The so-called ‘Board of Peace’ symbolises the degeneracy of our times, when a problem is grave as genocide is dealt with through a mafia style-structure led by Trump’s henchmen to enrich their emperor.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Everyone and his dog appears to have been invited on US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” but thus far only Morocco, Albania, Argentina, Hungary and Vietnam have accepted.
With admission priced at $1bn, and with the suspicion they could be joining a half-baked proposal to sideline the UN, it is little wonder that few are rushing in.
The Board of Peace is supported by a founding executive board, which is stacked full of people who denied a genocide was and is taking place in Gaza, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, as well as people like Mark Rowan, Wall Street financier, who intimidated US campuses into banning demonstrations in support of Palestine.
They are united, too, by a profound lack of knowledge about the Middle East.
The one person on the executive board who has experience of the region – if you call invading Iraq and unleashing a devastating seven-year civil war “experience” – is Britain’s very own Tony Blair.
Blair, however, represents no-one but himself. The British government has been careful to make that clear by distancing itself from its former prime minister.
In November when Blair’s name first popped up, Jonathan Powell, the current national security advisor and Blair’s former chief of staff in Downing Street, said privately that Blair did not represent the British state.
Powell lobbied actively against Blair’s nomination, according to two separate informed sources who spoke to Middle East Eye on condition of anonymity.
Powell accurately represents the view of the deep state that does not conceal its disdain for Blair’s many attempts to recapture the limelight on the international stage.
Not endorsing Blair
A source with knowledge of the thinking inside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: “That is entirely accurate. This isn’t even really in contention. Blair has no position within the British government.
“His activities in terms of the Tony Blair Institute are as a private citizen. That’s not to say that there aren’t contacts but he really doesn’t represent the British state. I’d have been astonished if anybody had claimed otherwise.
“The whole thing about Blair, was he in or was he out, is fascinating. Was there ever really a time when he was out? But most of the others on the board are worse: Kushner, Witkoff, Rubio. Very few of them have any knowledge of Palestine,” the source said.
Keir Starmer, who before becoming a prime minister marched against the Iraq war and called it illegal as recently as 2020, has studiously avoided endorsing Blair as Britain’s representative on Trump’s board.
He said Blair was a “great leader” and would make a “huge contribution” to the peace board, but repeatedly refused to endorsehim for the role.
Middle East Eye contacted the Cabinet Office about Powell’s remarks, but has received no reply until the time of publication. Also, FCO refused to comment.
On Monday, Starmer said that Britain was talking to allies about the Board of Peace.
According to Trump’s Board of Peace charter, each member of the executive board will have a portfolio to manage, which means they will have real power over Gaza, unlike a second executive body, much lower down the chain of command, which will have none.
This is confusingly called the Gaza Executive Board. It includes four of the seven members of the founding board but adds Hakan Fidan, the Turkish foreign minister; Qatari minister Ali Al Thawadi, and Major General Hassan Rashad, the Egyptian intelligence chief.
These men are knowledgeable about Gaza, but Turkey, Qatar and Egypt have been brought on as window dressing.
The White House statement defined their task in the following terms. It said the board “will help support effective governance and the delivery of best-in-class services that advance peace, stability, and prosperity for the people of Gaza.”
Which could mean anything or nothing.
It is significant that Saudi Arabia is staying out of this. And it is wise to do so.
A deeply problematic history
Nikolai Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat, will be Gaza’s “high representative” which, in EU parlance, could mean its foreign minister. To support them are a spate of “advisors” with deeply problematic recent histories.
Men such as businessman and rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, a staunch defender of the settlers who was heavily involved in the creation of the Israeli-backed aid distribution mechanism, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), at whose sites more than 2000 Palestinians were killed by live fire.
Lurking at the bottom of the pile is the technocratic government that is supposed to govern Gaza. Only two of the names that were put forward by the Palestinians factions have made it onto the list.
The most problematic character is the man in charge of security.
Sami Nasman, a retired senior Palestinian Authority security officer, was sentenced in absentia by a Gaza court to 15 years in prison for inciting “chaos” and allegedly orchestrating assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, Asharq al-Awsat reported. Nasman has been in exile ever since. It is unlikely that he will return in the near future.
With a cast of characters like these, what could possibly go wrong?
Witkoff announced the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in the same way as he announced the ceasefire itself. He put all the onus on Hamas to deliver.
