Introduction
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has resisted the ordinary machinery of international dispute resolution for more than seven decades. Wars have been fought, ceasefires signed and peace processes launched and abandoned, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has twice pronounced on the illegality of Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), yet the underlying dispute remains as unresolved in 2026 as it was in 1948. The paper examines a structural explanation for that persistence, that is, the United States sustained diplomatic shielding of Israel, principally through its veto power at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and its unparalleled scale of military assistance, has repeatedly insulated Israeli policy from the accountability mechanisms that international law is designed to supply. This shielding, the paper argues, has not merely been a bilateral matter between Washington and Tel Aviv. It has functioned as a systemic distortion of the international legal order, contributing to recurring cycles of violence by removing the incentive for a negotiated settlement grounded in enforceable rights rather than in the prevailing balance of power.
