It’s said that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But sometimes, the smoke is meant to create the illusion of a fire.
Such is the case with Donald Trump’s speciously named “Board of Peace,” which met this week for the first time.
It’s a motley crew of authoritarians and Trump lapdogs, and the speeches reflected that. One leader after another offered empty platitudes and gushing, albeit fictional, praise of the U.S. President.
There is a surreal quality to Trump convening a “Board of Peace” as he muscles up for what is increasingly looking like an inevitable, and disastrous, attack on Iran and blithely declaring that he has brought “peace to the Middle East” as Israel continues to slaughter Palestinian civilians in droves.
But when we get past the theatrics and the hypocrisy, nothing about this “Board of Peace” is changing anything. Its impact in Gaza is currently zero; the conditions, the killing, and the tensions there would be identical even without this “Board of Peace.”
But it is still important to follow gatherings like what Trump convened on Thursday. Even if what was discussed is irrelevant to life on the ground for the moment, it is still illustrative of what Israel and its allies are seeking to build on the remains of the genocide. If Thursday was any indication, this augurs a very grim outlook for Gaza.
Reality intrudes on the ‘Board of Peace’
Much attention has rightly been paid to the fact that Trump invited both Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin to sit on the Board. Both men, of course, face charges of war crimes for which they are wanted fugitives by the International Criminal Court.
Israel agreed to join the Board just before Netanyahu met with Trump last week. Russia has yet to respond to the invitation. There is, quite pointedly, no Palestinian presence on the Board whatsoever. Indeed, this week, the Trump administration announced it had established formal two-way “communication” between the Board of Peace and the Palestinian Authority, a body that is no longer credible in the eyes of most Palestinians. So Palestinian contact, let alone input, remains minimal at best.
The current members of the Board of Peace are:
- Albania
- Argentina
- Armenia
- Azerbaijan
- Bahrain
- Bulgaria
- Cambodia
- Egypt
- El Salvador
- Hungary
- Indonesia
- Israel
- Jordan
- Kazakhstan
- Kosovo
- Kuwait
- Mongolia
- Morocco
- Pakistan
- Paraguay
- Qatar
- Saudi Arabia
- Turkey
- United Arab Emirates
- Uzbekistan
- Vietnam
That’s a list of authoritarian states and leaders desperate to win Donald Trump’s favor. It’s noteworthy that just a handful of Eastern European states joined, and none, aside from Israel, are traditionally close allies of the United States.
About two dozen other states did send observers to the meeting of the Board, as did the European Union, but many of them have already made it clear they will not join (even the Pope has refused), and clearly wanted to be in the room just to get a first-hand look at what would happen there.
What happened was very little.
While the focus was technically on Gaza, almost nothing of substance came out of the meeting regarding Palestine at all. Trump said the U.S. would donate $10 billion to the Board of Peace, but he failed to specify what the money would be used for or how he intended to raise it, since Congress, not the President, controls the United States’ checkbook.
Trump also stated that Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Kuwait would be coming up with $7 billion for rebuilding Gaza.
But it’s all smoke, as the “reconstruction plan” for Gaza remains far out of reach. Israel maintains control of more than half the Strip, is launching daily, deadly attacks, and is doing all it can to prepare the ground for a new wave of full-blown genocide.
Hamas and other Palestinian factions—none of whom, the world must be reminded, ever agreed to disarm themselves—are about to submit to sacrificing their right to fight against Israel’s siege and occupation, which is guaranteed under international law.
None of the states that have pledged troops intend for those troops to confront Palestinian factions; rather, they are supposed to be a peacekeeping force, maintaining security alongside a Palestinian police force.
But that police force, which the U.S. is trying to assemble from the armed Palestinian gangs that are either employed by Israel or are simply freelance bandits, is not coming together any time soon, either.
Under those circumstances, none of Trump’s cronies are going to send either troops or funds to Gaza for his Board of Peace, no matter what they told him as they fawned over him in Washington this week.
