, thereby questioning the very existence of the UN.”

“Surely, all Member States feel empowered to voice their views and find ways to ensure that the basic principles of the UN remain steadfast. Putting your own country first does not automatically imply that one must not focus on a common, agreed-to agenda based on respect for all,” declared Dr Mane.

Ian Richards, a former President of the Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations and an economist at the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) told IPS: “I don’t think it is correct to say the UN is abandoning DEI”.

The Secretary-General, he said, “is fortunately a big champion and continues to support landmark initiatives on sex, race, disability, regional origin, age and gender identity”.

To varying extents these set hiring quotas, mandatory training and reporting requirements.

A conference will be organized on DEI this summer in Lisbon, hosted by the Government of Portugal, to identify further ways to strengthen measures. Unlike other organizations the Secretary-General has also maintained the right of staff to choose their pronouns in email communications.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Trashing Jewish Values Risks Israel’s Survival as We Know It

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A family gathers in a damaged building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. 10 March 2025. Credit: World Food Program (WFP)

NEW YORK, Mar 13 2025 (IPS) – 77 torturous years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, punctuated by intense violence and wars, successive Netanyahu-led governments have shattered Jewish values to the core—values that have sustained and preserved Jewish lives for centuries and provided the moral foundation on which Israel was built.

Throughout millennia of dispersion, the Jews had no army, no weapons, and no advanced technology to fight back against persecution, segregation, expulsion, and death, but they survived.

They persevered because they upheld these moral values at all times: in times of joy, in times of suffering, in times of loss, in times of gain, and in times of anxiety when they did not know what tomorrow would bring.

The historian Paul Johnson noted in his book A History of the Jews: “To [the Jews] we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.”

Tragically, these moral values have not resonated with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ardent followers. From the first day he rose to power in 1996, he vowed to undermine the Oslo Accords, and swore to never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state under his watch. Since he returned to power in 2008, the Israeli-Palestinian relationship has hit a new nadir, and the prospect for peace is dimmer today than ever before.

Dehumanizing and brutalizing the Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, tightening the blockade around Gaza, and categorically objecting to making any meaningful concessions to reach a peace agreement became his life-long mission, rendering the conflict increasingly intractable.

He facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars from Qatar to Hamas, which allowed Hamas to build a powerful militia that is still standing against Israel’s formidable military machine. Netanyahu convinced himself that Hamas was under control, but then came Hamas’ savage attack under his watch.

Though Hamas’ barbarism is unforgivable, and Israel has every right to defend itself, Netanyahu unleashed a retaliatory war against Hamas unparalleled in its scope and disproportionality. The war has laid two-thirds of Gaza in ruin; 47,600 Palestinians were killed, with half of those identified as women, children, or elderly, and over 100,000 have been injured.

Forcible and repeated displacement of 1.9 million people, restriction on deliveries of food, medicine, drinking water, and fuel, and the destruction of schools and hospitals, precipitated a humanitarian disaster unseen since Israel was created in 1948.

Revenge and torture, shooting to kill with no questions asked, and treating all Palestinians in Gaza—men, women, and the elderly—as legitimate targets as if they were all combatants, demonstrate the moral rot that has taken root in Israel.

Asa Kasher, one of Israel’s best-known philosophers, recently stated, “We heard a eulogy from the family of a soldier who was killed, who related how he burned homes and undertook acts of revenge. Where did this disturbed idea of revenge come from?”

These moral crimes have not only violated the laws of war but the very core of Jewish values. They have not brought back to life a single Israeli who was massacred by Hamas, they have only satisfied a corrupt Netanyahu-led government that functions like a criminal gang whose thirst for Palestinian blood is insatiable and would stop short of nothing to achieve its ends.

Furthermore, Netanyahu is using the cover of the Gaza war, where the whole world’s attention is focused, to ransack the West Bank.

During the past 17 months, 886 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and 7,368 were injured. In 2024 alone, 841 homes in the West Bank and 219 homes in East Jerusalem were demolished. Additionally, as of the end of June 2024, 9,440 Palestinians have been detained on “security grounds,” including 226 minors.

