The council, packed with billionaires and allied world leaders, is positioned as a humanitarian effort but will really function as a transactional boardroom for deciding the fate of a devastated territory, raising alarming questions about profiteering and the ethnic cleansing of a land inhabited primarily by 2.3 million Palestinian refugees.
This new "Peace Council" represents a grotesque form of doublespeak, proposing to build a future for Gaza on the graves of thousands of innocents recently killed by U.S.-funded operations that saw Israeli forces indiscriminately killing Palestinians and Hamas using the Palestinians as human shields in a war that continues to dehumanize people and leave children starving and dying from lack of medical care. In other words, the architects of destruction in the Gaza Strip are now becoming the overseers of reconstruction, and the people who were brutalized will have little to no say in the direction going forward.
Key points:
The framework of Trump's board reveals its true nature. According to draft documents, while countries can join, their participation is capped at three years unless they pay more than $1 billion in cash within the first year to become a permanent member. This structure, echoing the membership models of elite private clubs, transforms international diplomacy and conflict resolution into a pay-to-play scheme.
The "founding executive board" includes figures like Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and property developer Steve Witkoff, alongside former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. This composition points to a council less concerned with restorative justice and more with financial and political deal-making, determining who owns and what gets built atop the rubble of homes, hospitals, and schools. The invitation to Putin, whose forces are accused of widespread atrocities in Ukraine, strips the council of any moral credibility, signaling that membership is based on power and alignment with Trump's interests, not on a commitment to peace.
This council's formation follows a horrific period where U.S. political leadership, under both Biden and Trump, facilitated a flood of weaponry to Israel, enabling what observers and journalists have described as genocidal actions against the Palestinian population in Gaza. Now, the same sphere of influence proposes to manage the aftermath. This is not reconstruction; it is a grift. It allows billionaire developers and compliant world leaders to use Gaza as a real estate toy, furthering a long-term project of ethnic cleansing by deciding the territory's future without the meaningful consent of its people.
The plan envisions a "Palestinian technocratic administration" during a transitional period, but it would operate under the thumb of this international board, effectively placing Gaza under a form of trusteeship that denies true sovereignty. The tragic irony is stark: children who survived bombardment may find their homeland reshaped by the very powers that funded their suffering.
The path forward for Gaza must be led by justice and self-determination, not by a council of billionaires and strongmen voting over a map of the ruins. True peace cannot be built on a foundation of corpses, rewritten history, and piles of cash.
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