Little relief in sight in Gaza
The Board of Peace managed to secure United Nations Security Council approval, along with Trump’s terminally flawed “20-Point Peace Plan.” That combination means that the fiction of bringing “peace” to Gaza granted the Board a certain air of legitimacy; it was sold as a means to finally end the periodic Israeli “lawn mowing” that, after October 7, morphed into a genocidal horror that horrified a normally complacent Western world.
The truth is, as I’ve noted before, Trump has much bigger aspirations for the Board of Peace. That’s why he created the so-called “Executive Board,” which will be the tool he intends to use to govern Gaza to turn it into a resort town on the Mediterranean with a reduced number of Palestinians acting as quaint “native servants” for tourists, in Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s racist vision.
The Board of Peace, as Trump hinted during his remarks on Thursday, is intended to challenge the United Nations and serve as a vehicle for Trump’s personal and family power even after he has left office.
“The Board of Peace is going to almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly,” he told the audience.
Meanwhile, Gaza remains stuck in limbo. The technocratic committee that is supposed to take over the day-to-day administration and civic responsibilities in Gaza (and represents the full extent of Palestinians’ involvement in governing their own lives) remains in Egypt, their entry into Gaza barred by Israel.
But never fear, they do have a name: the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). They even have a logo, one which is very reminiscent of that of the Palestinian Authority, so Israelis have found a reason to complain even about that.
All of this remains incidental and amounts to little more than a distraction. Israeli leaders are eager to get back to the intense violence that crushed Gaza for two years.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar represented Israel at the Board of Peace confab, and made it absolutely clear that the threat of major violence is very real.
“Distinguished leaders, all previous plans for Gaza failed because they never addressed the core issues: terror, hate, incitement, and indoctrination,” he told the gathering. “At the heart of President Trump’s comprehensive plan are the disarmament of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, demilitarization of the Gaza Strip, and deradicalization of Palestinian society there.”
Sa’ar’s words built on Netanyahu’s own threats. “Hamas will very soon face a dilemma. Lay down its weapons the easy way or the hard way,” he told an audience of Israeli soldiers on Thursday.
Meanwhile, even more extreme figures such as Knesset Member Limor Son Har-Melech of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Kahanist “Jewish Power” party, joined a rally of the radical settler group Nahala earlier this week to infiltrate Gaza—under the full protection of the Israeli army, naturally—to plant trees there in anticipation of the return of Israeli settlements.
“‘Where the Jews rule over their enemies’ is not just a verse in the Book of Esther, it is the reality we are building here on the ground. Gaza will be Jewish, because only in this way will we ensure victory and real security for the people of Israel,” she said during the ceremony.
Nahala is planning a march into Gaza over Passover, which begins on April 1. If Netanyahu gets his way, Har-Melech will be frustrated because the full-scale invasion of Gaza will have resumed by then. Perhaps it will take longer if Trump’s timetable dictates a delay. But it’s coming.
This is where the Palestinians in Gaza find themselves: trapped between the madness of the radical settlers and the expansionist dreams of the Israeli government. Genocide stares them in the face in either case, while the international community plays games to appease Donald Trump, and American weaponry flows into Israel while its warships prepare to decimate Iran.
The “Board of Peace” isn’t even relevant enough to this reality to be a joke.