There were 1,860 instances of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians from October 7, 2023, to December 31, 2024; under the watchful eyes of the police and the military, settlers regularly attacked Palestinian villages, setting fire to homes and cars, forcing thousands to abandon their homes and villages where they lived for hundreds of years.

As recently as January 2025, Israel launched a large-scale military operation in the West Bank, displacing 40,000 Palestinians, which is in line with Finance Minister Smotrich’s call for the annexation of the West Bank.

Given what the Jews have endured for centuries in foreign lands, it was once hard to imagine that any Israeli government would be capable of treating another human being the way that the Jews have been treated.

The Netanyahu-led government has steadily been trashing the values that provided the moral foundation of Israel, built on the ashes of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust; this tragic moral collapse of Israel has infected the Israeli public.

There has been hardly any pushback from Israelis, 80 percent of whom were born after 1967. For them, the occupation has become a way of life—the suppression and incarceration of Palestinians is normal, dispossession of their land is a given, demolishing their houses is unvarying, and night raids are another good measure to instill constant anxiety and fear in their hearts.

The Israelis, many of whom have grown numb to the Palestinians’ daily suffering, should wake up for a brief moment and watch what is being done in their name, internalize the daily tragedies that are being inflicted on so many innocent civilians whose only guilt is being Palestinians. Isn’t that evocative of the Jews’ persecution, whose guilt was just being Jewish?

This total betrayal of Jewish values should send shivers through their spines as it has for every decent human being.

Netanyahu does not want peace. Maintaining perpetual conflict with the Palestinians would allow him to usurp more Palestinian land through coercion, intimidation, and violence than what he can gain through a peaceful negotiating process.

He persistently paints the Palestinians as an existential threat while using night raids, home demolitions, and more to provoke them into committing acts of violence to justify the occupation on national security grounds, while gobbling up their land bite by bite.

Netanyahu opposes a Palestinian state but offers no alternative to a two-state solution. He must show the world another option where both sides can live in peace and security short of that. Is the annexation of the West Bank the answer?

It will do nothing but erase Israel’s Jewish character and deprive it of living in security and peace, defying its founders’ vision and its reason for being. Ninety percent of all living Palestinians were born under occupation. They are left hopeless and despairing and have nothing left to lose.

A fourth generation of youth will now live to avenge the calamity that has befallen their people. What fate will await them? They would rather die as martyrs than live hopelessly in servitude. It will not be if but when a new inferno erupts at a magnitude never seen before.

Netanyahu is champing at the bit to exile the Palestinians from Gaza, courtesy of Trump, who is clueless about the horror that will unfold should he act on his brazen idea. However, Netanyahu’s dream of a greater Israel will be nothing but a lasting nightmare.

Israel will never be able to sustain itself on the ashes of the Palestinians. By forsaking Jewish values, Netanyahu is destroying the moral foundation on which the country stands. The Israelis must remember that the values that guarded the Jews’ survival throughout the millennia must be restored to ensure the survival of the country and, indeed, its very soul.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

IPS UN Bureau

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UN Chief Launches New Initiative as World Faces Growing Challenges

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Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, at a Press Encounter on the UN80 Initiative

Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2025 (IPS) – Our world is facing challenges on every front. Since the United Nations reflects that world in all its aspects, we feel it in all our work.

These are times of intense uncertainty and unpredictability.

And yet certain truths have [never] been more clear: The United Nations has never been more needed. Our values have never been more relevant. And the needs have never been greater.

At the same time, we know the more the UN does together to address big challenges around the world, the less the burden on individual countries to do it alone.

The United Nations stands out as the essential one-of-a-kind meeting ground to advance peace, sustainable development and human rights.

But resources are shrinking across the board – and they have been for a long time. For example, for at least the past seven years, the United Nations has faced a liquidity crisis because not all Member States pay in full, and many also do not pay on time.

