Expert: Diana Buttu, Human rights attorney, former advisor to Palestinian Authority president and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian negotiators.
Question: President Donald Trump’s Orwellian-named “Board of Peace” (BoP) will be headed by Trump and include world leaders chosen by him. While there are no Palestinians on the board, Benjamin Netanyahu will be on it. There will also be a “Gaza Executive Board” (GEB) that includes Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and former British prime minister Tony Blair, and a technocratic committee of Palestinians tasked with actually administering Gaza. How would you describe the two boards, the committee, and Trump’s plan for Gaza in general?
Diana Buttu: It’s hard to imagine anything more grotesque or obscene than establishing a so-called “Board of Peace” for Gaza consisting of the very people who have armed, funded, and carried out Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The aim, of course, is to try to erase Israel’s crimes and to turn them into a money-making real estate venture for Trump, Kushner, and their cronies.
In particular, inviting Netanyahu - a genocidal war criminal and fugitive from the International Criminal Court- to join the board shows the depths of Trump’s cynicism and the lengths to which he is attempting to rebrand Netanyahu. There has never been a more dystopian attempt to rewrite history and to erase mass atrocities than what we are witnessing today.
As for the “Gaza Executive Board,” it will be composed of people - none of whom are Palestinians - who will be ruling over Palestinians and deciding their future based on a plan that was primarily drafted by longtime close family friend of Netanyahu and supporter of Israel’s illegal settlement movement, Jared Kushner, without consulting any Palestinians. This is neocolonialism in the 21st century. Palestinians need freedom and an end to Israel’s control over their lives, not recycled “economic peace” plans devoid of political freedoms in which the focus is on the development of high-rise towers and soccer stadiums that can be bombed at Israel’s pleasure.
As for the technical committee, while it does consist of highly respected and qualified Palestinians from Gaza, it lacks any real power and is beholden to Trump, Netanyahu, and the rest of GEB. It is also deeply problematic that Gaza is being dealt with in isolation, separated from the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem - which are considered a single territorial unit under international law, and that the committee is made up of politically unaffiliated “technocrats” in an attempt to separate Palestinians from their political institutions and negate their agency and rights.
Q: As noted by Amnesty International and others, Israel is still committing genocide in Gaza, despite the supposed ceasefire. The Israeli government’s objective - repeatedly stated by Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials - is to make Gaza uninhabitable so Palestinians have no choice but to leave. Given Israel’s ongoing killing and systematic destruction of Gaza, and Trump’s failure to stop it, what are the chances that the Palestinian technocratic committee can succeed in rebuilding and providing services to some two million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes and are living in dire conditions exposed to the harsh winter weather?
DB: The committee will not be able to do a thing without the approval of Israel’s far-right, genocidal government, which recently blocked it from even entering Gaza. Just as Israel has defied the ICC and the International Court of Justice’s orders to stop and prevent genocidal acts and has systematically violated the supposed ceasefire announced in October, continuing to kill Palestinians almost every day since and not allowing humanitarian aid to enter, there is no way that this committee will be able to succeed in its mission unless Trump reverses course and puts his foot down with Netanyahu, which there is no reason to believe he will do based on his failure to do so up until now.
The Israeli military has killed more than 470 Palestinians - including more than 100 children - in Gaza since the ceasefire supposedly went into effect and destroyed more than 2,500 Palestinian homes. What makes anyone think that they will magically stop now and listen to a powerless committee of Palestinians?
Q: Critics charge that the BoP is intended to undermine the UN and usurp the power of the Security Council with a body controlled by Trump and the US. Trump himself has said the board “might” one day replace the UN. This would effectively dispense with the international legal order put in place after World War II to prevent and punish crimes like those committed by the Nazis, which the UN is central to. Do you agree that the board poses a threat to the UN and human rights based legal system, however flawed and unevenly applied, that it embodies? If so, what implications do you think it will have for Palestine/Israel and for the world as a whole?
DB: That order is already dead and has been dead for years. It was made abundantly clear by the world’s inaction to stop Israel in carrying out genocide. Liberal western leaders like Biden were further made this clear by being actively complicit in Israel’s genocide before Trump returned to power.
It has become abundantly clear that there is a dire need for reform of the international system as we know it and an end to the impunity granted to Israel by the US and other western governments- not just over the past two years but for decades - which exposed the failures and double standards of the system.
The problem lies in the fact that most states are unwilling to challenge powerful nations that violate or aid and abet violations of international law - like the US and Israel in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. The solution is not to create another structure that will exacerbate this one-sided, rigged system, as Trump is attempting to do, but instead to reform the system that exists so it is applied universally without exception and there are real consequences for violating it.
Given that many governments are going along with Trump’s seemingly absurd but terrifying board, the result will be that the international legal system that has at least in theory been based on rules and human rights will effectively normalize genocide and other crimes that are committed by powerful states and their allies.
Q: The UN Security Council formally approved Trump’s plan for Gaza, giving it a veneer of legitimacy even though it completely disregards international law and UN resolutions. Why do you think members of the Security Council gave a green light to Trump’s plan, despite the fact that no serious analyst or observer of Palestine/Israel believes it will actually lead to peace and will in fact perpetuate Israel’s apartheid system, which is the root cause of the problem in the region? And what would you like the international community to do to move in the right direction?
DB: Members of the Security Council chose to wash their hands of the headache that Gaza has caused them in terms of their blatant hypocrisy and double standards and their citizens’ outrage at Israel’s crimes and their failure to do anything about them.
The UN has essentially given a green light for Trump’s efforts to erase Israel’s genocide and normalize Israel’s re-colonization of Gaza, which he and Kushner stand to profit from greatly. The Trump plan is, in many ways, really an Israeli plan rebranded as Trump’s.
If the international community - in particular Western governments - had really been serious about upholding international law in Gaza, its focus should have been on stopping Israel from committing genocide and also holding Israel accountable by imposing sanctions and a comprehensive arms embargo - which signatories to the Genocide Convention are legally obligated to do -and providing reparations and return for Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed from their homes. Israeli war criminals would now be facing trial at The Hague instead of walking free and being welcomed in Washington and other world capitals. The root causes of Israel’s genocide - including its nearly eight-decade-old apartheid regime - would have been addressed; not ignored and in fact further entrenched, as Trump’s plan will do.
Instead, the Security Council has tragically exacerbated the harm Israel has inflicted on Palestinians by pretending that Israel did not in fact commit a genocide that was livestreamed for the entire world to see and effectively forcing Palestinians to live under the same people and governments that have committing and enabling that genocide.
To add insult to injury, the US and most other Western governments actively deny Israel committed genocide and have attempted to silence and criminalize Palestinians and anyone else who says it did. If these countries can’t even acknowledge the reality of what Israel has done, and continues to do, in Gaza, how can they help bring peace to the region or claim to support international law elsewhere in the world?