The charter announcing Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” — released by Israeli media as the framework for governing Gaza after the so-called ceasefire — opens with a striking omission. Gaza does not appear.
Not as territory. Not as a people. Not as a place that exists despite sustaining one of the most destructive military campaigns in the world.
A body presented as the mechanism for peace in Israel and Palestine begins by removing from its founding document the land where the genocidal war has been happening: Tens of thousands killed. Entire neighborhoods erased. A population subjected to siege, bombardment, and forced displacement. None of this is named.
What is offered instead is a language of administration using terms like reconstruction, stabilization, and governance designed to flatten the obscene violence into a managerial problem and turn any accountability into a real inconvenience.
The structure of the Board is not a multilateral body accountable to international law, but rather a three-tier hierarchy crowned by one maniacal man. Donald Trump sits at the apex as chairman, holding veto power over all decisions. He selects the members, appoints the executive leadership, defines the agenda, controls funding, and even claims authority over the Board’s seal. Membership itself is conditional: permanent seats reportedly require billion-dollar contributions.
Palestinians, of course, are nowhere near this apex. They do not sit on the Board. They do not shape its agenda. They do not vote. At best, they are assigned to a subordinate administrative committee tasked with municipal services like electricity, sanitation, and paperwork, under the supervision of a foreign-appointed “High Representative,” ultimately answerable to Trump’s board. For Trump, Palestinians may be allowed to manage their menial daily lives under ruins, but may not decide their political future.
Within this architecture, the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu is a confirmation of the obscenity of the objective. A sitting prime minister indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes is welcomed as a participant in so-called peace deliberations. The legal process underway in The Hague is simply set aside.
The man who presided over the bombardment of Gaza is invited to help oversee what exactly?
The United States and France are anchoring this perverse project. Washington, which supplied the weapons, vetoed accountability at the United Nations, and shielded Israel diplomatically, now presents itself as guarantor of reconstruction. France, which invokes international law with urgency in Europe and restraint when it collapses in Palestine, is positioned as an arbiter of the post-war order.
The circus was on full display in Davos, where President Emmanuel Macron took the stage to lecture the world about the sanctity of international law, doing so in designer sunglasses, projecting authority while presiding over a policy that has treated that same law as optional when it comes to Gaza.
The image was unintentionally revealing: performance where substance is absent, posture where principle should be. International law, it turns out, is invoked when it flatters power and accessorized when it does not.
The board’s membership reflects this logic: Billionaires whose interest in reconstruction aligns with capital flows not political rights. Financiers and World Bank officials whose development language has historically imposed donor priorities on devastated societies. Political figures whose records include illegal wars, repression, mass incarceration, and open hostility to Palestinian self-determination.
Tony Blair, a war criminal who exploited Iraq and a failed Middle East envoy, reappears somehow as a statesman.
Jared Kushner, who once described Gaza as “valuable waterfront property” and believes Palestinians’ lack the capacity for self-rule returns alongside Marco Rubio, who has argued that critics of Israel should be denied visas and has championed the criminalization of Palestine solidarity.
This is not a gathering of peacemakers. As Muhammed Shehadeh has warned, Gaza is not the end goal. It is the pilot project.
The Board’s founding charter explicitly calls for “a more nimble and effective international peace-building body” and urges “the courage to depart from institutions that have too often failed” — a direct reference to the United Nations and the post-World War II multilateral system.
”The ambition is not merely to manage Gaza, but to replace the architecture of international law with ad hoc councils of unaccountable power. If this model succeeds here, it will not stop. Venezuela. Ukraine. Greenland. Panama. One board after another, each bypassing international law in the name of efficiency.”
The breadth of international endorsement only deepens the problem. The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Qatar, and the UAE have publicly welcomed the invitation extended by President Donald Trump to their leaders to join the Board of Peace.
This support is often framed as pragmatism, and as a necessary seat at the table. These are states that speak fluently about Palestinian rights in principle, yet have agreed to enter a forum where Palestinians themselves are excluded, where an indicted war leader is normalized, and where international law is treated as optional.
Their presence is meant to decorate this impending disaster.
On Wednesday, China made this plain by expressing reservations about joining the Board unless it operates under the auspices of the United Nations, reaffirming its stated commitment to an international system with the UN at its core. Whatever one thinks of Beijing’s intentions, the objection matters because it exposes what this Board is designed to avoid: shared rules, legal restraint, and accountability beyond the discretion of a single emperor.
Any world power that chooses to join this body does so with eyes open. Participation is an endorsement of a structure that sidelines the occupied, rehabilitates the accused, and substitutes power for law. Simply put, it is legitimacy laundering.
Hour after Benjamin Netanyahu formally joined Trump’s “Board of Peace” — Israeli forces killed three more journalists in Gaza.
They were not combatants. They were journalists that were filming a displacement camp, documenting what Israeli bombs had already done to civilian life.
No emergency meeting was convened. No consequence followed. The deaths registered only as background noise, folded into the same diplomatic process that claims to mark a new phase of calm.
This is what peace looks like under this model: violence continues uninterrupted, provided it does not disrupt the ceremony.
The ceasefire the Board claims to celebrate never existed, as it continued to be repeatedly violated. Israeli attacks have continued. Palestinians continue to be killed and injured. Aid remains restricted. Humanitarian organizations face shutdowns and obstruction.
This is how the contemporary international order increasingly operates. War is reframed as stabilization. Destruction is followed by conditional generosity. And accountability is deferred indefinitely in the name of pragmatism.
The so-called Board of Peace does not stop the violence. It domesticates it. It makes destruction legible to power and tolerable to allies. And any state that takes its seat accepts that future—one where brutality survives, provided it is properly governed.
Peace means no more occupation & apartheid regime, not its continued normalisation.
It also means accountability for genocide.
The creation of a fake Peace Board by those complicit in or responsible for Genocide, that effectively bypasses UN resolutions and international law, is illegitimate
This so-called ceasefire is the continuation of Genocide by other means: humiliation, degradation, privation, non-assistance & illegal siege.
The path to true peace - not the colonial illegal occupation & apartheid variety, begins with accountability for Genocide, not real-estate tenders for Zionist cronies.
A genocidal illegally occupying apartheid regime does not get to be a broker of fake colonial peace. Especially when it is brokered with a US regime that has armed & protected that Genocide.
This is an attempt by a USA complicit in Israel's Genocide - and its vassals, who armed, funded and protected the Genocide, or simply let it happen, to bypass international law's regime of responsibility and accountability, and guarantee immunity and the maintenance of control by those responsible for genocide.
The place for Israel's leaders is in a prison at the Hague, it is not seated at a table of power with those complicit in its Genocide.
Macron is probably hiding a black eye his wife/father gave him?