In his statement,. Witkoff said that Phase Two was about the full demilitarisation of Gaza “primarily the disarmament of all unauthorized personnel”. He said the US expects Hamas to comply fully. “Failure to do so will bring serious consequences.”
There was not one word about Israel’s obligation to withdraw from the yellow line, from which it has been advancing. It now occupies over 60 percent of Gaza’s territory. Nor did Witkoff acknowledge over 1000 ceasefire infringements and the death of up to 450 Palestinians since the ceasefire was signed in October.
Blair’s statement was similar in tone. Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza, according to Blair, was an extraordinary achievement. The war did end, he declared.
This will be news to Gaza, which apart from the daily Israeli air strikes, have suffered untold hardships with floods, the heaviest winter in years and the destruction of over 100,000 tents.
Israel has continued to deny Gaza either the food or the reconstruction aid it needs.
It is unbending too about not allowing two-way traffic at the Rafah border crossing. So much so, sources tell me, that the new technocratic committee, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, will have to meet in Cairo not in Gaza itself.
Alternative world
Israel has continually broken the terms of the ceasefire, both in terms of its air strikes and its failure to keep to the yellow line. Blair, however, inhabits an alternative world. One in which genocide did not happen, and Hamas will have to disarm while the occupation remains in place.
As Blair knows only too well, Powell, Blair’s chief negotiator with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), would never have gotten the Republican movement to end its armed campaign without a power-sharing agreement in Northern Ireland’s Stormont. But today he sings a very different tune with Hamas.
“For Gaza and its people, we want a Gaza which does not reconstruct Gaza as it was but as it could and should be.”
As dictated by whom? By an Israel, duty bound to keep Gaza a living hell, in order to force as many Palestinians out as possible, and make agreements with breakaway parts of Somalia to enable that to happen?
Ever the faithful servant of Israel, Blair does not mention the word Palestinian or Palestine once in his statement.
Powell is absolutely right to put as much distance between himself and this chicanery as possible.
For the truth is that nothing will happen. The battle lines will stay as they are, for the foreseeable future.
For Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters to disarm under these conditions would be tantamount to committing suicide. The siege will be maintained. Israeli forces will continue to occupy over half of Gaza. And no international forces will arrive to police this mess. And over two million Palestinians will continue to live out of tents.
To invite the same cast of characters who allowed Israel to expand to the point at which Gaza exploded, and expect them to end the conflict, is more than just insane. It is criminal.
The equivalent of inviting onto the Board of Peace the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s genocide, would be to invite the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Radko Mladic, the ethnic cleansers of Bosnia and architects of the genocide in Srebrenica, to negotiate the Dayton Peace Agreement.
Blair was the architect of international conditions that barred Hamas from the negotiating room while it refused to recognise Israel. That international pact was the basis on which Israel delivered its siege of Gaza in 2006 when Hamas won the only election Palestine has held. The siege has continued ever since.
Under the premiership of David Cameron, I revealed how Blair, who was then Middle East envoy of the Quartet, had talked to Khaled Meshaal, who was then leader of Hamas, and invited him to London.
The offer came to nothing, but the talks themselves were an admission that Blair’s policy of barring Hamas from the negotiating table had produced no results.
Blair has indeed been around the block on this issue several times, but each time his only effect has been to provide cover for Israel’s siege which increased in severity after each war.
There is no sign Blair has seen the light or will act differently this time round. If anything his statements on Islam and Islamists have hardened. Unlike his noble successor Gordon Brown, Blair has cashed in on all the perks an ex-prime minister can harvest.
A mafia boss
And as for Trump, the man does not even pretend to care about the Palestinians, justice, human rights, or children dying of cold in tents.
Trump cares about depositing bits of Trumpland around the world, and syphoning off large sums of cash in the process.
In creating his own gang of consiglieres and calling it a Board of Peace, Trump is now trying to run the world as he is currently running America. He is not a fascist, as much as he is a mafia boss, demanding respect and regular payment.
If he gets both, he might just decide to leave the smaller fry of this world alone. Or not. Trump is a bully and gets a kick out of seeing how so few stand up to him.
If Trump’s tactics do not intimidate the Greenlanders, they are unlikely to cower the Palestinians who have seen off colonisation, international mandates, exile, military rule, separation walls, demolition, siege and now genocide with their national identity intact.
The Palestinian cause beats more fiercely in the heart of every Palestinian than it has ever done before.
Palestinians will throw the Board of Peace into the dustbin of history long before the same happens to Trump himself.
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