Donald Trump in Davos. Photo: The Trump White House Archived / Flickr / Public Domain
The club of autocrats Trump plans for Gaza is a colonial travesty that the international Palestine movement will have to challenge, argues John Rees
It’s ‘a fledging club of autocrats’, according to the Financial Times. It’s a ‘vanity project’, says the Sydney Morning Hearld. The Guardian called it ‘a Trump-dominated pay-to-play club: a global version of his Mar-a-Lago court aimed at supplanting the UN itself’.
They are talking about US President’s board of peace, originally meant to rebuild Gaza but now inflated by Trump to be an alternative to the United Nations. Earlier this week, Trump said that ‘the UN never helped me’ and that the board of peace ‘might’ replace the UN altogether.
In another sign of the tensions between US and European imperialisms, Britian, Spain, France, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, and Slovenia have refused to serve on Trump’s board. Canada was invited to join but then Trump withdrew the invitation after Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney made a speech critical of Trump at this week’s Davos summit.
Trump is demanding that each member of the board pay $1 billion to join. So far the Middle East kingdoms and autocracies are signed up: Egypt, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Morrocco, and the country that is virtually a US naval base, Bahrain. They are joined by the unhinged Argentinian far-right populist leader, Javier Milei who is an enthusiastic member. So is his co-thinker, Hungary’s Victor Orban. The authoritarian rulers of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are signed up. In all, over two thirds of the regimes on the board of peace are authoritarian.
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to join, as has former UK prime minister Tony Blair, overriding the objections of many in the Middle East who recall all too well his part in the Afghan and Iraq wars.
The board will also include Trump’s special envoy, the property developer Steve Witkoff; the World Bank president, Ajay Banga; and the president’s son-in-law and a real-estate investor Jared Kushner. Trump, who alone will have a veto, will serve as chair.
There are no Palestinians among the decision-making executives of the board of peace; they will be invited in to police the operation on the ground, should it ever get that far. It is a transparently colonial set-up, but it is also where the first of many potential faultlines may occur. The Israeli government has firmly opposed any element of the second phase of the ceasefire that would bring Palestinian governance back to Gaza, and the disarmament of Palestinians in Gaza is still a distant dream of the court of King Trump.
The sparkling skyscrapers pictured on Gaza’s seafront behind Jared Kushner when he spoke about the board of peace at Davos are a mockery of that tragedy in Gaza. And on that, the Palestinians and the global Palestine movement have not yet had the last word.
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John Rees
John Rees is a writer, broadcaster and activist, and is one of the organisers of the People’s Assembly. His books include ‘The Algebra of Revolution’, ‘Imperialism and Resistance’, ‘Timelines, A Political History of the Modern World’, ‘The People Demand, A Short History of the Arab Revolutions’ (with Joseph Daher), ‘A People’s History of London’ (with Lindsey German) and The Leveller Revolution. He is co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition.