The fate of the Palestinian people offers a warning about the future of humanity. When I recently visited the West Bank, Palestinians kept impressing the same point on me: Israel has turned their land into a laboratory. The technology of oppression that it has deployed – including in its genocide in Gaza – ranges from hi-tech surveillance to military drones and AI on the battlefield. These technologies have been exported to oppressive states across the world. And it doesn’t stop there.
This brings us to Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, now set to rule Gaza. In the sleepy Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay, where George Orwell lies buried, the ground itself ought to be shaking. This isn’t peace. It’s naked neocolonialism.
Not a single seat is reserved for a Palestinian, let alone a survivor of Gaza. Trump will serve as chair in an individual capacity rather than as US president – in other words, as Gaza’s emperor. Its invited members include Tony Blair, who is despised across the Middle East as an architect of the illegal invasion of Iraq. If you’re curious about his skill set when it comes to rebuilding ravaged Arab territory, recall what the Chilcot inquiry concluded about that catastrophe: “the UK failed to plan or prepare for the major reconstruction programme required in Iraq”.
Who else? At least two property developers, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who once boasted of the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property”. Hungary’s far-right autocrat Viktor Orbán. An Israeli billionaire, Yakir Gabay, and an American private equity tycoon, Marc Rowan. Vladimir Putin, who helped pioneer reducing predominantly Muslim lands to rubble in Chechnya, also has an invite, according to the Kremlin. Sure, Israel isn’t happy, presumably because the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been invited. Nothing but total control of Gaza would satisfy them – but that is little consolation for its traumatised Palestinian population.
The clues about where this is heading are hardly subtle. Trump is demanding $1bn from each country to be a permanent member, and the draft of the charter appears to suggest, as per Bloomberg, that he will control the money. A year ago, he proposed permanently resettling Gaza’s population: ethnic cleansing. He posted an AI-generated video showcasing Gaza as a luxury resort, featuring a giant golden statue of himself.
It would be naive to assume that he has abandoned such plans, even if pressure from Arab states appears to have had some effect last year, when he said “nobody is expelling any Palestinians”. That was clear in little-noticed comments he made at a recent press conference with
Benjamin Netanyahu – the Israeli prime minister wanted by the international criminal court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Trump suggested that if Gaza’s population “were given the opportunity to live in a better climate, they would move. They’re there because they sort of have to be.”
He leaned on polling suggesting almost half of Gaza’s population would leave. Hardly surprising: the territory has been reduced to apocalyptic ruin, its survivors living in tents, deprived of life’s essentials.
When Netanyahu says Palestinians will “be allowed to exit,” as he did last year, he clearly anticipates they will not return. At the beginning of the genocide, he privately backed “voluntary migration” in principle, perhaps knowing his army was going to make Gaza unliveable. “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,” he told his allies two years ago.
Note, then, that Israel recently recognised Somaliland. Somalia’s president suggested it had intelligence that the breakaway republic had agreed to take refugees from Gaza in exchange. Somaliland denies it, but its foreign minister didn’t rule it out last March. Gaza is a devastated wasteland, now destined to be a money-making scheme for property developers and Trump’s courtiers.
But this isn’t just about the Palestinian people. The “board of peace”’s charter doesn’t even mention Gaza. It reads as an attempt to build an alternative to the UN: a blunt instrument for Trump to exercise American power. In other words – here is a template, with Gaza merely acting as a trial run.
Yet if Trump believes this will serve the interests of US hegemony, a brutal collision with reality awaits. Western dominance was founded on three pillars: military supremacy, economic dominance and moral superiority. The first was slain in the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The second was discredited by the 2008 financial crash. And moral superiority? This was always a con, of course, as the torture chambers of US-backed dictatorships in Latin America or the peeling skin of Vietnamese children hit by American napalm can testify. But, unlike older rivalries between great powers, the cold war was sold as a clash of universal philosophies: democracy and freedom v socialism and equality. The Soviet collapse was presented as the triumph of the western creed.
As the US military incinerated Afghan wedding parties, and American soldiers were photographed with rictus grins as naked Iraqis were piled into a human pyramid at Abu Ghraib prison, those moral claims disintegrated. When US Democrats armed and facilitated the liquidation of Gaza, American moral bankruptcy was exposed as a bipartisan affair.
What is striking about Trump is that he has abandoned even the pretence of moral superiority. On Venezuela, he openly boasts that US companies are going to “take back” the country’s oil. Gone are claims that US hegemony is driven by a desire to protect the freedom of all humanity – “a country that would be a light unto the nations, and a shining city upon a hill,” as Ronald Reagan put it.
Trump’s crude honesty merely hastens the fall of US power. Moral supremacy was always a deception, but it was a useful lie. It bought at least some support and acquiescence. Now it is dead, the world will be ever more eager to turn the page on its failing masters.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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