Zuhair Al-Anhar
Months after a “ceasefire” between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas initiated by Donald Trump was announced last October, the conditions in Gaza today are as dire as at any time since this horrific genocide began. The daily Israeli bombardment of the besieged strip has continued essentially unabated. During these five months, over 500 Palestinians have been reported killed and almost 1,200 injured. Thousands of refugee shelters have been destroyed or are uninhabitable, and children are dying of hypothermia and malnutrition. Meanwhile, the Israeli regime has opened the way to expanded settlements in the West Bank, signaling a move toward wholesale annexation.
Despite there being no peace in the occupied region that anyone can see, Trump has pronounced that they are ready to proceed to phase two of the Gaza peace deal, which includes convening what he has dubbed “The Board of Peace.” Originally represented and named in a UN Security Council resolution last year as a body to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction, this brainchild of Trump’s has since rapidly escalated both in its scale and in its implications. First it sought to govern Gaza indefinitely, with sweeping powers such as the ability to nominate senior officials and appoint a “High Representative.” Now it has expressed its open-ended aspirations of authority around the world in any “areas affected or threatened by conflict.” In fact, as many have noted, its founding charter doesn’t mention Gaza at all.
This Board was assembled during the recent Davos summit and met for the first time in Washington on February 19. It includes representatives of member states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt: a rogue’s gallery of Middle Eastern and other global south states in the US’s imperialist orbit, most of them bitterly oppressive authoritarian regimes. Notably, the states which declined to join included leading members of the European Union such as France, Germany, and Spain, citing concerns that it sought to undermine the UN itself. Indeed, Trump has stated that it “might” do just that.
This is perhaps the starkest example to date of the total abandonment of the so-called “rules-based order” or “liberal international order” established after WWII to facilitate “international cooperation” through structures like the UN, NATO, and the IMF. Trump is remaking the world in his image, and it means a new and even more dangerous face of imperialism in the years ahead.
A “Peacemaking” Body Built For Control
A look at the Executive Board of what Trump declared “the most consequential International Body in History” makes fairly clear that peace is nowhere on its mind. Sitting on the body is Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the UK who oversaw the invasion of Iraq that killed over one million people, as well as Jared Kushner and Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank. Meanwhile the Trump regime is fresh off an unprovoked invasion and coup in Venezuela about which Trump said in no uncertain terms “we’re in charge,” and the US stands at the precipice of another invasion in Iran where it has accompanied diplomatic talks with an ominous military buildup. All of this clearly places the Board of Peace in a context of increasingly unilateral US imperialist action that divorces it from any pretense of international decorum.
This Board of Peace now seeks to supplant the UN, which has always been dominated by the US but is now seen as an encumbrance to US imperialist control. Trump sits as the Chairman-for-Life and has sole veto power. The days of imperialism colonizing the world behind a veil of liberal respectability are over. The far right, represented by Trump and such figures as Javier Milei of Argentina, another Board of Peace participant, is showing that it intends on a much harsher and more unabashed approach.
For Gaza, this means a reversion to a previous era of direct colonialism. The 1993 Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority and gave occupied Palestinians a modicum of self-governance, albeit through a steward of the Israeli occupation that would later be pushed out of Gaza by Hamas. Prior to that time, it was under direct military and civil control by Israel, and before that by Egypt. The genocidal onslaught of Gaza sought to clear the land of the Palestinians and unseat Hamas, reopening the door for imperialism to assume control unchecked. This is in keeping with the pursuit of a fiercer, sharper, more ironclad imperialism unconcerned with the appearance of respecting its own international law, and Gaza will serve as the testing ground for what the Orwellian Board of Peace seems to have in store for countries around the world.
Meanwhile the already dubious claim that the Board is intended to bring about “world peace” is contradicted not just by Trump’s attack on Venezuela and threats against countries like Iran and Cuba, but also by the fact that its charter was signed the day before some 75,000 workers went on a general strike in the Twin Cities to demand an end to the terror, kidnappings, and murders of Trump’s own private army, ICE.
Wrestling Authority Away from China
Underlying this move is the ever-present competition between US and Chinese imperialism over spheres of influence. Multiple traditional US client states that have joined the initiative, namely Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, also recently became members of BRICS, the (largely toothless) international economic and political alliance headed by China and Russia. It is of the utmost importance for US imperialism to reaffirm ties with these important economic partners, the same reason Trump recently visited the Emirates and Saudi Arabia and invested billions in AI development.
Trump also invited China and Russia to take part in the Board of Peace, a likely power move also accompanied by his desire to engage in business deals with Russia, which underscores his interest in ending the Ukraine War. But any semblance of breaking bread across imperialist divides is superficial. This body was conceived for the sole purpose of asserting US power.
No Imperialist Solution to War
Neither Trump’s newborn Board of Peace nor the old guard of the “rules-based” formations such as the UN and NATO can offer any respite to the masses of people ravaged by imperialist war. In fact it is these structures of state control and the nationalist interests of the capitalist class whose will they enact that create the conditions of war and immiseration in the first place. The only force that can rid the world of this scourge is the worldwide working class, properly unified through international solidarity in a mass antiwar movement. A Palestinian state must be free and independent under the rule of its own working people, as part of a federation of socialist nations in the Middle East and throughout the world. And finally the rule of the obscenely rich, dividing and consuming the world by the power of their militaries and “international alliances,” must be brought to an end and replaced with the democratic rule of the working class, to lay the basis for a socialist world.