From day one of my mandate, we embarked on an ambitious reform agenda to strengthen how we work and deliver.

To be more effective and cost-effective. To simplify procedures and decentralize decisions. To enhance transparency and accountability. To shift capacities to areas such as data and digital.

And, significantly, the Pact for the Future and UN 2.0 are exactly about updating the UN for the 21st century.

These efforts are not ends in themselves. They are about better serving people whose very lives depend on us.

They are about hardworking taxpayers around the world who underwrite everything we do. And they are about ensuring the right conditions for everyone serving under the UN flag as they undertake their critical work.

For all these reasons, it is essential that an organizational system as complex and crucial as the United Nations – subjects itself to rigorous and regular scrutiny to assess its fitness for purpose in carrying out its goals efficiently.

And this 80th anniversary year of the United Nations is a prime moment to expand all our efforts, recognizing the need for even greater urgency and ambition.

That is why I have informed yesterday UN Member States that I am officially launching what we call the UN80 Initiative.

I have appointed a dedicated internal Task Force led by Under-Secretary-General Guy Ryder – and composed of principals representing the entire UN system.

The objective will be to present to Member States proposals in three areas:

First, rapidly identifying efficiencies and improvements in the way we work.

Second, thoroughly reviewing the implementation of all mandates given to us by Member States, which have significantly increased in recent years.

Third, a strategic review of deeper, more structural changes and programme realignment in the UN System.

Under the leadership of the President of the General Assembly, I will consult closely and regularly with all Member States on the progress made, seeking guidance on the way forward and presenting concrete decisions for discussion and decision-making when appropriate.

My objective is to move as soon as possible in areas where I have the authority – and to urge Member States to consider the many decisions that rest with them.

This goes far beyond the technical. Budgets at the United Nations are not just numbers on a balance sheet – they are a matter of life and death for millions around the world.

We must ensure value for money while advancing shared values.

The need is great and the goal is clear: an even stronger and more effective United Nations that delivers for people and is tuned to the 21st century.

And I thank you.

IPS UN Bureau

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The G20: How it Works, Why it Matters and What Would be Lost if it Failed

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Prof Daniel D. Bradlow is Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria.

The G20 Johannesburg Summit will be the twentieth meeting of the Group of Twenty (G20), a meeting of heads of state and government scheduled to take place from 22 to 23 November 2025. It will be the first G20 summit held in Johannesburg, South Africa and on the African continent.

PRETORIA, South Africa, Mar 11 2025 (IPS) – South Africa took over the presidency of the G20 at the end of 2024. Since then the world has become a more complex, unpredictable and dangerous place.

The most powerful state in the world, the US, seems intent on undermining the existing order that it created and on demonstrating its power over weaker nations. Other influential countries are turning inward.

These developments raise concerns about how well mechanisms for global cooperation, such as the G20, can continue to operate, particularly those that work on the basis of consensual decision making.

What’s the G20’s purpose?

The G20 is a forum in which the largest economies in the world meet regularly to discuss, and attempt to address, the most urgent international economic and political challenges. The group, which includes both rich and developing countries, accounts for about 67% of the world’s population, 85% of global GDP, and 75% of global trade.

The G20, in fact, is a misnomer. The actual number of G20 participants in any given year far exceeds the 19 states and 2 international entities (the European Union and the African Union) that are its permanent members.

Each year they are joined by a number of invited “guests”. While there are some countries, for example Spain and the Netherlands, that are considered “permanent” G20 guests, the full list of guests is determined by the chair of the G20 for that year.

This year, South Africa has invited 13 countries, including Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. They are joined by 24 invited international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations and eight African regional organisations, among others.

The G20 should be understood as a process rather than a set of discrete events. Its apex is the annual leaders’ summit at which the participating heads of state and government seek to agree on a communiqué setting out their agreements on key issues. These agreements are non-binding and each of the participating states usually will implement most but not all the agreed points.

The communiqué is the outcome of a two track process: a finance track, consisting of representatives of the finance ministries and central banks in the participating counties, and a “sherpa” track that deals with more political issues. In total these two tracks will involve over 100 meetings of technical level.

