The grammar of colonial power in Israel/Palestine: reading UN Security Council racialised discourses

This article examines how the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has discursively produced racialised hierarchies of human worth that legitimise violence against Palestinians. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 479 Council records (1975–2025), it traces the emergence, diffusion, sedimentation and contestation of dehumanisation, demonisation and paternalisation as interconnected discursive formations. Passive constructions, omissions, abstractions, euphemisms and false symmetry harden into moral inversion and terrorism framing, systematically devaluing Palestinian life while elevating Israeli suffering as morally urgent. Situated within settler-colonial and decolonial scholarship, critical narrative theory and critical international relations theory, the article conceptualises the Council as a colonial structure of global governance whose dehumanising grammar constructs adiaphorisation: the institutional production of moral indifference that renders Palestinian death politically tolerable. Dehumanisation functions as the historical precondition for demonisation; once Palestinian life is rendered expendable, Palestinians are recast as ontological threats, suspending legal and ethical constraints on violence against them. Once sufficiently routinised, dehumanisation and demonisation transform first into institutional tutelage, then into trusteeship. The article traces moments of discursive fracture when Global South and eastern states challenged the Council’s racialised moral grammar, fractures that intensified during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It concludes that the UNSC does not merely fail to prevent mass violence but actively produces and reproduces a settler-colonial order –enforced by US hegemony and the veto –by normalising elimination, erasure, and differential human worth.