Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ for Gaza Is a Nightmare Masquerading as a Solution

Image Credit: The White House via Wikimedia

When you unravel Trump’s vision of peace, it amounts to little more than a real estate deal dressed in grandiloquent terms, an accession to Zionist lobbying and a denial of history. As Ilan Pappé notes, peace processes that pre-existed the current plans were merely American-Israeli initiatives which the Palestinians were told to accept. Peace, without the promise of decolonisation and self-determination, is the familiar refrain echoed again and again by the victors of war. These actors distort the present by building on the unsteady foundations of a made-up past. They become cynically creative with their narrative, yet perhaps too arrogant when it comes to the ‘lesser world’s’ incapacity to defy their will, so tenacious they have been in their victory and supremacy. Tony Blair, a war criminal, somehow reappears as a statesman. Benjamin Netanyahu, another war criminal (this time confirmed by the ICC), has voiced his participation in the plan. Will the instigator of war be softened by the prospects of peace? Supposing a criminal would usher in transitional justice and condemn his own campaign of indiscriminate bombing, murder, and intentional starvation of the Palestinian population is ludicrous.

Of course, one billion dollars suffices to secure permanent seats at the table - nothing short of “legitimacy laundering”, as one writer labels it.

The culmination of “pragmatic judgment” and “common-sense solutions”, this alleged peace process (most emphatically) applauds the Board’s “courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”. Under the guise of international conflict management and postwar reconstruction, the MAGA elites are overseeing the disintegration of the UN Charter and the bedrock of international law. What is the driving force behind this contemptuous assault on international institutions? Whilst international oversight is frequently unable to contain regional tensions, especially when  meaningful mediation is impossible between irreconcilably opposed enemies, a third party is sometimes needed to ameliorate tensions and bring about eventual peace. Of course, institutions “fail” not only due to their own internal deficiencies, but because of unwieldy member states. And in any case, can international oversight really pave the way to peace? Do we retain a permanent peacekeeping force to prevent two sides from killing each other, or in the case of Gaza, ‘de-radicalise’ one side whilst endorsing the other?

The reality is, though mediation may reduce the severity of conflict and violence in the short term, it is decisive victories that provide lasting peace -  peace in the sense of stability and secession of violence, often accompanied by the exclusion of a defeated group and an absence of accountability. Perhaps the Orwellian iteration is not so dystopian after all, especially in the context of the nuclear race, where humanity’s fear of armageddon serves as a pre-emptive mechanism for great-powers to avoid self-annihilation. How can peace be anything other than war? By demarcating war/peace binaries, we risk visualising socio-political dynamics in terms that are simply too simplistic, failing to see (or admit) that we all embody contradictory dynamics, and that the world is much more complex (and more colourful) than we might want to believe. When you start de-constructing these boundaries, what you are revealed with may be more disheartening, but also more interesting.

Or, perhaps humanity has just fallen to the point where dystopian absurdities have undergone a systematic process of normalisation, where cynical war-hawks interminably surpass the morose but passionate will of the oppressed.

This ‘Trumpian Peace’ has once again laid bare the emptiness of modern diplomacy – the endurance of such political impotence is not merely contingent, but historically consequential.