Most of the work in each track is done by working groups. The finance track has seven working groups dealing with issues ranging from the global economy and international financial governance to financial inclusion and the financing of infrastructure. The sherpa track has 15 working groups dealing with issues ranging from development and agriculture to health, the digital economy, and education.

The agenda for the working group meetings is based on issues notes prepared by the G20 presidency. The issues notes will discuss both unfinished business from prior years and any new issues that the president adds to the G20 agenda.

The working group chairs report on the outcomes of these meetings to the ministerial meetings in their track. These reports will first be discussed in meetings of the deputies to the ministers. The deputies will seek to narrow areas of disagreement and sharpen the issues for discussion so that when they are presented at the ministerial meeting the chances of reaching agreement are maximised.

The agreements reached at each of these ministerial meetings, assuming all participants agree, will be expressed in a carefully negotiated and drafted communiqué. If the participants cannot agree, the minister chairing the meeting will provide a chair’s summary of the meeting.

These documents will then inform the communiqué that will be released at the end of the G20 summit. This final communiqué represents the formal joint decision of the participating heads of state and government.

The G20 process is supplemented by the work of 13 engagement groups representing, for example, business, labour, youth, think tanks, women and civil society in the G20 countries. These groups look for ways to influence the outcomes of the G20 process.

What is the G20 troika and how does it operate?

The G20 does not have a permanent secretariat. Instead, the G20 president is responsible for organising and chairing the more than 100 meetings that take place during the year. The G20 has decided that this burden should be supported by a “troika”, consisting of the past, present and future presidents of the G20. This year the troika consists of Brazil, the past chair; South Africa, the current chair; and the US, the future chair.

The role of the troika varies depending on the identity of the current chair and how assertive it wishes to be in driving the G20 process. It will also be influenced by how active the other two members of the troika wish to be.

The troika helps ensure some continuity from one G20 year to another. This is important because there is a significant carryover of issues on the G20 agenda from one year to the next. The troika therefore creates the potential for the G20 president to focus on the issues of most interest to it over a three-year period rather than just for one year.

How successful has the G20 process been?

The G20 is essentially a self-appointed group which has designated itself as the “premier forum for international economic cooperation”.

The G20 was first brought together during the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s. At that time, it was limited to a forum in which ministers of finance and central bank governors could meet to discuss the most important international economic and financial issues, such as the Asian financial crisis.

The G20 was elevated to the level of heads of state and government at the time of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The G20 tends to work well as a cooperative forum when the world is confronting an economic crisis. Thus, the G20 was a critical forum in which countries could discuss and agree on coordinating actions to deal with the global financial crisis in 2008-9.

It has performed less well when confronted with other types of crises. For example, it was found wanting in dealing with the COVID pandemic.

It has also proven to be less effective, although not necessarily totally ineffective, when there is no crisis. So, for example, the G20 has been useful in helping address relatively technical issues such as developing international standards on particular financial regulatory issues or improving the functioning of multilateral development banks.

On other more political issues, for example climate, food security, and funding the UN’s sustainable development goals, it has been less effective.

There’s one less obvious, but nevertheless important, benefit. The G20 offers officials from participating countries the chance to interact with their counterparts from other G20 countries. As a result, they come to know and understand each other better, which helps foster cooperation between states on issues of common interest.

It also ensures that when appropriate, these officials know whom to contact in other countries and this may help mitigate the risk of misunderstanding and conflict.

These crisis management and other benefits would be lost if the G20 were to stop functioning. And there is currently no alternative to the G20 in the sense of a forum where the leading states in the world, which may differ on many important issues, can meet on a relatively informal basis to discuss issues of mutual interest.

Importantly, the withdrawal of one G20 state, even the most powerful, should not prevent the remaining participants from using the G20 to promote international cooperation on key global challenges.

In this way it can help manage the risk of conflict in a complex global environment.

Source: The Conversation AFRICA

IPS UN Bureau

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