It gets worse.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/20/mike-huckabee-israel-middle-east-tucker-carlson
“This is where the Palestinians in Gaza find themselves: trapped between the madness of the radical settlers and the expansionist dreams of the Israeli government.” All Palestinians find themselves trapped between the madness of the settlers and the expansionist dreams of the Israeli government. David Shulman reports on the madness of the settlers in the West Bank in the latest New York Review of Books:
As long as the daily horrors in the occupied territories continue and the extreme right remains in power, democracy in Israel will be sick at the core…..On the night of March 7, 2025, dozens of heavily armed settlers under the protection of the police and the army invaded Ras al-‘Ain and stole at least a thousand, and possibly as many as 1,500, of the villagers’ sheep and goats. We have excellent video documentation, taken by two remarkably courageous activists, of that raid. The Palestinian owners submitted a formal complaint to the police, with the video documentation, but—as usual these days—within a few hours the police closed the file on the grounds that there was no supporting evidence…. No Israeli official, however, was prepared to enforce the law. The police have been turned into a vicious ultranationalist militia under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the serial criminal (dozens of indictments and several convictions) and hate-monger appointed minister of national security by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There is also no succor from the Israeli civil courts. After the theft of the sheep, those who remained in the village still had to deal with the daily incursions of the settlers, including beatings, curses, threats, harassment, pepper spray, and more theft….By our count, Ras al-‘Ain is the eighty-sixth village destroyed in the last two to three years. No one knows for sure how many brainwashed, hate-driven, sadistic settlers are now active in Area C.
Evil in the West Bank | David Shulman | The New York Review of Books
I don’t think Trump will be in control of events or have the discretion to manage that many things. For example, by law, tariffs imposed under Section 122 automatically expire after 150 days unless Congress passes legislation to extend them. So he has both Republican and Democrat States wanting his illegal tariffs refunded. Congress can’t overcome a filibuster to extend his current stop gap, and his Big Beautiful Bill has triggered a DHS shutdown. He raised the DoD budget to $1 trillion and still doesn’t have enough ammunition and misses for our own needs, much less Israel’s.
The Bored of Peace (shout out to Max Blumenthal for this) triggers my now warped mind towards memories of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Stepford Wives’. This is because these socio/psychopathic fiends that are, or will be, members of this ‘august’ group are really no better than, nor different from, the creepy villains of those iconic movies.
It’s interesting that this delusional plan is advancing ostensibly with the support of Israel, since Ben Gvir and Smotrich have already made it clear that they want Gaza for Israel as part of their own messianic plans for world Jewish supremacy and not as some sort of Mediterranean riviera controlled by Western oligarchs.
So, it makes me wonder if Bibi, one of the founding members of the ‘Bored’, sees how this is destined to fail, since Hamas, or whomever takes up the reigns of Palestinian resistance, will NEVER allow western colonialists to simply walk into Gaza and do whatever they want while ethnically cleansing, through death or expulsion, whatever remains of the Palestinian population by then. Once this Trump wet dream fails, Bibi and his right wing lunatics actually pulling Bibi’s strings can then ‘finish the job’, only for Israel’s sake solely.
I’m convinced that THIS, at least in the minds of the Israeli leadership, is the real, long range dystopian plan for Gaza. But, even it will ultimately fail!
Limor Son Har-Melech betrays the complete lie of Jewish return to Jerusalem. Return is legitimization narrative of a white racial supremacist European Zionist colonial settler invader, interloper, thief, impostor, and perpetrator of genocide.
In:
Book of Esther
There is:
Esther’s Jews appear fully embedded in imperial society.
Mordecai is a court official.
Esther is queen.
They operate within the imperial system.
The book does not frame Persia as exile.
It frames it as home territory under imperial administration.
That suggests:
By the Hellenistic period, many Diaspora Jews no longer experienced Persia (or later Egypt) as temporary exile.
Diaspora had become normalized. In fact, as Josephus, the Book of Esther, and the Babylonian Talmud all point out, by the Hasmonean period, the vast majority of the Jews in Egypt and Mesopotamia had no Judean ancestry but were mostly Greek, Italian (from Magna Graecia), Mesopotamian, or Phoenician/Punic in ancestry. Jew had become in most respects a religious legal category that was not connected with Judea the province or the territory. In many situations, Hebrew became a demonym that was preferred to Judean. The New Testament contains a Letter to the Hebrews not a Letter to the Judeans. Rome contained a synagogue whose name was Synagogue of the Hebrews. No synagogue of Rome was ever called Synagogue of the Judeans.